While elite merchants, financiers, shopkeepers, and customers were
the most visible producers, consumers, and distributors of goods
and capital in the nineteenth century, they were certainly not
alone in shaping the economy. Lurking in the shadows of
capitalism's past are those who made markets by navigating a range
of new financial instruments, information systems, and modes of
transactions: prostitutes, dealers in used goods, mock auctioneers,
illegal slavers, traffickers in stolen horses, emigrant runners,
pilfering dock workers, and other ordinary people who, through
their transactions and lives, helped to make capitalism as much as
it made them. Capitalism by Gaslight illuminates American economic
history by emphasizing the significance of these markets and the
cultural debates they provoked. These essays reveal that the rules
of economic engagement were still being established in the
nineteenth century: delineations between legal and illegal, moral
and immoral, acceptable and unsuitable were far from clear. The
contributors examine the fluid mobility and unstable value of
people and goods, the shifting geographies and structures of
commercial institutions, the blurred boundaries between legitimate
and illegitimate economic activity, and the daily lives of men and
women who participated creatively-and often subversively-in
American commerce. With subjects ranging from women's studies and
African American history to material and consumer culture, this
compelling volume illustrates that when hidden forms of commerce
are brought to light, they can become flashpoints revealing the
tensions, fissures, and inequities inherent in capitalism itself.
Contributors: Paul Erickson, Robert J. Gamble, Ellen Gruber Garvey,
Corey Goettsch, Joshua R. Greenberg, Katie M. Hemphill, Craig B.
Hollander, Brian P. Luskey, Will B. Mackintosh, Adam Mendelsohn,
Brendan P. O'Malley, Michael D. Thompson, Wendy A. Woloson.
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