Cultural History as the Old History of Capitalism?

No two self-identified historians of capitalism will generate identical lists of the predecessors of the new history of capitalism. That should not surprise us: the field has experienced, one might say, combined and uneven development, a pattern which has produced consistently innovative scholarship but little overarching consensus on a research program or even on basic terms (like what “capitalism” is).

In part, that is because enthusiasm, one might say, has outrun infrastructure: there is more desire to “do” the history of capitalism than there have been centrally recognized outlets to do so. This is changing, with the important book series Columbia University Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism and the University of Pennsylvania Press journal—set to debut this year—Capitalism and History. Additionally, Who Makes Cents? A History of Capitalism Podcast—run by Bets Beasley and David Stein, who wrote about the podcast for USIH here—has provided a lively and intellectually rich forum for authors of new monographs in the field to discuss their work and ideas. And that doesn’t even cover the first generation of enterprises in the field, such as the History of Capitalism Summer Camp, the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, and the Harvard Program on the Study of Capitalism.

But if we could take several steps back and look at the new history of capitalism as a whole, this diffuseness might look less like disorder and more like a slow centripetal in-gathering. In other words, rather than trying to identify a core and its causes—a starting point and its theoretical premises or institutional womb—it might be better to look at the development of the field as a gradual coalescence of scholars starting from many different points.

The way we imagine the field’s past development obviously matters a great deal for the field’s future growth, and it also matters a great deal for the kind of expectations other scholars might reasonably have about the theoretical and methodological coherence exhibited its practitioners. While eclecticism is not intrinsically good, neither is it synonymous with a lack of sophistication nor is it incapable of maintaining a respectable degree of rigor. To put the matter more plainly, some of the critiques of the new history of capitalism (particularly by economic historians) rather miss the point when they apply a single methodological standard to its products.

The development of the field is also quite fascinating on its own, and if I am right to insist that we shouldn’t think about it as a story of a small enterprise—a few scholars with a new intellectual product—slowly expanding, gaining market share as they set up new branches or franchises across the country, then that interest has an obvious origin. The story of the new history of capitalism is, in some sense, the history of the discipline over the past couple of decades: talking about it is the same as talking about history after the cultural turn or after the linguistic turn.

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I put it that way in part because I’ve been (re-)reading the introduction to the collection of essays The Cultural Turn in U.S. History. Titled “Twelve Propositions for a History of U.S. Cultural History” and written by James W. Cook and Lawrence B. Glickman, the essay has pushed me to think about the development of the new history of capitalism as in some ways a parallel or even a replay of the development of cultural history. A few of the propositions may make what I’m trying to express clear:

Proposition Six: Many of the seedbeds of U.S. cultural history can be found in the work of those who first identified themselves as specialists in other fields.

Proposition Eight: The unifying trope of a “cultural turn” needs to be understood not as the evolution of a single method but as a weaving together of innovations from a variety of disciplinary locations.

Proposition Nine: As growing numbers of younger scholars embraced cultural history from the outset, the specific terms of debate began to shift once again.

One of the overall themes of the essay is the way some scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began to turn to “culture” in order to clear away or jump over what looked like dead ends in their own, previously established fields—labor history, social history, women’s history, African-American history, and intellectual history. In Proposition Three, Cook and Glickman itemize six distinct definitions of culture active in the historiography of the cultural turn (e.g., “Culture defined as the larger matrix of commercial institutions and structures in which artistic forms are produced and consumed”). These definitions often overlapped in practice, but they also emerged out of different locations within the discipline or even from other disciplines that were more closely adjacent to one or another specific subfield (for instance, at the time, American Studies arguably sat closer to and had more influence within intellectual history than social history).

Thus, cultural history was not a self-conscious turn in the discipline or the result of a frontal critique of regnant orthodoxies (as “history from the bottom-up” was) but was instead the aggregation of individual scholars’ attempts to negotiate their way around problems they found in their own subfields. Or, as Glickman and Cook put it, “On one level, then, it is helpful to think of the ‘cultural turn’ in latitudinal terms: as a series of interrelated debates in adjoining fields, each with its own particular vectors and points of emphasis” (23).

This began to change when graduate students began to treat cultural history as a subfield and perhaps as an identity, not as a tendency within an existing subfield. But with that stronger sense of identity came a set of new expectations about the conceptual rigor and coherence of the field. Graduate students in the 1980s and 1990s applied a battery of theoretical resources to their own field and their fellow (especially their senior) practitioners in a way that the first cultural historians did not.

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The history of the new history of capitalism mirrors this story in some ways, and in other ways it does not. Perhaps the main similarity is that “capitalism” has functioned a bit like “culture” in the sense that it has functioned as a tool that some historians have reached for to winch themselves up and out of intellectual blind alleys. This has meant that—like “culture”—there has been a certain amount of tentative opportunism in the way it has been used. It serves a purpose, but defining it isn’t a purpose in itself.

On the other hand, the two generations of cultural historians described in Glickman and Cook’s history have been considerably compressed. That has had less, I think, to do with time—the field has been growing for long enough to have produced a second generation of scholars—and more to do (ironically, perhaps) with the job market. I don’t know for sure when jobs for “cultural historians” started to pop up, but I would guess that it took longer for such jobs to appear than it did for “history of capitalism” to become something that a department might advertise for. That is, where before younger scholars self-definition as cultural historians occurred in advance of the existence of a well-defined market for such scholars, the increase in the number of younger scholars today self-identifying as historians of capitalism has, in part, been driven by the idea that one might be able to get a job that way. Or, at least, that one might be a more competitive applicant as a historian of capitalism than as a labor historian or a business historian.

In essence, then—and I may be very wrong about this—the academic job market adjusted in the 1980s and 1990s to an abundance of cultural historians by beginning to hire people under that label. Younger scholars were able to push forward a broader disciplinary change by their enthusiasm for cultural history. In the late 2000s and 2010s, the interaction between younger scholars’ interests and the interests of the job market—between what younger scholars wanted to study and what departments would hire for—was more intricate, operating in a kind of accelerating feedback loop. More younger scholars wanted to study the history of capitalism, but it also seemed like there might be jobs there, so the demand (or a perceived demand) for historians of capitalism amplified previous inclinations. Regardless, it cannot be said that graduate students or early career scholars were driving this process—they were, at best, trying to balance their intellectual interests with a calculation about their own marketability.

I will stop here for now, but I have more to say about this analogical relationship between the new history of capitalism and cultural history. Stay tuned, I suppose?