Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the History of Capitalism

Jeffrey Sklansky

The past few years have seen a revival of innovative historical studies of American

capitalism.1 These revisionist interpretations depart from the great wave of social history written in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, which likewise took capitalism as a central concern, in two key respects: First, the older social history focused on the organization of labor, in the double sense of how work was organized in the process of production and how workers organized themselves in trade unions, political parties, and social movements. Much of the new history of capitalism focuses instead on the economic and political organization of capital, particularly finance, examining the mechanisms of making money as opposed to those of producing goods and pushing earlier concerns about labor and class to the margins. Second, the older social history tended to pivot on a set of developmental questions concerning how the capitalist order originated and progressed through a series of phases including merchant capitalism, agrarian capitalism, industrial capitalism, and corporate capitalism. By contrast, newer scholarship has largely left such transition questions behind. In this essay I relate the gap between the history of finance and the history of labor to a long- standing tendency to conceive of capitalist relations in terms of an essential dichotomy of labor and money. That basic binary underlies a set of foundational distinctions within the social sciences that have long expressed and defined the ideological stakes of struggle over capitalism, informing both its strongest advocates and its fiercest critics. The labor- versus- money divide has thrown into stark relief the
For helpful comments on previous drafts, I thank Ken Alder, Natasha Barnes, Smita Das, Stephen Engelmann, Leon Fink, Alex Gourse, Daniel Immerwahr, Susan Levine, Beth Lew- Williams, Rebecca Marchiel, Kate Masur, Susan Pearson, Eric Slauter, Helen Thompson, Javier Villa- Flores, John Whipple, Aleks Zarnitsyn, and Yue Zhang. 1. See Sven Beckert, History of American Capitalism, in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 314 35; and Jeffrey Sklansky, The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism, Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 1 (2012): 23348.
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 11, Issue 1 DOI 10.1215/15476715-2385381 2014 by Labor and Working-Class History Association

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profound tension between the imperatives of productivity and profit, but it also has tended to distort or disguise the historical basis of capitalist development in class relations and social struggle. Following this introduction, I examine more concretely the core assumptions underlying the older and newer approaches and critique a handful of leading new works on the history of early American finance. Finally, I offer some suggestions for bringing the new focus on finance to bear on the still- pressing questions of transition and class at the heart of the older history of labor, through the study of class struggles over the means of payment as well as the means of production. The organization of currency and credit, like that of factories and fields, has played a central part in the exploitation of labor for more than three centuries, never more than in the past three decades.
I.

Ever since English writers discerned the appearance of a new form of market society around the beginning of the seventeenth century, the coming of capitalism has been identified with the advent of a distinctively modern relation between labor and money. Most broadly, the exchange value represented by money came to determine the organization of work and wealth and to mediate relations between owners and workers. However, the causes, characteristics, and consequences of that transformative bond between productive effort and pecuniary exchange have proven persistently hard to pin down, for historians no less than for those they study. Part of the problem lies in the convention of conceiving of capitalist relations in terms of an essential dichotomy between labor and money. One side of this imaginary divide comprises a real economy ostensibly devoted to the production and exchange of material goods and services. The other consists of a financial domain dedicated to the creation and circulation of monetary claims and credits. The distinction between labor and money, or wealth and value, has an ancient lineage, including a classic formulation by Aristotle, but it gained special force in seventeenth-and eighteenth- century discourses that gave rise to the modern social sciences in general and classical political economy in particular, receiving its fullest articulation in Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations (1776). Because the labor- money dualism has proven so fertile in informing popular and academic discourse, it is worth surveying its historical foundations before considering its historiographical ramifications. While recent scholarship has repudiated many of its presuppositions, the underlying dichotomy continues to frame historical interpretation in both enabling and constraining ways. In its early modern form, the dualism had a temporal and a geographical dimension. It identified the poles of labor and money with both a conjectural history (also known as four- stages or stadial history) and a comparative ethnography of what Smith called commercial society.2 The stock story went roughly as follows: In an imagined presocial state of nature, individuals possessed solely their
2. See especially Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (1976; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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own labor and the material wealth it produced. Absent market exchange, there was no exchange value, let alone money to represent it. Thus, in the beginning, all the world was America, as John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689), and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was any where known.3 Political theorists supposed that in this savage state, the value of goods was inextricably attached to their intrinsic physical qualities and to the utility or power they directly conferred on their possessors as a virtual extension of the bearers own bodies. This condition of irreducible materiality and particularity was epitomized in the eighteenth- century discovery of the African or American fetish an object of worship whose spiritual value supposedly could not be separated from its material body or from that of its owner which Europeans counterposed to both a transcendent, universal deity and a transcendent, universal exchange value.4 Yet even the most primitive peoples were distinguished from lesser creatures by the innately human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another, in Smiths famous phrase.5 In tribal societies, such exchanges ostensibly took place primarily among kin, for whom the value of traded goods remained bound to the specific social relations among those who gave and received them. European explorers deemed these inalienable gifts as opposed to marketable commodities, bearing personal rather than pecuniary value.6 The dual development of the division of labor and of market exchange, it was theorized, gradually led to a state of generalized barter. Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, as Smith put it, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.7 At this transformative stage, money purportedly emerged spontaneously from the welter of two- person transactions, overcoming the necessity of a coincidence of wants between each pair of petty proprietors swapping the products of their specialized labor. As the universal equivalent for which all things were exchanged, money acquired its omnipotence by its abstraction from any particular persons or possessions. It represented for early modern theorists a peculiarly intangible value that made possible the transition from the bilateral barter of goods to the multilateral circulation of commodities.8
3. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. Richard H. Cox (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 30. 4. William Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish, I, Res 9 (Spring 1985): 5 17. As the literary historian Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, Marxs concept of the fetishism of commodities thus turned the classical notion of the fetish on its head by applying it to the very thing against which it had originally been defined, namely the immaterial exchange value of commodities. Stallybrass, Marxs Coat, in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Speyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 183 207. 5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), 1:25. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Ibid., 1:26. 6. Christopher A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (New York: Academic Press, 1982). 7.Smith, Wealth of Nations, 37. 8. Jean-Michel Servet, Le troc primitive, un mythe fondateur dune approache conomiste de la monnaie, Revue Numismatique, 6th ser., 157 (2001): 15 32.

