New Bedford, Capital of the 19th Century?

Declaring New Bedford, not Paris, capital of the 19th century enables exploration of basic and yet remarkable issues in the relations of capitalism and culture. Paris, the city of light, needed New Bedford, the city that lit up the world. Following Boon, not Benjamin, takes us beyond the dazzle of commodity consumption and into the cultures of enterprise. Melville, not Marx, understands the ontology of enterprise and even its theology. And while Melville anticipates by generations Weber's interest in the complexities of Protestant ethics of the "fighting Quakers" and their nascent systems of company and finance, his fellow New Bedford resident Frederick Douglass explains the motives of crew, the racial history of work, and the significance of freedom in America. Benjamin's gender-challenged obsession with hunting for hidden, flashing meanings is more than matched by Boon's tactics for hunting and gathering; Boon teaches methods for non-symptomatic reading that can enable us to articulate race, company, finance and fiery hunt with fetish, class, and struggle in the history of capital. Pursuing surprises in the history of New England whaling, we juxtapose the views of C.L.R. James and D.H. Lawrence on race and colonial capitalism, as well as Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, and Thorstein Veblen on the significance and politics of investment. In the end, we return to New Bedford and Paris in the 21st century, not because the dead are not safe, but because Boon has taught us to how to see new meanings living, not dead, even in the very Arcades haunted by the obsessions of Benjamin.