The tale reads as a classic fall from grace. In the 1960s and 1970s, historians investigated the economy. They were serious and politically relevant. But then the discipline fell to the beguiling ways of cultural and social history. Fractured and fragmented, scholars wandered off like cats into various alleyways, pawed at incomprehensible theories, and lost track of the common reader. There is hope, however, because in the past decade or so a new movement has arisen to lead historians out of the obscure alleyways and back to the main path: the economy, so long neglected.Footnote ¹

This is the “New History of Capitalism” (NHOC); it rings with so much promise that in no time at all it earned a front-page New York Times exposé.Footnote ² Since I know a jeremiad when I hear one, and because I'm an alley cat by nature, I'm more interested in the work this redemption narrative is doing to consolidate a new subfield than in dickering about its truths and falsehoods. The NHOC jeremiad makes such sweeping claims across five decades of scholarship that it almost inevitably asserts some truths as well as some mischaracterizations.Footnote ³ Jeremiads as a narrative form, as historians have shown, are about revitalizing faith and establishing the community of believers around a common mission. They construct an image of lost reverence and cohesion, but the future they point to is a qualitatively new one.Footnote ⁴ I am not against faith—I will get to some of mine soon—but I want to know: just what faith are we being called to?

In case you have missed it, the New History of Capitalism is the moniker attached to a waxing interest among U.S. historians over the past ten to fifteen years in highlighting political economy and economic matters more generally. This growing interest developed across the field rather than originating in a particular influential book or program. New work appears to have coalesced in response to multiple contemporary crises in capitalism, including the economic crash of 2008. It has entailed a revitalization of both business and labor history (and some cross-fertilization between them), though its practitioners can be found in virtually any subfield. A number of individual historians and institutions have stepped forward to develop programs and to shape and define this interest and its still rather amoeba-like growth.Footnote ⁵ If an ethos unites this endeavor, it is the rejection of the neoclassical economist view of the economy as a system based on natural laws and the insistence on its political construction.Footnote ⁶ I reflect here on the most common origin story of the subfield and its potential deleterious effects. In particular, I will argue that the notion of economy invoked by the NHOC jeremiad easily becomes freighted with fantasies of mastery.

The NHOC jeremiad ranges in its various iterations from the reasonable and unobtrusive to the absurdly overblown. Think of the difference between propping your front door open with a brick so you can carry in a new couch to blasting the door open with a grenade. One is conducive to the subsequent entry of neighbors and friends; the other makes more of a mess. Thus Philip Scranton wrote in brick-like fashion, “Now, after decades emphasizing social and cultural themes, US historians have begun to display renewed interest in organizations and actors structuring, critiquing, and transforming America's political economy.” Kenneth Lipartito took the door off its hinges when he described a fall from grace in the 1980s: “As historians’ confidence in the base importance of material structures declined, so did their interest in the economy. Labor historians looked outside the workspace and studied communities and identities. Social historians turned from class to language.” Sven Beckert reached for the explosives when he claimed that labor historians’ failure to find socialism in the United States “led scholars ultimately to make do with collective picnics in the park…. By the 1980s and 1990s, labor history wandered even further afield, to investigate other, perhaps even competing ‘identities,’ analyzing how class was reflected and often deflected by gender, ethnic and race identities.” Beckert acknowledged that this work added “rich new perspectives” but saw them as hampered by “the rather weak conceptual tool of identity.” With similar force, Louis Hyman opined that “most social historians wrote celebratory histories of the oppressed,” guided by questions that now seem “naïve.” Social and cultural historians wanted to “impress people with clever jargon.” They “ceded the public sphere, retreating to obscure journals … confident that critical theory was still much hipper than math, even if the White House did not call [them].” After criticizing “silly analyses of advertising” for their “diluted” use of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony, Hyman asserted that new historians of capitalism, “ask more questions about firms, which still have power today, than about movements, which do not.”Footnote ⁷

Some of these statements tempt us to quibble with their characterizations—at least they tempt me.Footnote ⁸ Despite their potentially distracting difference in degree, however, I am citing these iterations primarily for their commonalities in basic narrative arc, because I am more interested in how that door to this new subfield is being opened than the relative force used to do it. I notice this jeremiad not only in the influential published sources cited here, but also in myriad casual professional conversations and on social media, where the idea that “social and cultural” historians lost interest in “the economy” in the 1980s and 1990s is offered as a non-controversial, nearly self-evident view.

