| dc.description.abstract | This essay examines, in the history of American capitalism, the changing relationship between social types, groups and classes to the questions of economic change and the origins of modern America. Historical schools have considered different subjective figures – such as capitalists and entrepreneurs, managers and clerks, the working class – as key objects of historical analysis as well as constitutive of economic change and American capitalism. The essay argues that a distinguishing characteristic of the booming field of the “new” history of American capitalism has been the concentration of analytic efforts on a novel breed of historical actors: bosses, bankers, brokers and other economic elites. But while the burgeoning subfield has demonstrated that much is to be gained analytically by treating businesspeople as meaningful historical actors, it is not the first to take businesspeople seriously. In fact, the history of capitalism has always debated which object should be central to historical analysis and American capitalism. This essay explores the changing objects and categories of historical analysis, and how they relate to the questions of economic change and the origins of the modern United States, in six historiographical traditions: the Progressive school, business history revisionism associated with Allan Nevins, Chandler school of business history and the organizational synthesis, labor history, and the “new” history of American capitalism. | |
