By
JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
A specter is haunting university history departments: the specter of capitalism.
After decades of “history from below,” focusing on women, minorities and
other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of
scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the
most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run
the economy.
Even before the financial crisis, courses in “the history of capitalism”
— as the new discipline bills itself — began proliferating on campuses,
along with dissertations on once deeply unsexy topics like insurance,
banking and regulation. The events of 2008 and their long aftermath have
given urgency to the scholarly realization that it really is the
economy, stupid.
The financial meltdown also created a serious market opportunity. Columbia University Press recently introduced a new “Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism”
book series (“This is not your father’s business history,” the proposal
promised), and other top university presses have been snapping up
dissertations on 19th-century insurance and early-20th-century stock speculation, with trade publishers and op-ed editors following close behind.
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