H.W. Brands: American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

From the Pritzker Military Library: From the beginning, the nation’s commander-in-chief and its capitalists have been uneasy partners in the American enterprise. But for a few decades, it was nothing short of love. Andrew Jackson earned popular acclaim and enraged business magnates by crushing the Bank of the United States and quashing federal spending on roads and canals. But H.W. Brands argues that the Civil War radically changed the relationship between government and business. When J.P. Morgan received a draft notice, he hired a substitute to serve in his place, and spent the war doing a swift trade in commodities like rifles; nearly all of the fortunes that dominated the next four decades, from Carnegie to Vanderbilt, would either begin or soar during the Civil War. In American Colossus, H.W. Brands chronicles an age when the railroads led the nation west and began the Indian Wars; meanwhile, even further west, capitalists would save the military the trouble of toppling the native government of an obscure set of islands called Hawaii. By the Spanish-American War in 1898, business and military interests were so inextricably entwined that ambassador and merchant alike could agree: it had, indeed, been a “splendid little war”.



From Publisher's Weekly: In this timely study, University of Texas historian H.W. Brands (Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) describes the rise of the great corporate capitalists after the Civil War. J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie constituted an trinity of power-obsessed individuals who instinctively understood that wealth was the ultimate political weapon. They defined the cold-blooded authority of big business. Fascinating detours away from the tale of corporate empires examine the Reconstruction process in the South, the Indian Wars of the West, the opening of the Great Plains, immigration in the East, and the rise of organized labor and the agrarian reformers. Effectively, excerpts from the first-person accounts of Booker T. Washington, Black Elk, Jacob Riis, and others convey the drama of the time. Perhaps the only significant omission in this fast-paced, engrossing narrative is a tendency to dwell on political doctrines that sought to repudiate or restrain capitalism while only briefly discussing the dogma of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, which favored the monopolists.



From Wikipedia: Henry William Brands is an American historian and author of 22 books, co-author of 2 and editor of 4, he is also a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated from Stanford University in 1975 with a B.A. in history and from Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon. He resides in Austin, Texas. In June 2009 he and eleven other distinguished historians had dinner at the White House with President Barack Obama.



Financial Times - John Gapper - 17 Dec 2010: The life stories of the first JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt have been written by authors such as Ron Chernow. But HW Brands weaves them into a broader account of the astonishing social changes that rippled through the nation in these decades – shaking up the lives of everyone from the southern slaves to Lower East Side immigrants. [...] Brands, a professor of history at the University of Texas who has written Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, does not shy away from such suffering. He chronicles the tensions between capitalism and democracy created by extreme divergences of fortune and the lobbying power of big business – tensions that are no less strong today. [...] Yet Brands concludes that “the capitalist revolution was in many ways the best thing ever to befall the ordinary people of America”. The population grew from 40m in 1876 to 76m in 1900, one-third of the rise coming from immigration. Infant mortality fell by one-third and life expectancy grew by one-seventh. Output tripled and average per capita income doubled as the proportion of the workforce on farms halved.

Look again: Reform of China’s financial sector has slowed. This might prove dangerous: China's financial system - from The Economist

A week ago, The Economist had this to say about the China and its economy, from within the context of a review of the book, Red Capitalism:

Anyone who is overly impressed with the apparent resilience of China today would do well to read a new book by two bankers who have worked there for many years, Carl Walter and Fraser Howie. “Red Capitalism” avoids the standard approach to Chinese analysis, which uses mounds of macroeconomic data that even Chinese regulators acknowledge are replete with flaws. Instead, the authors examine how China’s financial system has grown from pretty much nothing three decades ago into the dynamic, bewildering and possibly doomed set of institutions that fill the landscape today. The book is, in many ways, a story of remarkable progress. In 1974 a delegation to the United Nations led by the future Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, almost never left home because there wasn’t enough cash in the banking system—the entire Chinese banking system—to pay for the delegates’ plane tickets. Conditions worsened even further after that. By 1978, when Mr Deng returned from yet another political exile to assume power, China’s formal financial system had shrunk to a single institution, the People’s Bank, whose head office was made up of 80 people buried within the Ministry of Finance. [...] Skipping ahead, China now has more dollars than it can spend and its financial system is populated by a constantly expanding array of institutions. This is no accident. As “Red Capitalism” describes, it was Mr Deng’s goal, pursued with the vital support of his immediate successors, President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, who pushed through changes that were thoughtful, often brutal, and sometimes mistaken.

Read that Economist article, here. The Financial Times mentioned the book in "China starts crackdown on insider trading":

Mainland China’s markets are notoriously opaque and speculative. Everyone, from small retail investors to top fund managers, appears to trade on tips from contacts who claim to have “inside” information. “If you ask any Chinese investor whether they think a chairman or executive of a company is trading in their own stock, nine out of 10 would expect that to be the case just as they would expect a government official to be taking bribes,” says Fraser Howie, co-author of Red Capitalism and other books on China’s stock markets. Last week’s announcement marked the first time the Chinese cabinet has publicly addressed the issue of insider trading and was interpreted by investors as a signal of the government’s determination to head off a new stock bubble.

Read that full FT article here. See also: Out of the Red: Investment and Capitalism in Russia, Capitalism's Brutal Comeback in China (Red Banner Reader), Out of the Red : Building Capitalism and Democracy in Postcommunist Europe, Red Capitalism: An Analysis of the Navajo Economy

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford from Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk by Steven Rose

A book on Soviet utopianism prompts Steven Rose to wonder if the dream of a fair, prosperous society can ever be fulfilled. When I first visited Moscow, in what now seems a far-distant era, a giant red neon sign beamed Lenin's famous phrase "Socialism plus electrification equals communism" across the Moskva river. The slogan encapsulated several central aspects of communist thought. First, optimism for the future. Second, that science and technology were both by definition progressive forces but were impeded by capitalism; only under communism could they enable the building of a society of abundance for the many, not just the few.

Full book reviews like these, are books in and of themselves, and require a full reading on the proper site. See the Guardian piece here. Also, check out this BBC podcast, where Francis Spufford and Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times debate the comparison between the China and the USSR in the 60s and their influence on the Western economies. [Still trying to see if I can order Red Plenty for my Kindle from Asia.]