Last week, I began a process of rethinking when the “New History of Capitalism” emerged as a distinct field. I argued that the conventional story—that the crisis of 2008 marked, if not the beginning, then the maturation of a new and coherent approach to the study of capitalism—was largely the product of a 2013 New York Times profile of many of HOC’s leading young scholars, and that we should be skeptical of giving such weight to the financial crisis. There are simple reasons for this, as well as some that are more complex. The simplest reason is that it doesn’t Read more