Capitalism invades classrooms

Even before the financial crisis,courses in the history of capitalismas the new discipline bills itselfbegan proliferating on campuses,along with dissertations on once deeply unsexy topics like insurance,banking and regulation. The events of 2008 and their long aftermath have given urgency to the scholarly realisation that it really is the economy,stupid.

The financial meltdown also created a serious market opportunity. Columbia University Press recently introduced a new Studies in the History of US Capitalism book series,and other top university presses have been snapping up dissertations on 19th-century insurance and early-20th-century stock speculation,with trade publishers and op-ed editors following close

behind.

The dominant question in US politics today,scholars say,is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. And to understand capitalism, said Jonathan Levy,an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,youve got to understand capitalists.

That doesnt mean just looking in the executive suite and ledger books,scholars are quick to emphasise. The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with insights of social and cultural history,integrating the bosses-eye view with that of the office dronesand consumerswho power the system.

I like to call it history from below,all the way to the top, said Louis Hyman,an assistant professor of labour relations,law and history,at Cornell and the author of Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink.

The new history of capitalism is less a movement than what proponents call a cohort: a loosely linked group of scholars who came of age after the end of the Cold War cleared some ideological ground,inspired by work that came before but unbeholden to the questionslike,why didnt socialism take root in the United States?that animated previous generations of labour historians.

Instead of searching for working-class radicalism,they looked at office clerks and entrepreneurs. Earlier,a lot of these topics would have been greeted with a yawn, said Stephen Mihm,an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists,Con Men and the Making of the United States. But then the crisis hit,and people started asking,Oh my God,what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?.

In 1996,when Harvard historian Sven Beckert proposed an undergraduate seminar called the History of American Capitalismthe first of its kind,he believescolleagues were sceptical. They thought no one would be interested, he said.

But the seminar drew nearly 100 applicants for 15 spots and grew into one of the biggest lecture courses at Harvard,which in 2008 created a full-fledged Program on the Study of US Capitalism. That initiative led to similar ones on other campuses,as courses and programmes at Princeton,Brown,Georgia,the New School,the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere also began drawing crowdssometimes with the help of canny brand management.

After Seth Rockman,an associate professor of history at Brown,changed the name of his course from Capitalism,Slavery and the Economy of Early America to simply Capitalism,students concentrating in economics and international relations started showing up alongside the student labour activists and development studies people.

Its become a space where you can bring together segments of the university that are not always in conversation, said Rockman.