Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made by Michael Zakim (review)

Michael Zakim's Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made doesn't account for capitalism, but it does offer a provocative contribution to the burgeoning field of paperwork studies. Zakim offers a marvelous tour of the material and cultural world of the nineteenth-century clerk. Other scholars have written excellent accounts of clerical aspirations during this period—for example, Thomas Augst's The Clerk's Tale and Brian Luskey's On the Make.¹ And studies like JoAnne Yates's superb Control through Communication have described the importance of paper technologies.² But no one had yet offered up such a thick description of the minutiae of clerical life—from pens and paper to cabinets and constipation.

In five lively chapters—and they are as lively as any history of scrivening can be—Zakim argues that seemingly trivial scraps of paper piled up into something more: Paperwork created market society and defined a new vision of masculinity. It also gave people indigestion and sent them in search of exercises and diets to cure their sedentary ailments. Along the way, these market-making activities created a new vision of labor and a new social order. As Zakim concludes in his final chapter, "Buying and selling were no longer just a means for disposing of the products of one's hard work. They were the objects of labor in their own right in a market system that defined all value, and all values. This was the world the clerk made" (190).

Zakim's subtitle, The World The Clerk Made is, surely, a reference to Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.³ And, throughout the book, Zakim suggests that by accommodating market capitalism, clerks were, in a sense, entrapping themselves. This is a book about what scratching on paper, in all its dullness and apparent neutrality, led them (and us) to overlook. It is "a search for the everyday sources" of "amnesia," and of the high costs of a "cultural system that so resolutely, and convincingly, reinvented civic life in the form of a business deal" (8). In some ways the idea that clerks made this world fits Zakim's tale better than Genovese's: The men Zakim describes (and they are all men) helped to construct what many discovered is an illusion of upward mobility.

Zakim describes the book as "an alternative kind of subaltern study"—an "account of the winners written from below" (2). This styling feels insightful if also potentially misleading. While the category of clerk was capacious, ranging down to very menial and temporary labor, it would certainly be more accurate to call the clerical class the middle. To invoke another classic of the 1970s, this is, in a sense, a close analysis of the hands in Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand.⁴ In Zakim's interpretation these hands were making the market, while in Chandler's they were building organizations. Zakim's account puts them at the bottom. Chandler, by contrast, painted them as middle managers, offering a rosy portrait of the kinds of productive labor they could accomplish. Chandler described new skills; Zakim the de-skilling of paperwork. Both frames fit a period where members of the clerical class were upwardly mobile, but very few were winning the victories they imagined. Zakim's contribution is to show how, even as the middle came to look more like the bottom, it kept imagining itself on the way to the top.

The book, then, is less about the productive work that paperwork accomplishes and more about the ideological work it does along the way. It is about what mountains of paper—now megabytes—can cause us to forget and overlook. Indeed, Zakim sometimes seems not to care about what was actually written on all of the paper. There are references to double-entry bookkeeping and the like, but how they worked...