Over the last decade, probably no subfield of analysis has seen as much growth and been as voguish in American historiography as the self-proclaimed “new history of capitalism.”1 With institutional homes at Harvard and the New School, a book series at Columbia, and burgeoning numbers of conferences and special journal issues devoted to the subfield, to quote a New York Times headline, “in history departments, it’s up with capitalism. Some of the work done under the moniker has been salutary, though on the whole perhaps not revolutionary or even particularly new in its broader historiographical and interpretive implications. Certainly in my graduate cohort in the early and mid 2000s many of us understood we were studying capitalism historically, though if asked to define ourselves we might have used methodological designations like intellectual, cultural, or social; or subject designations such as labor, political economy, African-American, legal, gender or urban to modify our respective research interests. Nevertheless—and I do not think we were unique in this regard—while we saw ourselves as grappling with the question of change and continuity in political economy or historicized capitalist social relations we did not see ourselves as making any substantive departure from generations of scholars who came before us. On the contrary, I suspect we saw our interest in the relationship between political economy and our other concerns as in line with those of our advisors and the historians as well as humanistic social scientists we most admired. Indeed, one of the most puzzling things about the history-of-capitalism phenomenon has been its assertion that the only options for historical and critical attention between roughly the end of the Cold War and the Global Financial Crisis were neoclassical-derived rational-actor models and the cultural turn, with not a locale save the former that would allow attention to economic issues.
Thus, I had always thought the notion of a “new history of capitalism” as above all a marketing trick. And, as marketing tricks go, it has probably been successful, at least on its own terms. I have certainly not been immune to its charms when naming classes to attract students in an enrollment economy of scarcity or in self-descriptions for employers or grant providers who may find it sexy because the New York Times wrote about it and it’s institutionalized now at Harvard. Deans and provosts in particular find it appealing. Unlike more politically charged terms like labor and political economy, the history of capitalism holds out a promise to administrators—if perhaps unfulfilled—of attracting students and funding normally directed toward business schools or economics departments. And if, as marketing trick, it leads to more student interest in historicizing political economy and capitalist social relations—something I am not certain has actually occurred—then that’s a feedback loop I could get behind.
Analytically though, after more than a decade of breathless boosterism and highly contestable claims of revolutionary interpretive shifts, the “new history of capitalism” has finally come in for some much needed analytical critique