Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America ed. by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (review)

It is interesting, and not a little ironic, that much of the best work about the genealogy and what might be called the architecture of American capitalism has come from cultural and social historians. Political and business historians have weighed in on the subject as well, but mainstream economic historians, by and large, have remained on the sidelines. Why? Primarily because many, if not most, of them prefer to avoid messy questions relating to capitalism's evolution in favor of a more static perspective that allows them to render capitalism and the behavior of the actors therein amenable to neoclassical assumptions and formal methods. Refinements in neoclassical theory over time and the rise of institutional approaches of one type or another have changed the landscape to some extent, but, even so, few mainstream economic historians spend much time dealing with capitalism as a process, particularly the ontology of its becoming.

But Capitalism Takes Command, an exceptionally fine collection by a diverse cast of first-rate scholars, is full of messy questions. Writing about "capital's transformation into an 'ism" in the nineteenth century (1), the various contributors assembled by Zakim and Kornblith strive to "illuminate the anonymous, often invisible workings of a system [capitalism] that has effectively reorganized our humanity" (12). The tack adopted in this "economic and cultural geography of capitalism" focuses not on the commanding heights of the system—such things as, for example, big business, dark satanic mills, or robber barons—but on, as Jean-Christophe Agnew points out in his provocative afterword, the "flatland of ordinary material practices that habituated Americans to the new, systemic rules of capitalism as a market form of life and that did so in ways of which most Americans at the time were only dimly and bemusedly aware" (279). Thus, among the twelve chapters included in the volume are pieces on changes in mortgage and inheritance patterns; new financial instruments (including securitization!); evolving forms of business organization (the rise of the corporation in particular); the beautification of capitalism, as seen in changing depictions of dockyards and maritime commerce; and the culture and work experience of the merchant's clerk, one of the economic symbols of nineteenth-century American capitalism.

In focusing on the multifarious, often insidious, ways in which capitalism—"a thoroughly manmade system" (11)—came to dominate America, and how "business logic" became "a general social logic and the 'bottom line' emerge[d] as a favorite synonym for the unadulturated truth" (5), Zakim and Kornblith acknowledge their debt to Sigfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Oxford, 1948). In that brilliant work, Giedion explored the manner in which engineering and technology re-made modern society, a transformation that became manifest in myriad quotidian ways. The contributors to Capitalism Takes Command continue Giedion's project, examining in close—sometimes excruciatingly close—detail how a system that arose to rationalize the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services had, by the end of the nineteenth century, reorganized most aspects of American life.