Seth Rockman dispatches the titular question in his lucid 2014 survey/review “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?” relatively quickly but a bit ambivalently. “Nothing succeeds like success” is an old capitalist adage, and it appears to have held true for the field of the “new history of capitalism”—a sudden accession to institutional power and distinction (in the form of tenure lines, a book series, and overflowing lecture courses) has drawn the attention of curious fellow historians and the lay public.
Yet even if this virtuous circle of power and prominence is news, it may not exactly be worthy—Rockman spends a few pages throwing cold water on the idea that the field is a genuine novelty. Or as he says, “This ‘new’ history of capitalism might be a testament to good branding (appropriately) rather than original insight, less a new field than a fad” (441). What is truly worthy of note—if not, perhaps, the kind of thing to draw the New York Times’s attention—is not the emergence of a cadre of historians interested in capitalism but in the changes in the way they frame and execute their studies. “What makes the history of capitalism newsworthy is less institutional than intellectual, as the field has opened new vistas on the past by pursuing its questions differently from an earlier scholarship” (442).
“What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?” is perhaps the most comprehensive essay yet written in the way it itemizes the intellectual and institutional threads that have come together as the history of capitalism: he identifies, by my count, no fewer than 19 distinct strands of forebears and influences, and he gestures to “a dozen other historiographies [that] might appear in competing accounts of the field’s genealogy” (442).[1] Yet if Rockman exhaustively catalogues these many possible genealogies for the field, he is really much more interested in asking what the field is and in enumerating the ways that it differs from earlier approaches to the historical study of capitalism, the way it “pursu[es] its questions differently from an earlier scholarship.”
It was partly to focus on that other line of inquiry—thinking through and reconstructing its genealogy—that I started to write a series of posts about the new history of capitalism: I was (and remain) very curious about how one might not only identify its influences but also how one might weight and arrange them. Rather than focus on what makes this field “new” in the sense of different or newsworthy, I hoped to explore what underlying and deeply rooted preconceptions and affinities (elective or natural) it has carried over from older scholarship.
Take, for instance, Louis Hyman’s well-known pithy definition of the field’s ambit as “Foucault and regressions,” which appeared in Jennifer Schuessler’s New York Times feature and which Rockman quotes in his essay. While the focus has generally been on the conjunction and on “regressions”—parsing what it means to add this statistical tool to the historian’s toolkit—the question I wanted to ask is, “why Foucault?”
I got sidetracked over the last few months by other things, but I want to reset today, as it were, and plunge ahead again in asking some of those questions about genealogies and connections.
I’ve also mulled over some of the questions that I was trying to ask before by thinking through a point made by Jeffrey Sklansky in his 2012 survey of the field, “The Elusive Sovereign” that the history of capitalism had shifted the terms of the primary plot or narrative of capitalism from proletarianization to commodification. Rockman also zeroes in on the importance of commodification for the field, calling it “one of the watchwords of the new history of capitalism.” “At bottom, commodification is a discursive process in which language and the means of its transmission… do the epistemological work of creating goods that can be bought, sold, and consumed” (450). A focus on commodification—and on its twin, financialization—allows historians of capitalism to “dismantle the black box that obscures the substantial work involved in transforming aspects of the material world into exchangeable units. Very quickly, commodification directs attention to the social production of knowledge” (ibid.). He later says,
The concept of financialization, like that of commodification, attests to the field’s abiding interest in de-naturalizing the entire range of goods and services that might otherwise be presupposed as inherent to “the economy.” As processes suggesting the agency of human beings rather than the autonomous operations of market forces, both terms impel scholars to excavate the relations of power that underlay what can be bought and sold (and by whom and on what terms) at a given moment in history. (452)
These are essential points, and they add much sharper definition to our understanding of what questions and impulses really drives the research program of the field. But they also presume rather than unpack the role of two fundamental concepts that underwrite that research program: the social production of knowledge and social construction or social constructedness in general.
Rockman elsewhere notes that “The history of capitalism might be thought of as comparable to Science Studies (or STS), an enterprise that similarly seeks to de-naturalize processes that appear inevitable under the heading of ‘progress’” (447). He continues:
Both undertakings interrogate their very subjects—science, capitalism—as contested terrain on which claims to authority and social power are made and exercised. Presuming nothing to be inevitable, historians of capitalism and STS scholars embed what they study in a matrix of social relations, cultural practices, and institutional arrangements operating under specific, yet always contingent, historical circumstances.
