Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America ed. by Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson (review)

Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America is a collection of essays based on a conference sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2012. It is tempting to write that the book illuminates capitalism’s shadows in the nineteenth-century United States, but the core of the volume’s project is to eschew such easy binaries of shadow and light. Instead, horse thieves, shinplasters, secondhand clothiers, emigrant runners, mock auctioneers, and more move from margin to center: these were examples not of fringe capitalism, but of capitalism.

The eleven essays challenge common understandings of entrepreneurialism and push readers to consider the lived realities of how capitalism actually worked. Entrepreneurs ranged from the Loomis Gang’s open trade in stolen horses as portrayed by Will B. Mackintosh, to Paul Erickson’s booksellers with “tin boxes” of smut below the counter for the knowing consumer, to Ellen Gruber Garvey’s “Back Number Budd,” who profited by collecting old newspapers and selling them to reporters and lawyers. Two essays look at early American secondhand markets, with Robert J. Gamble transporting readers to Philadelphia’s South Street, and Adam Mendelsohn to New York City’s Chatham Street with its Jewish clothiers. Used markets allowed the old to become new again, but they aroused suspicion as liminal spaces where criminals might reinvent themselves or where poor consumers might use refurbished clothing to pass themselves off as their social betters (p. 82). Brendan P. O’Malley describes aggressive Irish and German “runners” who commandeered the luggage of not-yet-disembarked immigrants and hawked local inns and transportation services. These “land sharks” were not uniquely deplorable, O’Malley tells us, but figured as “the most visible workers within the emerging commercial system of mass transatlantic migration” (p. 95).

The volume elucidates how American capitalism’s development was paved by exigencies, choices, and values. Market societies are not ideal types; they are lived products of history. Thus Michael D. Thompson’s essay on pilfering by whites and blacks on the Charleston waterfront captures how raced assumptions of morality and criminality shaped laws regarding petty thievery. Joshua R. Greenberg describes how the dearth of legal tender gave rise to the knowing exchange of dubious currencies issued by merchants and municipal corporations. Shinplasters were not counterfeit, but nor were they sanctioned by state or banking authorities. They held value for as long as others willingly accepted them—which people did, locally, for lack of better options.

Markets themselves depend on the legibility of certain products and transactions. Even as secondhand goods, shinplasters, or mock auctioneers might be seen as “passing” as their more respectable counterparts, they were products of the same market system. As Corey Goettsch notes, “Mock auctions became the swindle against which the city’s myriad other confidence games—whether finessed at the stock exchange, in the church, within government offices, or inside retail stores—were defined” (p. 124). The antebellum press popularized smooth mock auctioneers and “Peter Funks” as staples of trickster lore in a way that provided critical distance for “legitimate” market manipulations (p. 126). Swindler stories operated as market parables—not simply a question of right or wrong, but of whether the mark deserved to be caught for greed or foolishness. Conversely, masking the commercial nature of a transaction might be part of the commodity, as with the high-end Baltimore brothels discussed by Katie M. Hemphill.

The collection underscores the messy nature of developing American capitalism. To editors Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson, “the rules of economic engagement were still being established,” and “definitions of terms such as legal and illegal, moral and immoral, acceptable and disdained were still up for debate” in the nineteenth century (p. 9). Has this ever...