I feel a need to work out my relationship to this narrative because I myself have heard the subfield's siren call. The phrase, the “new history of capitalism,” simple though it is, interested me the first time I heard it. There is a new emphasis on the categories of economy and capitalism. I welcome the new effusion of work and find much of it inspiring. Accordingly, I sometimes have described my recent work on the corporation with the phrase.

The field's jeremiad, however, creates dissonance for me, because I remain deeply committed to all—all!—of the alleyways that are variously named (and blamed) as heralding historians’ decades-long neglect of economy: the social history of race, gender, labor, and sexuality; cultural history; theory. I am also picnic-ready, because I know that all forms of human association may hold historical, and indeed material, significance. Though I began graduate school during the 1980s—the fall-from-grace decade—I have had no come-to-Jesus moment about the economy: ahem, that's one central thing I'm talking about when I talk about race, gender, labor, sexuality, and “culture.” My own career feels not like a story of sin, repentance, and redemption but like a steady build toward a comprehensive and compelling view of U.S. and global history, one that speaks to the actual students in my classes, though it's true that the White House has never called me. So, I've become curious—suspicious even—about the work performed by the increasingly prevalent jeremiad of the new history of capitalism. How is this narrative organizing our intellectual and monetary resources? How does it highlight some voices and perspectives over others? Most critically, when historians talk of “economy,” are we all speaking about the same thing? I believe we are not, and this is a problem worth attending to.

I was musing on these issues when I had occasion to return to Raymond Williams's masterpiece, Marxism and Literature, published in 1977. Working class and Welsh, Williams was a leader in the generation that brought Marxism into the British and U.S. academic mainstream. He was interested in economy! It was the 1970s! My reread of Williams brought me to two lines of argument. The first is that an opposition between “social and cultural” and “economic” obstructs clear thinking about the nature of “economy.” It assigns value to “economy” by pushing against a newly manufactured construct of “social and cultural” that even the NHOC jeremiad's most ferocious advocates cannot entirely stand by, leading to a flurry of contradictions and qualifications. This is of concern for our collective critical acuity because, as Williams argued, the terms “culture,” “society,” and “economy” developed historically in relationship to each other and must be understood as interrelated movements that structure and limit how it is possible for us to think about and critique capitalism. More on this in a minute.

The second argument evolves from the first, and posits that by juxtaposing “economy” against “social and cultural,” the NHOC jeremiad falls prey to a universalizing tendency within the term “economy” that deflects attention from interrogating the place of gender and race in its conceptualization. And indeed the young subfield has been most sharply criticized for its failure to significantly address gender and for its creation of a literature about slavery that omits substantial consideration of slaves.Footnote ⁹ True, without exception, everyone I cite who has spoken for the new history of capitalism agrees that gender and race are important to the field—and I believe that this agreement is genuine—but why and how they are important is neither clear nor much discussed in field-defining essays. Are they elements of social life? Cultural constructs? Part of the division of labor? Definitive of or defined by economic markets? Something else? These are serious matters. I urge historians to stop deflecting underlying disagreement with statements of inclusion and discuss what we mean by “economy” and the particular hazards that attend to taking up that concept. Such a debate may not lead to consensus but it could make us all smarter. Our ability to write truly oppositional histories of capitalism at the present moment of global political crisis depends on confronting this issue.

To begin, let me review Williams's argument about “economy,” “culture,” and “society.” Williams situates these three critical terms as relatively “recent historical formations” that are inextricably interrelated. Their changing meanings were part of an enlightenment process of coming to see the social order as made by people rather than ordained by gods. People developed new meanings for these terms in order to help them conceptualize how systems worked. Williams writes, “‘Society’ was active fellowship, company, ‘common doing’, before it became the description of a general system or order. ‘Economy’ was the management of a household and then the management of a community before it became the description of a perceived system of production, distribution and exchange. ‘Culture,’ before these transitions, was the growth and tending of crops and animals, and by extension the growth and tending of human faculties” and eventually came to refer to a people's way of life. As these three terms developed explanatory power, they “did not move in step, but each, at a critical point, was affected by the movement of the others.”Footnote ¹⁰ The foundational theories and methods of British cultural studies grew out of this insight. Practitioners studied capitalism by investigating the complex interrelationship of economy, society, and culture.

