The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism

by Joyce Appleby

6. C. Knick Harley’s “Reassessing the Industrial Revolution,” in Joel Mokyr, The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1999), 204–05. The figure is for 1820. Michael G. Mulhall, The Dictionary of Statistics (London, 1899), 420, puts the figure at 35.6 percent for Great Britain.

  7. R. Allen, “Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800,” in European Review of Economic History, 4 (2000), 20; Angus Maddison, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development (Oxford, 1991), 32; Alan S. Milward and S. B. Saul, The Economic Development of Continental Europe, 1780–1870 (London, 1973), 368; Thomas Weiss, “The American Economic Miracle of the 19th Century,” American Historical Association (1994): 18.

  8. Milward and Saul, Economic Development of Continental Europe, 388–96.

  9. Ibid., 376.

  10. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 193–94.

  11. United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, 1961), 7–11.

  12. Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700–1815 (Columbus, OH, 1994); John Majewski, “Toward a Social History of the Corporation: Shareholding in Pennsylvania, 1800–1840,” in Cathy Matson, ed. The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (Philadelphia, 2006).

  13. Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Process of Government under Jefferson (Princeton, 1978), 107; and L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Political Economic Policy and Political Development in New York State, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, 1988).

  14. Malcolm Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (Oxford, 1968), 48, as cited in Cunningham, Process of Government, 107. See also Arthur H. Cole, “Cyclical and Sectional Variations in the Sale of Public Land,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 9 (1927): 50; Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, 1986), 115–17.

  15. Matthew Gardner, The Autobiography of Elder Matthew Gardner, Dayton, 1874), 69; Christopher Clark, “The Agrarian Context of American Capitalist Development” and Jonathan Levy, “The Mortgage Worked the Hardest’: The Nineteenth-Century Mortgage Market and the Law of Usury,” in Michael Zakim and Gary Kornbluth, eds., For Purposes of Profit: Essays on Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2009).

  16. John C. Pease and John M. Niles, A Gazetteer…of Connecticut and Rhode Island (Hartford, 1819), 6.

  17. T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York, 2009), 90–95.

  18. Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago, 2004), 35.

  19. Henry L. Ellsworth, A Digest of Patents Issued by the United States, from 1790 to January 1, 1839 (Washington, 1840); see also Kenneth Sokoloff, “Inventive Activity in Early Industrial America: Evidence from Patent Records, 1790–1846,” Journal of Economic History, 48 (1988): 818–20.

  20. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000 [originally published 1835, 1840]), 386.

  21. Olive Cleaveland Clarke, Things That I Remember at Ninety-Five (1881), 10–11. This was in 1802.

  22. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, 1983). For slave fertility, see Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 149. See also Andrew R. L. Cayton, “The Early National Period,” Encyclopedia of American Social History, ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton et al., 3 vols. (New York, 1993), I: 100.

  23. Warren S. Thompson, “The Demographic Revolution in the United States,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, no. 262 (1949): 62–69; Andrew Cayton, “The Early National Period,” 88.

  24. Allen Trimble, 1783–1870 Autobiography and Correspondence (1909), 74; Gershom Flagg, The Flagg Correspondence Selected Letters, 1816–1854, eds., Barbara Lawrence and Nedra Branz (Carbondale, 1986), 5–7; William J. Baumol, Productivity and American Leadership (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 34–35.

  25. Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Cambridge, 1991), 135–41.

  26. Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia, and Bonnie G. Smith, The Making of the West: People and Cultures, A Concise History, 2nd ed. (Boston, 2007), 708.

  27. John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (New York, 2000), 111–40.

  28. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York, 1950), 83.

  29. Maarten Prak, ed., Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and Social Change in Europe, 1400–1800 (New York, 2001), 194ff; “Werner von Siemens,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biog-raphie, online version, vol. 55 (Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, 2007): 203–13.

  30. Colleen A. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, 1994), 202–05.

  31. Clive Trebilcock, The Industrialization of the Continental Powers, 1780–1914 (London, 1981), 44–46, 172–77; Stiles, First Tycoon, 82–85; Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization, 38–41.

  32. Trebilcock, Industrialization of Continental Powers, 173–74; Robert E. Wright and Richard Sylla, eds., The History of Corporate Finance: Development of Anglo-American Securities Markets, Financial Practices, Theories and Laws, 4 vols. (London, 2003), iv.