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Arising naturally from the division of labor and the growth of trade, a common currency was seen to confer on commodities a dual character, expressed in labor and in money. According to classical economic writers, commodities carried both an intrinsic use value and an extrinsic exchange value, both a real or natural price (the labor required to produce them) and a nominal or market price (the money required to purchase them).9 So too, the development of commercial society was characterized in theory by a double movement of labor and money. On the one hand, the division of labor ostensibly entailed its increasing emancipation from nonmonetary bonds to lands and lords, reflected in the ascendance of money wages over other means of compelling or rewarding labor. On the other hand, the abstraction of money meant its increasing detachment from the commerce in actual goods and services from which it originally arose, eventuating in the displacement of commodity currencies and coins by paper bills and notes, the purest embodiment of immaterial exchange value. Together, the advent of paid labor and paper money marked the coming of age of market relations, the climax of the bildungsroman begun in barter. As the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi has written of this creation myth of modern market society, no misreading of the past ever proved more prophetic of the future.10 Indeed, in making the mutual transformation of labor and money appear as preordained as the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, the barter- to- bills narrative has proven a kind of self- fulfilling prophecy, naturalizing capitalist development. At the same time, it has provided a versatile platform for criticisms of corruption or deviation from the providential path, signaled by the divergence between money and labor or between finance and the real economy. Such concerns have long defined the terms and parameters of public debate, informing such formative political divides as country versus court, bourgeois versus aristocrat, producers versus paupers and plutocrats, and Main Street versus Wall Street. That two- dimensional perspective underlies a further set of closely linked dualisms including those of market and state (the former supposedly natural, the latter artificial), country and town (the former imagined as the primary scene of production, the latter as the central arena of exchange), and home and work (whose separation symbolizes the ascendance of paid labor and market relations). Each of these dichotomies similarly finds its apotheosis in Smiths Wealth of Nations and other works of classical political economy, and each has likewise played a key role in setting the stakes of struggle over capitalist development. In recent years, virtually every aspect of this dichotomous way of conceiving market society has been rigorously repudiated by historians and other scholars. They have shown that each of these pairings tends to separate in time and space phenomena
9. On the labor theory of value, see Ronald L. Meek, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value, 2nd ed. (New York: Monthly Review, 1976). 10. Karl Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 50 51. See also Caroline Humphrey, Barter and Economic Disintegration, Man, new series, 20, no. 1 (1985): 48 72; and David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 21 41.

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that are inherently, congenitally conjoined. Each conjures up a kind of contractual or commercial exchange between preexisting parties, obscuring the ways in which the paired categories themselves are creations of capitalist ideology. Business historians have challenged the false dichotomy of the state and private enterprise, environmental historians have disavowed the romantic opposition of the pastoral countryside and the commercial city, and gender historians have critiqued the ideological divide between the separate spheres of private and public life.11 This wide- ranging reconsideration has recently been extended to the labor- money dualism as well, and particularly to the identification of capitalist development with the alienation of wage labor and the autonomy of finance capital. Rejecting the stark opposition of paid labor to bound labor a historical distinction often mapped onto geopolitical boundaries between capital and colony, core and periphery, metropole and frontier labor historians have shown that the commodification of labor took a wide variety of forms arising simultaneously and in close proximity, ranging from chattel slavery through indentured servitude, sharecropping, debt peonage, prison labor, and a range of contractual and paid labor.12 At the same time, monetary historians have rejected the opposition of hard money based on the value of a tangible commodity, most commonly gold or silver, to paper currency backed solely by fiat and faith. They have shown that hard money and paper money actually arose in tandem, forming twin pillars of the transatlantic financial revolution in England and its American colonies around the turn of the eighteenth century. Legal measures pegging the value of the English pound to the market value of gold and silver the introduction of milled- edged coins to prevent clipping, the removal of restrictions on foreign exchange of bullion and specie, the establishment of a fixed monetary ratio of gold to silver, the reminting of the coinage to match
11. On the state and private enterprise, see, inter alia, William Novak, The Myth of the Weak State, American Historical Review 113:3 (June 2008): 752 72; and Richard John, Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787 1835, Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347 80. On the country/city divide, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); and William Cronon, Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1992). On home and work, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 12.Robert J. Steinfeld and Stanley L. Engerman, Labor Free or Coerced? A Historical Reassessment of Differences and Similarities, in Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues, ed. Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1997), 107 26; Moon- Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 17761941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the Worlds First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Stacey Smith, Freedoms Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2013); and Sven Beckert, Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the Civil War, American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (2004): 1405 38.

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its face value to its metallic value went hand- in- hand with the growth of commercial banking and legal reforms that conferred negotiability on a host of paper IOUs, most importantly bank notes. The sovereign prerogative of creating currency and transferable credit was delegated to commercial banks at the same historical moment that saw the hardening of the metallic standard.13 The dual creation of hard money and paper currency meant that money became a commodity produced for private profit, just as the joint rise of chattel slavery and wage labor along with other forms of free, semifree, and unfree labor meant that labor became a commodity as well. In various ways, historians and other scholars have been moving beyond the dichotomies of paper money and hard money, paid labor and bound labor, state and market, country and city, and home and work, which have long set the poles of political debate. Yet the dualism of labor and money continues to constrain conceptions of capitalist development, as evidenced in the gulf between an older history of labor and the new history of finance.
II.

We live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy wrote in 1950, and this fact lends particular interest to studies of earlier transitions from one social system to another.14 Indeed, their widely shared sense of living through a period of protracted proletarian revolution colored midcentury historians search for the origins of market society in a similarly conceived bourgeois revolution several centuries earlier.15 Such scholars understanding of the epochal transformation of their time enabled them to view capitalism as a modern social order rooted in a specific, contingent set of class relations, even as it shaped their understanding of both the rise of capitalist society and its class basis in ways more evident from the perspective of our own historical moment.
13. See especially Christine Desan, The Market as a Matter of Money: Denaturalizing Economic Currency in American Constitutional History, Law and Social Inquiry 30 (2005): 1 60, but see also R. D. Richards, The Early History of Banking in England (London: P. S. King & Son, 1929), 23 61; James Steven Rogers, The Early History of the Law of Bills and Notes: A Study of the Origins of Anglo-American Commercial Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 94 170; J. Keith Horsefield, British Monetary Experiments, 16501710 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), xii xviii; and A. E. Feaveryear, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 91 108. 14. Paul M. Sweezy, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Science and Society 14, no. 2 (1950): 134 67, quoted passage at 134. 15.On midcentury scholars widespread anticipation of a movement beyond the capitalist frontier, see especially Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). See also Raymond Williams, Tragedy and Revolution, in Modern Tragedy, ed. Pamela McCallum (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Encore Editions, 2006), 871 08. For the most influential accounts of the revolutionary rise of capitalism to emerge from the sense of another great transformation under way in the late twentieth century, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1944); Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789 1848 (London: Weiden feld and Nicolson, 1962); and Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1982 1984).