Crucially, Williams argued that our own scholarly use of these concepts requires understanding that each term “embodies not only the issues but the contradictions through which it has developed.” For Williams, these terms do not just describe but emerged as part of the ongoing struggle over resources and power, that is, over capitalism. Because of this, groups with opposing interests appropriated and changed the terms, so that the concepts ended up carrying multiple and even contradictory meanings. Consider “economy.” Williams notes that “the rationality of ‘economy’, [which emerged in part] as a way of understanding and controlling a system of production, distribution, and exchange … [became] projected as ‘natural’, a ‘natural economy’, with laws like the laws of the (‘unchanging’) physical world.”Footnote ¹¹ Williams urges us to see these categories as evolving as part of related movements and the ongoing battle over their meanings as part of the struggle against capitalist oppression.

The contradiction in “economy” that Williams identified forty years ago is precisely the problem that the new history of capitalism promises to confront. Williams reminds us that we cannot expect to create clean terms—we have no choice but to wrestle with the concepts we inherit. As Williams wrote, “When the most basic concepts—the concepts, as it is said, from which we begin—are suddenly seen to be not concepts but problems, not analytic problems either but historical movements that are still unresolved, there is no sense in listening to their sonorous summons or their resounding clashes. We have only, if we can, to recover the substance from which their forms were cast.”Footnote ¹² If the struggle over the word “economy” is still unresolved, then how can Williams's ideas help us gain perspective on our uses of this concept?

For Williams, a successful materialism resists the “isolation of [seemingly] autonomous categories” and instead has a “relational emphasis.” He argued that the terms “economy,” “culture,” and “society” should not be treated as separate arenas of life nor as fully separable categories of analysis: their power for analysis comes from their interrelationship. Williams critiqued the way that “bourgeois political economy” creates abstract categories like “material production” by evacuating specific content that would reveal myriad practices that are simultaneously productive and social. Such a rarefied category then “can be separated from other categories such as consumption, distribution, exchange, etc.” Marxist analysis, for Williams, promises a method for resisting this tendency. However, Williams was no fan of how the model of base and superstructure became popularized. He argued that its spatial character invited people to polarize and rank categories (base and superstructure) rather than to investigate the “decisive relationship” that he saw as the point of materialist analysis. “The words in the original arguments had been relational,” Williams insisted, “but the popularity of the terms tended to indicate either … relatively enclosed categories or … relatively enclosed categories of activity.” Williams argued instead that more attention should be paid to the nature of “productive forces.”Footnote ¹³

Returning to Williams after many years, his definition of “productive forces” struck me as refreshingly sophisticated. A productive force, he averred, “is all and any of the means of the production and reproduction of real life.” What is meant by “reproduction of real life”? Williams continued by explaining that a productive force “may be seen as a particular form of agricultural or industrial production, but any such kind is already a certain model of social co-operation and the application and development of a certain body of social knowledge.” All of this constituted the “base” for Williams, and it would necessarily include, considering agricultural production as an example, the agricultural home that reproduced both workers and knowledge. Such productive forces interact with other elements of life, such as religion or media (both of which also have their material elements). Williams insisted, then, that when we investigate productive forces, we should consider a “whole material social process,” or “real life,” not just an abstraction. He also urged us to look at “actual productive activities, without assuming in advance that only some of them are material.”Footnote ¹⁴ (I think I smell a pic-a-nic basket!)

