"Paying the Shot": Hank Morgan's Miller-Gun and Monetary Policy in Camelot

Hank Morgan thinks of himself as an instigator of the first industrial revolution, but his career in Camelot more accurately maps onto a late nineteenth-century revolution, one that witnessed the decline of the profit-driven entrepreneur and the rise of the corporate oligarch whose interest was less in establishing a competitive advantage among rivals than in maintaining price and currency stability across the economy. The novel grapples more seriously than critics have realized with this transition and with a changing conception of money that accompanies the rise of the corporate regime. A seemingly innocuous object, something Hank calls the miller-gun, plays an important role in this story about the emergence of economic stability as an aspiration among corporate and political leaders of the 1880s and '90s.