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Social historians brought to the past a far more robust sense of labor than of capital, reflecting the prominence of working classes and their purported political allies around the world for much of the twentieth century, from Soviet and Chinese communism to Latin American syndicalism, European social democracy, and New Deal liberalism.16 The dominant image of labor looming over postwar scholarship was that of the rising ranks of semiskilled and unskilled wage workers in mass- production, smokestack industries. The implicit image of capital was that of the pioneers of assembly- line manufacturing such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford, even as such industrial titans were being effectively displaced, in much midcentury social science, by a proletarianized vision of management in which the technical dictates of organization and productivity seemed paramount, eclipsing the claims of anonymous and largely passive shareholders. Socialized production appeared to many observers to be sloughing off the skin of individual private property and profit in what John Maynard Keynes heralded as the euthanasia of the rentier.17 The apparent evanescence of capital or at least of capitalists, and more specifically financiers seemingly left labor to struggle against its own technological and organizational imperatives: against the time- and- motion discipline of the machine, the enfeebling effects of consumerism, the plebeian politics of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and the organization man. In place of class conflict, social scientists studying poverty and inequality pitted a humanistic but ahistorical model of group psychology and culture against a narrowly economistic concept of social structure.18 The self- styled new social history highlighted the personal agency of workers and social movements along with the impersonal power of long- term, tectonic shifts in population, prices, technology, and trade. As scholars sought the origins of the Fordist political economy they inhabited, labor history came to the fore. E. P. Thompsons The Making of the English Working Class (1963) set the standard for much subsequent scholarship in its master narrative of proletarianization, the decline of earlier forms of bound labor and the rise of wage labor in their place.19 Key works of American labor history followed suit, describing on the one hand the inexorable expansion of markets, increasing division of labor both within and between industrial enterprises, the bastardization of crafts and demise of the artisan- journeyman- apprentice system, and the widening gulf between owners and workers; and on the other hand the rise of working- class resistance, trade unions and labor parties, and
16. Gran Therborn, Class in the Twenty-First Century, New Left Review 78 (November/December 2012): 5 29. While there are a number of plausible labels that might be attached to the 20th century, in terms of social history it was clearly the age of the working class. Ibid., 5. 17.John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), 376. See also Adolph A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Commerce Clearing House, 1932); and John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). 18. See generally Brick, Transcending Capitalism; and Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 19. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).

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agrarian, republican, populist, syndicalist, and socialist challenges to capitalist imperatives.20 While such bottom- up history elevated the resourcefulness, rebelliousness, and resilience of propertyless workers, it tended to chronicle their struggles without comparable consideration of the class consciousness and organization of capital.21 Beyond narrating the collective biography of the industrial working class, social historians more broadly explored the transition to capitalism in early modern Europe and America. Here, too, scholarship focused critically on class relations, refracted through the lens of the labor- money dualism. In the pathbreaking work of Christopher Hill, Lawrence Stone, R. H. Tawney, and like- minded historians, the growth of commerce and population was seen to have given rise to an early modern bourgeoisie that hastened the preordained destruction of decaying political forms, particularly in the English Civil War and the French Revolution, and the rise of capitalist relations in their place.22 American historians, meanwhile, overturned an exceptionalist consensus school that had envisioned the new nation as having neither a feudal past nor a potentially socialist future, neither a declining aristocracy nor a rising proletariat, only a single- class, thoroughly bourgeois society in which the seeds of capitalist principles and practices arrived in the first ships. In contrast, building on the recovery of a transatlantic tradition of classical republicanism as opposed to Lockean liberalism, social historians argued that the broad mass of early American
20. Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working- Class and Social History (New York: Knopf, 1976); Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeepers Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815 1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth- Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and The Rise of the American Working Class, 1788 1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 18651925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Leon Fink, Workingmens Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 21. See the historiographical indictments of Tony Judt, A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians, History Workshop 7 (Spring 1979): 66 94; Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, Why Does Social History Ignore Politics? Social History 5, no. 2 (1980): 249 72; and Elizabeth Fox- Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective, Journal of Social History 10, no.2 (1976): 20520. 22. Christopher Hill, The English Revolution, 1640: An Essay, new ed. (London: Lawrence and Wish art, 1955); Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558 1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912); Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925); Paul Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1978); and T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre- industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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smallholders engaged primarily in precapitalist, cooperative, mixed farming for local subsistence, not capitalist, competitive, staple- crop production for long- distance trade, while jealously guarding their relative autonomy and competency as self- employed householders.23 Social historians painted a similarly conservative portrait of the most commercially minded producers in early America, namely slave- owning planters, whom they depicted as neofeudal lords reliant on extra- economic compulsion of their human chattel rather than contractual market relations with a rising working class.24 The case for the precapitalist character of the colonies and the new United States thus rested on the Smithian identification of a capitalist economy with paid labor, abstract money, and an enterprising bourgeoisie. The latter was depicted as an invading host of Hamiltonian moneyed men and later Yankee industrialists who used their control over the federal government as a battering ram to demolish the aging edifice of premodern, peasant, and aristocratic relations.25 Little wonder that Michael Merrill, one of the leading social historians of the transition in America, claimed Adam Smith as the foremost anticapitalist theorist in the new nation.26 For their conception of capitalism as a market economy ruled by, or in the interests of, capitalists closely resembled what Smith meant by mercantilism, while the household economy that social historians discovered in early America looked much like the self- governing market of shopkeepers and smallholders that Smith contrasted to the rule of merchants and financiers in league with a powerful central state.27 The theoretical and empirical problems with social historians portrayal of the class relations underlying the transition to capitalism the bourgeois revolution in seventeenth- century England and eighteenth- century France, the market revolution in the nineteenth- century United States came under escalating attack in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex story, the critics could be said to have demonstrated that if the English Civil War was capitalistic in its economic consequences, it was not bourgeois in its social origins, for it was actually aris23. See Michael Merrill, Cash Is Good to Eat: Self- Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States, Radical History Review 13 (1977): 42 71; Christopher Clark, ed., The Transition to Capitalism in America: A Panel Discussion, History Teacher 27, no. 3 (1994): 263 88, and The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780 1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); JamesA. Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991); Alan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992); and Daniel Vickers, Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 67, no. 1 (1990): 329. 24. Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon, 1969); and Elizabeth Fox- Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 25. See especially Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815 1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 26. Michael Merrill, The Anticapitalist Origins of the United States, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 13 (Fall 1990): 46597. 27. Michael Merrill, Putting Capitalism in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 52, no. 2 (1995): 315 26, quoted passage at 322.

