The best work in the new “history of capitalism” field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the nineteenth-century United States to the topics of slavery's relationship to capitalism and the realization of selfhood either through manumission, the labor market, or finance.

The current political-economic turn's influence on twentieth-century U.S. research seems, at least initially, far less coherent. For example, books lumped under the “capitalism” rubric have documented the lived experiences of consumer creditors, Wall Street speculators, retail shoppers, supply chain managers, long-haul truckers, free-market theorists, factory managers, and conservative politicians. Yet a close read of a sampling of recent books, either clearly or loosely connected with this scholastic fulcrum, indicates that a new holistic sense of the American experiment's place in the world of political economy may be taking shape.

One recurrent question, for instance, is why the apparent increase in global trade fluidity, starting in the early Cold War and accelerating since the 1960s, coincided with declining social mobility and growing economic inequality in the twentieth century's second half. This question appears be an overarching theme that brings coherence to twentieth-century histories of capitalism and explains what ultimately arose from the end of nineteenth-century European empires and their trade in commodities, goods, and slaves. This latent, revisionist grand narrative could be as powerful as the new sweeping accounts of nineteenth-century unfree labor, commodity production, and empire, because twentieth-century scholars seem to be implicitly grappling with why demands for more individual opportunity and economic mobility reinforced inequality and social stratification.

Geraldo Cadava, for example, shows the U.S.-Mexico divide to be pivotal in keeping migrants impoverished in his award-winning Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland. His account of the borderlands between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, begins with the World War II military buildup carried out in the spirit of Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy. Defense also shaped the commercial exchanges that intertwined the development of Tucson, Hermosillo, and the small towns in between. “The interplay among militaries, governments, and businesses on both sides of the border,” Cadava emphasizes, “demonstrated how profit—in addition to military necessity—motivated the joint efforts of the United States and Mexico” (p. 31). A previous generation of scholars insisted the U.S.-Mexico border had hardened early in the twentieth century; it seems far more porous in these pages, especially for postwar trade and tourism. Moreover, transnational transactions actually increased in the face of escalating turmoil in Mexico and Central America and the late-twentieth-century populist insistence on keeping Latino immigrants (illegal or otherwise) out of the United States. Both, Cadava contends, were a function of an evolving capitalism that upended the postwar manufacturing economy, ushered in free-trade agreements, and created the infamously low-wage factories (maquiladoras) run by multinationals on Mexico's side of an increasingly violent divide.

Standing on Common Ground is as much an outgrowth of the 1970s sociocultural evolution as it is a product of the more recent political-economic turn. Beautifully written snapshots across time and space trace the U.S.-Mexico border's hierarchy of cultural, academic, and business exchanges. Cadava offers readers an especially rich, nuanced portrayal of select members of this area's elite, a cadre that “travel[ed] back and forth across the border [and] went relatively unencumbered despite increasing border restrictions” (p. 97). Of the utmost importance was Tucson retailer Alex Jácome. He provided his wealthy Mexican clientele with an exclusive shopping experience that demonstrated their power, wealth, and entitlement. “Like the missions of an earlier era,” Cadava recounts, “Jácome's became an institution that demonstrated the nexus of Catholicism, business, and politics in the borderlands” (p. 101). Jácome's business conservatism was deeply interwoven with a robust internationalism disdainful of civic equality across racial or class lines. These principles endeared him to Senator Barry Goldwater, a fellow retailer who later helped Jácome secure high-ranking diplomatic appointments.

Cadava has hence done much to interweave borderlands, immigration, Chicano, Western, and diplomatic histories into a new understanding of this region's political economy. Those literatures help Standing on Common Ground outshine much of the capitalism literature in its attention to cultural representations of political power and economic change. For example, Cadava traces recent anti-immigrant sentiment back to 1970s managerial decisions to move low-skill manufacturing jobs to Mexico or to hire undocumented immigrants in American fields. Both occurred when well-paying manufacturing and service work seemed in increasingly short supply. Growing mobility, opportunity, and competition underwrote both xenophobic hysteria as well as congressional support for the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that merely sanctioned well-established corporate practices.

