Politics & Government
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Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States
A leading economic historian traces the evolution of American capitalism from the colonial era to the present-and argues that we've reached a turning point that will define the era ahead.
"A monumental achievement, sure to become a classic."-Zachary D. Carter, author of The Price of Peace
In this ambitious single-volume history of the United States, economic historian Jonathan Levy reveals how capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages and how the country's economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life itself. The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era through the outbreak of the Civil War, and the Age of Capital traces the lasting impact of the industrial revolution. The volatility of the Age of Capital ultimately led to the Great Depression, which sparked the Age of Control, during which the government took on a more active role in the economy, and finally, in the Age of Chaos, deregulation and the growth of the finance industry created a booming economy for some but also striking inequalities and a lack of oversight that led directly to the crash of 2008.
In Ages of American Capitalism, Levy proves that capitalism in the United States has never been just one thing. Instead, it has morphed through the country's history-and it's likely changing again right now.
"A stunning accomplishment . . . an indispensable guide to understanding American history-and what's happening in today's economy."-Christian Science Monitor
"The best one-volume history of American capitalism."-Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
"A monumental achievement, sure to become a classic."-Zachary D. Carter, author of The Price of Peace
In this ambitious single-volume history of the United States, economic historian Jonathan Levy reveals how capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages and how the country's economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life itself. The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era through the outbreak of the Civil War, and the Age of Capital traces the lasting impact of the industrial revolution. The volatility of the Age of Capital ultimately led to the Great Depression, which sparked the Age of Control, during which the government took on a more active role in the economy, and finally, in the Age of Chaos, deregulation and the growth of the finance industry created a booming economy for some but also striking inequalities and a lack of oversight that led directly to the crash of 2008.
In Ages of American Capitalism, Levy proves that capitalism in the United States has never been just one thing. Instead, it has morphed through the country's history-and it's likely changing again right now.
"A stunning accomplishment . . . an indispensable guide to understanding American history-and what's happening in today's economy."-Christian Science Monitor
"The best one-volume history of American capitalism."-Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
Editorial Reviews
"Prodigiously researched, elegantly written, and relentlessly interesting . . . Ages of American Capitalism deftly weaves strands of economic, business, political, social and intellectual history into an engaging, accessible narrative."-The Washington Post
"Prodigious . . . a vivid social and geopolitical history."-Boston Review
"It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding its economic history. This book, from one of the nation's foremost historians of capitalism, brings that important and endlessly fascinating story to life, taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of plantations and factories, boardrooms and government offices. If you want to get a better sense of where we are, think about how we got here."-Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
"Ages of American Capitalism is a monumental achievement. Jonathan Levy has crafted an economic history that rivals Eric Hobsbawm's and Charles Kindleberger's in ambition, augmented by a thorough analysis of the legal and political currents that have shaped economic change across 350 years."-Zachary D. Carter, author of The Price of Peace
"A remarkably shrewd, sweeping, and entertaining history of American capitalism that strikes at the heart of one of the great American fallacies: that markets can ever be separated from society, politics, and history."-Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands
"American capitalism is in crisis. To know how to get out of the mess, you need to know how we got into it. That takes a historian. This is a book with the ambition and originality of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. . . . Unputdownable."-James Robinson, co-author of Why Nations Fail
"In this monumental work, Jonathan Levy has written a history of economic life in the United States that puts capital back at the center of our nation's history. In his sophisticated yet accessible assessment, Levy shows how the institutions that define the meaning and purpose of capital have evolved rather ...
"Prodigious . . . a vivid social and geopolitical history."-Boston Review
"It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding its economic history. This book, from one of the nation's foremost historians of capitalism, brings that important and endlessly fascinating story to life, taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of plantations and factories, boardrooms and government offices. If you want to get a better sense of where we are, think about how we got here."-Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
"Ages of American Capitalism is a monumental achievement. Jonathan Levy has crafted an economic history that rivals Eric Hobsbawm's and Charles Kindleberger's in ambition, augmented by a thorough analysis of the legal and political currents that have shaped economic change across 350 years."-Zachary D. Carter, author of The Price of Peace
"A remarkably shrewd, sweeping, and entertaining history of American capitalism that strikes at the heart of one of the great American fallacies: that markets can ever be separated from society, politics, and history."-Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands
"American capitalism is in crisis. To know how to get out of the mess, you need to know how we got into it. That takes a historian. This is a book with the ambition and originality of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. . . . Unputdownable."-James Robinson, co-author of Why Nations Fail
"In this monumental work, Jonathan Levy has written a history of economic life in the United States that puts capital back at the center of our nation's history. In his sophisticated yet accessible assessment, Levy shows how the institutions that define the meaning and purpose of capital have evolved rather ...
