What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of historical inquiry? With a sampling of cutting-edge research from prominent scholars, these broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women's rights; slavery and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond industrial wage workers; and more.

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History and cofounder of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University. He is the author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014).
Christine Desan is Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law and cofounder of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University. She is the author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (2014).

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Making Markets
1. The Capitalist Constitution, by Woody Holton
2. What Was the Great Bull Market? Value, Valuation, and Financial History, by Julia Ott
3. The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Idea of the State, by Kim Phillips-Fein
Part II. Claiming and Contesting Capitalism
4. Utopian Capitalism, by Richard White
5. The Sovereign Market and Sex Difference: Human Rights in America, by Amy Dru Stanley
6. Negro Cloth: Mastering the Market for Slave Clothing in Antebellum America, by Seth Rockman
7. Revulsions of Capital: Slavery and Political Economy in the Epoch of the Turner Rebellion, Virginia,
1829-1832, by Christopher Tomlins
Part III. "Knowing" Capital
8. Risk, Uncertainty, and Data: Managing Risk in Twentieth-Century America, by Mary Poovey
9. Representations of Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, by Peter Knight
10. Value of Life: Insurance, Slavery, and Expertise, by Michael Ralph
Part IV. Refiguring Space from the Local to the Global
11. War by Other Means: Mercantilism and Free Trade in the Age of the American Revolution, by Eliga H. Gould
12. "Innovative Solutions to Modern Agriculture": Capitalist Farming, Global Competition, and the Devolution of the U.S. Rice Industry, by Peter A. Coclanis
13. Importing the World's Fair, by Michael Zakim
14. Plantation Dispossessions: The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism, by Kris Manjapra
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index