Standing on Common Ground nevertheless underscores how difficult it is to fully capture the interplay between labor, commerce, politics, and culture. Such commercial exchanges and political transactions are not well rendered. Cadava falls back on terminology used to describe capitalism's transformation in the more often studied urban industrial South, West, and Northeast. For example, he reflexively follows the Sunbelt literature's emphasis on the military-industrial complex's importance but can name only one major contractor who came to postwar Tucson. Indeed, his evidence suggests southern Arizona and northern Mexico remained far more tied to the tourism, commodity production, and retail trades that had defined this area's earlier quasi-colonial political economy. Only in the 1970s had some area firms become industrial and agribusiness multinationals. Indeed, Sonora attracted significant manufacturing in a period that, Cadava asserts, the service economy rose to dominate.

Though “postindustrial” certainly described the once-mighty North Atlantic and Pacific Rim manufacturing metropolises, it does not seem to capture what was going on along the U.S.-Mexico border. Borderland mining's importance had steadily declined until its 1970s collapse. Even though that sector's death spiral coincided with increased low-wage manufacturing investment, state-subsidized agriculture had never ceased to be a vital source of employment, investment, and financial return. Cadava's contention that borderland political instability followed “the transition from a state-driven to a neoliberal economy” may be true, but his evidence actually does not show decreased government “investments in Arizona's and Sonora's agricultural and livestock sectors” (p. 173). Immigration fights instead seemed to have followed an evolution in the state and corporate power structures that still kept people, goods, and profits moving across international boundaries.

Standing on Common Ground hence illustrates a need to fundamentally reconsider both American and global political-economic metamorphoses as scholars increasingly turn their attention to new areas of the world and sectors of capital. N. D. B. Connolly does just that in A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. He tells the story of Miami, which, like Tucson, mushroomed in size over the course of the twentieth century. Connolly describes how this racially and residentially mixed city's color lines hardened as it became pivotal to Caribbean capitalism. The barriers between poor African Americans and the rest of Miami literally became concrete during the postwar period because slumlords and developers used federal funds to raze wood shantytowns, pave over these areas to create expressways, and erect cement-block apartment buildings well away from desirable areas. This narrative, as Connolly notes, is at odds with historical understandings of southern history, civil rights, class conflict, urban inequality, and property rights.

Like some of the most well-known capitalism historians, Connolly approaches these inconsistencies by exploring an economic exchange that many white Americans take for granted: residential property ownership. Leasing proved pivotal to the inequality that accompanied twentieth-century Miami's emergence as a Caribbean capital, American tourist destination, and international hot spot. Caribbean nationals and native-born minorities labored to build the whites-only hotels marketed to wealthy northerners in the so-called Progressive Era. However, a minority of this area's blacks (the propertied African American middle class) entered politics claiming to speak for all residents of color. Many minority elites had a background in sharecropping, which left them suspicious of whites steadily moving closer to black neighborhoods by the 1920s. Segregation was also a means to protect this black elite's property rights, which were legally more inviolate than their civil rights.

Renting cheap, shoddy, wood-frame homes also proved profitable, not just for black owners but also for white investors. Both turned to rent collectors to manage these properties, and these middlemen made a fortune for themselves and their employers. So-called housing reformers also profited off of poverty. Their concerted political efforts to clear dilapidated areas removed the poor from the downtown districts earmarked for tourism and commerce. Central-city land values increased alongside the home prices in distant white neighborhoods. That markup likewise personally benefited the white policy makers living there who spent their careers zoning neighborhoods to qualify for federal mortgage assistance. Connolly emphasizes that New Deal and wartime liberalism did much to forestall whites and minorities from occupying common ground and subsequently furthered segregation. Such divides suited the black property owners who prized “respectability, entrepreneurship, and taxpayers' rights” and an administration that “directed millions in government dollars to aid private enterprises in segregationist economy building, improving everything from black hospitals to schools” (p. 120).