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tocratic landlords who enlisted the English government on behalf of aggressive legal reforms enclosing the commons, fencing private property, and in other ways rendering smallholders and tenant farmers increasingly reliant on the market for access to the means of subsistence.28 Conversely, critics revealed the French Revolution to have been broadly bourgeois in its class basis but not capitalistic in either its causes or its effects, for the rising French bourgeoisie mainly comprised lawyers and professionals jockeying with the aristocracy for control over the central state as a vehicle for extracting surplus value from taxes and rents, not merchants and improving farmers capitalizing on investment and employment in the productive process.29 Meanwhile, American historians showed that northern yeoman farmers were neither so liberal and profit- driven as the consensus historians had maintained nor so republican and anticapitalist as the social historians had argued in response, but more typically composite farmers with one foot in mixed farming for subsistence and one in staple production for distant markets.30 They also convincingly contended that southern slaveholders were far less paternalistic and far more capitalistic in their attitudes and actions regarding property, prices, and markets than social historians had suggested.31 Meanwhile, a line of Marxist critics led by the historian Robert Brenner (building on the earlier work of the economist Maurice Dobb) issued a more comprehensive challenge to the classical account, according to which the capitalist order was supposed to have arrived on the wings of technology and trade and hence given rise to a bourgeois revolution in which merchants and financiers dealt the fatal blow to the old order of property and power. While that conventional narrative had climaxed in class struggle, it had found the origins of capitalism in the seemingly natural spread of commerce and the division of labor, bringing with it a conquering army of traders, townsmen, and moneyed men. Brenner and company, however, made effective use of comparative history to show that the expansion of trade actually had promoted markedly divergent developments in different parts of early modern Europe, including the recrudescence of feudalism in Eastern Europe, the maintenance of a smallholding peasantry alongside an absolutist regime in France, and the unprecedented advent and advance of capitalist relations in England. The real roots of capitalist society
28. Robert Brenner, Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism, in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 271 304. 29. George C. Conminel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (New York: Verso, 1987). 30. Richard Lyman Bushman, Markets and Composite Farms in Early America, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 55, no. 3 (1998): 35174. See also Vickers, Competency and Competition; and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast, Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (2003): 43761. 31. See James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf, 1982); and Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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therefore were not to be found in the commercial networks extending over the continent and across the Mediterranean and Atlantic; the roots lay rather in the English countryside itself, where the end of serfdom deprived landlords of their traditional rights to vassals labor, while enclosures and prohibitions on hunting and poaching deprived laborers of their traditional rights to the land. In short, the sharpest critics of the Smithian story insisted on the priority of changes in class relations that rendered both landlords and those working their land increasingly dependent on market exchange for their livelihood, compelling them to maximize productivity in order to compete and propelling capitalist development.32 The problem with earlier interpretations stemmed from the deep- seated tendency to view the transition to capitalism in starkly dichotomous terms, like a wave of new markets and means of production engulfing a precapitalist countryside, but the leading critics of the classical account tended to do something similar when it came to currency, credit, and finance capital. They maintained that merchants and moneylenders, far from forming the vanguard of a commercial revolution that transformed agriculture and industry into profit- driven, productivity- maximizing enterprises, actually tended to play a conservative (if corrosive) rather than transformative part. The needs that merchants and usurers served were largely those of lords and princes and kings. . . . Since they were essentially parasites on the old economic order, while they might bleed and weaken it, their fortune was in the last analysis associated with that of their host, as Maurice Dobb wrote.33 To the extent that it remained commercial and money- dealing capital, wrote historians Elizabeth Fox- Genovese and Eugene Genovese, merchant capital eventually became an impediment to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production.34 By so insisting, social historians made monetary relations effectively epiphenomenal in the main story of the transition. They treated finance as essentially extraneous to (and perhaps parasitic upon) the class relations that arose from the sphere of production, not the sphere of exchange. This predilection for assigning finance a peripheral role in the mode of production reflected both the social context from which the new social history arose, in which many anticipated the gradual ascendance of the imperatives of mass production over those of money making and rent seeking, and the enduring dualism of labor and money.
32. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1946); Brenner, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre- Industrial Europe, in Ashton and Philpin, Brenner Debate, 1063. See also Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review, 1999); and David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 33.Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 121. 34. Elizabeth Fox- Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 6 7 (italics added).

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III.

The social history produced in the 1960s 1980s reflected the widespread sense of a major transformation under way in twentieth- century capitalism, which inspired academic interest in the systems early modern origins. The new history of capitalism, by contrast, reflects the loss of that revolutionary prospect. It manifests the virtual disappearance among American and European scholars of any broad- based anticipation of a transition to a qualitatively different social order, whether the absence of alternatives is greeted with hope or regret.35 Current scholarship registers the eclipse of the earlier sense of the capitalist market as externally bounded historically bounded by precursors and successors, economically bounded by nonmarket relations, politically bounded by fascism and communism and internally divided by class conflict and radical resistance. If earlier scholars represented the history of capitalist development as largely a chronicle of working- class formation, organization, and opposition, in much recent work the history of capitalism has become largely a history of capital. The new dispensation is proving richly revealing, particularly of the fundamental role of finance in subordinating the production and exchange of goods and services to the pursuit of pecuniary and speculative profit. However, the new history of capital could best deliver on its promise by engaging more fully the questions of class power and exploitation central to the older history of labor. The all- encompassing titles of important new syntheses Republic of Debtors, Debtor Nation, A Nation of Counterfeiters, A Nation of Deadbeats, One Nation Under Debt indicate the return of a form of consensus history in which capitalist dictates confront no serious rivals.36 These titles reflect another conspicuous feature of the new scholarship, projecting backward into the past the character of twenty- first- century capitalism. Amid the proliferation of new financial instruments, markets, and institutions and the sweeping transfer of profits and power from manufacturing to banking since the 1970s, finance has become the dominant form of capital in history as in current affairs. Previous scholarship typically treated seventeenth-and eighteenth- century trading companies and banking houses, along with the monarchs and landlords they served, as protocapitalist precursors of the entrepreneurial industrialists who plowed their profits into the production of commodities and the employment
35. For an enthusiastic mapping of this plateau, see Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty- First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). For sharp laments over the sense that there is no alternative Herbert Spencers phrase, adopted by Margaret Thatcher see Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999); and Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (New York: Monthly Review, 1999). 36. Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Stephen Mihm, Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of Americas Financial Disasters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); and Robert E. Wright, One Nation under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe (New York: McGraw- Hill, 2008).

