Brahmin Capitalism : Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age

Noam Maggor shows how the moneyed elite in Gilded Age Boston leveraged their wealth to forge transcontinental networks of commodities, labor, and transportation. With the decline of cotton-based textile manufacturing, these gentleman bankers found new business opportunities in the mines, railroads, and industries of the Great West. Tracking the movement of finance capital toward far-flung investment frontiers, Noam Maggor reconceives the emergence of modern capitalism in the United States. Brahmin Capitalism reveals the decisive role of established wealth in the transformation of the American economy in the decades after the Civil War, leading the way to the nationally integrated corporate capitalism of the twentieth century.Maggor's provocative history of the Gilded Age explores how the moneyed elite in Boston—the quintessential East Coast establishment—leveraged their wealth to forge transcontinental networks of commodities, labor, and transportation. With the decline of cotton-based textile manufacturing in New England and the abolition of slavery, these gentleman bankers traveled far and wide in search of new business opportunities and found them in the mines, railroads, and industries of the Great West. Their investments spawned new political and social conflict, in both the urbanizing East and the expanding West. In contests that had lasting implications for wealth, government, and inequality, financial power collided with more democratic visions of economic progress.Rather than being driven inexorably by technologies like the railroad and telegraph, the new capitalist geography was a grand and highly contentious undertaking, Maggor shows, one that proved pivotal for the rise of the United States as the world's leading industrial nation. Brahmin Capitalism explores the surprisingly dynamic role of established wealth in the rise of modern capitalism in the United States. Far from declining in prosperity and influence, elite Bostonians of illustrious lineage - the quintessential old money families on the American scene - successfully reinvented themselves. Better known as social reformers, philanthropists, and men of letters, these scions of wealth were also astute businessmen with immense financial resources. Venturing far afield from the comforts of the northeast, they painstakingly forged wide-ranging networks of capital, commodity, and labor flows that incorporated large territories in the American West into the economy of the United States. They played a decisive role in the reconstruction of the American economy during the decades after the Civil War, leading the way to the nationally-integrated corporate capitalism of the twentieth century.-- Provided by publisher Contents Preface Introduction 1. Anatomy of a Crisis 2. Cultivating the Laissez-Faire Metropolis 3. Brahminism Goes West 4. The Contest over the Common 5. Eastern Money and Western Populism 6. The Age of Reform Conclusion Notes Acknowledgments Index