During and after World War II, biracial coalitions of landlords and housing reformers fought bitterly over the future of these slums. Black and white public housing advocates wanted residents far from a dilapidated city center easily redeveloped for tourism, trade, and industry. Many of the black and white opponents of razing slums for hotels, civic centers, and interstates asserted that the fate of these poverty-stricken areas should be left to all-American, free-market market forces. Slumlords prevailed in the early Cold War because these “seemingly competing approaches to land were, in fact, deeply complementary.” Tenants were kept out of the debate “because of the dangers, frankly, that increased democracy presented to . . . authority” (p. 202). The exclusion of tenants unintentionally helped 1960s radicals to organize residents for boycotts and sit-ins. Both white and black investors finally sold off their slum holdings and reinvested their profits elsewhere, ending the political opposition to the asphalt expressways whose construction finally demolished wood-frame shantytowns. Rezoning, removing renters, and paving over communities may have been justified as improvement but were in fact done “as part of a necessary, if at times unfortunate, grammar of state violence, liberal violence” (p. 203).

This powerful analysis of the business transactions behind twentieth-century housing policy connects A World More Concrete to the work done on the brutality of nineteenth-century southern racism, a mainstay of research into nineteenth-century capitalism. Connolly's use of the term “liberal” is particularly provocative because it challenges well-worn twentieth-century political narratives. Though he joins other historians in noting just how much the Roosevelt administration and subsequent Democratic presidents protected—if not advanced—Jim Crow, he does not reflexively label anti–New Deal businessmen as conservative, because “the debate over postwar housing was hardly an intellectual one. . . . It was about location and profitability” (p. 190). Omitting political affiliations represents a jarring break with most of the literature on postwar politics, particularly in the metropolitan South. That region's party realignment is often told as the courting and rebranding of Dixiecrat politics as conservative, often without much consideration of how business values fit into that story.

A World More Concrete instead makes the ideal of property ownership central to understanding twentieth-century Miami and an increasingly racially and economically stratified urban America. His evidence substantiates the bold assertion that “ideas about property rights, especially in regard to the lived experience of race, were not simply the purview of white segregationists or of business interests warring against the New Deal state. Such ideas were the engine of real estate development, landlording, homeownership, demands for educational justice, law-and-order politics, and rental property management, broadly accepted and broadly practiced” (p. 278). Historians have long known that multiple fissures weakened and distorted New Deal reformism, but the breadth and wealth of Connolly's research sheds new light on how property ownership, and therefore real estate, became ingrained in America's racialized politics, culture, and society long before housing policy became an economic driver, tool for social mobility, and stark reminder of American inequality.

Jenifer Van Vleck reveals commercial air travel to be a similar symbol of the growing divide between rich and poor. Her Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (reviewed in Business History Review in Winter 2014) looks at the massive mid-century carrier largely responsible for furthering American military and commercial air power. The history of Pan American Airways enables Van Vleck to interrogate the complex diplomacy, business politics, and geography of the storied, if brief, American Century. That tack situates this book in a recent evolution in the field of American foreign relations that reconsiders the privileged place of diplomatic statesmanship and Cold War grand strategy.

That “U.S. in the world” approach offers vital links between nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of capitalism. Nineteenth-century scholarship has placed renewed emphasis on Europe and its empires, the preamble to Pan Am's founding. Continental countries readily invested in flight, whereas the U.S. federal government resisted subsidizing this burgeoning industry. Even after the U.S. Post Office reluctantly turned to small, floundering outfits to deliver the mail, army higher-ups struggled to convince Congress to extend service to Latin America. When legislators approved the Miami–Havana route, army and navy commanders quickly founded Pan Am, in 1927, “less as a moneymaking scheme than as a means of enforcing the Monroe Doctrine and protecting U.S. sovereignty over the Panama Canal” (p. 65). Pan Am executives depended on the Roosevelt administration's financial and political support for their enterprise, which encompassed subsidiaries picked to build the worldwide aviation infrastructure for American involvement in World War II. As in Tucson, this 1940s investment laid the groundwork for the military and commercial traffic that sustained America's postwar political and economic dominance.

Government contracts and excellent personal relationships with politicians and popular press publishers facilitated meteoric growth under Juan Trippe, the chief executive officer (CEO). Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce proved herself a tireless advocate both for a federally subsidized “Age of Flight” and contractor-of-choice Pan Am. Her husband, Henry Luce, made sure his dear friend Trippe's airline would be the preeminent emblem of the era that Luce pronounced the “American Century” in 1941. Luce's periodicals provided readers with exaggerated stories of lavish travel and of building airfields abroad. These accounts reinforced a sense of America's exceptional ability to traverse the globe and civilize those Latin Americans and Africans employed to build the airports that turned cities around the world into commercial and military hubs.

