A fascinating history of New York during the late 19th-century, a
time when big money was changing the face of the city..The word
"bourgeoisie" doesn't get much of a workout these days, now that
Marxist-tinged analyses of the world have become suspect even
within academia. But Beckert (History/Harvard Univ.) employs the
term fearlessly to describe New York's mercantile class, whose
members, in the early decades of the 19th century, tended to lead
quiet, unostentatious private lives. That class, which included
large numbers of traders and ship owners, owed much of its wealth
to the international cotton trade, which bound New York to the
South (and, in large measure, explains why the city gave only
lukewarm support to the Union cause during much of the Civil War).
In the postwar era, Beckert writes, the merchants' power was eroded
by a new kind of capitalist, the manufacturer. Many of these newly
wealthy industrialists, who profited greatly from the war and
worked their way up from the shop floor to ownership, were inclined
to more public displays of wealth. Shunned as "arrivistes", they
nonetheless gained supremacy over the better-established merchants.
What is more, they had a stronger grasp of politics, and through
various mechanisms they remade city and, later, state government
into an arm that served their interests with private legislation
and other species of cronyism. The new plutocracy asserted itself
with huge mansions, soirees that aped the manners of the European
nobility (the author often returns to a fancy dress party at the
end of the century, to which dozens of New York's "grandes dames
"came costumed as Marie Antoinette - whose fate, "they confidently
believed, would not be theirs"), and other unsubtle displays of
conspicuous consumption. Their arrival on the scene, Beckert
insists, added a new dimension to the history of class struggle -
and their influence on American politics endures in the age of Bill
Gates and Warren Buffett.."New York has taught me to put capital
and capitalists closer to the center of modern history," Beckert
writes. His account is a dazzlingly successful exercise in doing
just that.. (Kirkus Reviews)
Tracing the shifting fortunes and changing character of New York City's economic elite over half a century, Sven Beckert brings to light a neglected--and critical--chapter in the social history of the U.S.: the rise of an American bourgeoisie. The Monied Metropolis is the first comprehensive history of New York's economic elite, the most powerful group in nineteenth-century America. Beckert explains how a small and diverse group of New Yorkers came to wield unprecedented economic, social, and political power from 1850 to the turn of the twentieth century. He reveals the central role of the Civil War in realigning New York's economic elite, and how the New York bourgeoisie reoriented its ideology during Reconstruction, abandoning the free labor views of the antebellum years for laissez-faire liberalism. Sven Beckert is the Dunwalke Associate at Harvard University. He is the recipient of several honors and fellowships, including the Aby Warburg Foundation prize for academic excellence, a MacArthur Dissertation Fellowship and a Andrew W. Mellon fellowship. This is his first book.
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