Gaslight illumination provides an apt metaphor for this volume of essays on capitalism in nineteenth-century America. On the one hand, the advent of gaslight revealed a world that had previously been almost entirely in shadow. These essays also shed light on a wide range of commercial practices and experiences that were previously obscured by older narratives of industrialization and class creation, merchant princes and transatlantic trade. On the other hand, the flicker of gaslight also transformed familiar terrain into something precarious and shifting. Collectively these essays perform a similar task. They suggest an interpretive framework that alters our perception of the transition to capitalism. Instead of seeing a struggle between capitalists and precapitalists over the expansion of an already established economic system, we are offered a more contingent landscape, one where uneven negotiations over legitimacy, morality and value created American capitalism in the nineteenth century. Exposing these shadowy transactions, these essays demonstrate how men and women, both powerful and weak, did not transition into capitalism. Rather they built a new economic and cultural system from the bottom up.

The central theme to emerge from this collection is the question of who determined what counted as legitimate and indeed moral economic behavior in the nineteenth century. That Americans struggled with this issue is evident in a number of essays. Joshua Greenberg's insightful essay on shinplaster currency illuminates this theme perfectly. Shinplasters were a form of paper currency, issued privately by individual merchants and small corporations. Their worth depended the reputation of the issuer, something created by a complicated matrix of knowledge, trust and geography. Although their value was in part determined by federal and state laws regarding the issue of currency, in truth their validity was regulated by those individuals who engaged in the transactions. A willingness to accept shinplasters ultimately determined whether business could proceed. As Greenberg's analysis demonstrates, legitimacy proceeded from necessity and cooperation, until communal consensus revoked the note's validity.

A similarly democratic and even anarchic model of regulation existed in upstate New York. Will Mackintosh's examination of a criminal family called the Loomis Gang highlights how communities used both “legal and extra-legal” authority to intervene in economic behavior they found morally unacceptable (29). Using vigilante justice to curtail business activities that were only degrees removed from their own economic practices, this community not only helped to define the boundaries of legitimate commerce in Sangerfield, but also chose to privatize justice within the marketplace. This too is Paul Erickson's point about the private crusade of Anthony Comstock, who made it his entrepreneurial mission to curtail the spread of smut in New York in the 1870s. Those who defined and applied the moral norms of capitalist behavior did not always begin as the wealthy or indeed as the powerful, but learned how to manipulate both money and authority to their advantage.

Katie Hemphill's suggestive research into the world of the Baltimore sex trade demonstrates a different aspect of this type of democratic regulation. By relocating sex work to a space that appeared domestic and intimate rather than commercial, prostitutes and madams troubled the boundaries between the private sphere and the public, subtly shifting the parameters of the marketplace to suit their interest. Taken together these essays show how the boundaries of the market and the principles of commercial behavior were shaped by the habits and expectations of a broad range of people.

Thus, as Corey Goettsch notes, the market revolution was a “crisis of legitimacy,” a protean moment where opportunity and chance offered anyone the ability to step in and shape new market practices to suit themselves or a wider interest (113). Some essays elucidate perfectly how uneven this process of negotiation could be. In Brendan P. O'Malley's essay on New York immigrants, the chaotic overlapping efforts of commercial and municipal authority to control the movement of people and urban space reveals the extent to which local knowledge offered power, leaving immigrants vulnerable to fraud, exploitation and violence. Other essays, such as Michael D. Thompson's, perhaps overstate the power of vulnerable individuals in shaping market processes. When slaves on Charleston's waterfront stole tiny amounts of cotton and other commodities, they certainly provoked a response from authorities. But their actions did not add up to “essential roles” in establishing the commodity flow through the broader commercial economy (154). Here is where pushing the marginal to the middle of the story has somewhat distorted the terrain of power and wealth on which individuals like slaves operated.

Indeed, one criticism of this collection might be that this interpretation of the transition to capitalism obscures the history of class conflict that we are used to seeing in these narratives. Without unions and other labour movements, without strikes and mobilized state violence, the history of American capitalism seems curiously consensual. None of the actors in these essays seems outside or beyond the reach of the market; everyone is already inside and on board with the capitalist projects of nineteenth-century commercial expansion, looking for their own way to take advantage of new forms of capital.

Perhaps this is in part a function of geography. Taken together, these essays reveal the fascinating ways in which local markets were slowly connecting to larger regional, national and even international markets throughout this period. But the focus is largely on East Coast urban settings. As the editors readily acknowledge, there is a gap when it comes to thinking about how this interpretation of capitalism might apply to the South. I would add the rural and in particular the plantation and the reservation. How much power did nonurban Americans, especially the enslaved and the oppressed, have when it came to defining the norms of doing business in nineteenth-century America?

Nonetheless, this collection makes a convincing case for seeing capitalism as a process of cultural creation in the nineteenth century and certainly demonstrates that it was not only the wealthy and powerful who were able to control this creation. As such, the book provides a wonderful model for thinking about how culture and economy intersect. If, as Karl Polanyi has argued, capitalism can be defined as the moment when an economic system submerged all other social relations, then this book reveals the minute and marginal processes through which such a great transformation took place.Footnote ¹