Herein lies one problem with the NHOC jeremiad: the ill-defined term “social and cultural history” juxtaposed with “economic history” or “the history of political economy” invites us to believe, first, that it is possible to separate these categories and, second, that they refer to discrete and diametrically opposed aspects of life. The jeremiad suggests that historians of the 1980s and 1990s (the time frame is vague and variable) studied social and cultural areas of life and neglected another distinct and separable area, economy. This is a significant mistake that has prevented a rigorous critique of prior scholarship. Social and cultural history were analytical approaches to studying a myriad of topics, including formal and informal politics, business, labor, imperialism, welfare, marriage, immigration, slavery, and so on. Historians using these approaches did not study only social and cultural events or themes, as though those could be isolated as such. Part of the problem is that the terms we have used for subfields invite the same reductive polarization that Williams critiqued. We might compensate for these limitations by insisting, as I myself have done, that one can do an economic analysis of, say, Elvis, and a cultural analysis of the Ford Motor Company. This claim is true as far as it goes, but the polarization remains. As Williams put it, such a move transforms “a relationship into abstract categories between which connections are looked for.”Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, we continue to discover our premise: that the economy is not isolated or natural but is formed within human history.

Understanding this dilemma helps explain why the NHOC jeremiad has seemed internally contradictory. Having blown open the door to the new subfield by juxtaposing “economy” with “social and cultural,” spokespeople for the NHOC trip over the rubble. For example, though Hyman had sharply dismissive things to say about social and cultural history, he avowed in the same piece that the new history of capitalism “starts by assuming that people on the margins matter, that culture is essential, and that questions of gender and racial power cannot be divorced from questions of class.” Though Hyman disparaged unnamed historians who are “still trying to impress people with clever jargon,” he is one of many self-described NHOC practitioners to embrace the methods of Michel Foucault, especially. (Strangely, theorists like Williams who pay much more explicit attention to economy are not nearly so popular as Foucault.) Though the jeremiad juxtaposes the history of capitalism with social and cultural history, several of the field's spokespeople have taken pains to deny any conflict or rejection. Seth Rockman, in a much-cited review essay, answered an unreferenced charge when he claimed that the history of capitalism was “[not] a repudiation of the last thirty years of social and cultural history.” In a Journal of American History forum, Julia Ott asserted with some exasperation, “I do not know of any plot to derail the linguistic turn.”Footnote ¹⁶ New historians of capitalism do both—culture and economy.

Hyman, Rockman, and Ott are speaking truthfully. Because historians have developed the categories “social” and “cultural” to denaturalize hegemonic ideological formations (for example, showing how citizenship is culturally or socially constructed through historical processes), these categories are absolutely crucial for the history of capitalism's project of denaturalizing “economy.” In fact, some new historians of capitalism work in the traditions of social and cultural history, though they do not often put it that way. The renunciation, then, is largely performative (as is the case with jeremiads), designating an “old” in order to ring in a “new.” Since many social and cultural historians of the 1970s and 1980s studied labor or business or commodities (and many worked in a Marxist tradition), this renunciation clouds rather than clarifies historiographic change and the competing meanings of economy that are in play.

Sven Beckert has recently revised his historiographic lineage of the history of capitalism, softening his earlier tone but retaining its polarities. In 2011, Beckert asked, “Why this recent and sudden interest in the history of economic change?” But in 2018 he and Christine Desan, in their introduction to the edited volume American Capitalism: New Histories, find origins and “inspiration” for the budding field over a longer time period. They acknowledge that social historians had a “commitment to material history” and “engaged economic pressures and dynamics,” but the difference between social history's engagement with economy and the new history of capitalism's remains unclear. Cultural history, though focused on the “emergence and fragmentation of identities,” gained credit in Beckert's and Desan's Introduction for seeing terms like “economics” and “data” as discursive, but that, apparently, was the sum total of cultural history's engagement with economy.

