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BUILDING A HUMANE EMPIRE

ocation and legal murkiness about “crony capitalism” (169). The last chapter returns Knight to a subject of previous study: conspiracy theory. Reading cartoons, muckraking investigation documents, and Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus, Knight demonstrates that, despite the acceptance of the concept of an abstract market, reformers hunted for the conspiracies of powerful individuals. J. P. Morgan and other titans of finance argued that their potentially unethical behavior was cooperation rather than collusion, control rather than conspiracy. Knight argues that historians, especially Richard Hofstadter and Alfred Chandler, have been too quick to dismiss the conspiracy theorists of the turn of the twentieth century as “delusional or misguided” (239). The reformers, he argues, “made the mistake of focusing solely on combatting illegal, formal collusion, when, in fact, it was the informal social ties and sharedmores that were more important in oiling the machinery of business during this period” (239). The critics of finance might have been looking for individual human spiders, but according to Knight, they found a more interesting web composed of the class interest of the moneyed elite spun in the absence of regulation. Knight argues that by studying all of these cultural productions, we can see the creation of “an abstract yet animated image of the market” that allowed for the obfuscation of the market’s dependence on social relationships and government intervention (11). Knight’s research suggests a fascinating irony: Gilded Age and Progressive Era Americans’ acceptance of the concept of the impersonal market depended on its personification. Reading the Market reflects Knight’s extraordinary engagement with literary scholars, historians, philosophers, and cultural critics. In the process of writing this book, he brought many of these writers, myself included, together through the meetings of his Culture of the Market Network and the funding of the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Jargon like “prosopopoeia,” a rhetorician’s term, and “financescape,” an oft-repeated anthropologist’s coinage, suggests both Knight’s impressive engagement with this large and interdisciplinary scholarly literature, and that the intended audience for Reading the Market is these same scholars (21). As a historian, my methodology for explaining the conundrum at the heart of Reading the Marketmight be different. I might chart a clearer chronology of change over time or link these cultural changes more precisely to particular events. I might even have chosen a different gerund for the title, as few of the people in Reading the Market are actually reading; they are mostly writing. Nevertheless, Knight’s contribution in Reading the Market to the discussion of America’s financial past is powerful and persuasive. His larger work of personalizing its academic genealogy will have a lasting effect on the future scholarly reading of the market’s past.