The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896

by Sven Beckert

• ISBN13: 9780521790390
• ISBN10: 0521790395
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-03-19
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is the first comprehensive history of the most powerful group in the nineteenth-century United States: New York City's economic elite. This small and diverse group of Americans accumulated unprecedented economic, social, and political power, and decisively put their mark on the age. Professor Beckert explores how capital-owning New Yorkers overcame their distinct antebellum identities to forge dense social networks, create powerful social institutions, and articulate an increasingly coherent view of the world and their place within it. Actively engaging in a rapidly changing economic, social, and political environment, these merchants, industrialists, bankers, and professionals metamorphosed into a social class. In the process, these upper-class New Yorkers put their stamp on the major political conflicts of the day - ranging from the Civil War to municipal elections. Employing the methods of social history, The Monied Metropolis explores the big issues of nineteenth-century social change.

Table of Contents

Maps, Graphs, and Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Abbreviations	xvii
Introduction	1	(14)
Part I Fortunes, Manners, Politics	15	(64)
Accumulating Capital	17	(29)
Navigating the New Metropolis	46	(32)
The Politics of Capital	78	(1)
Part II Reluctant Revolutionaries	79	(126)
Bourgeois New Yorkers Go to War	81	(64)
The Spoils of Victory	145	(27)
Reconstructing New York	172	(33)
Part III A Bourgeois World	205	(118)
Democracy in the Age of Capital	207	(30)
The Culture of Capital	237	(36)
The Rights of Labor, The Rights of Property	273	(20)
The Power of Capital and the Problem of Legitimacy	293	(30)
Epilogue	323	(146)
Index	469