Rockman emphasizes the way that the two fields proceed in parallel to call into question their subjects’ self-image as instruments of progress: capitalism, like science and technology, must be denied the historical inevitability it wishes to claim for itself.
But that parallelism overshadows another that I would argue is just as important: in the process of denaturalizing their subjects by illuminating the contested and constructed nature of everything that falls under those titular categories of “capitalism” and “science,” both fields apply the same kind of tools to both persons and things, to identities and objects, frequently blurring the hard and fast separations between not only actors and networks but agents and instruments as well, and even between humans and nonhumans, the knower and the known, the maker and the made.
In the next post in this series, I want to think further about the centrality of social constructedness as a bedrock assumption and basic tool of the history of capitalism, and where that centrality comes from. This line of inquiry reaches back to where I left off before—with my attempt to stress the legacy of the linguistic turn within the history of capitalism—but it also reframes Sklansky’s point that the main plot of the new history of capitalism is commodification.
In a sort of throwaway point made while he is passing through the many different strands of influences on the field, Rockman acknowledges the importance of commodity histories to the shaping of the new history of capitalism. More can be made of that lineage, though: if some historians have identified a work like Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power as an important predecessor, it is also important, I believe, to credit more popular works like Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World (1997). The questions that the subtitle of that book posed to historians are ones that in many ways both animate and perplex today’s scholarship. What does it mean to write “a biography of a fish” and to use that framing as a way to tell a story about capitalist development?
What I am driving at—to anticipate the argument I’ll make in the next post—is that commodity histories, by appropriating a narrative form that has traditionally been used only to tell the stories of named human individuals, simply make explicit a more basic reorientation away from subject formation toward object formation as the primary explanandum of this scholarship.
Another way of saying this might be that, for the new history of capitalism, the most important relations are not exclusively between people. Alongside—and sometimes overshadowing—traditional relations between classes, between employers and employees, between buyers and sellers, the new history of capitalism studies relations between commodities and institutions, between climate and commerce, between animals and the environment. All of those categories, of course, do not exist outside of human definitions, but there is nonetheless a meaningful difference in scholarship that decenters the human in some manner, that thinks about the bios in biography as a more capacious category, that puts nonhuman things in that starring role.
Notes
[1] Here are all the threads I found: new labor history (440 and 441); 1980s transition to capitalism debate (440); market revolution debate (440); commonwealth histories (e.g., Oscar and Mary Handlin) and other mid-century histories of capitalism (440); a Columbia school headed by Elizabeth Blackmar, Barbara Fields, and Eric Foner (441); a Yale school led by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Michael Denning (441); Sven Beckert’s Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard (441); insights drawn from environmental history (e.g., William Cronon) and urban history (e.g., Thomas Sugrue) as well as from labor history (e.g., Nelson Lichtenstein), business history (e.g., Colleen Dunlavy and Richard John), and European history (e.g., Eric Hobsbawm, William Sewell, and E. P. Thompson); American Political Development (442); commodity studies (442); cultural history (446); Marxism (446-447); science and technology studies (STS) (447-448); the New Institutional Economics (449); and International Political Economy (IPE) (449).
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Great post, Andy. Don’t have time to fully engage this but I did want to mention that in my grad seminar this semester, we’ve been thinking a lot about the prehistory to the “new history of capitalism” that began circa 2010. One such book, I think, is Cronon’s “Nature’s Metropolis,” which anticipates some of the trends you discuss briefly here and will expand on in your next post. At a forum at Cornell last week, Ed Baptist discussed the ways in which the Caribbean history of capitalism literature that he explored as an undergraduate presaged many of the defining interests of the “new” HoC.
I know I’m not alone in wishing that I could be in your class! It sounds like you are having great discussions there, and I definitely think that Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis is a key predecessor and influence on the field. I tried–not very successfully, I think–to articulate last month some of the ways Cronon filtered some of the ideas of the linguistic turn for a generation of scholars. Of course, many of those scholars also learned from that book how interesting stuff like probate records and bills of lading could be–and perhaps that is its more obvious and direct influence!
Andy– Thanks for engaging with my essay and using it to launch a very promising line of inquiry about the non-human cast of characters who might populate future studies in the history of capitalism. As I am currently contemplating where the Old Materialism meets the New Materialism in my own research, I am eager to hear where you see things heading.