For Beckert and Desan, everything published after the year 2000 that addressed “economy” may be claimed for the “new” focus on economy, even if nurtured in subfields with long pedigrees. This makes the newness of the new history of capitalism more difficult to discern. About labor history, for example, Desan and Beckert write: “One of the prime foci of social history … was the history of labor. The history of capitalism picks up that interest but moves beyond wage labor in an industrial setting. Recent histories look at enslaved workers, sharecroppers, and other nonwaged workers and shift attention from the industrial cities of the Northeast to the nation as a whole.” From my observation, labor historians have studied slaves, servants, sharecroppers, and other workers outside the industrial Northeast for decades. Indeed, Beckert acknowledged this very fact in 2011. He named Neil Foley, Teresa Amott, and Julie Matthaei (there are dozens of others) as working in labor history of the “South and West” but deemed their reliance on “identity” to have led them to wander far afield. In 2018, these many scholars are rendered invisible, replaced by new historians of capitalism who, circa the year 2000, discovered the world outside of the Northeast factory.Footnote ¹⁷ Beckert's and Desan's 2018 tone was friendlier, but it remained difficult to perceive labor history's specific contributions to the emergence of the new history of capitalism. Likewise, it is unclear whether more recent studies of labor treat “economy” in a substantively new way. Never mind! Labor historians are, apparently, not social historians anymore but new historians of capitalism. The field consolidated around the privileged term economy; “social and cultural” were toggled to the past.

I am uninterested in defending social and cultural history. The truly vast amount of very diverse work referenced by these categories stands on its own merits. The problem here, I have become convinced, is not any particular charge against prior histories so much as the novel function for the category “social and cultural history” to enhance the value of the “new” focus on “economy.” Not only does this dichotomize terms that are necessarily interrelated, it also allows “economy” to take on a static and universalizing function within the field, despite the expressed aim of its practitioners to situate economy historically. It is my contention that some NHOC practitioners, despite their intent to denaturalize “economy,” are falling prey to some of the assumptions baked into the category back in the nineteenth century, namely its promise of rational, masculine mastery in apprehending and controlling the flow of resources—a mastery that is also, historically, white. This history, I'll argue, left sedimented meanings in “economy” that are still resonant in the term (indeed, this history is still unfolding).

Consider one recent NHOC manifesto, Kenneth Lipartito's 2016 American Historical Review article. Unlike Beckert and Desan, Lipartito explicitly named a (redeemed) “social and cultural” history as critical to the future of the history of capitalism, calling for “a synthesis of the material and the mental in the study of the past.” Lipartito also explicitly included a place for gender history in his recommendations for the future of the field, but his vision was constrained by the way he polarized the categories “culture” and “economy,” and he ran into particular category trouble when he turned to marriage. Lipartito wrote that business historians have recently “shown how cultural practices such as marriage and religion used business methods to adapt to new conditions,” and that historians might do more to “point causal arrows in both directions, from business to culture and from culture to business.” (Lipartito is likely referring to recent work on the $50-billion-dollar wedding industry.)Footnote ¹⁸ Categorizing marriage as a “cultural practice” was not an attempt to dismiss it from consideration—quite the contrary—but that characterization did make my gender historian's eyebrows hit the ceiling. If culture and economy are seen as spheres of life (as they are in this piece), it is telling that Lipartito's one reference to marriage would categorize it as fundamentally cultural. If you ask any gender historian, they will tell you that marriage was unquestionably a foundational economic institution in the United States long before the post-1945 exponential growth of the wedding industry. Lipartito makes a few other references to gender, including noting that “many important public issues also get enacted inside business: civil rights, environmentalism, gender relations.”Footnote ¹⁹ Gender is not lost in Lipartito's piece, then, but his vision for gender in the NHOC is anemic despite his best intentions.

Let's talk about marriage for a moment. Gender and women's historians have demonstrated that marriage, and specifically the system of coverture, was a legal and economic structure embedded in common law that was foundational to the economic functioning of European settler society from colonial America to the 1970s United States. Coverture organized labor (one could say it created a division of labor) that shaped work and its relative value both inside and outside the household; it ordered property ownership and management; it ordered property inheritance and business succession. It determined and denied parentage, which took on particular economic significance in the context of indentured servitude and slavery. Activists fought against coverture, resulting in its gradual reform over more than a century. In the very same decades, other activists promoted the ideal of the family wage (to be awarded to males), an idea and economic form rooted in coverture that became foundational to Keynesian economic policy. Marriage also became central to the rising welfare system (both public and corporate), so that a very wide swath of benefits and programs, including tax structures, tracked—and still track—to marriage status. Furthermore, the high financial stakes of marriage became weaponized as a primary way of regulating race “mixing,” immigration, and same-sex relationships.Footnote ²⁰ Surely, the history of marriage's complex role in U.S. capitalism is a central concern of the history of capitalism, and gender and women's historians’ long work on the topic is of great interest. No?

