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THE SUBNATIONAL SINEW OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

Noam Maggor’s Brahmin Capitalism offers a meticulous study of Boston bankers’ crucial role in shaping Gilded Age industrial acceleration. In lucid prose, Maggor traces the way these men’s savvy investment and political strategies—emerging in part from a recognition of economic and democratic turmoil in their home city and state—began to forge a “national market” during the final third of the nineteenth century (xi). He mines, synthesizes, and critiques an impressive range of business histories and archival sources, aiming to overturn what he identifies as a teleological (and tautological) Chandlerian consensus that attributes industrialization to technological and managerial transformations. That consensus, he claims persuasively, assumes the logical emergence of a national economic structure rather than interrogating it as a historical process. For Maggor, it was the choices of Boston capitalists such as Henry Lee Higginson, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, and Henry Davis Minot that soldered East and West together. He tells these elite men’s stories with an eye for patrician detail, attending to their ancestry, upbringings, and educations, as well as their independent realizations that the investments in textile production and merchant shipping that had grown their parents’, grandparents’, and in-laws’ fortunes would not make or maintain their own. Instead they looked West, to mining, stockyards, railroads, and other industrial pursuits. In doing so, they facilitated “the mobilization of old wealth into new fields of investment” and became “a driving force behind North American economic development” (99). But this is a history of political economy, so Maggor does not allow politics to disappear in capital’s shadow. He attends to complex stories of local disputes over tax policy and public space, deftly teasing out their relationship to Brahmins’ ambitions for Boston as a financial metropolis. Elite Bostonians, he conveys with compelling evidence, viewed contests over local property taxes and municipal centralization as consequential within political-economic geographies far more extensive than those of the city or commonwealth alone. They fought local battles with nonlocal purposes in mind. Maggor makes an excellent case here for the value of a “subnational” analytical scale: for resisting the temptation to use urban histories “as microcosms or stand-ins for the nation as a whole,” rather than “as interconnected sites in a larger political economy” (57). Observing the logic of this critique, he broadens his investigation to “[t]he tug of war between [Boston] investors and populists” in the West, showing how their disputes bore on the project of a national market by producing “a variety of legal regimes” governing investment and development (177). Such regimes, he argues, “produced a complex new geography, an institutional patchwork that was never fully transcended in the twentieth century” (177). In a sense, then, his book is not just a challenge to the consensus of how or when a “national market” formed, but rather an argument The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 (2018), 574–591