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of a growing wage workforce, signaling the arrival of full- fledged industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century and foreshadowing the euthanasia of the rentier in the twentieth century. The recent rise to supremacy of merchants like Walmart and banks like Goldman Sachs has prompted historians to recast capitalist development as the story of how finance came to rule over industry, agriculture, and commerce. In Michael Zakim and Gary Kornbliths edited collection of a range of recent work, Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth- Century America (2012), finance forms not the preliminary scaffolding of the capitalist order but its permanent skeleton, its underlying structure.37 Framed in collective counterpoint to the earlier construct of the market revolution, the articles in this volume largely leave aside both industrial capitalists and industrial workers, who occupied the leading roles in the older narrative of industrialization and proletarianization. The main protagonists are rather the legal and literary instruments of credit and investment mortgages, trusts, bank notes, account books that set the financial terms of capitalist development, along with the rising ranks of clerks devoted to the production of profits, not goods. The nineteenth- century class war over factories and fields forms at most a distant thunder in these new essays, as Jean- Christophe Agnew notes in the afterword. Capital works its will invisibly, anonymously like the invisible hand, one might add in a Smithian flatland with no commanding heights or real rulers, only subjects of the almighty market.38 The books title aptly takes its cue from Siegfried Giedions self- styled contribution to anonymous history, Mechanization Takes Command (1948). For the central subject of Capitalism Takes Command seems a similarly faceless sovereign, albeit one made of paper and ink rather than cotton and coal.39 The new emphasis on finance thus brings with it a diminished attention to class conflict, which current scholars, like their social- history predecessors, implicitly identify with conflict over the means and modes of production rather than those of exchange. Older accounts of the transition to capitalism were punctuated by a series of decisive shifts in class relations, such as the separation of labor from land that gave birth to the modern working class, and the separation of ownership from management that spawned the modern business corporation. The new history of capitalism turns instead on an endless cycle of financial crises and the economic wreckage and reconstruction that resulted. Scott Reynolds Nelsons A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of Americas Financial Disasters (2012) retells American economic history as a sequence of recurrent conflicts arising from capitals own internal tensions and contradictions.40 Such crises, as Nelson lucidly depicts them, were occasioned
37. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth- Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 38. Jean- Christophe Agnew, Anonymous History, in Zakim and Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command, 277 84, quoted passages at 278 79. 39.Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). 40.Nelson, Nation of Deadbeats.

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by new modes of marketing staples such as wool, cotton, sugar, and wheat, which entailed new forms of finance and an ever- growing gap between financial assets and the commodities on which they were based. Nelsons work illustrates the ways in which the accelerating series of asset bubbles and banking busts in recent decades fits into a longer pattern of economic crises dating back to the origins of industrial capitalism, crises born of breakdowns in the financial machinery of credit creation rather than in the production of food and other basic necessities.41 Like much recent scholarship, his study has little to say about how class inequality fuels the growth of credit and debt relations to begin with, fostering overaccumulation of capital in search of profitable investment among owners, underconsumption and deepening debt among workers, and escalating volatility for all. Among the heretofore unsung heroes of Nelsons story is the pioneer of actuarial science Elizur Wright, who led the way in the establishment of life insurance in the nineteenth- century United States, designed both to capitalize on and to contain the increasingly violent vicissitudes of fortune that Nelson recounts. Wright plays a similar part in perhaps the most compelling new survey of American finance as the driving force in American economic development, Jonathan Levys Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (2012).42 Like the railroad regulator Charles Francis Adams in Richard Whites recent history of the transcontinental railroads or the Progressive jurist Louis Brandeis in Gerald Berks new biography, Wright exemplifies the regulatory promise of finance, presiding over an expanding capitalist economy in the interests of stability and shared prosperity.43 Such standard- bearers of a kind of administrative or technocratic model of banking and other financial services devoted to maintaining the health of the capitalist system as a whole what earlier New Left scholars called corporate liberals represent the human face of capitals efforts to manage its self- destructive tendencies toward cutthroat competition and reckless speculation, which take the place of class conflict in much recent work. The central struggle in Levys Freaks of Fortune lies in the tension between the embrace of risk taking and speculative endeavor, on the one hand, and the movement toward risk management and security, on the other. Levys elegant narrative charts the rise of risk, which began the nineteenth century as the special province of maritime merchants buying and selling insurance on the goods they traded across the Atlantic and ended the century as the essence of economic agency for nearly all Americans navigating the stormy seas of the capitalist economy. The increasingly universal quest for control over the risks and rewards of a turbulent market subsumed
41. Cf. E. J. Hobsbawm, The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century, Past and Present 5, no. 1 (1954): 33 53. 42. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 43. Gerald Berk, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900 1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011).

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earlier notions of self- mastery based on ownership of labor and land, according to Levy, signifying the financialization of freedom itself. The price of such proprietorship lay in individuals growing dependence on financial corporations such as life insurance firms, mortgage companies, and commodity futures exchanges, which both fed on and fueled the radical uncertainty that Levy locates at the core of industrial capitalism. Yet even the financial institutions that hold the purse strings appear as servants of what he calls a new, perplexing kind of master, of economic events that came so fast and were so outsized that they could not be attributed to human responsibility, of godlike freaks of fortune. Nobodys responsible, as a debt- driven farmers wife observes. Such struggling homesteaders, on the threshold between peasantry and proletariat, appear as both agents and objects of a newly abstract financial power rather than subjects of any identifiable ruling class.44 In the absence of radical alternatives, newer scholarship recovers contests among rival models of capitalist enterprise. It often juxtaposes some variant of a decentralized, production- oriented, small- business- based, competitive but not cutthroat vision of market relations to wholesale corporate consolidation, speculation, and monopoly.45 In a related vein, recent scholars explore the legal and cultural conflicts over where to draw the line between capitalist practices and institutions and the illicit others against which they came to be defined, such as prostitution, addiction, and gambling. For example, in Stephen Mihms luminous study, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalism, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (2007), the dual development of capitalist finance and its counterfeit double takes the place of the parallel rise of industrial capital and organized labor in earlier social history, as strikes and lockouts yield center stage to the battle of law enforcement against a burgeoning black market in credit and currency.46 The new history of capitalism is less concerned than its predecessors with how profits came to derive from contractual, market relations between employers and employees. It pays closer scrutiny instead to two sources of plunder long associated with precapitalist ruling classes: the warfare state and unfree labor, both ultimately
44.Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 313, 310. Cf. the work of the French historical sociologist Jacques Donzelot, arguing that the idea of social insurance or the socialization of risk arose in the Third Republic as an ideological alternative to the language of sovereignty and rights inherited from the French Revolution. Donzelot, LInvention du Social: Essay sur Le Declin Des Passions Politiques (Paris: Libairie Artheme Fayard, 1984), and The Promotion of the Social, Economy and Society 17, no. 3 (1988): 395 427. 45. See, for example, Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of the American Industrial Order, 18651917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Richard R. John, Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly Reconsidered, Enterprise and Society 13 (March 2012): 1 38; and Robert Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive- Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 46.Mihm, Nation of Counterfeiters. See also Timothy A. Hickman, Mania Americana: Narcotic Addiction and Modernity in the United States, 18701 920, Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (2004): 1269 94; David Hochfelder, Where the Common People Could Speculate: The Ticker, Bucket Shops, and the Origins of Popular Participation in Financial Markets, Journal of American History 93, no. 2 (2006): 335 58.