Pan Am's overwhelming market share and U.S. diplomatic supremacy were both contested and short. Van Vleck suggests that the importance American policy makers and CEOs placed on aviation's military uses actually left both Pan Am and the United States unable to compete once the world fully entered the jet age. The Cold War, after all, had only made mass commercial travel seem imperative; Trippe had to make it profitable. During the 1950s, he stripped flights of the posh amenities highlighted in Luce publications and Pan Am ads so that more Americans could afford to travel. Nevertheless, it was really only upper-middle-class, mostly white citizens who could afford tickets. By 1970, other countries eclipsed American commercial flight power, which had not received as much political or financial investment as had military aviation. Pan Am itself struggled to find a new generation of managers to keep the firm both globally and domestically competitive. Deregulation enabled new, smaller airlines to compete with established giants, which caused Pan Am to fold a few years before NAFTA was enacted in 1994.

Van Vleck, like Connolly, offers both an internal look at an industry and a bird's-eye view of political economy. Neither vantage point considers domestic party politics but instead brings readers into the diplomatic discussions that created the air routes and built the fields necessary for the three-decade postwar reintegration of the world economy. Though Empire of the Air is convincing, a closer consideration of partisan rancor may have been needed. Few customers knew the ins and outs of tense international negotiations. But elite travelers likely knew about the party politics behind the 1970s deregulation that eventually destroyed Pan Am. Van Vleck skips this story, missing a chance to explain the involvement of Pan Am executives in the legislative changes that doomed their airline.

Military contractors, like Pan Am, may have been among the array of politicians, pundits, and interest groups demanding looser rules. Those business lobbyists are the subject of Benjamin Waterhouse's Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA. Waterhouse promises “the story of how businesspeople got themselves mobilized and what their mobilization created” when they confronted labor, inflation, federal regulation, and the consumer movement (p. 13). He contends that American businesses associated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable displayed an unprecedented unity in the 1970s and 1980s, which arose out of a shared sense of crisis in the late 1960s. Partnerships between “corporate executives and free-market ideologues, association directors and small shop owners, presidential staff members and think-tank scribblers” did not survive the Reagan administration (p. 3). Organized business groups made similar free-market, low-tax pitches for NAFTA just a few years later, but lobbyists faced a concerted challenge from right-wing populists like Pat Buchanan. His popularity, Waterhouse emphasizes, proved “the limits of the business community's intellectual influence over conservative politics” (p. 247).

This book's primary virtue lies in Waterhouse's insistence that none of these organizations were hegemonic. Their lobbying and public outreach certainly played an outsized role in “the decline of liberal and progressive politics and the ascent of a business-oriented, neoliberal political culture” (p. 2). Yet these politically potent associations hardly got everything that they wanted. This point aligns Lobbying America with the most current understanding of America's “right turn” as partial, contested, and contradictory.

Yet the book feels out of step with new capitalism scholarship. Waterhouse rightly insists that there is a need to better understand the ideology and social milieu of those at the helm of this country's most powerful enterprises. “To the extent that corporations are people,” he promises, “this book is about those people” (p. 3). However, Lobbying America reveals little about leaders, their worldviews, or their business dealings, particularly at the local, national, or international level. He purposefully limits himself to national “business and economic debates,” running afoul of the political-economic turn's insistence that society, culture, politics, and markets cannot be disentangled. More detailed portraits of these men and their dealings would have improved Lobbying America, particularly since Waterhouse insists their unity dissolved in the 1980s because of “the realignment of global capitalism, particularly the rise of finance and the decline of industrial manufacturing” (p. 232). Yet recent globalization studies emphasize that reintegration relied on steadily rebuilding postwar business networks. By the 1970s, these connections had yielded genuinely multinational corporations, whose higher-ups were likely members of the cosmopolitan managerial class in Lobbying America.