No. If we look at the major edited collections that proclaim themselves part of the new subfield, in addition to the field-defining statements, we see that women and gender history are poorly represented indeed. Hyman and Baptist, for example, published American Capitalism: A Reader, an edited collection of primary and secondary sources for courses on the history of capitalism, the first such reader to appear (developed in the course of co-teaching a MOOC on the history of capitalism at Cornell). The course reader included fourteen secondary articles but none related to gender history. Just three primary pieces out of forty-one might be claimed for gender history: a selection on settlement houses by Jane Addams, a journalistic description of the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett, and an account of the Lynn Shoemakers Strike. Beckert and Desan, in their introduction to American Capitalism: New Histories, had nothing to say about gender or gender history. They did include one (and only one) article that engaged gender, an excellent piece by Amy Dru Stanley on how legislation around sexual violence became foundational to the Commerce Clause, which tied human rights to commodity traffic. Interestingly, Stanley also authored the only article that addressed gender in another anthology, Capitalism Takes Command, a fact she herself critiqued later in print. In his review essay on that volume, Seth Rockman did not address gender but did mention women as subjects when envisioning the future of the history of capitalism, saying rather narrowly, “The question of what capitalism did for (or, to) women is a longstanding subject of inquiry, but scholars continue to find new insights from women's participation in the formal and informal sectors of the urban economy.”Footnote ²¹ For some of us, “economy” itself is an inherently, deeply gendered category in U.S. history. For others, apparently, this is not what they mean when they speak of economy.

How race relates to economy in the imagination of the field is a parallel but not identical problem—one that I will explore through a brief tour of the scholarship on “civilization,” a literature centrally concerned with capitalist expansion. According to Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature, the term civilization developed in very close connection to the word culture. In the eighteenth century, civilization shifted in meaning from “bringing men within a social organization” to “an achieved state of development” and “an achieved condition of refinement and order,” which stood in contrast to “barbarism.” Williams argued that civilization's new meaning profoundly affected the term “culture,” which came to reference a people's “way of life.” Williams explained that Marxists contested the dominant meaning of civilization. They asserted its role in capitalism by defining it as “bourgeois society as created by the capitalist mode of production.” They also challenged civilization's promise of progressive development, noting that it not only brought improvements but also “poverty, disorder, and degradation.”Footnote ²² I read all this with interest and eagerly turned the pages, expecting Williams to describe next how race was inextricable from the idea of civilization and its function in the spread of capitalist imperialism—but I found myself at the end of the chapter! A half-blank page!

I quickly realized that Williams's book predated most of the work that influenced my understanding of the term civilization. Edward Said's Orientalism did not come out until the year after Marxism and Literature, and Gayatri Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” only appeared five years after that.Footnote ²³ But within British cultural studies, the Jamaican-born Stuart Hall soon picked up Williams's baton. After joining the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964, Hall pushed British Marxists to deal with race, ethnicity, and colonialism. He knew that methods had to shift in order to analyze capitalism in the colonies. Whereas British Marxism looked at how “capitalism evolved organically from within its own transformations,” Hall wrote, “I came from a society where the profound integument of capitalist society, economy, and culture had been imposed by conquest and colonization.”Footnote ²⁴ Capitalism, for Hall, was not race neutral but deeply embedded in imperial relations in both Britain and Jamaica.

