Adam D. Mendelsohn's The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire begins with a simple but provocative question: Why have Jews, more than nearly any other minority or immigrant group in American history, enjoyed such extraordinary rates of prosperity and economic mobility? Mendelsohn's answer is this: nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American Jews were uniquely positioned to take advantage of the dramatic growth of the American clothing industry. To understand the fortunes of American Jewry, in other words, one must also understand the history of the industry in which so many American Jews were employed.

The intertwined history of American Jews and the clothing industry, as Mendelsohn tells it, is a deeply contingent one. Forcefully rebutting scholars who anchor the New World success of Jews in Old World cultural acquisitions—Jews' high rates of literacy and numeracy, for instance, or their fluency in bourgeois cultural norms—Mendelsohn instead argues that a unique and fortuitous intersection of work experience and historical circumstances accounts for this phenomenon.

To prove this claim, Mendelsohn organizes The Rag Race around a comparative history of Jews in the British and American clothing industries. Despite nearly identical social and cultural backgrounds, the author contends, Jews in the British clothing industry fared far less successfully than their American counterparts.

Why did the American clothing industry prove a more effective springboard for Jewish social mobility than the British industry? In eight chapters, which span a period from roughly 1800 to 1950 (but which focus primarily on the mid-nineteenth century), Mendelsohn offers a remarkably nuanced answer to this question. At the center of his narrative are two key moments of contingency that helped catapult American clothiers to preeminence while leaving the British industry languishing: the first was the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s; the second was the American Civil War.

Both of these events, Mendelsohn argues, helped displace the American clothing industry's incumbent gentile leaders and open the field to Jewish competitors. The Gold Rush did so by offering rich rewards to energetic risk takers. While large incumbent retailers were squeamish about doing business in rowdy California boomtowns, smaller Jewish firms could afford no such reservations. The Civil War, on the other hand, benefited Jewish producers by bankrupting many of New York's leading clothing firms. Dependent upon a lucrative trade with the South, incumbent gentile firms had trouble staying afloat when secession and war separated them from their best customers. Jewish firms, by contrast, used their California connections to weather the secession crisis, enabling them to successfully position themselves for profitable wartime uniform contracts.

Thanks to these contracts, The Rag Race concludes, American Jewish firms emerged from the Civil War era in a dominant position in the clothing trade. Perhaps more importantly, a key set of circumstances ensured that the benefits of this dominance were diffused downwards to less fortunate American Jews. Due in large measure to the business acumen and extensive ethnic networks that many Jews had forged as clerks and peddlers (common nineteenth-century Jewish occupations), as well as the minimal capital requirements for clothing manufacture, top-tier Jewish firms were able and eager to subcontract the production of clothes to successive tiers of entrepreneurial coreligionists. Over time, and despite a number of setbacks, this arrangement would help lift a large number of American Jews into the upper echelons of American wealth.

In Britain, on the other hand, the circumstances that had combined to raise the collective boat of American Jewry were markedly absent. While the Australian Gold Rush of 1851 buoyed the fortunes of some British Jews in the clothing industry, the history of the British clothing industry offered no counterpart to the American Civil War—an event capable of knocking incumbents from their pedestal and allowing those who had gained ground in the Australian trade to seize the reins in the metropole itself. Just as importantly, British Jews, according to Mendelsohn, lacked the entrepreneurial knack and extrafamilial ethnic networks that helped diffuse the benefits of elite clothiers' dominance to their poorer coreligionists.

Overall, Mendelsohn's argument is a compelling one. The contingent histories of the British and American clothing industries were, indeed, of crucial importance in shaping the economic fortunes of British and American Jewry. And scholars should, in fact, be more wary about linking Jewish success in America to Jews' Old World cultural inheritances (the literacy, numeracy, and exposure to bourgeois values described above). This, no doubt, is the book's foremost virtue.

The Rag Race's second great virtue is its erudition. Spanning a century and a half, three continents, and a host of scholarly literatures, Mendelsohn's volume is an outstanding illustration of the benefits of putting disparate chronologies, geographies, and bodies of scholarship in conversation. Though the thread of Mendelsohn's intricate argument is occasionally difficult to follow throughout the body of the text, The Rag Race is well worth readers' time. It will be useful reading for scholars of British and American Jewry, immigration studies, the clothing and textile trades, and British and American capitalism.