There may be a great crime behind every great fortune, as Honoré de Balzac supposedly declared. But many little crimes—petty theft, bait-and-switch scams, small-scale chiseling—lurk among the origins of modern-day American capitalism. In the early American republic, the railroads, telegraphs, and steam presses of the Market Revolution enabled the rapid duplication and efficient distribution of many old-fashioned sins and swindles. Successful businessmen defined themselves in opposition to corner-cutting little men on the make, but those small-time operators were the foot soldiers of a powerful economic army. The big shots defined the boundaries of probity and respectability, but the borders they defended between the legitimate and the illegitimate were porous and shifted frequently.

This argument is driven home in an ingenious collection of essays called Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America. Like new scholarship on slavery by scholars like Edward Baptist, this volume exposes the mechanisms of early capitalism in contexts where we might not expect to find them. Revised and expanded versions of papers originally presented at a conference jointly sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Library Company of Philadelphia, the 11 chapters in this book bring together such varied subjects as mass-produced erotica (Paul Erickson) and paper currency issued by hotels and industrial establishments (Joshua R. Greenberg). Although the individual reader is apt to scan the table of contents for particularly relevant selections—any one of the chapters would yield a fruitful discussion in an undergraduate seminar—there is both profit and enjoyment in reading the entire collection and watching major themes emerge.

Not every American could enter the capitalist marketplace on an equal footing; many of the participants who tiptoed in barefoot nevertheless succeeded. As is demonstrated in Robert J. Gamble's essay on the trade in secondhand merchandise, Adam Mendelsohn's contribution on Jewish retailers of used clothing in England and America, and Michael D. Thompson's piece on the reselling of raw cotton stolen from the Charleston waterfront, small-time entrepreneurs turned the profligate waste generated by the engines of capitalism to good account. These opportunities provided openings for people not usually included in the history of capitalism to play a new economic role. Even those marginalized by race, ethnicity, gender, or labor status found an opening by supplying the needs of society's underclass. Scavengers who repurposed refuse, who found value in the apparently worthless, contributed to the transformation of the economy. Ellen Gruber Garvey writes about an African-American New Yorker called “Back-Number Budd” who realized there was a market for old newspapers if anyone could find a way to organize them—which he did. He successfully set a valuation on discards that his customers were bound to respect.

Negotiations over the value of commodities reflected the era's calculations over the value of character and decency—both of which turned out to be for sale. Markers of respectability were used to market the most reprehensible and scandalous products. Craig B. Hollander shows how “seemingly virtuous and upright citizens” applied a veneer of legality to slave-trading ventures in the early 1820s, when such trade amounted to international piracy. Financiers of two of these projects hired young sea captains remarkably skilled in self-justification who managed to win sympathy—and pardons—because of their youth and apparent desperation. Katie M. Hemphill writes about new, more specialized forms of prostitution that arose in the early nineteenth century. Enterprising madams, discovering that even intimacy could be packaged and sold, successfully masked the economic transactions of prostitution by staging them in domestic settings.

Boundaries between the respectable and the morally dubious were self-righteously proclaimed but not so well-enforced as the record would have it. The legal construction of the corporation, allowing investors to share profit and divide risk, also made possible the evasion of responsibility. Big corporations benefited from petty exploitation that figured nowhere on their balance sheets. Brendan P. O'Malley shows how major shipping companies profited from the transport of steerage passengers even as they subcontracted the recruiting of these unfortunates to unscrupulous brokers; then once the emigrants arrived in the United States, “runners” collected kickbacks from boarding houses, packet lines, and railroad companies for steering customers in their direction. Will B. Mackintosh suggests that the structure of the family-run Loomis Gang of horse thieves and counterfeiters owed something to legitimate business operations and manipulation of the law. So implicated were the Loomises in the social system that they were only stopped with vigilante violence. Similarly, Corey Goettsch's article describes the phenomenon of mock auctions, the target of much official indignation. Unwary stooges were lured into elaborately rigged sales of watches and jewelry, only to emerge with empty pockets and handfuls of dross. As Goettsch points out, these auctions, condemned as perversions of the new system, served “reputable” retailers as convenient straw men. In fact, these auctions were not aberrant at all. They were at once distractions from the real outrages of the marketplace and crude embodiments of the false promises of unregulated capitalism itself.