Every society has its economic and political elites. Yet how and to what extent they form and operate as a more or less coherent and enduring upper class, integrated through dense networks of social relations and sharing a distinctive self-understanding, lifestyle and world view, varies substantially over space and time. One of the major achievements of Clifton Hood's history of New York's upper class is its courageous long-term perspective, covering from 1750 until the present. On the one hand, this enables him to propose a number of space-specific, path-dependent characteristics and institutions fundamental to the construction of the city's upper class; on the other, it allows him to highlight systematically the shifting strategies deployed by the upper class to reposition, reorganise and indeed reinvent itself during a number of transformative historical periods. In this respect, Hood's study is a welcome addition to existing historical scholarship on New York's elite, which tends to focus on more constrained periods, and on the Gilded Age in particular.

Since the eighteenth century, New York's upper class has obviously changed considerably in terms of size and socio-occupational composition, but, as Hood argues, less in term of its shared world view and mentality. Not so restrained by the religious and political ideals that stimulated elite formation in Boston and Philadelphia, New York's elite have, according to Hood, always been ‘bolder in their quest for wealth, prestige and power’ and at the same time more receptive to new people and open to new ideas (p. xi). In a chronologically organised series of chapters, loosely focusing on the 1750s, 1780s and 1790s, the 1820s, 1860s, 1890s, 1940s, and the 1970s and beyond, he elegantly elaborates on this key idea, although the comparative perspective that strengthens his opening chapters gradually disappears as a methodological tool. Instead, Hood increasingly pays attention to the ways in which established members of the upper class defined and organised themselves in relation to the nouveau riche as well as to the middle and working classes. In this context the ‘comparatively dynamic, open and aggressive’ character of New York's elite and its incessant pursuit of privilege becomes a convincing leitmotif (p. xi).

In his aim to document and compare the politics of social inclusion and exclusion of New York's upper class during various phases of the city's history, Hood focuses on familiar themes, such as patterns in residential segregation, housing design, and membership of clubs and associations. He skillfully expands familiar knowledge, using original research to highlight various long-term developments. For example, building upon well-known insights into the shift in upper-class residential areas from Hanover Square and Bowling Green via Broadway's arc to the Upper East Side, Hood demonstrates how in 1949 half of the corporate elite resided in suburbs such as Scarsdale, Bronxville and Montclair, whereas the old elite listed in the Social Register still overwhelmingly preferred to reside in Upper East Side. In the same vein, his original analysis of obituaries enables him to chart long-term transformations in the relative importance of occupation, wealth and contribution to society in the perception and self-perception of upper-class male citizens. At the same time, a high degree of overlapping membership of eighteenth-century elite associations and organisations effectively underlines long-term continuities in social and political strategies of elite formation.

One of the most interesting long-term transformations highlighted in the book is the presumption of a change in attitude among New York's elite towards ordinary people and the urban crowd. In the 1750s, as Hood argues on the basis of diaries, elite men and women were able to move through urban space without really noticing their fellow citizens. In the 1780s and 1790s, democratic and radical politics put an end to the ‘invisibility’ of the lower orders, while the notorious draft riots in the 1860s made the elite believe that workers and migrants formed an outright danger to society. In the 1970s, however, Hood notes a romantic elite reappraisal of ordinary, and especially African American people as ‘exemplars of human spirit and social justice’, able to enjoy life and act authentically in ways unthinkable to many stilted members of the upper class (p. 306). Although anti-elitist discourse in contemporary elite magazines such as Town and Country is truly remarkable, Hood's argument also reveals his tendency to over-emphasise historical change on the basis of a selective choice of sometimes hardly comparable sources and cases. I would, for that matter, not bet my money on the hypothesis that elite diaries in the 1970s would be filled with encounters with ordinary New Yorkers in the street.

With 111 pages reserved for footnotes, Hood has studied an amazing number of primary sources, ranging widely from private diaries and letters to public newspapers, journals, pamphlets, etiquette books, fascinating literary subgenres such as nineteenth-century anti-Wall Street accounts, social registers, and membership lists. I found the book elegantly written, shifting seamlessly between individual lives used as exemplars, key analyses and contextual overviews. I was, therefore, slightly surprised by Hood's decision to start his book with the 1897 Bradley Martin costume ball that Sven Beckert previously used for the introduction to his magisterial Monied metropolis: New York City and the consolidation of the American bourgeoisie, 1850–1896, published in 2001. For me, the use of this anecdote framed the book as a synthesis of existing literature rather than as the result of substantial new research on New York's elite, which is what it actually represents. Moreover, the subtitle's allusion that the book analyses the role of the elite in the making of New York is somewhat overstretched, especially as Hood mainly points to the elite's contribution to the establishment of well-known cultural institutions. Nevertheless, for readers who struggle to grasp the fascinating mix of ethically progressive and blatantly materialistic elite attitudes in the city that created the current US president, this book offers much to consider and to reconsider.