Readers Top Reviews
GVgolferJennelle
Having taught economics for 40 years, this book is just nonsense. He takes simple economic concepts like "capital" and "liquid assets" and makes them overly complicated and confusing. He disagrees with well accepted economic concepts because they do not support his liberal/progressive/pro labor claptrap.
james hammill
Very impressive analysis. Unfortunately the author ended his analysis in 2010. Wish he had offered some thoughts on what should be done as opposed to what is being done in this age of economic chaos.
If you like American history and economics/finance, there is no better book. Can be a bit dry for a casual reader, but fascinating if this is a subject you are interested in. Very detailed and well researched. Excellent read/listen.
Joseph Somma
Levy provides a masterful history of American capitalism. His work is detailed and brilliantly written. You should buy this book for its last section: the age of chaos. Here Levy details the US economy since Reagan and identifies critical trends and questions we all need to address. This is not a book for a casual reader, each chapter is hard work. However, the rewards more than outweigh the effort.
Alan H. Macdonald
Alan MacDonald Wells, Maine As submitted to the NYT Jonathan Levy noted in his insightful, “Ages of American Capitalism”: Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). Camouflage constitutes the greatest weapon of many prey animals, viruses, and cancer. The late great, Earl Shorris, writing “American Vespers” in Harper's on his death bed from cancer noted: "The ultimate effect of the work of the man with no philosophy was to be a philosopher: he removed ethics from politics. Everything followed on his elegant excision, an operation performed so deftly on the body politic that it did not feel the wound. The disease that Reagan brought into the American mind was like the terrifying shadow the patient sees in X-rays clipped to a light box. It came from nowhere and appeared in the body of the country. There is a magic quality to the decline of men and democracies. Historians and histologists study the tissue, identify markers, but only after the decline has begun can they do their work. No doctor, for all that she might wish to heal the heart or soul, can predict the onset of the fouling of the tiniest part. One cell must be the first to sicken and then sicken another. The beginning is the magic.” So it is with Jefferson's dream of an “Empire of Liberty” that it has metastasized into this Disguised Global Crony Capitalist & Racist Empire.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Mercantilism
Wealth is power, and power is wealth. The aphorism commonly attributed to the Englishman Thomas Hobbes, author of the great political philosophical treatise Leviathan (1651), was later invoked by Adam Smith in the greatest treatise ever written on commerce, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was a Scot, not an American, but up until 1776, Scots and Americans shared something in common: both were subjects of the British Empire. In the Age of Commerce, empire and capitalism grew up together.
For centuries, empires had long assessed their control over land, population, and taxable resources. In Europe by the eighteenth century, commerce had become the most dynamic generator of imperial wealth and imperial power. How states might best promote commerce was Smith's focus in The Wealth of Nations, published the year the thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from the British Empire.
Smith said Britain might let the colonies go, arguing that what he called the "mercantile system"-the imperial policies that defined the commercial relationship between Great Britain and its colonies, against which the North American colonists were then revolting-did not promote the wealth of nations. Smith admired the commercial character of British North America, and today many consider him to be something like a patron saint of capitalism, as, supposedly, he was critical of all government intervention into "the market." That was not so. Smith was a theorist of political economy, of the relationship between the ordering of power and the generation of wealth. He made no categorical separation between the political and the economic, or state and market. The question for him was their relationship and the consequences of their complicated overlap. The wealth of nations could be the result only of good policy making.
However, The Wealth of Nations does not begin with a policy analysis. Rather, book one lays out Smith's explanation of economic commercialization. To understand the dynamics of preindustrial capitalism, there is no better place to begin but here. Book one of The Wealth of Nations holds the key to explaining the development of American capitalism from seventeenth-century English colonial settlement through the American Civil War, the era spanning the Age of Commerce.
Smith explained how the self-interested pursuit of commercial gain, breeding more commerce, tends toward an increasing division of labor. When the "extent of the market" for goods expands on the demand side, spurred on by self-interest under the pressures of competition, producers specialize, and on the supply side the division of labor increases. So then does labor productivity. The ongoing search for "gains from trade" induces more capital investment. In the cumulative process, economic activity brings increasing returns. Everyone may gain from trade. The wealth of nations grows. This is what economists today call "Smithian growth," the combined and interactive result of self-interest, the division of labor, and the extent of markets.
