Brahmin Capitalism

Noam Maggor's Brahmin Capitalism is a distinguished contribution to a small but growing library of revisionist monographs on U.S. financial history that probes the prehistory of the 2008 financial crisis. Maggor's theme is the “understated” entrepreneurialism of a small yet influential cohort of late nineteenth-century investors—a purposeful group that included Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Henry Lee Higginson, Henry A. Wells, Nathan Matthews, Jr., and Henry Davis Minot—all of whom were based in Boston and its environs (p. 99). Rather than being hidebound traditionalists, as earlier historians often assumed, the “Brahmin capitalists” helped forge a “new industrial political economy organized around an interconnected domestic market” (p. xi). For Maggor, as for many recent historians of American capitalism, this project was emphatically a political one in which a group of “strategic actors” deliberately built a set of institutional arrangements that they then hailed as the natural by-product of inexorable technological imperatives and economic incentives that no one could alter or control (p. xii

Capitalism · Economic history · Gilded Age · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Populism · Sociology · Theme (computing · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Political Economy and Marxism