Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CAPITALISM Takes Command

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Editors' Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: An American Revolutionary Tradition Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith.....................................................11 The Agrarian Context of American Capitalist Development Christopher Clark...............................................................132 The Mortgage Worked the Hardest The Fate of Landed Independence in Nineteenth-Century America Jonathan Levy............................393 Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1897 Edward E. Baptist............................694 Inheriting Property and Debt From Family Security to Corporate Accumulation Elizabeth Blackmar.........................................935 Slave Breeding and Free Love An Antebellum Argument over Slavery, Capitalism, and Personhood Amy Dru Stanley...........................1196 Capitalism and the Rise of the Corporation Nation Robert E. Wright......................................................................1457 Capitalist Aesthetics Americans Look at the London and Liverpool Docks Tamara Plakins Thornton.........................................1698 William Leggett and the Melodrama of the Market Jeffrey Sklansky........................................................................1999 Producing Capitalism The Clerk at Work Michael Zakim...................................................................................22310 Soulless Monsters and Iron Horses The Civil War, Institutional Change, and American Capitalism Sean Patrick Adams.....................249Afterword: Anonymous History Jean-Christophe Agnew........................................................................................277Contributors...............................................................................................................................285Notes......................................................................................................................................289Index......................................................................................................................................351

Chapter One

Christopher Clark

Over the long nineteenth century, from the late colonial period to the aft ermath of World War I, American capitalism established itself with revolutionary force. The United States became the world's largest economy and in per capita terms one of its richest, while developing to a marked degree the main facets of industrial and finance capitalism. Contemporaries marveled at the speed of the transformations this entailed. By the 1890s the United States had become the world's biggest manufacturer and producer of minerals, its largest absorber of mobile international labor, and one of its chief financial centers. Its most powerful figures were among the world's wealthiest individuals. Essential elements of American capitalism—integrated markets in land, capital, labor, and commodities; large-scale manufacturing; corporate organizations; a substantial wage-earning working class and salary-earning middle class—all emerged during the period.

Economic historians once characterized this as a sectoral shift from "primary" activities, such as agriculture and fisheries, to "secondary" manufacturing activity, noting the growth of urban societies and the emergence of service ("tertiary") sectors to facilitate and coordinate these. Scholars in the Marxian tradition pointed to the constraints that led working men and women—American-born and immigrants—to enter wage work, providing the labor force on which capitalist industry and finance were built. But the long nineteenth century, in which the United States expanded territorially from seaboard settlements to become a continental empire, was also a period of dramatic growth in agriculture. During the seventy years before 1860 alone this growth was rapid enough: farms and plantations more than quadrupled in number to more than two million. But over the next sixty years, the figure more than trebled again, to nearly six and a half million. Farms and ranches large and small were created across much of the continent, and the United States played a leading part in a global drama of agricultural settlement that involved Canada, Australasia, and parts of South America, Africa, and Asia.

Agriculture and its expansion were deeply involved in many of capitalism's key attributes, and so had profound implications for American capitalist development. Expansion entailed the creation of landed property by the addition of "new" lands to the property system, the emergence of land markets, and the production and distribution of produce that fed growing national and international commodity markets. Agriculture also created markets for wage labor, though here the picture was more complex and ambiguous. The sectional conflict between North and South and the destruction of chattel slavery during the Civil War involved the defeat of one agricultural system based on forced bondage by another based on "free" family and wage labor. But while wage labor in farming grew in specific circumstances, agriculture did not become primarily a locus for waged employment. The continued growth of farming that relied on family-based labor would give American capitalism some of its notable characteristics.

The long nineteenth century marked a distinctive period in the development of US agriculture, and hence American capitalism as well. Rural societies, of course, had dominated early America; in 1790 nine-tenths or more of the population was engaged in or connected with farming. The emergence of other sectors meant that the relative position of farming necessarily declined. By 1820 about 72 percent of the workforce was in agriculture; by 1920 the proportion had fallen to 27 percent, and in that year census enumerators found, for the first time, less than half the population living in settlements defined as "rural" (with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants). Yet the expansion of American farming continued throughout this period. Though its proportion of total employment fell, the absolute size of the farm workforce increased until the 1910s. Only in certain pockets did the number of farms decline before 1900, and the total number was still rising in the 1920s. In many regions, farm households tended to become focused on specific patterns of agricultural production; as household manufacturing declined, farm consumption from markets rose, and specializations emerged.

By 1920, however, agriculture was entering a new phase. Output continued to rise, but farming went into significant demographic and even geographical retreat; farm sizes grew but, except during the Depression, the number of farms fell. Government and agribusiness came to dominate farm policy and investment, and the proportion of the population engaged in farming began to plunge toward its present-day level of around 2 percent. Systematic investment in machinery, artificial fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and other commoditized inputs marked a massive substitution of capital for labor, raising labor productivity in agriculture by a factor of 15 by the early twenty-first century. Previously, by contrast, productivity gains had been...