On the issue of intellectual/institutional genealogies, there are some very regrettable omissions in the 2014 essay– or at least I regret them, especially in light of the influences that allowed me to write Scraping By a few years earlier. If I were rewriting that essay today, I would have devoted much more attention to the Marxist-Feminist scholarship and questions of women’s labor. Work by scholars like Jeanne Boydston (in the US context) or Sonya Rose, Joan Scott, and Anna Clark (in the European) matters a great deal more to what has emerged as the history of capitalism than the 2014 article would lead one to believe. I do think that the current interest in social reproduction (and perhaps the growing citations to Nancy Fraser’s “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode” article) is a very good sign.
The other through-line is Africana Studies and Black Marxism, and I surely should have talked more about how the work of DuBois, Eric Williams, CLR James, and Cedric Robinson had shaped the field. Of course, some could argue that this itself would be a revisionist account of how history of capitalism had emerged in the early 2000s, wherein this particular scholarly tradition was given short-shrift. That would be fair; and to that extent, I appreciated the exhortations that Walter Johnson and others offered in the Boston Review a few years ago to position “racial capitalism” as the central analytic frame for histories of capitalism and modernity. I think future scholarship in the field will make good on this promise.
However– and this circles back to where your post is headed– I do wonder about how work under the heading of “New Materialism” will intersect with work organized by racial capitalism. To put it in the bluntest terms, what are the politics of New Materialism’s “all things matter” in the era of #blacklivesmatter? Is it too soon to de-center the human in light of racial capitalism’s enduring denial of black humanity? I’d be curious to hear if you are reading scholarship that threads this needle?
Again, thanks for the post and your continuing work to untangle this field.
Seth,
Thanks so much for your comment! I completely agree that those two strands have become more prominent, and that this turn is a very positive development for the field.
I find what you say about the short-shrift given to Africana Studies and Black Marxism early in the development of the field really important, and I would connect it to the question you ask at the end of your comment. Rather than seeing this de-centering of the human as a recent turn in the field–perhaps, as you allude to, as a response to the New Materialisms emerging in other disciplines–I would argue that this prioritization of things over raced and gendered bodies was part of the field from early in the 2000s. Or at least, that’s part of what I’ll try to argue in the next post!
Thanks for this fascinating and complex discussion. I am somewhat confused by some aspects of “the new history of capitalism,” at least as described by Rockman’s essay. I do not want to be unfair, and I haven’t read all the material that Rockman cites. Perhaps I can ask a few questions–and only those questions that one might ask after having read Rockman and Peer Vries’ comments on Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (Journal of World History 28.1 [2017]) in quick succession.
First, it this really a history of capitalism? Rockman writes, “the current scholarship has minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism,” so that “capitalism float[s] as a placeholder.” Vries notes that Beckert introduces a term, “war capitalism,” that is “identical to what is normally called ‘mercantilism,'” so that B.’s history of capitalism is a history of “almost exactly the opposite of what most people would consider capitalism…”
Second, can we say that economic growth, even if neither “natural” nor “inevitable” (nor even necessarily desirable), is merely socially constructed? Rockman notes, “The concept of the Industrial Revolution has largely disappeared from the history of capitalism,” even as he suggests a revised “history of innovation.” Tellingly, when Rockman describes “massive warehousing complexes,” he only describes them as aesthetic phenomena. Vries instead suggests the staggering importance of “technological innovation,” so that, if we measure the labor equivalents of adult male laborers conjured up by steam power, “For 1840 their number was 17 million; for 1870, 121 million; and for 1896, 411 million.”
Third, if the “new history of capitalism” ignores economic growth, can it tell us anything about those institutional arrangements that may create or impede growth or about the relative contribution of violence and coercion to growth?
Rockman notes that “economists like Paul A. David or Douglass C. North would credit formal and informal institutions with reducing transactional uncertainty,” but the new historians of capitalism “implicate law and culture” in “unequal prospects and liabilities.” It isn’t clear to me if this means that David and North are (completely, mostly, partially?) wrong about the importance of “open-access-order” societies or how we would even tell.
Curiously, Rockman mentions the work of Robert E. Wright, who argues that antebellum corporations “allow[ed] for economies of scale, vertical integration, research and development, reduced production costs; and they channel[ed] capital to where it could do the most good.” This, for Rockman, is an example of the “different sensibilities of traditional economic historians,” but he seems to only critique Wright for a moral deficit–Wright seems “indifferent” to human costs. This may or may not be true, but it isn’t quite clear in Rockman where or how much violence and coercion must enter into the story that Wright wants to tell. (Vries, for his part, notes, “The importance of violence and coercion in the economic history of the West is becoming a matter of intense debate.”)
