The American road to capitalism : studies in class-structure, economic development, and political conflict, 1620-1877
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The American road to capitalism : studies in class-structure, economic development, and political conflict, 1620-1877
（Historical materialism book series, v. 28）
Brill, 2011
- : hardback
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [279]-293) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Most US historians assume that capitalism either "came in the first ships" or was the inevitable result of the expansion of the market. Unable to analyze the dynamics of specific forms of social labour in the antebellum US, most historians of the US Civil War have privileged autonomous political and ideological factors, ignoring the deep social roots of the conflict. This book applies theoretical insights derived from the debates on the transition to capitalism in Europe to the historical literature on the US to produce a new analysis of the origins of capitalism in the US, and the social roots of the Civil War.
Winner of the Paul Sweezy Marxist Sociology Book Award 2013
Short-listed for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Ellen Meiksins Wood
Introduction
1. The American Road to Capitalism
i. Plantation-slavery
ii. Agrarian petty-commodity production
iii. Capitalist manufacture and industry
iv. Conclusion: the Civil War
2. The Agrarian Origins of US Capitalism: The Transformation of the Northern Countryside before the Civil War
i. Rural class-structure in the North before the Civil War
ii. Debating the transformation of northern agriculture
iii. The transformation of the northern countryside, c. 1776-1861
3. Plantation-Slavery and Economic Development in the Antebellum Southern United States
i. The 'planter-capitalism' model
ii. The 'non-bourgeois civilisation' model
iii. Class-structure and economic development in the antebellum-South
4. Agrarian Class-Structure and Economic Development in Colonial British North America: The Place of the American Revolution in the Origins of US Capitalism
i. The commercialisation-staples model
ii. The demographic-frontier model
iii. Agrarian social-property relations in colonial British North America
iv. Colonial economic development, the American Revolution, and the development of capitalism in the US, 1776-1861
5. Social-Property Relations, Class-Conflict and the Origins of the US Civil War: Toward a New Social Interpretation
i. Ashworth's social interpretation of the US Civil War
ii. A critique of slavery, capitalism and politics in the antebellum-republic
iii. Toward a new social interpretation of the US Civil War
Conclusion: Democracy against Capitalism in the Post-Civil-War United States
i. Democracy against capitalism in the North: radicalism, class-struggle and the rise of liberal democracy, 1863-77
ii. Democracy against capitalism in the South: the rise and fall of peasant-citizenship, 1865-77
iii. The defeat of populism, 'Jim Crow' and the establishment of capitalist plantation-agriculture in the South, 1877-1900
References
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
