Noam Maggor's Brahmin Capitalism offers a meticulous study of Boston bankers’ crucial role in shaping Gilded Age industrial acceleration. In lucid prose, Maggor traces the way these men's savvy investment and political strategies—emerging in part from a recognition of economic and democratic turmoil in their home city and state—began to forge a “national market” during the final third of the nineteenth century (xi). He mines, synthesizes, and critiques an impressive range of business histories and archival sources, aiming to overturn what he identifies as a teleological (and tautological) Chandlerian consensus that attributes industrialization to technological and managerial transformations. That consensus, he claims persuasively, assumes the logical emergence of a national economic structure rather than interrogating it as a historical process.

For Maggor, it was the choices of Boston capitalists such as Henry Lee Higginson, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, and Henry Davis Minot that soldered East and West together. He tells these elite men's stories with an eye for patrician detail, attending to their ancestry, upbringings, and educations, as well as their independent realizations that the investments in textile production and merchant shipping that had grown their parents’, grandparents’, and in-laws’ fortunes would not make or maintain their own. Instead they looked West, to mining, stockyards, railroads, and other industrial pursuits. In doing so, they facilitated “the mobilization of old wealth into new fields of investment” and became “a driving force behind North American economic development” (99).

But this is a history of political economy, so Maggor does not allow politics to disappear in capital's shadow. He attends to complex stories of local disputes over tax policy and public space, deftly teasing out their relationship to Brahmins’ ambitions for Boston as a financial metropolis. Elite Bostonians, he conveys with compelling evidence, viewed contests over local property taxes and municipal centralization as consequential within political-economic geographies far more extensive than those of the city or commonwealth alone. They fought local battles with nonlocal purposes in mind. Maggor makes an excellent case here for the value of a “subnational” analytical scale: for resisting the temptation to use urban histories “as microcosms or stand-ins for the nation as a whole,” rather than “as interconnected sites in a larger political economy” (57).

Observing the logic of this critique, he broadens his investigation to “[t]he tug of war between [Boston] investors and populists” in the West, showing how their disputes bore on the project of a national market by producing “a variety of legal regimes” governing investment and development (177). Such regimes, he argues, “produced a complex new geography, an institutional patchwork that was never fully transcended in the twentieth century” (177). In a sense, then, his book is not just a challenge to the consensus of how or when a “national market” formed, but rather an argument that such a market never really formed at all. This is an important contribution of the best variety: it invites new research.

Maggor contends that battles between Brahmin wealth and what he calls “populist” or “radical” political forces played a key role in the political economy of the Gilded Age, hence his book's subtitle. The radicals or populists in his stories tend to resemble Robert Johnston's “radical middle classes”: city officials such as Boston tax assessor, Thomas Hills, who tried to extend taxes to wealthy local churches and (gasp!) Harvard; middling tradesmen and mechanics who petitioned to use the Boston Common to celebrate industry and promote their wares while posing as avatars of a new democratic spirit; and Western state politicians seeking to safeguard local interests by placing legal limits on out-of-state investors’ extractive capacities.Footnote ¹

Maggor shows that elites viewed such petit bourgeois politics as a nuisance, and perhaps even as a genuine threat to their financial or corporate agendas. Brahmins worried that democratic taxation and municipal centralization would drive capital away from Boston (not to mention, impinge on their manorial serenity). They saw tradesmen's displays as vulgar blights on the city. They abhorred Western politicians’ and settlers’ attempts (as they saw it) to evade the beneficent workings of the free market. They fought all these meddlesome opponents, as Maggor ably chronicles.

But were these really the pivotal political-economic disputes of the age? Was Brahmin antipathy toward such petit bourgeois and local-booster antagonists as influential to their thinking as revulsion toward and fear of fire-breathing farmer populists, property-destroying unionists, or bearded anarchist radicals? These latter, more familiar populists and radicals of Gilded Age political and economic historiography seem oddly absent from this book—as do women, elite or otherwise.

Likewise, Maggor acknowledges, but neither confronts nor interprets the inextricable roles of slavery and the U.S. government's genocidal wars of expansion in the accumulation and investment of what he repeatedly terms (with a whiff of Weberian approval) the Brahmins’ “saved resources.” Surely such foundational atrocities left legacies on Brahmins’ thinking and activities—not to mention on the shape of the “national market”—worth exploring further within the scope of this study?

Such elisions might raise fewer eyebrows if Maggor did not also describe his capitalist subjects (or allow them to describe themselves, with minimal critical intervention) in an almost awestruck language of masculinist endeavor. The reader is invited to marvel at the “untamed wilderness” (9) across which the Brahmins traveled “staggering distances” (40), in which they “went to great strenuous lengths” (40), demonstrating their “entrepreneurial, energetic, even aggressive role in conquering the West” (99). With their “truly heroic analytical powers” (109) and an “almost superhuman capacity to mobilize resources” (125), these men “penetrated the Great West” (158) with their capital, of which they “laboriously mobilized massive infusions … from east to west” (207). It is true that such “infusions” did not become possible or profitable without certain people paying a huge price, but Brahmin Capitalism provides an incomplete accounting of who paid it, how, and why.

Despite these lacunae, Maggor concludes with an astute warning that “much wider scope for democratic participation” will be necessary to resolve the “contradictions of democracy and capitalism in our own day” and to reconstitute “our governing institutions” (211). Brahmin Capitalism provides a timely illustration of how deep research into subnational political-economic dynamics can reveal significant and consequential interconnections within much broader histories of political economy. In this regard, it offers a promising model for emerging histories of capitalism.