In Brahmin Capitalism, Noam Maggor describes how elite Bostonians reoriented their investments away from New England textiles and toward new Western enterprises in the decades following the Civil War. Maggor shows that these elite financiers helped encourage the integration of the West into a new, national market that nonetheless remained disproportionately fueled by Eastern wealth and governed by a highly decentralized network of state and local (as opposed to national) authorities. As Maggor’s creatively researched and exceptionally well-written book underscores, this process was hardly easy or automatic. Among other obstacles, Boston’s Brahmins faced populist opposition not only out West but also in their hometown.

One of Maggor’s main goals is to challenge the “overdetermined quality” of previous scholars’ “sweeping narratives” of U.S. industrialization in the late nineteenth century. Rather than merely tracing “national economic growth over time,” Maggor’s book “explores the formation of the new geography of American capitalism in the latter decades of the nineteenth-century—an uneven and contradictory process not captured by macroeconomic indicators or master narratives of ‘industrialization’” (x). Along the way, Maggor seeks to show that political resistance to Eastern investors’ agenda was neither reactionary nor weak and ephemeral. On the contrary, Maggor echoes and extends the findings of recent scholarship on late nineteenth-century populism and on big city politics by highlighting how the populists he examines “embraced the democratic possibilities of urban industrial society” (xi) and left durable imprints on the U.S. political economy.

Primarily through a series of wisely selected vignettes, Maggor tells the story of the Boston Brahmins’ transition from textile- and cotton-centric investors to holding portfolios heavy with Western assets. He tells the stories of men like Henry Lee Higginson and Charles F. Adams Jr., and how, by the 1870s, they had set their sights on cultivating industries far from New England, in places like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where Higginson helped build the highly profitable Calumet & Hecla Mining Company, and Kansas City, where Adams worked to establish the Kansas City Stockyards Company. Maggor dedicates a chapter to reconstructing the entrepreneurial efforts of Henry Davis Minot, whose tireless pursuit of business west of the Mississippi catapulted him from a “genteel adolescence in suburban Boston to a position as a stockbroker and analyst, a financier, and finally, vice president of one of the largest railroads in North America” (99), all before Minot’s early death at the age of thirty-one in a train crash, tellingly, on “the Pennsylvania Central’s Western Express” (96). Men like these, according to Maggor, “became key agents in the formation of the new continental order” (99).

Through a tightly argued chapter on state constitutional conventions, Maggor details how inhabitants of new Western states attempted to curb Eastern investors’ power even as they remained friendly to economic development. Delegates to state constitutional conventions in the West attempted to limit corporate exploitation of local water supplies, to regulate labor conditions, and to curb abuses by railroad companies, even as they also sought to ensure that new flows of Eastern capital would not bypass their states for others. Their efforts led to mixed results and varied by state in part due to this balancing act. As Maggor writes, “The constitutions of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, for example, provided for eight-hour days for all government work. This provision failed to pass in Colorado, Washington, and North Dakota. The constitutions of Colorado, Wyoming, and Washington mandated strict regulation of safety in mines. Those of Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota did not” (176). Maggor concludes, Western state “constitutions, as adopted, were not a clear triumph for any particular interest. They bore the mark of the divides and disagreements that surfaced during the writing process, varying based on the conditions of different industries and economic sectors at the time of the convention and the ability of the respective parties to mobilize and rally support” (175–176). Still, Maggor shows, convention delegates wary of Eastern investors emerged from these political fights having notched significant victories.

Even amid their growing obsession with Western affairs, Boston’s Brahmins sought to shape the development of their hometown. Maggor describes how Boston’s financial elite engaged in battles over local tax policy, annexation, and metropolitan development more generally as well as in politically charged cultural conflicts with Boston’s workers and small manufacturers, including use of the city’s Commons. In underscoring how wealthy political activists and their allies fostered metropolitan fragmentation and encouraged a shift toward raising municipal revenues through taxes on real estate rather than on personal property more generally (including, potentially, wealth earned outside the city), Maggor makes valuable contributions to the historical study of urban political economy.

Brahmin Capitalism deserves attention from U.S. business historians and historians of U.S. capitalism in general. Its clear, economical style makes the book promising as a text for both graduate and undergraduate courses. Scholars and students alike might debate the extent to which previous political economies of the Gilded Age have been “overdetermined,” as Maggor claims, and precisely the degree to which Maggor’s approach differs from various works that have come before. But as his forceful critique of earlier scholarship makes clear, Maggor rightly believes that these are debates worth having as today’s historians of business and capitalism struggle to learn from and transcend the work of their predecessors.