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founded on violent physical force. The history of finance is central to the flourishing field of what Paul Kramer calls imperial histories.47 Neoliberal and neoleft scholars alike have promoted the financial revolution, through which Dutch and English monarchs funded their widening European wars and colonial conquests, to a foundational role comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution in earlier scholarship.48 Dovetailing with studies of the British Atlantic in recent decades, new finance- focused accounts of the rise of the British Empire follow the lead of the world systems theorists Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Andre Gunder Frank, who envisioned capitalism as an imperial system based on commerce, conquest, and the exploitation of unfree labor in the colonial periphery to benefit the metropolitan core.49 In this spirit, Giovanni Arrighis sociological survey of the military- financial complex over six hundred years, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994), focuses on the union of monarchs and merchants in the creation of a transatlantic empire of trade since the late Middle Ages. Arrighi explicitly contrasts his imperial perspective to previous treatments of capitalism as a more recent system of class rule based on private property in the means of production and the profits made from maximizing productivity, rather than from the ancient practices of extraeconomic compulsion and of buying cheap and selling dear.50 So too, David Graebers anthropological expos of finance since the dawn of history, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (2012), describes the modern world system in terms that distinguish it only in size and scope from a long line of imperial precursors. Graeber depicts modern capitalism as a globe- spanning, blood- soaked chain of bondholders and bondsmen, linking statesmen and stockjobbers in Europe with soldiers and slave drivers in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, using moral compulsion to mobilize sheer physical force.51 Such a view of financial empire clearly resonates with scholars who have come of age in an era when the once- fierce conflicts between business owners and organized workers in the industrial heartlands of the global North have waned, while capital has extended its reach over intensely exploited laborers in the hinterlands of the global South through sprawling supply chains presided over by the likes of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. At the same
47. Paul A. Kramer, Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World, American Historical Review (December 2011): 1348 91. 48.See, for example, Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700 2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Robert E. Wright, The First Wall Street: Chesnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Richard Sylla, Richard Tilly, and Gabriel Tortella, eds., The State, the Financial System, and Economic Modernization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 49. See, for example, David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500 1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 50.Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, new ed. (London: Verso, 2010). 51.Graeber, Debt, 346.

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time, the recent reign of finance has been predicated on an increasingly powerful alliance of Washington and Wall Street, harking back to the royal marriage of bank and state in the English financial revolution. Now as then, the biggest profits appear to flow from governmental largesse at home and coerced labor abroad.52 In this context, contemporary conceptions of postindustrial capital and labor have drawn attention to the history of preindustrial capital and labor, to the mercantilism and colonialism of the eighteenth- century Atlantic world, and to the commercial and transportation revolutions of the early American republic, which depended on a combination of government contracts, charters, and subsidies for internal improvements and a growing subaltern workforce of women, children, non- English- speaking people, free African Americans, servants, and slaves.53 Indeed, current notions of crony capitalism and sweatshop labor have reshaped scholars approach to the empire- building industrialists and slaveholding planters of the nineteenth- century United States as well. Among the most startling reconstructions of the heyday of industrial capitalism in the image of both the ancien rgime that preceded it and the financialization that succeeded it is Richard Whites Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011). White paints a portrait of the biggest business of the Gilded Age that looks more like Versailles in the age of Louis XIV or Wall Street in the 1980s than like the engine of industrial enterprise and western expansion in previous accounts. The significance of the transcontinentals, he contends, lies not in their building the infrastructure for the mass production and distribution of agricultural and manufactured goods or their innovation of economies of scope and scale that remade the landscape of American industry. To the contrary, he shows that the material legacy of the long- distance railroads was a record of colossal failure and inefficiency, hijacking more than hastening the development of a national market. The power of the transcontinentals, according to White, came rather from their prodigious capacity as financial vehicles through which investors gambled with other peoples money and capitalized on the corruption of state and national governments, growing rich from state giveaways, bankruptcy bailouts, insider contracts, real estate speculations, and shell games.54 Though White reviews at length the epochal labor conflicts on the railroads, including the great national strike of 1877, the strikes against Jay Goulds system in the 1880s, and the Pullman strike of 1894, these struggles seem largely incidental to
52. See Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, and Leo Panitch, In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010); Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization, and Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011). 53. See John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvements: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and D aniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 54.White, Railroaded.

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the scathing story of fraud and corruption he tells, for the fortunes of his plutocrats appear to rest less on the productivity of their mammoth labor force than on gambling and graft. Whites indictment echoes Thorstein Veblens Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which similarly lampooned the idle rich as latter- day bandits and barbarians making their millions by pure predation rather than production, or by the extortion of rents and taxes from modern industry as a whole as opposed to the exploitation of paid labor in the provision of goods and services. In Whites work, the implicit conflict is not labor versus capital, but what Veblen called industrial versus pecuniary pursuits, or the production of material wealth versus the wasteful consumption of profit in other words, labor versus money. Whites railroaders sound like contemporary fund managers, regarding their properties and payrolls as financial assets to be bought with borrowed money, leveraged for other purchases, bankrupted, broken up, and sold. These erstwhile captains of industry have much in common with recent portrayals of another nineteenth- century leisured class, the slaveholding sovereigns of the empire of cotton.55 If the face of capital in the new history is that of finance, the face of labor is that of slavery, and the two are as closely entwined as manufacturing and wage labor were in earlier scholarship.56 The resurgence of studies of the long- debated relationship between slavery and capitalism owes much to contemporary cross- disciplinary interest in the circulation of commodities, since southern slaves came to produce the vast majority of the worlds supply of cotton, the main raw material for the Industrial Revolution and the nations chief export, the profits from which sustained a large share of both international commerce and domestic economic development. Slaves were also the most valuable commodities in antebellum America, literally embodying the commodification of persons as well as things that recent scholars have argued was the central dynamic of early industrial development, in place of the earlier narrative of proletarianization.57 It is as a peculiarly modern form of property rather than as an age- old form of labor that chattel slavery finds its signal importance for the new scholarship.58 Slaves formed a uniquely liquid asset: unlike land, they did not require improvement in
55.Empire of cotton is from Beckert, Emancipation and Empire, though Beckert focuses on the era of emancipation, not slavery. 56. For a meditation on finance and slavery in the rise of capitalism, see Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 57. See Seth Rockman, The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism, in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 335 61, esp. 351; Johnson, Soul by Soul; and the contributions by David Wald streicher, Amy Dru Stanley, Stephanie Smallwood, and Walter Johnson in the special forum on Commodification of People, Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004): 267 308. 58.On the distinction between slavery as a system of labor, as a political regime, and as a set of property rights, and on the paramount importance of the latter aspect of slavery for capitalist development, see Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), esp. 1 17, 27, 30.