  33. Timor Kuran, “Explaining the Economic Trajectories of Civilizations: The Systemic Approach,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2009).

  34. Caroline Fohlin, Finance Capitalism and Germany’s Rise to Industrial Power (New York, 2007), 65–69.

  35. Charles P. Kindleberger, A Financial History of Western Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993 [1984]), 102–10.

  36. Thorstein Veblen, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York, 1950), 83.

  37. Trebilcock, Industrialization of Continental Powers, 40; Fohlin, Finance Capitalism and Germany’s Rise to Industrial Power, 220–21.

  38. Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 2006), 76–77; Thomas K. McGraw, “American Capitalism” in Thomas K. McGraw, ed., Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (Cambridge, 1995), 335.

  39. Robert C. Allen, “The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective,” (2006): 29 [available on the Internet]; Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY, 2006), 113.

  40. Irwin Unger, Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton, 1964), 13–20.

  41. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (New York, 1873).

  42. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 69–74.

  43. Wright, History of Corporate Finance, 1: iv; Timothy W. Guinnane, Ron Harris, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Putting the Corporation in Its Place,” Enterprise and Societ, 8 (2007): 690–91.

  44. Kindleberger, Financial History of Western Europe, 196.

  45. Wright, History of Corporate Finance, I: x–xxvii.

  46. McGraw, “American Capitalism” in McGraw, ed., Creating Modern Capitalism, 315–16.

  47. Guinnane, Harris, Lamoreaux, and Rosenthal, “Putting the Corporation in Its Place”: 698.

  48. Trebilcock, Industrialization of Continental Powers, 54, 64–66.

  49. Walter A. Moss, An Age of Progress?: Clashing Twentieth Century Forces (New York, 2008), 58–59.

  50. Jeffrey A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2006), 6–7, 14–19, 42–43.

  51. A striking exception to this generalizati
on can be found in Colleen Dunlavy and Thomas Weisskopp, “Myths and Peculiarities: Comparing U.S. and German Capitalism,” German Historical Bulletin, 41(2007).

  52. Henry James, “The German Experience and the Myth of British Cultural Exceptionalism,” in Bruce Collins and Keith Robbins, eds., British Culture and Economic Decline (London, 1990), 108.

  53. Steve N. Broadberry, “How Did the United States and Germany Overtake Britain?: A Sectoral Analysis of Comparative Productivity Levels, 1870–1990,” Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998): 375–76.

  54. Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687–1851 (Cambridge, 2004), 126–27.

  CHAPTER 7. THE INDUSTRIAL LEVIATHANS AND THEIR OPPONENTS

  1. T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York, 2009).

  2. Ibid., 279.

  3. Harold C. Livesay, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Boston, 1986).

  4. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 1991), 39–42.

  5. Jeffrey Fear, “August Thyssen and German Steel,” in Thomas K. McGraw, ed., Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (Cambridge, 1997), 185–226; Clive Trebilcock, The Industrialization of the Continental Powers, 1780–1914 (London, 1981), 61–62.

  6. J. R. McNeill, An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000), 24–25.

  7. Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Capitalism, Culture and Catastrophe: Lawrence Levine and the Opening of Cultural History,” Journal of American History, 93 (2006): 783

  8. Jose C. Moya, “A Continent of Immigrants: Post Colonial Shift’s in the Western Hemisphere,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 86 (2006): 3–4; Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley, “The Living Standard of Women during the Industrial Revolution, 1795–1820,” Economic History Review, 46 (1993): 745–49.

  9. Geoffrey Barraclough, ed., Times Atlas of World History (London, 1992), 208–09.

  10. Adam Mckeown, “Global Migration, 1840–1940,” World History, 15 (2004): 156.

  11. Moya, “A Continent of Immigrants,” 3–4.

  12. Trebilcock, Industrialization of Continental Powers, 32; Alan S. Milward and S. B. Saul, The Economic Development of Continental Europe, 1780–1870 (London, 1973), 142–45.

  13. David Khoudour-Casteras, “The Impact of Bismarck’s Social Legislation on German Emigration before World War I,” eScholarship Repository, University of California; http://repositories.edlib.org/berkely.econ211/spring2005/, 4–45; Trebilcock, Industrialization of Continental Powers, 65–77; Hubert Kiesewetter, Industrielle Revolution in Deutschland, 1815–1914, Neue Historische Bibliothek (Frankfurt, 1989), 90.

