To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise unravels the intersecting regional, political, religious, and economic factors that account for the retail giant's unique approach to free enterprise and consumer capitalism, along with its unparalleled rise to market dominance. The readily accepted portrayal of Wal-Mart as corporate monster gutting small town businesses, exploiting wage laborers and women, while not the main trope of Moreton's argument, is, nevertheless, nuanced with extensive primary research, yielding sophisticated historical cross-readings of labor, religious, and gender narratives. Without a guiding narrative or structural framework, Moreton divides her study into three discrete, sequential approaches. The first chronicles the economic trends of the Ozark region in order to exhibit the particular challenges faced by Sam Walton and his vision for a low-price, large-scale corporate retailer. Like many southerners, the farming classes of the Ozarks were anticorporate populists who viewed the industrial economy as an encroachment upon their own livelihood. These early twentieth-century farmers were not without their own strategies for securing their own economic futures through the development of farming cooperatives.

Agriculture · Capitalism · Dominance (genetics) · Economics · Economy · Free enterprise · Free market · Futures contract · Livelihood · Market economy · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Finance · History · Law