Whither the History of Capitalism?: Reconsidering Finance’s Place in the American Democratic Experiment

“In History Class, Capitalism sees Its Stock Soar” was a surprising headline to find on the front page of a Sunday New York Times. That April 2013 feature alerted readers to the spread of a “new history of capitalism” on college campuses. That splashy feature covered upper-division classes on “deeply unsexy topics” like insurance, just-released books, t-shirts designed for a scholarly “boot camp,” and new programs “drawing crowds—sometimes with the help of canny brand management.”¹

“Well-advertised” seemed a fitting description of the supposedly “new” history of capitalism early in the millennium. Columbia University Press launched a new book series billed as “not your father’s business history,” campuses started or continued to run centers dedicated to capitalism studies, and the Journal of American History eventually published a lengthy 2013 online scholarly interchange including some of the historians profiled in The New York Times as well as the author of this essay. That discussion delved deeper into scholarly issues only hinted at in the news: reconsiderations of slavery and finance; questions about how new this attention-grabbing field was; and fears that people of color, especially women, would be left out of a sub-discipline promising to cover broad stretches of time from the bottom all the way to the top.²

Those worries seem especially salient almost a decade later, when a pandemic disproportionately ravaged low-income communities of color and pushed women out of the workforce amidst Black Lives Matter protests, #MeToo revelations, efforts to disenfranchise voters of color, and a violent assault on the Capitol. Yet the history of capitalism “brand” appears to have faded. Well-known capitalism scholars were not the headline names working on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which controversially put slavery at the center of U.S. history. Capitalism scholars also didn’t participate in the Trump Administration’s Presidential Advisory 1776 Commission, whose report included no mention of Indigenous people.³

Historians have, of course, continued to ask questions about power and probed the sources of systemic inequality, which suggests that the once-headline-making self-proclaimed new history of capitalism may best be understood as a political-economic turn within the historical profession in particular and the academy in general. Dissertations, books, and articles (some in the new journal Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics) grappling with political economy remain numerous, befitting two decades marked by global economic catastrophes and worldwide threats to democracy. There seems to have been a need to understand the historic business behind everything, as evidenced by the dissertations on farming,⁴ mining,⁵ fast food franchising,⁶ and the commercial sex trade⁷ as well as the monographs devoted to gay magazines,⁸ banking fees,⁹ Christian oil men,¹⁰ high-tech entrepreneurs,¹¹ defense contractors,¹² early paper money,¹³ private beaches,¹⁴ and Fordism’s global reach.¹⁵

Recent work on the history of finance indicates that this political-economic turn has offered a potent challenge to assumptions about the late-twentieth-century financialization of the country’s economy and emergence of a neoliberal world order. Capitalism scholars—including those in disciplines other than history—have painstakingly revealed how important financial products (like mortgages, bonds, and insurance policies) have always been to the economy, politics, and social fabric of the U.S. A lot of this research has emphasized finance’s historic complicity in worsening inequality, particularly racism and segregation. Yet these eye-opening accounts of pernicious federal policies and private banking practices have often been top-down. As such, the conflict, resistance, and struggle for power, when...