Professionally curated financial information is inescapable in twenty-first-century media. The genres are vast—from the cable news shows to the financial podcasts, from the polished TV ads for investment advice to the local banners at the school sports complex, from the Hollywood films on insider trading to the books exposing the men behind the Great Recession. Americans, it seems, are constantly reading the market, attempting to decipher just what—or who—is behind the curtain. Peter Knight’s Reading the Market, published in the New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural series edited by Jeffrey Sklansky, considers the expansion of this media—and the interest that motivates its consumption—within the historical context of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Tracing Americans’ growing imaginative engagement with the stock market from the 1880s onward, Reading the Market assembles an expansive archive, including fiction, advice manuals, satirical cartoons, and prototypical organization charts. Interdisciplinary in its interventions, Reading the Market portrays a market in the nineteenth-century United States that not only required but also followed from “conceptual adjustments” (p. 14). Because this cultural studies approach allows Knight to adjust traditional accounts of the market’s transformation, this book is likely to be of wide interest to readers of this journal.

Across an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, Knight delivers two related revisions to understanding of the development of capitalism in the United States. First, Knight claims that, in orienting ordinary Americans to the “fictiveness of finance” (p. 15), the culture of the market helped “render it legible and thus call it into being” (p. 6). Second, Knight refines the project of the new history of capitalism. This multidisciplinary field has profitably directed attention to the “institutions, mechanisms, and personalities of finance at the heart of capitalism,” thereby challenging prior generations’ sense of business history as a record of an “inevitable” march to corporate, technological, and production efficiencies. With abundant evidence from the cultural record, Reading the Market further challenges the market’s inevitable march toward abstraction. Reconsidering the “great transformation” from a “traditional society” to a “market society,” Knight argues principally that, across the late nineteenth century, “the market was viewed as both impersonal and personal, abstract and concrete, often in contradictory ways” (p. 16).

In his analysis of the genres that not only describe but also conjure the market, Knight prefers to use dialectical historical materialism to challenge the metanarrative of abstraction. In chapter 1, “Market Reports,” as he emphasizes financial journalism’s role in framing the market, he shows how the market report veered between representing the market as an “impersonal abstraction” and as “the product of gossipy, personal relationships” (p. 25). These contradictions inhere in media seemingly separated from the more austere business publications: most surprisingly, the gossip rag, Town Topics. In chapter 2, “Reading the Ticker Tape,” Knight similarly finds that even the “new methods of scientific analysis,” seemingly predicated on a transcendent statistical abstraction, “attributed a mysterious sense of human agency … to the market and its mechanical registers” (p. 61). Citing numerous late nineteenth-century firsthand published accounts of Wall Street, Knight shows how market readers “incorporated … the logic of personification” as they came to view “the economy” as subject to its own internal laws (p. 61, emphasis in original). Even though the market, a nuanced form, could be read—and predicted—it attained legibility via an interpretive mix of both traditional and scientific methods.

The second part of chapter 2 illustrates how this tension between reading the ticker tape as an art or as a science haunts (his term) writing about the market. I use “haunt” advisedly here, for it makes clear Knight’s allegiance to a method that reveals market reading as an uneasy combination of “financial rationality” and “occult” magic. Even as the new history of capitalism might incorporate stock traders like (the fictional) Larry Livingston, James R. Keene, and Sampson Rock into a metanarrative of abstraction, Knight’s dialectical approach articulates these traders’ “trancelike” readings not as technical analysis but “intuition, supernatural possession” (p. 92).

After a chapter on print visualizations of the market, the fourth chapter, “Confidence Games and Inside Information,” signals a temporary shift in the book from the contradictions of market reading to the contradictions of market mechanisms: “the problematic relationship between a sentimental and an exchange economy” (p. 145). For Knight, “inside dealing” stands at the intersection of these economies. Because “inside dealing” offered a ready “narrative structuring device” to a market culture in flux, he probes the broad meanings of this concept in literature from Herman Melville’s antebellum novel The Confidence-Man to the high realism at the end of the nineteenth century of William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton. (Surprisingly, there is no mention of Mark Twain, who coauthored The Gilded Age, the novel that named the era.) For Knight, Wharton offers an especially rich sense of how the corruption of Fifth Avenue interpenetrated Wall Street (and not vice versa).

Like chapters 1–3, the book’s final chapter, “Conspiracy and the Invisible Hand of the Market,” refers to a wealth of archival, print, and scholarly literature in order to track “the changing meanings of conspiracy in legal and economic debates” during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Whereas a previous generation of historians dismissed late nineteenth-century conspiratorial interpretation as fringe thinking, Knight incorporates this mode into his thesis. For Knight, conspiracy theory, “a combination of personal and abstract registers,” becomes a hallmark of market reading (p. 193). In reading a market prone to fluctuations, late nineteenth-century readers asked, “Was there a plan behind the economic upheavals that beset the United States, or were they simply the result of the blind workings of the market?” (p. 194) As readers of a complex system, late nineteenth-century conspiratorial readers of the market “imbued” an abstraction “with a sense of uncanny, almost supernatural agency” (p. 251): a kind of cognitive mapping for an era of large-scale industrial combinations such as the Standard Oil Trust. This kind of thinking—what the critical theorist Fredric Jameson has dubbed “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age”—thus emerges as a form of protest against market abstraction as inevitable: a muckracking impulse to “account for the operation of the invisible hand of the market” (p. 251).

Knight’s book is impressively researched, his interventions reaching into a number of subfields. His arguments, moreover, are not only convincing but also easily digested in well-organized chapters with clear subheadings. Of course, despite the richness of his archive, one wonders, naturally, how the habit formations of market readers relate to our financialized present. Although both Knight’s introduction and his epilogue touch on how his thesis relates to the present, in doing so, he provokes, but does not answer, questions.

I will briefly mention three such lines. First, sure: market reading is both a science and an art. But the very dialectical method that articulates this contradiction—a method essential to a Marxist tradition, to which Knight declares, quietly, an allegiance—would seem to demand the question: What kind of labor is such reading? Second, Knight details white, male Americans’ engagement with the market. Did people of color read the market as well? Immigrants? Women? And third, Knight addresses how the sites of market reading evolved with and responded to the deterritorialization of the market. Yet what about the kind of market reading in which Knight, the readers of this journal, and this reviewer engage: the scholarly inquiry located, more often than not, in the university? This kind of meta-reflection would be the intersection of critical university studies and critical finance studies, inviting considerations of institutional practices—or labors—that might seem unrelated but, at the same time, respond to conditions of financialization—abstraction—in the present.

Reading the Market demonstrates cultural studies as an essential method for the new history of capitalism, blazing a trail for future research.