I’m very sorry about the length and artlessness of the above. I think that you’re right that “the most important relations are not exclusively between people,” but perhaps the relations can also be, for better or worse, between people and relatively high rates of economic growth spurred by technological, financial, and political innovation? If so, I wonder how the new history of capitalism contributes to the project. Thanks again.
Re Wm Sturgeon’s comment above: A broad definition of “capitalism” (for example: a system that makes the endless accumulation of capital its main priority or raison d’etre; cf. I. Wallerstein) could and does encompass mercantilism as one stage in the history of capitalism. On the other hand, a definition of capitalism that is narrower and somewhat more specific (whether that definition emphasizes proletarianization and wage labor, or ‘commodification’, or something else) might well not.
As long as Beckert offers a defensible definition, implicit or explicit, of capitalism and then positions his “war capitalism” w.in it, I think Empire of Cotton falls w.in ‘the history of capitalism’ even if “war capitalism” looks like, or is, mercantilism. In any case, governments, or states, say in their interactions with merchants and entrepreneurs, or in how their policies shaped and reflected the class structures of particular societies, have been an important part of the history of capitalism (but if historians think they’ve already “been there and done that,” I could see some reason for going off in new directions).
The notion of capitalism simply “floating as a placeholder” in scholarship, new or old, on the history of capitalism seems a little weird. If a writer’s going to use the word “capitalism,” I think he/she should take some position on a definition, either explicitly or in a way that becomes fairly from the exposition.
correction: should read “fairly clear from the exposition”
I think the idea of commodification underwrote, or motivated, my entire MJ Adler-focused study on the history of the great books idea. I studied how the great books moved from being an educational “idea” to a market idea, and I focused on Adler’s involvement in that move. So, was my book a prefigurement—as a cultural-intellectual history stream—of the new history of capitalism? 🙂 – TL
William and Louis,
Sorry for letting your comments hang–there was a lot to consider, and I wanted to do them justice. I will definitely be saying more in my next post about the definition issue–why I think historians of capitalism feel comfortable leaving it as a floating placeholder and why I think that choice is defensible.
For now, what I would say is that the things William (following Rockman) identifies as missing from or marginalized in the history of capitalism–a clear definition, the Industrial Revolution, attention to and appreciation of rates of growth–clearly go together as a package, and it would be stranger, I think, for historians of capitalism to accept selected elements of the package than it would be for them to reject it wholesale.
If a historian is looking primarily to explain differential rates of economic growth over the course of human history, they are apt to foreground the Industrial Revolution as the most salient event and the event most in need of study and explanation. They are also likely to feel compelled to account in some way for the Great Divergence and unlikely to feel satisfied with explanations that focus on factors that are either non-economic or orthogonal to economic factors. Finally, they are likely to feel that a clear definition of capitalism is indispensable: how else can one identify the tipping point that divides pre-capitalist societies from societies that have crossed the threshold of economic growth necessary to sustain capitalist development? How can one begin to identify the institutions, practices, or resources essential to a society that can and will cross that threshold?
Historians of capitalism are not really that interested in explaining rates of economic growth per se. Economic growth is, generally, a second-order question for them, and that, I think, largely accounts for the differences between them and more traditional economic historians. It also, I would offer, largely accounts for why the conversations between the two groups have been so contentious and unproductive.
I hope that makes some sense. At least, thank you for your comments and for prodding me to think this through.
Thanks to you and Louis for your generous replies. I will be very interested to read your next post. I wonder if the conversations between “historians of capitalism” and “traditional economic historians” have had to be “contentious and unproductive.” (There would seem to be the potential to find middle ground, not least by foregrounding historical subjects’ perceptions of and reactions to economic growth and innovation. Another option is suggested by Louis.)
Also, I am curious to know whether relegating questions of economic growth to “second-order questions[s]” limits the relevance of the “historians of capitalism,” particularly for those who are interested in the historical background to poverty and inequality. (Interestingly, at one point, Rockman notes that, besides scholarship and art, some “historians of capitalism” may have been influenced by “a spell of post-collegiate employment in management consulting.” Would things be quite different if they had been influenced by “a spell of post-collegiate employment” in manufacturing or poverty alleviation programs in rural areas?)
Thanks again.