The Home of Capital

Cities are the home of capital, whether in the form of Bear Stearns or Peoria Savings and Loan (both now RIP), and indeed of capitalism itself, whether U.S.-style or Chinese. They grow through the concentration of production, trade, and finance, meanwhile making themselves indispensable for the same. Their very space embodies capital, as every parcel is measured and valued as real estate. In sum, as the two books reviewed here attest, the histories of capitalism and urbanization are intertwined.

Capital of Capital and The Constitution of the City approach this nexus in very different ways. As the subtitle implies—Money, Banking + Power in New York City, 1784–2012—the first is a case study, descriptive, and organized chronologically. The subtitle of the second book—Economy, Society, and Urbanization in the Capitalist Era—is equally indicative of a general, critical, theoretically oriented, and largely thematic treatment. Placing them side by side highlights the strengths and limitations of each and, arguably, of two different styles of discourse.

In 2012, the Museum of the City of New York mounted an exhibit on the city's history of banking. This commemorated the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of Citi, once the City Bank of New York. As the museum's director notes in a foreword, both the exhibit and the resulting book were supported by Citi, which alerts us that this history might lean in a certain direction. And to some extent it does. There are appropriate and indeed quite generous references to panics, crashes, and various forms of malfeasance, but as its title implies, the general tone is triumphalist with respect to finance, New York City, and indeed the United States as a whole. The very character of the book communicates this message: glossy and abundantly illustrated in color, it is far more than a coffee table book, but it would not look out of place on a banker's desk.

The illustrations serve an informative text. The authors tell a loose-jointed story, as they trace the evolution of banking—not finance in general—from the time that Alexander Hamilton and associates founded the Bank of New York in 1784 down to the latest post-bailout recovery. It is loose-jointed because it encompasses several themes, as these relate to the three main types of banks (commercial, savings, investment), while including intriguing sidebars that feature notable bankers (Jacob Barker), banks (Banca Stabile, for immigrants; the Amalgamated Bank, for workers), fraudsters (George L. Leslie), innovations (the credit card), and activists (feminists; Occupy Wall Street). The main themes are sketched in a brief introduction: New York as an incubator of financial innovation; its banks as centers of political debate and targets of federal regulation; and the city as a "battleground on which ordinary New Yorkers … have struggled to expand their own access to bank loans and investments" (p. 5). These themes do indeed recur throughout the nine chronological chapters, but the authors use a light hand and refrain from underlining arguments or articulating, explicitly, how themes interrelate. The result is readable and engaging, easy to dip into but more difficult to follow cover to cover.

From my point of view, speaking as an urban geographer, the main limitations of Capital of Capital are that it does not say much about two important contexts: the global and the local. Capital has been flowing around the world for centuries, now more rapidly and in larger quantities than ever. Whether or not New York deserves the label "capital" of capital, it is certainly one of the main hubs. There has been extensive discussion about how it fits into the current global scene, much of it focused on the arguments of Saskia Sassen, who has suggested that...