Waterhouse's argument also hinges on a distorted picture of corporate politics before 1968. In contrast to Cadava, Connolly, and Van Vleck, Waterhouse reaches back to the old idea of a liberal consensus. This assertion ignores or dismisses recent research that has shown how pivotal business conservatism was to the antiliberal counterreformation that began during the New Deal and had a profound impact on American politics well before the late 1960s. That historiographic shift attacked the argument that a postwar consensus or accord was to be found in labor-management or business-government relations. Waterhouse does not engage this literature; he simply decrees that “‘consensus’ need not imply that everyone agreed with each other all of the time but merely that the sharpest conflicts did not dominate the mainstream” (p. 19).

He also insists that this agreement was just between business and the state—an assertion that ignores the once-dominant idea of a historic 1947–1973 “tripartite” partnership between industry, the government, and labor. A generation of labor historians once thought these storied power-sharing arrangements responsible for creating a “labor-management accord.” Despite federal boards peppered with government, business, and union representatives, there was never an era of industrial peace, even in the supposedly stolid 1950s. Senior scholars, whom Waterhouse cites, and a more recent generation of historians have repeatedly shown that postwar business conservatism was anything but accommodating, at either the local, state, or federal levels or even within individual firms or economic sectors. Subversion could be found among profiteering rent collectors, far-flung Arizona retailers (like Jácome and Goldwater), and mainstream manufacturers. General Electric, for example, engaged in a protracted war over economic policy. The firm's vicious postwar bargaining technique decimated and divided labor organizations representing hundreds of thousands of workers. Numerous firms adopted this strategy, which eroded organized labor's power in the 1950s and dramatically shaped the labor law reform efforts that Lobbying America seeks to explicate.

A broader study of 1970s business politics would have been invaluable. This decade served as the climax for Cadava's, Connolly's, and Van Vleck's books. The era's Democrats and Republicans struggled to meet the numerous demands for civil rights, environmental protections, and tax reforms. Waterhouse includes suggestive evidence that there was something unique and transformative in this thinly researched era. An important coterie of major executives were actively streamlining, building, and mobilizing their membership in the 1970s. Cadava's and Connolly's narratives show there to have been earlier, scattershot efforts to further business's political efforts at the local and federal levels, which seemed inadequate when entrepreneurs faced more radical challenges to their power in the 1960s.

What was the nature of this threat and how new was it? Lobbying America is not clear on the broader picture of American politics either before or during the 1970s and thus unable to provide an answer. One underlying challenge to business power may have been the important difference between New Deal and Great Society legislation. The former left a significant amount of power at the local and state levels, no matter what postwar critics charged. But the 1960s laws seemed likely to empower the federal government far more. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, created the federal mandates and enforcement mechanisms that empowered local activists, which, for example, finally pushed Miami slumlords to sell off their lucrative holdings. The Supreme Court added to the political tumult at the local and state levels by enforcing the “one person, one vote” principle throughout the 1960s. Waterhouse's narrative suggests that industry leaders likely considered it far easier to lobby one governing body than to challenge fifty, which does much (along with the eye-opening changes to campaign finance that Lobbying America discusses) to explain why business organizations have consolidated their power since the 1960s.

These books make clear how challenging it is to meet the political-economic turn's demand for grand, sweeping, revisionist, kitchen-sink narratives. Scholars attuned to relatively uncharted firms, economic sectors, areas of the world, and topics must not only pursue new primary sources but also fully confront existing literatures and jettison the routine arguments, terms, and assumptions first worked out from the perspective of a collapsing urban, industrial North Atlantic. These four books alone have made it clear that the American twentieth century might be defined by both an increase in opportunity and the persistence of structural inequality. Van Vleck provides a clear sense of how building the world's airfields shaped the lives of the ordinary people planning, managing, and constructing far-flung commercial hubs. Cadava illustrates that these destination points directed the development of surrounding regions. Air supply chains likely encouraged borderlands around the world to specialize in just one or two industries, which nonetheless attracted numerous multinational firms. Such businesses did not so much replicate the nineteenth-century company town as update it. Moreover, Connolly's provocative arguments suggest that deregulation, free trade, and equal opportunity have encouraged segregation in American cities. The lobbyists angling to maintain if not widen such systematic inequality remain influential both in the United States and abroad even if they are no longer as united as they once were.