Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America by Peter Knight (review)

Professionally curated financial information is inescapable in twenty-first-century media. The genres are vast—from the cable news shows to the financial podcasts, from the polished TV ads for investment advice to the local banners at the school sports complex, from the Hollywood films on insider trading to the books exposing the men behind the Great Recession. Americans, it seems, are constantly reading the market, attempting to decipher just what—or who—is behind the curtain. Peter Knight's Reading the Market, published in the New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural series edited by Jeffrey Sklansky, considers the expansion of this media—and the interest that motivates its consumption—within the historical context of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Tracing Americans' growing imaginative engagement with the stock market from the 1880s onward, Reading the Market assembles an expansive archive, including fiction, advice manuals, satirical cartoons, and prototypical organization charts. Interdisciplinary in its interventions, Reading the Market portrays a market in the nineteenth-century United States that not only required but also followed from "conceptual adjustments" (p. 14). Because this cultural studies approach allows Knight to adjust traditional accounts of the market's transformation, this book is likely to be of wide interest to readers of this journal.

Across an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, Knight delivers two related revisions to understanding of the development of capitalism in the United States. First, Knight claims that, in orienting ordinary Americans to the "fictiveness of finance" (p. 15), the culture of the market helped "render it legible and thus call it into being" (p. 6). Second, Knight refines the project of the new history of capitalism. This multidisciplinary field has profitably directed attention to the "institutions, mechanisms, and personalities of finance at the heart of capitalism," thereby challenging prior generations' sense of business history as a record of an "inevitable" march to corporate, technological, and production efficiencies. With abundant evidence from the cultural record, Reading the Market further challenges the market's inevitable march toward abstraction. Reconsidering the "great transformation" from a "traditional society" to a "market society," Knight argues principally that, across the late nineteenth century, "the market was viewed as both impersonal and personal, abstract and concrete, often in contradictory ways" (p. 16).

In his analysis of the genres that not only describe but also conjure the market, Knight prefers to use dialectical historical materialism to challenge the metanarrative of abstraction. In chapter 1, "Market Reports," as he emphasizes financial journalism's role in framing the market, he shows how the market report veered between representing the market as an "impersonal abstraction" and as "the product of gossipy, personal relationships" (p. 25). These contradictions inhere in media seemingly separated from the more austere business publications: most surprisingly, the gossip rag, Town Topics. In chapter 2, "Reading the Ticker Tape," Knight similarly finds that even the "new methods of scientific analysis," seemingly predicated on a transcendent statistical abstraction, "attributed a mysterious sense of human agency … to the market and its mechanical registers" (p. 61). Citing numerous late nineteenth-century firsthand published accounts of Wall Street, Knight shows how market readers "incorporated … the logic of personification" as they came to view "the economy" as subject to its own internal laws (p. 61, emphasis in original). Even though the market, a nuanced form, could be read—and predicted—it attained legibility via an interpretive mix of both traditional and scientific methods.

The second part of chapter 2 illustrates how this tension between reading the ticker tape as an art or as a science haunts (his term) writing about the market. I use "haunt" advisedly here, for it makes clear Knight's allegiance to a method that reveals market reading as an uneasy combination of "financial rationality" and "occult" magic. Even as the new history of capitalism might incorporate stock traders like (the fictional) Larry...