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The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. By Sven Beckert. Cambridge University Press, 2001. 512 pp. Photographs, 4 maps, graphs, index. Cloth, $35-00. ISBN 0-521-79039-5.
While American social and labor historians have devoted a great many words to the "making" of an American working class in the nineteenth century, there has been a studied lack of interest in examining the formation of an American "ruling" or "business" or "capitalist" class. Sven Beckert attempts to fill in this gap in The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 18501896, by articulating the historical process through which the American bourgeoisie constituted and consolidated itself as a dominant social class after the Depression of 1873.
There was little uniformity of interest among New York City's economic elites through the later half of the nineteenth century. The deepest fault line was that which separated merchants from manufacturers. While the merchants isolated themselves, culturally, politically, and geographically, from the working masses they both feared and disdained, the manufacturers, many only recently removed from the artisanal ranks, regarded themselves as part of the city's "producing classes" and were not averse to promoting their historic and organic ties to the wage workers who labored in their workshops and factories. The manufacturers welcomed protectionist assistance from "the fostering hand of government"; the merchants were opposed to governmental intervention in the economy, especially tariffs aimed at stifling foreign trade. The manufacturers, without economic ties to the South, were...