Influenced by this international conversation, U.S. historians created a large body of work that investigated the ways in which Americans deployed ideas of civilization and culture (as a way of life) in a wide variety of nation-building and imperial projects. Historians revealed a nineteenth century imperial system that ranked “peoples” racially along an evolutionary trajectory, with Euro-American as most civilized and African, generally, the most barbarous. Because civilized societies were supposedly marked by sharp gender bifurcation, white women found special opportunities in domestic and foreign civilizing missions that imposed Euro-American gendered order. Ideas of civilization also guided the criminalization, racialization, and exclusion of immigrants deemed unsuitable for citizenship. Political and economic leaders, likewise, drew on notions of civilization in order to justify and shape Jim Crow segregation as a system of apartheid. Global labor flows such as the coolie trade and the production of hierarchies in local labor markets alike depended utterly on this notion of civilization.Footnote ²⁵

In short, historians significantly shifted how they understood the constitutive elements of the term civilization. After decades of this work, it is impossible for scholars to present civilization as a race-neutral concept, as Williams did in Marxism and Literature. Historians not only showed that “civilization” is not progressive, but that it is about the production of racial inequalities; they have successfully revealed the once-mystified function of the term. The same goes for the term “culture” when used to mean the “way of life” of a people. Williams noted that the term “culture” gained this new meaning because of its proximity to “civilization.” We can see, for example, the connection of “culture” to the idea of civilization, complete with its implicit racialization, in the sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan's influential 1965 report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, on the so-called “culture of poverty” among African American families, attributed to improper gender relations, a framing that has helped to justify decades of anti-drug wars, over-policing, and criminalization of African Americans.

“Civilization” was thus crucial to the formation of a system of capitalist imperialism, both “at home” and abroad. Some historians attuned to it have explicitly investigated labor sourcing and management, financing, the creation of markets and industries, or the creation of business forms compatible with U.S. capitalist expansion. Others have focused more on the ways that imperial projects created a society and nation based on racial and gender hierarchies and exclusions. (Some, of course, have done both.) Yet, by and large, this work is not represented in the NHOC collections. I do not see referenced or included, for example, work on the so-called coolie trade, which is just as “economic” as the system it was designed to replace, African slavery. Hyman's and Baptist's published course reader includes nothing about this or the War of 1898, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines. Nor are these topics referenced in vision statements for the field offered by Beckert and Desan or Lipartito, though all do note the significance of race to capitalism. Categorizing this vast historiographic lineage as “social and cultural” and assuming it was not “economic” would be a grave error. Is this what happened? If so, was it because its focus on race and gender and the implication of embodiment seemed like “identity” (a matter of “social and cultural” concern) rather than economy? Would the same topics be of more interest if they were seemingly disembodied and rendered as finance or as economic discourse?

Here is my final question. We have seen that “civilization” and “culture” both turned out to be tacitly racialized and gendered. Is the same true for “economy”? Recall that Williams urged us to consider that the three categories “did not move in step, but each, at a critical point, was affected by the movement of the others.” Was “economy” also affected by the massive mobilization of “civilization” and “culture” for the purposes of capitalist expansion?

Even a cursory look at the late nineteenth century assures us that economy did, indeed, accrue heightened racialized and gendered connotations by its proximity to “civilization.” The term economy itself was not yet used quite in the way we now use it—to indicate a comprehensive system of production, distribution, and consumption. In the nineteenth century, economy still referred to judicious use of funds. But with the rising importance of the idea of civilization, the use of funds became tied to a particular kind of subject. Critics began speaking of the rational “economic man” (or “homo economicus”), the ideal subject who is optimally judicious and makes his assessments and decisions scientifically in the service of progress or “improvement.” They also began investigating comparative wealth across nations at the moment when European industrialization and imperialism had directed great wealth to Europe and the United States and anti-imperial revolutions had barely begun to log successes.Footnote ²⁶ They found that some kinds of subjects could approximate the ideal of the “economic man” and others could not. You guessed it: women could not (too irrational) and peoples lower on civilization's evolutionary ladder could not (also too irrational and lacking in technical aptitude).

For example, Max Weber, though critical of capitalism, found that the European Protestant had the greatest capacity for capitalist development; his favorite example of the opposite kind of economic actor was the Chinese man. Modern, rational bookkeeping practices promised to discipline and bring progress to the most “backward” of nations, with white men in charge, of course. Such ideas about a hierarchy of economic subjects suffused corporate imperial projects overseas and shaped the imaginations of corporate representatives. As Frank Canaday remarked while in China for the British American Tobacco Company, “Soft-slippered Chinese in long coats [pick] their way carefully [over cobblestones] as they have done for forty centuries without a thought of getting together to improve the street.” Canaday saw Chinese men as outside the history of progress, caught in a kind of stasis that only the infusion of Euro-American economic systems and commodities could rectify. For white British American Tobacco employees in China, this idea of economy underwrote an imperial fantasy of mastery that helped them deal with the fact that they were utterly dependent on Chinese businessmen and often failed at their endeavors.Footnote ²⁷ This idea of economy also shaped historical questions of comparative development for decades.

