Mike O’Connor’s remarkably learned and wide-ranging, A Commercial Republic is the kind of book that David Armitage and Jo Guild, authors of the History Manifesto, claim is no longer being written. In this impressive work, Mike O’Connor asks big questions about the relationship between capitalism and democracy via lucid explorations of six separate and often intricate debates about political economy over the longue duree of U.S history. In his granular and distinct case studies, O’Connor occasionally seems to lose the forest for the trees. And later chapters of the book sometimes appear to underestimate the power of the history traced Read more