The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896

by Sven Beckert

Overview

Tracing the shifting fortunes and changing character of New York City's economic elite over half a century, Sven Beckert brings to light a neglected—and critical—chapter in the social history of the U.S.: the rise of an American bourgeoisie. The Monied Metropolis is the first comprehensive history of New York's economic elite, the most powerful group in nineteenth-century America. Beckert explains how a small and diverse group of New Yorkers came to wield unprecedented economic, social, and political power from 1850 to the turn of the twentieth century. He reveals the central role of the Civil War in realigning New York's economic elite, and how the New York bourgeoisie reoriented its ideology during Reconstruction, abandoning the free labor views of the antebellum years for laissez-faire liberalism. Sven Beckert is the Dunwalke Associate at Harvard University. He is the recipient of several honors and fellowships, including the Aby Warburg Foundation prize for academic excellence, a MacArthur Dissertation Fellowship and a Andrew W. Mellon fellowship. This is his first book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521524100
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/03/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	516
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 8.74(h) x 1.22(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Manners, Fortunes, Politics: 1. Accumulating capital; 2. Negotiating the New Metropolis; 3. The politics of capital; Part II. Reluctant Revolutionaries: 4. Bourgeois New Yorkers go to war; 5. The spoils of victory; 6. Reconstructing New York; Part III: 7. Democracy in the Age of Capital; 8. A Bourgeois world; 9. The rights of labor, the rights of property; 10. The power of capital and the crisis of legitimacy; Epilogue.

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating history of New York during the late 19th-century, a time when big money was changing the face of the city. The word"bourgeoisie" doesn't get much of a workout these days, now that Marxist-tinged analyses of the world have become suspect even within academia. But Beckert (History/Harvard Univ.) employs the term fearlessly to describe New York's mercantile class, whose members, in the early decades of the 19th century, tended to lead quiet, unostentatious private lives. That class, which included large numbers of traders and ship owners, owed much of its wealth to the international cotton trade, which bound New York to the South (and, in large measure, explains why the city gave only lukewarm support to the Union cause during much of the Civil War). In the postwar era, Beckert writes, the merchants' power was eroded by a new kind of capitalist, the manufacturer. Many of these newly wealthy industrialists, who profited greatly from the war and worked their way up from the shop floor to ownership, were inclined to more public displays of wealth. Shunned as arrivistes, they nonetheless gained supremacy over the better-established merchants. What is more, they had a stronger grasp of politics, and through various mechanisms they remade city and, later, state government into an arm that served their interests with private legislation and other species of cronyism. The new plutocracy asserted itself with huge mansions, soirees that aped the manners of the European nobility (the author often returns to a fancy dress party at the end of the century, to which dozens of New York's grandes dames came costumed as Marie Antoinette—whose fate,"they confidently believed, wouldnotbetheirs"), and other unsubtle displays of conspicuous consumption. Their arrival on the scene, Beckert insists, added a new dimension to the history of class struggle—and their influence on American politics endures in the age of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. "New York has taught me to put capital and capitalists closer to the center of modern history," Beckert writes. His account is a dazzlingly successful exercise in doing just that.

Kirkus Reviews

"...a deftly told account of the Manhattan bourgeoisie's impressively shrewd negotiation of the ever-shifting terrain of the American political and economic landscape. As such, it yields thought-provoking insights into the ways in which power has been—and continues to be—acquired and exercised in the U.S." Publishers Weekly

"A fascinating history of New York during the late nineteenth-century, a time when big money was changing the face of the city....dazzingly successful." Kirkus

"...this is, in general, a deftly told account of the Manhattan bourgeoisie's impressively shrewd negotiation of the ever-shifting terrain of the American political and economic landscape. As such, it yields thought-provoking insights into the ways in which power has been - and continues to be - acquired and exercised in the U.S." Publishers Weekly

"A fascinating history of New York during the late 19th-century, a time when big money was changing the face of the city....dazzlingly successful." Kirkus Reviews

"...he has drawn deftly on an immense body of recent historical work on the period as well on extensive New York archives." William R. Taylor, washingtonpost.com

"...an exceptionally vivid and intelligent tour of a revolutionary class at the peak of its domination. It is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how a profoundly class-bound society managed to convince itself that class was irrelevant to the U.S. experience." " Newark Star Ledger

Ruth Century contains an explosive theme...Profesor Beckert also draws several illuminating parallels between then and now." Dallas Morning Star

"...Mr. Beckert...even in our own post-Marzist age, this approach to history can still bear fruit." The New York Observer

"Steven Beckert's sober, scholarly study of New York in the 19th century contains an explosive theme: The wealthy class that ruled Gothsm and the rest of the nation did everything in its power to make sure that the working class did not advance from poverty(wait until you draws serveral illuminating parallels between then and now." Dallas Morning News

"Libraries will purchase The Monied Metropolis and historians will cite it." Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

From the Publisher