Volume 41, Number 11 · June 9, 1994
Inventing American Capitalism
By Gordon S. Wood
The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860
by Christopher Clark
Cornell University Press, 339 pp., $39.95; $14.95 (paper)
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America
by Daniel M. Friedenberg
Prometheus, 423 pp., $27.95
The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism
by Allan Kulikoff
University Press of Virginia, 341 pp., $49.50; $17.50 (paper)
From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850
by Winifred Barr Rothenberg
University of Chicago Press, 275 pp., $37.50
The Origins of American Capitalism: Selected Essays
by James A. Henretta
Northeastern University Press, 312 pp., $40.00
Historians used to call it the Industrial Revolution; some social scientists labeled it modernization; the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi termed it the 'Great Transformation'; Marxists called it the transition from feudalism to capitalism. But by whatever name it has been known, scholars of all sorts have been fascinated with the emergence in the late eighteenth century of the great industrial or capitalistic market economies of the Western world. Now with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe this fascination has taken on a new relevance. In its struggle to invent capitalism and market societies in the present, does Eastern Europe have anything to learn from the way it originally happened in the West?
Review, 7010 words
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