Toward the end of the last post in this series on the new history of capitalism, I wrote that what distinguishes the new history of capitalism from the old is a “basic reorientation away from subject formation toward object formation as the primary explanandum… Another way of saying this might be that, for the new history of capitalism, the most important relations are not exclusively between people.” Now, I left the meaning of that rather dark or cryptic, but I hope you’ll forgive a bit of opacity for the sake of suspense. My argument in some more detail is this: Read more