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This article presents a critical survey of ten books from the history of capitalism, a newly emerging subfield of history. At their best, the books offer provocative insights and vivid descriptions of some of the darker episodes of our economic past. Yet specious arguments and failures of analytical reasoning sometimes undermine these books' effectiveness as social criticism. I highlight insights from the field of economic history that would strengthen the work of historians of capitalism. I also suggest some opportunities for dialogue, if not collaboration, between the two communities of scholars.

We study the effect of financial relationships on firms' investment decisions and access to external finance. In the early twentieth century, securities underwriters commonly held directorships with American corporations. Section 10 of the Clayton Antitrust Act prohibited bankers from serving on the boards of railroads for which they underwrote securities. We find that following the implementation of Section 10, railroads with strong preexisting relationships with underwriters saw declines in their investment rates, valuations, and leverage, and increases in their costs of external funds. Reassuringly, we do not observe similar effects among industrials and utilities, which were not subject to Section 10. Our results are consistent with underwriters on corporate boards acting as delegated monitors, and highlight the potential for regulations intended to address conflicts of interest to disrupt valuable information flows.

We analyze the effects of ownership of liberty bonds on election outcomes in the 1920s. We find that counties with higher liberty bond ownership rates turned against the Democratic Party in the presidential elections of 1920 and 1924. This was a reaction to the depreciation of the bonds prior to the 1920 election (when the Democrats held the presidency) and the appreciation of the bonds in the early 1920s (under a Republican president), as the Federal Reserve raised and then subsequently lowered interest rates. Our analysis suggests that the liberty bond campaigns had unintended political consequences.

Later works conceptualized slavery in new ways, as a system of property rights rather than merely a method of labor organization, and analyzed the relationships between masters and slaves using new theoretical tools.3 These and other innovations have been shown to have far-reaching implications for the arguments of Time on the Cross, and even the book's strongest defenders would likely concede that it no longer represents the current state of knowledge on the economics of American slavery. Some of the criticisms of Fogel and Engerman in fact remain equally relevant to the works of Baptist and Beckert.4 That those criticisms were in some cases produced by historians, or economists and historians in conversation with one another, suggests that something important has been lost.5 Because Time on the Cross was written in part to advocate for a particular vision of what constitutes good economic history, the debates surrounding that book focused not only on specific topics related to slavery, but also on broader issues such as the limits of particular methodologies and the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives for the study of those topics. Time on the Cross-An Overview Time on the Cross was published as two volumes-the book itself, which contained few footnotes and presented empirical evidence mainly in the form of graphs, and a separate volume, Evidence and Methods, which included citations of historical sources and the equations and tables underpinning the theoretical and empirical analysis. The main text was written for a popular audience in a brash and iconoclastic style, and its arguments were framed as a refutation of what the authors called the traditional view of slavery, which held that the enslaved were indolent and inept; that slave agriculture was inefficient, backwards, and dying out in the antebellum era; and that slave owners were irrational and unconcerned with their own economic self-interest in their efforts to perpetuate the system.8 Fogel and Engerman stated that their research, which reflected recent methodological advances and used previously unknown sources, was \"so much at variance with common beliefs ... and so central to the understanding of contemporary issues, that . . . [it] should no longer be restricted to the pages of esoteric scholarly journals.

Increasing savings rates among households of modest incomes would strengthen their balance sheets and reduce wealth inequality. This paper analyzes one of the largest and most successful efforts to increase the savings of ordinary households in American history. The Liberty Bond drives of World War I persuaded tens of millions of Americans to buy government bonds, which were sold in denominations as low as $50, and could be purchased in installment plans. Using newly collected data on the sales of Liberty Bonds at the county level, we analyze the factors that influenced the degree to which the bond drives were successful. The results highlight the importance of the participation of civil society organizations and local banks in marketing the bonds. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of modern programs to increase savings.

In 1822 New York became the first of many common law states to authorize the formation of limited partnerships. Little is known about the effects of these statutes. This article analyzes the use of the limited partnership in nineteenth-century New York City. We find that the form was adopted by a surprising number of firms, and that limited partnerships had more capital, failed at lower rates, and had fewer members with kinship ties, compared to ordinary partnerships. The results suggest that the introduction of the limited partnership facilitated investments that would not have occurred in the absence of the form.

This article analyzes the ownership structures and governance institutions of New York's corporations in the 1820s, using a new dataset collected from the records of the state's 1823 capital tax, and from the corporate charters. In contrast to Berle and Means's account of the development of the corporation, the results indicate that many firms were dominated by large shareholders, who were represented on the firms' boards, and held sweeping power to utilize the firms' resources for their own benefit. To address this problem, many firms configured their voting rights in a way that curtailed the power of large investors. “… we complain of directors considering themselves the company, when they are merely the agents.”1

We study the effects of a contraction in financial intermediation on nonfinancial firms. The Panic of 1907 originated in the shadow banks of the time, New York’s trust companies. The runs were caused by a shock unrelated to the trust companies’ nonfinancial corporate clients. In the years following the panic, corporations affiliated with the worst-affected trusts made fewer capital investments, paid lower dividends, and suffered lower profitability and higher borrowing costs relative to firms without such connections. The shock to New York’s trust companies accounted for at least 18.4 percent of the decline in corporate investment in the United States in 1908.

This article presents an overview of the history of corporate governance in the United States, emphasizing the period before the advent of federal securities laws and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Recent research has overturned many widely accepted beliefs about corporate governance during this period. In particular, the evolution of American corporate governance has not followed a simple, linear trajectory, beginning with small, well-governed firms and ending with large, poorly governed ones. Over time, economic and institutional changes have given rise to successive generations of corporations with their own governance problems and their own mechanisms to address those problems. When existing governance mechanisms failed, the United States experienced corporate governance crises—episodes that shattered investors’ faith in corporate management and the legal institutions intended to protect their rights. The resolutions of these crises have sometimes been found in legal innovations and, in other cases, in institutional or market-based solutions.