In Cutting Along the Color Line, Quincy Mills offers an unprecedented assessment of the complexities of black barbers and barbershops in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Across six chapters, Mills looks at how barbering shaped black and white experiences of chattel slavery, how it bounded the possibilities of black self-determination after Emancipation, and how it affected the development of public and black counterpublic spaces during and after formal racial segregation. Mills’s account strikes a difficult balance, being rich in empirical evidence and bursting with novel ideas. Readers will encounter more than one and a half centuries of history in this book, but it won’t take nearly that long for them to appreciate that something as apparently simple as a haircut was no simple matter at all.

Like many business history books, Cutting Along the Color Line principally explores the relationship between capitalism and politics. Although readers may, at times, question the relevance of certain details (such as how many barbers held local and national elected office under Reconstruction), the book remains driven in large part by several broad and important questions: How does business affect the public? How does barbers’ relative autonomy contribute to the “production of authority” among black people (p. 10)? How do barbershops inhabit the border between public and private space as men set about the business of “grooming race” (p. 9)? The book’s big questions give it a wide applicability to a variety of debates.

Readers will notice that barbershops, as institutions, and their clienteles change considerably over time. Initially, the most prominent black barbers and their shops served to preserve racial traditions of white supremacy and black deference. At the very same time, though, nineteenth-century shops helped cultivate ever-emergent notions of black respectability and economic autonomy that eventually proved indispensible to the development of barbershops in the twentieth century that catered to an almost exclusively black clientele. In charting the evolution of black business as part of the broader evolution of black political space, Cutting Along the Color Line inspires readers to reconsider the centrality of a service profession long thought marginal to the American economy and to American politics.

Critical to Mills’s contribution is an exploration of what the cultural critic Eric Sundquist called “shaving time.” Shaving time, for much of the nineteenth century, represented a time when black barbers—with their razors at the necks of white customers—exercised the restraint that ultimately came to define what it meant to be black and middle-class under slavery and Jim Crow. Shaving time also served as the time when African Americans, as customers, allowed themselves certain leisure experiences, when they celebrated themselves as being more than slaves, more than workers. Shaving time, in essence, challenged (and continues to challenge) the banal and harsh uniformity of racial discrimination and violence. It was, in effect, the time during which American public culture flowered from the meeting place of political ideals and the profit motive.

Mills’s working use of capitalism forces readers to reconsider certain assumptions. “Historians,” he writes, “must move beyond the blacks-made-money-too thesis in order to fully explore the challenges and tensions that capitalism played in visions of individual and racial progress” (p. 4). What Mills is after, it seems, is a fundamental rethinking of black business and the presumed separation of market decisions from political speech in public. In fact, students looking to affirm their lamentations about “neoliberalism” or “market fundamentalism” in the late twentieth century will find no ally here, because, for Mills, there is no public sphere that exists independent of the market economy. Indeed, in light of his evidence, it is hard to suggest that there actually ever was. Black barbers, like so many political actors, are constantly torn between pursuing self-interest and trying to advance more collective, political solutions to the race problem. The market is always an arbiter of their politics.

In an especially striking section in Chapter 2, Mills explains how, in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, black barbers actually resisted attempts from black customers to use black-owned grooming services. Many black barbers feared that, should they take a black clientele, their shops would lose their white patrons: “By opposing the Civil Rights Act, color-line barbers guarded their individual economic interests under the umbrella of privacy claims” (p. 82). Such, they argued, were the “rules” of the trade. In place of challenging segregation explicitly, many black barbers offered what can only be called “market-based” solutions. They built chains of barbershops, sometimes parlayed their profits into real estate and investments in funeral homes and insurance companies, and fostered, through their commercial ties, important political bonds with white elites. In this way, Mills provides an important history of black liberalism that looks strangely similar, in principle, to so-called neoliberalism.

Considering the book as a whole, Mills’s prose moves well and he demonstrates great facility in synthesizing the various legal and political contexts under which barbers plied their craft. However, in its granular approach to black business and its close readings of literary texts, Cutting Along the Color Line might be too dense for use in undergraduate courses. The book would make an excellent addition to any number of graduate courses, including ones on small business, the service sector, race and entrepreneurship, and the history of capitalism. It can also provide great material for researchers thinking through everything from the links between capitalism and slavery to the limitations of Jürgen Habermas’s formulation of the “public sphere.”

In conclusion, Cutting Along the Color Line makes both its historical and contemporary stakes clear. Not only have barbers played a special role in the development of small business and black politics, but the continued inroads African Americans have made into U.S. civil society, especially since the 1970s, have also given haircuts a special and unprecedented significance in American public life. As of 2008—and, as Mills points out, “for the first time in American history”—the U.S. electorate “was deeply interested in where a presidential candidate got his hair cut” (p. 252). In many respects, the book draws an important (if crooked) line between faceless antebellum barbers and Barack Obama. And in so doing, it gives American business history and U.S. political history a much-needed shape-up.