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order to generate a reliable income for their owners, and they could be transferred from place to place like any other personal property. The source of the deepest pain for enslaved people, the chattel principle produced the greatest profit for planters even when their slaves were not up for sale. Human property proved an ideal form of collateral for credit, enabling planters to liquidate and capitalize on the savings stored in their slaves much as homeowners have done with their houses in the past few decades. Slaves were worked financially as well as physically, Bonnie Martin has written of the mass mortgaging of men, women, and children.59 If slavery retarded the development of southern industry by soaking up investment that might otherwise have gone into roads, mines, and mills, it dramatically accelerated the development of southern finance. It drew into the region a deluge of cash and credit, forming the basis for a sophisticated system of banks, factorage firms, and capital markets that made much of the rest of the nation look primitive by comparison.60 In the new history of capitalism, the Old South appears as a society of rentiers in which the ruling class derived the greater part of its income from capital (i.e. slaves).61 Moreover, slaves supplied essential security for the development of financial assets and markets throughout the nation and across the Atlantic.62 Banking houses such as Baring Brothers securitized slave mortgages just as investment banks securitize home mortgages today, bundling them into bonds that enabled far- off investors to buy shares of enslaved human capital while avoiding the risk and responsibility of owning individual slaves.63 The skyrocketing prices of cotton and slaves fueled the biggest speculative boom in the nations history in the 1830s, followed by the greatest panic and deepest depression when the tower of toxic debt collapsed in 1837, much as in our own time.64 The new scholarship on the financialization of American slavery traces the long chain of credit that tied slaveholding planters to merchants, bankers, and investors from New Orleans and New York to Liverpool and London, making the Mississippi Valley the delta of capital as much as of cotton for the global market economy.65
59. Bonnie Martin, Slaverys Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property, Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (2010): 817 66, quoted passage at 866. 60. On the ways in which slavery fueled financial development and slowed industrial development, see Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, Capitalists without Capital: The Burden of Slavery and the Impact of Emancipation, in Quantitative Studies in Agrarian History, ed. Morton Rothstein and Daniel Field (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993), 130 57. 61. Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr., Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 18251885 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 6. 62. See Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr., Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets in Antebellum America: The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831 1852 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), 149. 63. Edward E. Baptist, Toxic Debt, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837, in Zakim and Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command, 6992. 64. Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 65. Financialization of American slavery is from Baptist, Toxic Debt, in Zakim and Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command, 71.

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What the financial focus reveals about the shorter shackles that bound slaves to their masters is less clear, as is what it says about the role of finance in mediating capitalist class relations more broadly. As much as planters treated slaves as financial assets in their dealings with each other and with merchants and creditors, their relationship with the slaves themselves was not mediated by money. Slaves were the objects of extensive credit relations (as well as of commercial and contractual relations more generally) but not typically the agents. Unlike the peonage of their sharecropping descendants, slaves subjection did not depend on debt. In perhaps the deepest new exploration of slavery and the capitalist economy, Walter Johnson stresses the brutally physical basis of planters power on the plantation itself, their reliance on torture, terror, hunger, and systematic surveillance of land and labor, and their corporeal calculus of the costs of production lashes into labor into bales into dollars into pounds sterling in which money formed the ends but not the means of compelling their workforce.66 In this essential respect, slaveholders dominion differed fundamentally from predominantly monetary modes of exploitation. Recent work rightly emphasizes the coercive character of the wide panoply of forms of labor on which early capitalists thrived, including both chattel slavery and wage labor under various legal restrictions regarding unionization and the right to quit. The absence of negotiation, the persistence of coercion, and the disparity in power between those buying labor and those performing it were not imperfections or temporary contradictions in capitalist development, as Seth Rockman writes in his landmark study of slavery and wage labor in early Baltimore. They were the very foundation of capitalism in the early republic.67 The common element of coercion only makes it more essential to attend to the specific mechanisms through which capital commanded labor, then and since. To think of slavery as the epitome of capitalist labor, and to conceive of capital itself as intrinsically dependent on the imperial state or political cronyism and unfree labor, can reveal a great deal, but it can also conceal the role of money and finance as distinguishing means of capitalist rule, mediating relations between owners and workers and between lenders and borrowers.
IV.

For earlier social historians, the critical challenge was to understand labor in its dynamic relationship to capital, eschewing a mechanistic approach that implicitly gave the primary role in economic history to the inexorable development of commerce and technology even as it highlighted the heroic agency of various groups of workers. Conversely, the vital imperative for current historians is to apprehend capital, especially in its most abstract and financialized form, in its intrinsic dependence on the exploitation of labor. More than ever, we need to come to terms with how the organization of currency, credit, savings, and investment enables bankers, brokers, and bond66. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 244. 67.Rockman, Scraping By, 8.

