Peter Knight's Reading the Market surveys how Americans learned to read, picture, and conceptualize financial markets and financial capitalism between 1870 and 1920. Across these decades, Americans were fascinated, mystified, and often outraged by the behavior of the stock market, the operations of the individuals dominating Wall Street, and the rising importance of corporate finance to the U.S. economy. Americans also witnessed the transformation of American finance from something resembling a local blood sport and magic show in Wall Street to a seemingly placeless and controlling “system” shaping every aspect of national economic life. Reading the Market focuses on the role of financial print culture and forms of market reading in these developments.

The most conspicuous and original contribution of Reading the Market is its archive. Drawing on the work of scholars in the social studies of finance, cultural history, print culture, and literary studies, Knight frames his study around two kinds of popular financial reading that are rarely studied together: first, forms of market reading such as market reports, ticker tape primers, and technical charts that gave practical shape to how investors understood speculative markets and the source and direction of price movements; and second, imaginative and political genres such as finance fiction, Wall Street guide books, government hearings reports, and reform journalism that framed how lay audiences understood and experienced the activity and influence of the financial realm, generally. Knight shows that these varied kinds of popular financial reading not only represented the world of finance but also fueled and frustrated public acceptance of the idea of “the market” as an abstract, self-governing system distinct from any specific stock exchange or investment arena.

The principal thesis of Reading the Market is that the emergence of “the deterritorialized and disembodied financial marketplace” was neither simple, linear, nor inevitable during this transitional era when large industrial combinations and investment banking came to define the American economy (p. 102). Rather, this emergence was contested and complicated by an enduring preoccupation with persons, human intentions, and social intimacies in the rich array of financial genres that “attempted to counter the impersonal abstractions of the market, but at the cost of confirming its totalizing power” (p. 20). This thesis, that “in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, the market was viewed as both impersonal and personal, abstract and concrete, often in quite contradictory ways,” leads Knight to suggest that we “need to rethink the story of the development of capitalism in nineteenth-century America”—that is, we need to humanize and historicize scholarly accounts that present the rise and acceptance of financial abstraction (and the impersonal forms of social relations it engendered) as natural and ineluctable (p. 16).

Reading the Market conducts its survey of market genres and their rhetorical, ideological, and epistemological work across five lucid and accessible chapters. Chapter 1 examines market reports in mass-circulated newspapers and magazines. These reports offer a sensible starting point for Knight's analysis because they made “the market seem of vital, daily importance to casual readers” and aimed “to make the mysteries of the market engrossing and intelligible” to a growing body of stock market investors and spectators (pp. 31, 34). Knight reveals how this maturing genre offered various, often conflicting, visions of the market, picturing price movements sometimes as the direct product of dramatic battles between rival manipulators, sometimes as expressions of abstract economic laws, and often as a complex amalgam of these. Chapter 2 surveys different kinds of popular financial advice literature, including brokers’ advertisements and guides for interpreting new technologies of market reading such as the ticker tape. The advent of technical stock-reading, Knight suggests, helped to “undermine an older critique of speculation as a rigged game of Wall Street cliques and insiders” and normalized outsider participation in the stock market by popularizing the idea of the market as an “impersonal aggregation of countless transactions whose patterns could be uncovered” (p. 99). Chapter 3 surveys widely circulated visual representations of the market, including illustrations of manic floor trading that accompanied Wall Street panic fiction, polemical cartoons about corporate bankers’ stranglehold on the American economy, and quasiscientific charts marking out stock price trends. These charts built up the idea of the market as a “vast, impersonal machine of interrelated parts that could be analyzed mathematically,” even as other genres continued to imbue the idea of the market with human, and sometimes occult, agency (p. 140). Chapter 4 analyzes novels by Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, and Edith Wharton that are preoccupied with the sharing of inside information and the role of “personal connections in a seemingly impersonal market” (p. 145). These texts all parse the evolving relation between older forms of social and sentimental intimacy and modern, discomfiting forms of financial activity. Chapter 5 examines the analyses of Populist reformers, congressional investigators, corporate apologists, fiction writers, and other observers of the corporate makeover of America who envisioned the complex matrix of financial transactions and obligations constituting the modern economy as a coherent system governed by a conspiracy, class, or some other singular agency. Their attempts to map—sometimes literally—the shape and scale of corporate collusiveness, Knight argues, were important attempts, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes visionary, to “rethink the relationship between impersonal structure,” class ties, social networks, and personal agency in the market (p. 194).

Reading the Market departs from traditional studies of finance's economic, political, and institutional dimensions by homing in on the less frequently studied “ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology of everyday financial culture, both factual and fictional” (p. 14). Focusing on the “conceptual and representational developments underpinning” finance during this watershed period in American economic history, and curating a rich assemblage of commercial, political, historical, and literary materials, Knight offers a welcome interdisciplinary study that contributes to the social studies of finance, the new history of capitalism, financial print culture, and visual studies in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (p. 14).