The most important development in the history of the United States during the nineteenth century, or so contend Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith in their introduction to this ambitious collection of essays, was the ascendancy of capitalism to economic and cultural supremacy. Ultimately, it was capitalism—rather than industrialism, or, say, democracy—that would become the country's revolutionary tradition. A close corollary is that the proper subject of the master narrative of the American experience should be neither its people nor even its social groups but “the commodity” (p. 7). Implicit in this thesis are two additional propositions. First, that capitalism was not supreme before the nineteenth century; and, second, that capitalism “took command” at some point in the nineteenth century. (The phrase “takes command” is, of course, borrowed from Siegfried Gideon, who in 1948 made an analogous argument for mechanization.) While Zakim and Kornblith's thesis has obvious affinities with the “market revolution” hypothesis, their emphasis is less on the marketing of agricultural staples and more on the expansion of banking, investing, and credit. A talented group of contributors sustain this thesis by documenting capital flows, delineating shifting property rights, and reconstructing relationships between economic processes and social and cultural phenomena. The contributors’ common subject, as Jean-Christophe Agnew perceptively observes in a bravura afterword, is the “flatland of ordinary material practices” (p. 279) that habituated nineteenth-century Americans to the “disciplinary and tutelary system” (emphasis in the original) into which “all classes were drawn and made over into market subjects” (p. 281).

For many contributors, this flatland is finance. For Jonathan Levy, the mortgaging of farms, and not wage labor, pushed American agriculture into an “age of capital” (p. 47). For Edward E. Baptist, the collateralization of slaves—a peculiarly “toxic” kind of debt—provides a key to the Panic of 1837 and also to the Civil War. And for Elizabeth Blackmar, the rise of partible inheritance hastened the transformation of landed property from a bulwark of independence into a form of investment capital. One exception was for certain legally defined groups—e. g. widows and orphans—for whom land remained “the nation's own unique inheritance, the permanent guarantor of the prosperity of future generations” (p. 117).

Finance also looms large for Robert E. Wright. He draws on a database of nineteenth-century corporations to calculate the “minimum authorized capitalization” (the amount of money that lawmakers permitted chartered corporations to raise from equity investors). In the 1850s the minimum authorized capitalization for the South was $99 per capita; in the North, $59 per capita. These totals, Wright posits, provide the best metric of the magnitude of the country's financial capitalism (p. 148). The mega-corporations of the twentieth century, Wright concludes, were not—as Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., posited in the Visible Hand—new institutions that originated in the post-Civil War era. Instead, they were the lineal descendants of institutions that date back to the early republic. (Wright does not include in his calculations the capitalization of corporations like Western Union that had been chartered under general incorporation laws. If he had, the total would of course have been larger, and the North might well have been ahead.)

The cultural and social consequences of innovations in finance are explored by Jeffrey Sklansky, Michael Zakim, and Sean Patrick Adams. For Sklansky, the proliferation of paper currency in the 1820s and 1830s prompted journalist William Leggett to invent a new kind of economic journalism that championed market fundamentalism (p. 199). For Zakim, the new information infrastructure created by Thomas C. Cochran's early nineteenth-century business revolution (p. 226) made the business clerk a central agent in the “wholesale reorganization” of the economy (p. 225). Sean Patrick Adams argues that the military imperatives of Civil War finance doomed, at least in Pennsylvania, a pre-Civil War regulatory regime that had limited corporate prerogatives. (Adams's argument works well for Pennsylvania, but is less compelling for states like New York in which general incorporation laws had by 1860 become widespread.)

Three of the contributors display uneasiness with the finance-centric accounts of Levy, Baptist, Blackmar, Wright, Sklansky, Zakim, and Adams. Christopher Clark underscores the extent to which non-capitalistic practices survived in the agricultural sector. Amy Dru Stanley shows how the pre-Civil War public debate over slave breeding prompted both slaveholders and abolitionists to articulate their revulsion against the commodification of “love.” Tamara Plakins Thornton documents how early nineteenth-century American elites viewed the London and Liverpool docks as an “aesthetic marker” for emerging capitalist values that exhibited Weberian rationality: “security, regularity, precision, impersonality” (p. 196).

Capitalism Takes Command envisions a new history of the American economy in which finance takes center stage. Though people are by no means absent, we learn far more about institutional mechanisms than about innovative managers, defiant workers, or visionary statesmen. Several of the essays can be fit into the comparative institutionalist tradition of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Douglass North, and Naomi Lamoreaux. Yet there is little attempt to refine a stage model of capitalist development, or to explain how and why nineteenth-century capitalism was different from capitalism in the colonial era, or capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Precisely when in the nineteenth century capitalism took command is not self-evident, though, if pressed, many if not most of the contributors would presumably locate its supremacy in the period before the Civil War. Yet there seems little doubt on the part of the editors that the current financial crisis—an event that hovers over many of the essays—is but the most recent chapter in a portentous economic transformation whose roots date back to the early republic.

It remains to be seen whether this finance-centric narrative will upstage the competing accounts of nineteenth-century U. S. economic history put forth by Charles Sellers in his Market Revolution (with its focus on social conflict), Joyce Appleby in her Relentless Revolution (which casts the spotlight on cultural norms), or Daniel Walker Howe in his What Hath God Wrought (which ascribes agency to the “communications revolution” of the 1815–1848 period). It is also uncertain how Capitalism Takes Command will be reconciled with the centrality to economic activity of market transactions that antedated 1800. The expansive contention of the editors raise further questions about how a system of profit-making based on the “perpetual movement” of people and goods became the “foundation” of “public order and stable government” in the nineteenth century (p. 1). So long as bad financial news continues to dominate the headlines, writing on the “history of capitalism” (as scholarship of the kind featured in this volume is becoming known) will proliferate. As such, this collection should be of special interest for readers of this Journal, because it provides the single best introduction to date of the possibilities and limitations of this emerging historical field.