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holders to control the labor and output of a far- flung capitalist workforce that they do not directly employ. This is a story told not by older histories that relegate finance to a marginal rather than integral role in class relations nor by recent accounts that assimilate the power of financial capital to that of monarchs, lords, conquistadors, and slaveholders reliant on nonmonetary means of compelling labor. It is a story of special interest today, when finance has assumed an outsized influence in class rule through investment bankers management of consumer debts and retirement savings, bondholders claims on public employment and social services, and traders and fund managers control over corporate decision making.68 A fuller exploration of how modern finance has commanded labor might productively draw on the insights of the leading scholars of the transition to capitalism and the rise of the working class, respectively, Robert Brenner and E. P. Thompson, though neither Brenner nor Thompson focuses on finance. Along these lines, Brenners conception of class relations deserves renewed attention in several respects. First, it calls for treating the property relations that determine various classes access to wealth or income as the basic causes and conditions for economic development, rather than simply its consequences. This is especially important in an age when we hear frequently that financialization, like globalization and information technology, has come to determine class relations. Historical study can usefully call into question the fetishism of finance that ascribes paramount power to economic mechanisms and processes themselves, rather than to those who create and control them. Second, Brenner emphasizes the need to consider not only relations between owners and workers but also class- constituting relations among owners and among workers as well.69 Finance mediates both kinds of class relations; the banking system, for example, which is often taken to represent its own distinct sector, industry, or interest, has also proven critical to the creation and consolidation of a coherent capitalist class capable of governing the market economy as a whole.70 Third, Brenners approach to the history of social- property relations implies that if the capitalist system is still to be conceived as a mode of production, then production must be understood very broadly, not just in terms of the manufacture, cultivation, and extraction of material goods but in terms of the production and reproduction of a whole system of organizing and allocating property, power, and wealth. Such a perspective can help uncover the ways in which control over the means of payment, which is to say, currency and credit, has
68. See Robin Blackburn, Age Shock: How Finance Is Failing Us (London: Verso, 2006); John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (New York: Monthly Review, 2009); and Costas Lapavitsas, Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation, Historical Materialism 17, no. 2 (2009): 114 48. 69. See Robert Brenner, Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong, in Marxist History- Writing for the Twenty- First Century, ed. Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 49 111. Brenner exemplifies this approach to intra-as well as interclass relations in his study of the global capitalist economy since World War II, The Economics of Global Turbulence (New York: Verso, 2006). 70. See James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 18901913 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

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been comparable to control over the means of production, such as land, raw materials, and the tools and technology of manufacturing, in structuring class relations. Indeed, as Brenner and allied scholars have noted, during much of the transition in England, small cultivators remained in control of their own farms and tools and were largely self- employed. At the same time, they were becoming dramatically more dependent on market mechanisms for their livelihood amid the enclosure of the commons, fencing of private farmland, and commodification of housing, food, fuel, and other basic necessities, which people of little or no property increasingly needed currency or credit to purchase. The commodification of the means of payment, now known as the financial revolution, proved pivotal in rendering common people dependent on modern monetary media governed by bankers and their private investors. The dismantling of the local, communal credit arrangements through which poor and laboring people had long been able to exchange and subsist; the measures taken to require bank- controlled coin or credit for the payment of taxes, debts, and rents; the drastic contraction of the currency (as in the great recoinage of the 1690s); and the deliberate construction of popular need for it went hand in hand with the commodification of the means of subsistence in creating the conditions for capitalist development in England.71 Though E. P. Thompsons Making of the English Working Class remains essential reading for labor historians, his articles collected in Customs in Common (1991) may be more immediately relevant for the new history of capitalism. These essays suggest the ways in which capital exerted its authority before the industrial revolution, mainly in the marketplace rather than the workplace, and through property in the means of payment as much as property in the means of production.72 Class figures in these eighteenth- century studies less as a noun than as an adjective, describing not a set of preexisting historical actors but a set of formative actions, namely struggles over the exploitation of labor that became crucibles of new forms of solidarity and class consciousness prior to the emergence of a large, propertyless wage workforce in the nineteenth century. These plebeian battles for the enforcement of long- held prohibitions on engrossing and forestalling basic necessities also embraced popular resistance to usurious interest rates and other measures that created artificial scarcity in the means of paying rising prices. What one notices about it first of all is the importance of money, Thompson writes of English society in the eighteenth century, when landed gentry came to be ranked by their rents and when all manner of political appointments, property rights, and social privileges came to be bought and sold. We are habituated to think of exploitation as something that occurs at ground level, Thompson reminds us, but the real killings were to be made in the distribution, cor71.See Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: Macmillan, 1998); Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 17401914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 72. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991).

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nering and sale of goods or raw materials (wool, grain, meat, sugar, cloth, tea, tobacco, slaves), in the manipulation of credit, and in the seizure of the offices of State.73 Seen in this light, the financial revolution appears central to the nascent class conflict over laboring peoples increasing dependence on both commodified goods and commodified means of payment. Thompsons studies of those struggles in England can point the way toward a deeper history of class conflict over money and market relations in colonial America, where the household in control of both family labor and land remained the basic social unit throughout the eighteenth century. In England, poor people with little control over either government or banking often allied themselves with older landed elites in defense of traditional protections such as the just price. In the colonies, by contrast, the much wider franchise meant that family farmers and other smallholders allied with domestically oriented merchants and landowners in laying claim to the machinery of money making itself. Therein lay the rudiments of a distinctive but related story of the twin birth of the money question and the labor question in early America. Colonial resistance to taxation without representation went hand in hand with opposition to the tyranny of moneyed men who controlled the currency in which taxes had to be paid. Instead of entrusting authority over the money supply to British bankers and their wealthy investors, the colonists pioneered the creation of paper currency controlled by their own representative legislatures. After royal officials halted that radical monetary experiment in the mid- eighteenth century, cash- poor farmers repeatedly rebelled against the ascendant creditor class. They defended their lands and livelihoods in the face of foreclosure and debtors prison, shutting down roads and courts and occasionally taking up arms in collective rebellion. Then, for more than a century after the revolution, successive movements of farmers and workers continued to battle the money power, a rising ruling class wielding unprecedented power over the expanding market economy. They viewed the recurrent banking breakdowns that invariably ushered in hard times as crises of democracy as much as of capitalism.74 Our modern system of popular politics was born in important part of grassroots campaigns for a monetary system run by and for the people. The long struggle reached its climax at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, when William Jennings Bryan delivered one of the most famous speeches in American history, demanding the democratization of finance. Bryan lost the election, but his denunciation of the cross of gold was echoed in the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and 2012. So were the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at another Democratic convention forty years after Bryan when he called for Americans to renew the spirit of 1776 by overthrowing the economic royalists who had concentrated into their own hands an almost
73. E. P. Thompson, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class? Social History 3, no. 2 (1978): 133 65, quoted passages at 138 and 139. 74. See Jeffrey Sklansky, William Leggett and the Melodrama of the Market, in Zakim and Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command, 199221.

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complete control over other peoples property, other peoples money, other peoples labor, other peoples lives. The despotism Bryan and FDR decried has been greatly augmented by the phenomenal ascendance of the financial sector in recent decades. From energy and education to housing and health care, and from local school boards to national governments around the globe, social policies have come to be determined by banks and allied institutions. What early Americans called the money question, a crucial question about finance as a means of class rule, seems worth asking anew.