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Economic history was once a deeply interdisciplinary field. The Economic History Association (EHA) was founded by members of both the American Historical Association and the American Economic Association, and the early volumes of the Journal of Economic History included numerous contributions by historians. But over time, as historians' interest gravitated toward cultural topics, and as the Cliometrics Revolution led to the incorporation of quantitative methods and economic theory into the field, economic history came to be dominated by economists.1Today, the Journal of Economic History and the Association's annual conference include few contributions from scholars trained in history departments. Research in economic history has flourished nonetheless, and the growing accessibility of historical sources such as census microdata, coupled with technological advances such as those related to geospatial information systems (GIS), continue to support rapid advances in the field. Important questions that would have been unimaginably difficult to address in a convincing way just two decades ago are being answered conclusively. Yet for all its methodological sophistication, some of the work by economic historians would have benefitted from the insights and criticisms of scholars trained in history departments, and the absence of many historians from the field has limited its intellectual diversity and the depth of its analysis.
The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in economic history among historians. Whether the product of waning interest in other topics or a desire to understand the historical forces behind the recent financial crisis and Great Recession, many young historians have chosen to focus on economic history in their work. Particularly among Americanists, this shift is gathering momentum, and works on economic history have been among the most celebrated books produced by historians in recent years. Yet this new wave of research has not brought historians back to the academic field of economic history. The scholars producing it do not think of themselves as participants in the field and have worked in isolation from it. Instead, many of them have styled themselves "historians of capitalism." A separate community of economic historians seems to be emerging.
In this article I present a survey of ten prominent books by the new historians of capitalism that focus on a variety of topics including finance, slavery, and conservative...