  14. Thomas Weiss, “U.S. Labor Force Estimates and Economic Growth, 1800 to 1860,” in R. Gallman and J. Wallis, eds., The Standard of Living in Early Nineteenth Century America (Chicago, 1992), 8–10; Lee A. Craig and Thomas Weiss, “Hours at Work and Total Factor Productivity Growth in 19th-Century U.S. Agriculture,” Advances in Agricultural Economic History, 1 (2000): 1–30; Weiss, “American Economic Miracle”: 20.

  15. Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, 2002), 4; Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, The Law, And Liberal Developments In The United States (Cambridge, 1992); Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton, 1964), 22.

  16. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warren, The Gilded Age (New York, 1973); Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York, 1906).

  17. Walter G. Moss, An Age of Progress?: Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (New York, 2008), 3–12.

  18. Lisa Tiersten, “Redefining Consumer Culture: Recent Literature on Consumption and the Bourgeoisie in Western Europe,” Radical History Review, 57 (1995): 116–59.

  19. Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 2004).

  20. Price F. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor, “The Adoption of Workers’ Compensation in the United States, 1900–1930,” Journal of Law and Economics, 41 (1998): 305–308.

  21. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, 1990), 70ff, 167–70, 218–36, 375ff, 430–34.

  22. Rosanne Curriaro, “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America,” Journal of American History, 93 ( 2006): 22–27.

  CHAPTER 8. RULERS AS CAPITALISTS

  1. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York, 1991), 18–74; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1999), 26–33.

  2. Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (New Haven, 2007), 230.

  3. Pakenham, Scramble for Africa, 15, 22.

  4. Ibid., 71–87.

  5. Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY, 2006), 108–09.

  6. Debora Silverman, “‘The Congo, I Presume’”: Tepid Revisionism in the Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, 1910/2005,” Paper given at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, January 2–6, 2009.

  7. Geoffrey Barraclough, ed., The Times Atlas of World History, rev. ed. (London, 1984), 238–41.

  8. Pomeranz and Topik, World That Trade Created, 130–32.

  9. Jonathan Holland, ed., Puerto del Sol, 13 (2006): 4: 61–62; 14 (2007): 38–40.

  10. Walter G. Moss, An Age of Progress?: Clashing Twentieth Century Forces (New York, 2008).

  11. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951).

  12. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1999), 56–57.

  13. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007).

  14. Kazushi Ohkawa and Henry Rosovsky, “Capital Formation in Japan,” in Kozo Yamamura, ed., The Economic Emergence of Modern Japan (New York, 1997), 208.

  15. F. G. Notehelfer, “Meiji in the Rear-View Mirror: Top Down vs. Bottom Up History,” Monumenta Nipponica, 45 (1990): 207–28.

  16. W. G. Beasley, The Modern History of Japan, 2nd ed. (New York, 1973), 156–57, 311, 120–31; Notehelfer, “Meifi in the Rear-View Mirror,” 222–26; E. Sydney Crawcour, “Economic Change in the Nineteenth Century” and “Industrialization and Technological Change, 1885–1920,” in Yamamura, ed., Economic Emergence of Modern Japan, 34–41, 53–55; Thomas K. McGraw, Introduction to Thomas K. McGraw, ed. Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (Cambridge, 1995), 1.

  17. Kaoru Sugahara, “Labour-Intensive Industrialisation in Global History: The Second Notel Butlin Lecture,” Australian Journal of Economic History, 47 (2007): 134, n. 24; Ohkawa and Rosovsky, “Capital Formation in Japan,” in Yamamura, ed., Economic Emergence of Modern Japan, 214–15; Mark Elvin, “The Historian as Haruspex,” New Left Review, 52 (2008): 88.

  18. Yamamura, ed., Economic Emergence of Modern Japan, 34–41, 53–55.

  19. Beasley, Modern History of Japan, 134–49.

  20. Constance Chen, “From Passion to Discipline: East Asian Art and the Culture of Modernity in the United States, 1876–1945” (UCLA dissertation, 2000).

  21. Yamamura, ed., Economic Emergence of Modern Japan, 112.