Gilt Trip

In examining how "Boston Brahmins"—including Henry Davis Minot, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Henry Lee Higginson, among others—preserved their wealth and status at the close of the nineteenth century, Noam Maggor rethinks a question central to the history of the Gilded Age. How did the United States transform, within the span of a few decades, from an agricultural exporting nation into the world's leading industrial economy? Brahmin Capitalism argues that historians have placed too much emphasis on the wave of corporate mergers that transformed manufacturing during the 1890s, while taking for granted the creation of an integrated national market that made industrial consolidation possible. To examine how a market connecting the northeast and the Great West formed during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Maggor dploys one of the hallmark methods of recent histories of capitalism: he follows the money.