The appearance of gaslight in the middle of the industrial century was an event of great material and moral significance. Most Americans subsequently embraced this technological sublime as a happy demonstration of enlightened progress and of modern civilization’s elevation of mind over matter.

The essays assembled under the suggestive title Capitalism by Gaslight all seek to turn the tables on such Whiggish conceits by examining the darker aspects of America’s emerging industrial order. As such, they direct the attention of readers to the underbelly of progress, to the irregular, if not illicit, outcome of the destruction of the fixed limits of the natural world that occurred over the century, or at least during the early republic. The closely researched accounts that follow tell of organized crime in the commercializing antebellum countryside and the vigilante justice that ensued; a “promiscuous” trade in used clothing that posits a mirror image, and almost a parody, of industrial capital’s promise of abundance for all (and the implicit axiom that poverty was destined to become a thing of the past); the “money question” as it played out in a vast alternative economy of paper circulating outside any political control, defying econometric scrutiny by either contemporaries or historians; fast-expanding transportation networks driven by the logistics of commodity exchange rather than any inherent techno-logic, and particularly geared to supply America’s new labor markets with a reserve army of wage workers; the widespread embrace of fraud at mock auctions, which effectively obscured the boundaries separating legitimate from less valid means of turning a profit; slave-smuggling operations organized in the wake of the federal government’s criminalization of the import trade in human chattel after 1808; and the intimate relationship between market society and the era’s burgeoning sex trade, bluntly expressed in the urban bourgeoisie’s escalating obsession with prostitution.

This dense roster of subjects—and the actual list is more extensive than space here allows—is framed by two adroit essays authored by the volume’s editors, Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson, presenting a synopsis of the central themes of “capitalism by gaslight.” These include the close relationship between material wealth and scarcity (or what Henry George would soon recognize as the incongruous but essential division of labor between poverty and progress), the multifarious and contradictory cultural logics born of the commodity form, the surprisingly capacious margins of a liberal political economy that formally pledged a place at the table for one and all, and, more significant still, the great variety of markets and market practices at work in an increasingly integrated market society.

One predominant theme remains unaddressed, however. That is the role of the “middle class” in this flux of events. None of the essays in Capitalism by Gaslight fail to explicitly reference this phenomenon. But none of them explain what the term, in fact, means. This is not an altogether surprising oversight: “middle class” remains a conspicuously undertheorized category in studies of the republic’s great transformation into an industrial democracy, a missed opportunity to deepen our understanding of not only how property was reinvented by capitalism, but how the propertied themselves assumed a wholly new place in the social order, an order salvaged from the ruins of the country’s traditional systems of hierarchy and deference. Instead, we are left with a rather lifeless rubric, a sociological straw man shorn of any history at all and assigned a transcendent set of normative practices that reflexively highlight subaltern formations. Such caricatures should truly be banished to the shadows, because they offer no illumination whatsoever.