New Books in Economic and Business History

When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant they traded property for money, yes. But that would make everyone who traded things for money over the past, say, 5,000 years, a “proto-capitalist.” If it meant that they thought of their property as capital to be used for maximizing profit, then no. As Martha C. Howell points out in her excellent Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge UP, 2010), early modern merchants–at least in the Low Countries–didn’t really think of their property as “capital” at all, and they certainly didn’t use it exclusively for the maximization of profit. Their idea of property was, according to Howell, as much medieval as modern. Essentially, they adapted received (medieval) categories of property to novel commercial conditions. The result was a unique hybrid of the old and new. In hindsight, their understanding of property might seem “proto-capitalist.” But really it was just the way they conceived of property. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From its earliest years, the United States was a nation of tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw. Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work, and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with the inventions that laid the foundations for America's economic dominance. Recently, Americans have come to question whether our tinkering spirit has survived the pressures of ruthless corporate organization and bottom-line driven caution. But as Alec Foege shows in The Tinkerers, reports of tinkering's death have been greatly exaggerated.Through the stories of great tinkerers and inventions past and present, Foege documents how Franklin and Edison's modern-day heirs do not allow our cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity to interfere with their passion and creativity. Tinkering has been the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations such as the personal computer and Ethernet, and smaller scale inventions with great potential, such as a machine that can make low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in impoverished countries and a device that uses lasers to shoot malarial mosquitoes out of the sky. Some tinkerers attended the finest engineering schools in the world; some had no formal training in their chosen fields. Some see themselves as solo artists; others emphasize the importance of working in teams. What binds them together is an ability to subvert the old order, to see fresh potential in existing technologies, and to apply technical know-how to the problems of their day.As anyone who has feared voiding a warranty knows, the complexity of modern systems can be needlessly intimidating. Despite this, tinkerers can – and do – come from anywhere, whether it's the R&D lab of a major corporation, a hobbyist's garage, or a summer camp for budding engineers. Through a lively retelling of recent history and captivating interviews with today's most creative innovators, Foege reveals how the tinkering tradition remains, in new and unexpected forms, at the heart of American society and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad's Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China's Three Gorges (Cambridge UP, 2011) stands as a beautiful case study of what it can look like to do so. Flad juxtaposes texts, bamboo slips, ceramic sherds, animal remains, and other lines of evidence to offer an exceptionally rich account of the technology of salt production in early China, offering glimpses at comparative archeological practices, ideas of spatiality, and the diversity of uses of animals in early China along the way. Reading the book inspired, for me, new ways of thinking about the conceptual role of fragments in the work of the historian, and our conversation was similarly inspiring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I remember clearly the day I was offered my first credit card. It was in Berkeley, CA in 1985. I was walking on Sproul Plaza and I saw a booth manned by two students. They were giving out all kinds of swag, so I walked over to see what was to be had. T-shirts, I think. I asked them if I could get a credit card, sure that the answer had to be “no.” But the answer was an enthusiastic “yes.” I asked them if they understood that: a) I had no income beyond a tiny graduate student stipend; b) that I was carrying a debt from college that had been kindly “deferred”; and c) that my long-term prospects, money-making wise, were poor (the market in early Russian history degrees not being very hot). They said they didn’t know any of that, but it didn’t matter. All I had to do was to fill out a form and the card would arrive in the mail. I declined.As Louis Hyman tells us in his excellent and important Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton UP, 2011), it wasn’t always so. Before the 1920s, most people could get no credit at all, least of all from a financial institution. But then, thanks to a confluence of odd interests, consumer credit expanded mightily. Companies that made expensive stuff (cars) and companies that handled large pools of idle money (banks) found, much to their surprise that if you lent ordinary folks large sums of money at moderate interest, they would pay it back. The producers and banks lent more; consumers borrowed and bought more; and, in turn, the producers and banks used higher profits to increase productivity, putting still more money in the pockets of consumers. And so the cycle continued, ultimately fostering the largest expansion in production and consumption the world had ever seen. Whether it will continue is a subject of some dispute today.A review of Debtor Nation can be found in Public Books here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and one of the most common ways we cooperate is through trade. Some form of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” lies at the heart of almost every human relationship. We are built for reciprocation, and we do it remarkably well.But, as Joyce Appleby shows in her provocative, readable, and thoroughly entertaining The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Norton, 2010), the natural impulse for reciprocal back-scratching did not capitalism make. A set of very unusual historical forces did. These historical forces were not everywhere and always. On the contrary, they came together in one place at one time: Northwestern Europe in what we might call the “long modern period,” roughly the 15th though 18th centuries. Of course people in other places and other times traded, and even traded a lot. But they did not develop the culture of capitalism, that is, a set of values that suggested making money was good not only for the money-maker but for everyone else. Alexander Pope, one of the early apologists of capitalism, put the capitalist ethic this way: “Thus God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame, and bade self-love and social be the same.” (An Essay on Man, 1733) Gordon Gekko, in the (anti-capitalist) film Wall Street (1987), put it more crudely: “Greed…is good.” Neither, it should be said, did pre-capitalist traders develop the institutions that make capitalism operate, that is, things like investment banks, credits, stock markets, insurance, and a whole host of government regulations (yes, government regulations) without which “free trade” could not be “free” at all. Caesar was not concerned about in the federal reserve. He didn’t even have a federal reserve to be concerned about.All of which leads to a single and startling conclusion: the culture and institutions of capitalism are Western. Thus when we in the West promote capitalism as the “best” way of going about things economic, we are engaging in a subtle form of cross-cultural persuasion. We may be right, capitalism may indeed be the best way to provision goods and services to the masses (I think it obviously is). But that doesn’t make capitalist culture any the less foreign to most of the world.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices