In the Eye of the Pyramid: Geographic Enterprise from John Smith to America Incorporated

Down behind this hill the sun was sinking, transforming it into a jagged pyramid of silhouette, crowned with a brilliant halo, whence a seeming midnight aurora burst forth through broken clouds, bordering each misty blue island with crimson and gold, then blazing upward in widening lines of light ...

A banner of smoke ... balanced over this seeming volcano, floating off, in many a circle and surge, on the evening breeze. But I did not realize that this hill, so strange and picturesque, was a city of the habitations of men, until I saw, on the topmost terrace, little specks of black and red moving about against the sky. It seemed still a little island of mesas ...

Frank Hamilton Cushing, "Going to Zuni," 1890

We shall take [the White City] as a pedagogy, a model and a lesson . .. And in our analysis we shall look not only at what it says but at what it fails to say, what it keeps hidden.

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 1982

The temporal and territorial sprawl of this issue of ALH brings to mind Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994). In The Long Twentieth Century, money trumps class, and it is finance (rather than industrial) capital that allows readers and viewers to trace the history of capitalism through the time-spaces of its movements—from the city-states of Renaissance Italy, to imperial Spain and burgher Holland, to industrial/imperial England, and over the Atlantic to the late-nineteenth-century US. There, in theincorporated America of the 1890s, which David Shumway claims is the spatio-temporal center of American studies today, the reader/viewer passes from Fordism and the Pullman strikes through the modern research university, the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Birth of the Typewriter, to emerge, gradually, up through the entwined genres of Realism and International Modernism and out, onto the flat surfaces of postmodernity and the vast and yeasty culture-world of the global present, a world made visible-and-legible (Fredric Jameson argues, 246-65) as only the most recent stage of finance capital in its long, long history of coming into view.

Whether you admire Arrighi or Jameson or not—and David Leverenz and James Livingston mostly do not—the world-shaping adventures of finance capital are the best way to account for an issue of ALH that opens with John Smith and Powhatan (1607) and concludes with a series of reflections on Alan Trachtenberg's locus classicusThe Incorporation of America (1982). Between William Boelhower's reading of Smith's A True Relationand essays by Brook Thomas, Alan Trachtenberg, Shumway, Leverenz, and Livingston on the meaning of late-nineteenth-century corporate culture, Stephanie LeMenager, JeVory Clymer, and Gavin Jones map key spatio-temporal features of the archive laid down by nineteenth-century finance capital as it dashed over the river and through the woods on its merry and global (yet historical) way. As Gavin Jones notes in his map of poverty's place in American literary history, Herman Melville was an astute tracker of finance capital's global adventures. Like Melville, the essays here insist that the world-geographies of capital are myriad, prolific, never unitary or self-identical, and certainly not assimilable to Melville's own weedy ships and freight, his East India merchantmen, his whale of a boat chasing a whale chasing a boat. They track, from specific textual sites, the intensely re-productive connection between territorialities (national, legal, propertied, and representational) and processes of deterritorialization epitomized by flights of money overseas and overland to new sites of exchange.

From counting house and ledger book to the scope of a Gatling gun, finance capital flows through the eyes. Its growth anddevelopment thrives on discovery and revelation, on truth brought forth from darkness just as profit is born from investment. In confronting the artifacts...