For decades, historians depicted the institution as unprofitable and on its way to extinction before the Civil War (a conflict that was therefore unnecessary). Slavery plays a crucial role in this literature. This new work portrays capitalism not as a given (something that “came in the first ships,” as the historian Carl Degler once wrote) but as a system that developed over time, has been constantly evolving and penetrates all aspects of society. Recently, however, the history of American capitalism has emerged as a thriving cottage industry. This situation was exacerbated in the 1970s, when economic history began to migrate from history to economics departments, where it too often became an exercise in scouring the past for numerical data to plug into computerized models of the economy. For residents of the world’s pre-eminent capitalist nation, American historians have produced remarkably few studies of capitalism in the United States.
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