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  • 2018
  • Book

American Capitalism: New Histories

By: Sven Beckert and Christine Desan
  • Format:Print
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Abstract

The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations, huge industrial working class, and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New York in the world of finance, America has come to symbolize capitalism for over two centuries. But an understanding of the history of American capitalism is as elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential across multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a range of geographic and chronological settings? And how does a focus on capitalism change our understanding of American history?
American Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women’s rights; slavery and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge, including the idea of the economy, among other topics. Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with capitalism as it is made by political authority, how it is claimed and contested by participants, how it spreads across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized without being universalized. A major statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work that the history of capitalism can provoke.

Keywords

Economic Systems; History; Finance; Trade; Economy; Policy; United States

Citation

Beckert, Sven and Christine Desan, eds. American Capitalism: New Histories. Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
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More from the Authors

    • 2019
    • Faculty Research

    Harvard and Slavery: A Short History

    By: Sven Beckert, Balraj Gill, Jim Henle and Katherine May Stevens
    • 2018
    • Faculty Research

    Global History, Globally: Research and Practice Around the World

    By: Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier
    • October 2017
    • American Historical Review

    American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950

    By: Sven Beckert
More from the Authors
  • Harvard and Slavery: A Short History By: Sven Beckert, Balraj Gill, Jim Henle and Katherine May Stevens
  • Global History, Globally: Research and Practice Around the World By: Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier
  • American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950 By: Sven Beckert
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