The Monied Metropolis
New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896
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- $36.99
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
This book, first published in 2001, is a comprehensive history of the most powerful group in the nineteenth-century United States: New York City's economic elite. This small and diverse group of Americans accumulated unprecedented economic, social, and political power, and decisively put their mark on the age. Professor Beckert explores how capital-owning New Yorkers overcame their distinct antebellum identities to forge dense social networks, create powerful social institutions, and articulate an increasingly coherent view of the world and their place within it. Actively engaging in a rapidly changing economic, social, and political environment, these merchants, industrialists, bankers, and professionals metamorphosed into a social class. In the process, these upper-class New Yorkers put their stamp on the major political conflicts of the day - ranging from the Civil War to municipal elections. Employing the methods of social history, The Monied Metropolis explores the big issues of nineteenth-century social change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
By 1892, 27% of American millionaires resided in New York City, and the city's dominance as an epicenter for capitalist enterprise was so well established as to seem both natural and inevitable. Yet, as Harvard history professor Beckert demonstrates, New York's ascendance as the nation's most important hub of manufacturing and trade was less an inevitability than the result of a series of deft and determined maneuvers on the part of the city's economic elites (i.e., the aristocracy and the wealthy merchants). Despite having often divergent political and economic interests, the monied classes came, over the course of the second half of the 19th century, to recognize one another as allies in opposition to the lower classes, and consequently worked together to achieve a remarkable consolidation of power, with the result that "not presidents but prominent New York entrepreneurs... came to represent the age." Beckert examines the process through which this consolidation of power occurred, explaining how the responses of the city's most prominent merchants and manufacturers to national conflicts and crises, such as the Civil War and periods of economic depression and labor unrest in the late 1800s, enabled these bourgeois New Yorkers to wield progressively greater influence over the shape of both local and national economic policy. While Beckert's narrative suffers at times from the burden of minute detail, which may deter readers other than economic historians, 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.
