Suchergebnisse

Introduction: the clerk problem -- Paperwork -- Market society -- Self-making men -- Desk diseases -- Counting persons, counting profits -- Conclusion: white collar

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In 'Accounting for Capitalism', Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the 'bottom line' became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust.

The history of paper is rooted in a material culture of ancient provenance which has insistently shaped cultural life since its invention two thousand years ago. As such, a history of paper is no less a study of immateriality, of the meaning of the marks inscribed on its surface. Indeed, because paper proved so adept at preserving those inscriptions, this ostensibly simple artifact emerged as the favored technology for recording, storing, and sharing what humanity knows about itself. There is no exaggeration, therefore, in describing paper as constituting the infrastructure – or operating system – of civilization. Since the eighteenth century this phenomenology has positioned paper at the center of modernity's two most important political projects, creation of the market economy and organization of the nation state. In both instances, paper served as the practical means for translating thought into action, or knowledge into power. This, in turn, raises important questions regarding the nature of both knowledge and power, and of the relationship between them, in a digital, or paperless, future.

In December 2013 the membership of the American Studies Association voted to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Has the boycott effectively challenged academic complicity with the policies of the Israeli state? Or has it only further isolated voices of dissent in Israeli society?

Nearly a year after the American Studies Association (ASA) adopted a formal resolution-supported by a minority of the association's membership but avidly embraced by the organization's leadership-to boycott Israeli academia, the results are readily apparent. In fact, the boycott's repercussions were felt almost immediately here in Tel Aviv, where I teach history. They clearly point to the boycott's success. At the same time, they also raise questions about what such success means, both in terms of the Palestinian cause and the future of Israeli policy towards Palestine. These questions have become even more relevant in the wake of this summer's fighting in Gaza, whose attendant war crimes have incited new demands by American academics to boycott Israeli universities. Adapted from the source document.

Introduction: an American revolutionary tradition / Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith -- The agrarian context of American capitalist development / Christopher Clark -- The mortgage worked the hardest: the fate of landed independence in nineteenth-century America / Jonathan Levy -- Toxic debt, liar loans, collateralized and securitized human beings and the panic of 1837 / Edward E. Baptist -- Inheriting property and debt: from family security to corporate accumulation / Elizabeth Blackmar -- Slave breeding and free love: an antebellum argument over slavery, capitalism, and personhood / Amy Dru Stanley -- Capitalism and the rise of the corporation nation / Robert E. Wright -- Capitalist aesthetics: Americans look at the London and Liverpool docks / Tamara Plakins Thornton -- William Leggett and the melodrama of the market / Jeffrey Sklansky -- Producing capitalism: the clerk at work / Michael Zakim -- Soulless monsters and iron horses: the Civil War, institutional change and American capitalism / Sean Patrick Adams -- Afterword: Anonymous history / Jean-Christophe Agnew

"Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America's transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, Capitalism Takes Command presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management--an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America's new revolutionary tradition. This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an "ism" and how business became a political philosophy, Capitalism Takes Command brings the economy back into American social and cultural history."--Provided by publisher.