The analysis of commerce in book one of The Wealth of Nations is of great explanatory power, but it is incomplete. For the North American colonies, as well as their commercial character, were conscious political creations, in which politics and Smithian growth dynamically interacted. There was no capitalism in North America prior to the long-term British investment in imperial expansion. By force, states had to increase the "extent of the market."
The British project to do so was imperialist in character, of a mercantilist variety. Mercantilism had no fixed body of doctrine. Smith named his own enemy when he spoke of the "mercantile system," as neither he nor anyone who came before him had used the term mercantilism. Nonetheless, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a common set of basic assumptions about the relationship between political and economic life held together that can usefully be labeled mercantilist.
Foremost, mercantilists promoted an understanding of political economy in which there was no categorical separation between state and market. Smith inherited this legacy. But unlike Smith, mercantilists defined national economic prosperity as the existence of a positive "balance of trade" with other nations. Greater market access and more commerce were the sources of imperial wealth, but only when a nation exported goods of a value greater than it imported, including in relation to its colonies. More coin flowed into the nation's coffers at the expense of its geopolitical competitors. "Foreign trade produces riches, riches pow...
Mercantilism
Wealth is power, and power is wealth. The aphorism commonly attributed to the Englishman Thomas Hobbes, author of the great political philosophical treatise Leviathan (1651), was later invoked by Adam Smith in the greatest treatise ever written on commerce, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was a Scot, not an American, but up until 1776, Scots and Americans shared something in common: both were subjects of the British Empire. In the Age of Commerce, empire and capitalism grew up together.
For centuries, empires had long assessed their control over land, population, and taxable resources. In Europe by the eighteenth century, commerce had become the most dynamic generator of imperial wealth and imperial power. How states might best promote commerce was Smith's focus in The Wealth of Nations, published the year the thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from the British Empire.
Smith said Britain might let the colonies go, arguing that what he called the "mercantile system"-the imperial policies that defined the commercial relationship between Great Britain and its colonies, against which the North American colonists were then revolting-did not promote the wealth of nations. Smith admired the commercial character of British North America, and today many consider him to be something like a patron saint of capitalism, as, supposedly, he was critical of all government intervention into "the market." That was not so. Smith was a theorist of political economy, of the relationship between the ordering of power and the generation of wealth. He made no categorical separation between the political and the economic, or state and market. The question for him was their relationship and the consequences of their complicated overlap. The wealth of nations could be the result only of good policy making.
However, The Wealth of Nations does not begin with a policy analysis. Rather, book one lays out Smith's explanation of economic commercialization. To understand the dynamics of preindustrial capitalism, there is no better place to begin but here. Book one of The Wealth of Nations holds the key to explaining the development of American capitalism from seventeenth-century English colonial settlement through the American Civil War, the era spanning the Age of Commerce.
Smith explained how the self-interested pursuit of commercial gain, breeding more commerce, tends toward an increasing division of labor. When the "extent of the market" for goods expands on the demand side, spurred on by self-interest under the pressures of competition, producers specialize, and on the supply side the division of labor increases. So then does labor productivity. The ongoing search for "gains from trade" induces more capital investment. In the cumulative process, economic activity brings increasing returns. Everyone may gain from trade. The wealth of nations grows. This is what economists today call "Smithian growth," the combined and interactive result of self-interest, the division of labor, and the extent of markets.
The analysis of commerce in book one of The Wealth of Nations is of great explanatory power, but it is incomplete. For the North American colonies, as well as their commercial character, were conscious political creations, in which politics and Smithian growth dynamically interacted. There was no capitalism in North America prior to the long-term British investment in imperial expansion. By force, states had to increase the "extent of the market."
The British project to do so was imperialist in character, of a mercantilist variety. Mercantilism had no fixed body of doctrine. Smith named his own enemy when he spoke of the "mercantile system," as neither he nor anyone who came before him had used the term mercantilism. Nonetheless, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a common set of basic assumptions about the relationship between political and economic life held together that can usefully be labeled mercantilist.
Foremost, mercantilists promoted an understanding of political economy in which there was no categorical separation between state and market. Smith inherited this legacy. But unlike Smith, mercantilists defined national economic prosperity as the existence of a positive "balance of trade" with other nations. Greater market access and more commerce were the sources of imperial wealth, but only when a nation exported goods of a value greater than it imported, including in relation to its colonies. More coin flowed into the nation's coffers at the expense of its geopolitical competitors. "Foreign trade produces riches, riches pow...