In short, “economy” has a tacit legacy of race and gender—a white masculine fantasy of rational mastery—that still travels with it, and this meaning will play out in the new history of capitalism if we are not careful. The neoclassical idea of economy as a system responding to natural laws is not the only meaning of economy that we need to confront and resist. Indeed, contesting the ahistoricism of neoclassical economists is an obvious move to most contemporary historians. The raced and gendered meaning of economy, however, poses a serious threat to the field while also profoundly affecting the terms of contemporary political debate.

If historians are reorienting historical questions around “economy,” then we need to struggle actively with that term, particularly with its gendered and raced freight—its legacy of a fantasy of white male mastery and universality—lest we replicate that legacy in our published work or in our professional hierarchies. We should be especially wary of any jeremiad that requires performative distancing from “social and cultural” history in favor of “economy” for two reasons. First, actively resisting the tendency to polarize materiality and social life will help us write critically astute histories of capitalism.Footnote ²⁸ Because the terms we inherit are themselves the product and site of struggles over power, we should be especially aware of the ways that race and gender attach in a sticky way to “social and cultural,” though they are, of course, equally “economic,” while derivatives or capital gains or even entrepreneurs can seem unquestionably economic, though they are also and equally social and cultural. We cannot allow the NHOC jeremiad to animate the same universalizing tendency of economy that we should be struggling against. Indeed, we might see “social and cultural” as valuable precisely because of the whiff of embodiment and identity that those terms carry from decades of history scholarship, even when they are being used as categories to analyze markets. We need to grapple with the role of embodiment in the history of capitalism and to guard against recreating longstanding assumptions about who had power to create capitalism and who was acted upon. If we mistake a fantasy of mastery for actual mastery, we will lose the ability to track the sometimes-surprising workings of power and contingency—a requisite ability for superb history writing.

Second, we need to resist giving value to the “economy” by contrasting it with “social and cultural” history because our historiographical framing has material implications for the professional distribution of resources. I am concerned not only about the production of knowledge in dissertations, articles, and books, but also publication, fellowship, and job opportunities. Who seems like the most credible candidate? What topic of work signals “economy” most effectively? I offer just one example. In Hyman's and Baptist's published course reader, there are fourteen secondary articles. As far as I can tell, every piece is written by a white male historian—all terrific historians, by the way. I offer this not as a social-media–inspired gotcha, but because it seems symptomatic to me of the dangers of a particular definition of “economy” to become an engine for inequity in our profession. The universalizing function of economy that derives from “the economic man” will most often work to the benefit of white men precisely because of the work in capitalist expansion that it performed historically. The jeremiad of the new history of capitalism will cohere the field around some vision, some “faith.” So, we should be clear about what we want to believe in.

I promised that I would cop to some of my own articles of faith before I closed this piece, because it's not faith I'm against. So, here they are: I believe that centering gender and race is necessary to write a truly critical history of capitalism because the last 200 years (at least) of expansionist capitalism has constructed and relied so centrally on these hierarchies, with astonishingly violent and destructive results for human, animal, and plant life. I believe, furthermore, that work that centers on the bodies and lives of the most marginalized is necessary and core to our project. Not every person must do such work, but such work must be highly valued by all of us for its particular abilities to keep us from replicating the repressive tendencies embedded in our analytical categories. And finally, I believe that we have a duty not only to expose treachery but to “envision justice without progress.”Footnote ²⁹ That is, I believe we need to avoid replicating capitalism's false promise of endless growth and progress but, nevertheless, to use history to help illuminate life-giving and life-saving human capacities even in this dark time. With these articles of faith, I welcome a new history of capitalism that I can wholeheartedly get behind.