Capitalism Takes Command
The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Introduction An American Revolutionary Tradition
Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith
1 The Agrarian Context of American Capitalist Development
Christopher Clark
2 The Mortgage Worked the Hardest: The Fate of Landed Independence in Nineteenth-Century America
Jonathan Levy
3 Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837
Edward E. Baptist
4 Inheriting Property and Debt: From Family Security to Corporate Accumulation
Elizabeth Blackmar
5 Slave Breeding and Free Love: An Antebellum Argument over Slavery, Capitalism, and Personhood
Amy Dru Stanley
6 Capitalism and the Rise of the Corporation Nation
Robert E. Wright
7 Capitalist Aesthetics: Americans Look at the London and Liverpool Docks
Tamara Plakins Thornton
8 William Leggett and the Melodrama of the Market
Jeffrey Sklansky
9 Producing Capitalism: The Clerk at Work
Michael Zakim
10 Soulless Monsters and Iron Horses: The Civil War, Institutional Change, and American Capitalism
Sean Patrick Adams
Afterword Anonymous History
Jean-Christophe Agnew
Contributors
Index
“Rarely has a collection of essays from a dozen scholars created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but Capitalism Takes Command conveys with detail, coherence, and sophistication the changes in the American economy in the nineteenth century under the multiple imperatives of capitalism.”
“The history of capitalism has attracted growing numbers of scholars, and this volume makes it clear why. By turns provocative, enlightening, and brilliant, the essays collected here capture capitalism’s twinned powers of creation and destruction. Essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the field.”
"This exemplary collection of essays provides the most finely tuned and precise renderings we have in the literature of a burgeoning culture of capitalism that created new economic practices, instruments, and institutions and shaped the ways in which Americans perceived and made meaning of the epic social and cultural transformations unfolding around them. Capitalism Takes Command is required reading for specialists in nineteenth-century American history, economists, and students of American culture."
Economics and Business: Economics--History
History: American History
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