Abstract

The essay reconstructs the recent U.S. history of American capitalism, organizing it around the long nineteenth century from early republic to the social and political transformations following the Civil War, and a short century marked by the implosion of the New Deal social order in the neoconservative and neoliberal turn. The New History of Capitalism undoubtedly has the merit of bringing history – and political history in particular – back centre to the study of American capitalism, but the convergence of economic/social history and political/intellectual history marks a shift in the centrality of social conflict which marked Labour History in the last century. The history of American capitalism thus tends to be a history of its order of power – proprietary, mercantile and monetary, economic and financial, legal and institutional.