A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety

Abstract

Since the new history of capitalism (NHOC) trend received national publicity in 2013, American historians have enthusiastically pursued the complexities and varieties of capitalism, producing a body of scholarship that offers a plethora of capitalism-modifying adjectives yet leaves capitalism undefined. “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” asks how historians developed these varieties and interpretations, and whether any gaps or limitations remain. To answer these questions, the essay begins with a survey of the many histories of capitalism, from the first use of the term, to America’s first business histories in the early twentieth century, to world systems theory, and up to the NHOC. It then makes the case for continued attempts at redefinition and specification by offering a new variety.

This new variety, martial capitalism, has its roots in the early national and antebellum eras and influenced the evolution of capitalism in the United States. It is a system of political economy in which concealed military power, rather than abstract market forces, serves as an invisible (“invisible,” at least, to those not subjected to it) hand and bestows economic opportunity upon some individuals. Under this system, government officials and private citizens coercively acquired resources, knowledge, territory, and “free trade” agreements in the service of aggressive economic opportunism. Steady military conflict, along with scattered and localized violence, intersected with honor, a mainstay in early American politics and culture, to engender a set of masculinized economic relations that shaped both the what/where and the how of capitalism in the United States.

Introduction

The argument for martial capitalism builds on over a decade of the new history of capitalism (NHOC), taking seriously the field’s emphasis on both state intervention and the cultural underpinnings of political economy. However, unlike the capitalisms described by the NHOC, martial capitalism has a definition and an origin. It melds the theoretical foundations of old and new histories by describing both the institutional structures and individual experiences that explain the intersection of state power, violence, gender, and labor in the U.S. political economy. Although many studies of capitalism have neglected gender, martial capitalism allows us to see the manly, paternal, honor-bound aspects of capitalist development. This development depended on the contributions of unequal laborers, from enslaved individuals, to lowly paid women, men, and children, to skilled wage workers; as a system, it encompassed everyone under the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal government. The labors, and compelled compliance, of all these people made martial capitalism possible; yet, white men with capital perpetuated the system because it benefitted them, and because they had the power to do so.

Using personal papers, government documents, and other secondary sources, this essay briefly sketches some examples of individual participation in martial capitalism through land speculation, filibustering, diplomacy, military service, and exploration. These individual experiences reveal the masculinized, honor-bound, and coercive nature of the U.S. political economy from the nation’s founding through the antebellum era, and bring us closer to understanding capitalism’s historical nuances.

How many varieties of capitalism do we need to understand its evolution? There is no shortage of words that modify capitalism: free market, state, war, global, grassroots, merchant, agrarian, industrial, finance, corporate, entrepreneurial, crony, street, social.¹ There are Marxist theories and new histories, critiques and celebrations. Most historians agree that the capitalism described by standard economic definitions is an oversimplification. “A political, social, and economic system in which property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled for the most part by private persons,” where “the price mechanism is used as a signaling system which allocates resources between uses,” has never quite existed because, throughout history, irrational human actors and interventionist governments have displaced abstract and impersonal supply and demand. Dissatisfaction with traditional definitions aside, scholars of the NHOC are reluctant to redefine capitalism, even as they have introduced new analyses to complicate economists’ varieties of entrepreneurial, state-guided capitalism, oligarchic, and big-firm capitalisms.² The plethora of capitalism-modifying adjectives leaves capitalism undefined, suggesting that capitalism is too capacious a term to explain any system of political economy satisfactorily. We need more precise definitions.

I would like to introduce and define another variety that developed in the United States’ first decades, in an era that blended elements of premodern, agricultural, and moral economies, as well as modern, monetized, marketized, and industrialized ones. Martial capitalism was a system of political economy in which concealed military power, rather than abstract market forces, served as an invisible (“invisible,” at least, to those not subjected to it) hand and bestowed economic opportunity upon some individuals. Under this system, government officials and private citizens coercively acquired resources, knowledge, territory, and “free trade” agreements in the service of aggressive economic opportunism. It was not a planned economic system but the result of private citizens’ and public officials’ aggressive pursuit of personal gain and willingness to use military force. Although very few Americans participated directly in the military and many white Americans made pretensions to their nation being a reluctant wielder of military power, there was a martial quality to economic life and domestic and international politics: from aggressive land speculation, bank wars, coercive trade agreements, and dueling in Congress, to forced labor camps and “frontier” violence. The evolution of capitalism has varied internationally over time, and although the United States was by no means “exceptional,” its development of capitalism had its own particularities.

The United States’ transition to capitalism cannot be explained by the main tenets of Marxist theories of capitalism, which did not yet exist and which hold that one’s relationship to the means of production determined one’s identity. In the United States, the myth of equal opportunity and prosperity for white men prevailed. Nor can this era be characterized as a self-regulated classical political economy because individual government officials wielded military and political power to shape economic outcomes. Also, although there was a militaristic quality to early U.S. economic life and domestic and international politics, its political economy diverged from those of early modern Europe’s fiscal military states, which built their economies to serve large armies, and according to Sven Beckert, engaged in “war capitalism” to dominate global commodity networks (notably, cotton). “Military” and “war” refer to armed forces, whereas “martial” is subtler. “Martial” is warlike—inclined or disposed to war, but not necessarily engaged in large declared wars.³ Steady military conflict, along with scattered and localized violence, intersected with honor, a mainstay in early American politics and culture, to engender a set of masculinized economic relations that shaped both the what/where and the how of capitalism in the United States.

This essay will begin with a survey of literature on capitalism, before making the case for continued attempts at redefinition. It will do so by explaining martial capitalism and its significance for the early national and antebellum United States. The argument for martial capitalism builds on over a decade of the NHOC, taking seriously the field’s emphasis on both state intervention and the cultural underpinnings of political economy.⁴ It also, in its specific definition of capitalism, models older scholarship. My argument for martial capitalism melds the theoretical foundations of old and new histories by describing both the institutional structures and individual experiences that accompanied the development of capitalism in the United States.

Capitalism as a system of economic behaviors and relations predates capitalism as a concept. The word as an “ism” was first used by French socialists Louis Blanc and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1850s. It appeared in William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes in 1854, and became associated with Karl Marx after the 1867 publication of Das Kapital. Exactly how much capitalism predated its mid-nineteenth-century coinage, and whether its precise origins matters, has been a matter of debate among historians. Scholars began writing about the history of capitalism during the Great Depression. In 1939, America’s first business historian, Norman Scott Brien Gras, traced capitalism’s life span and variants back to the “petty capitalism” of medieval traveling merchants and shopkeepers, which was followed by, and coexisted with, early modern mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism, and financial capitalism. National capitalism, Gras feared, threatened his preferred financial capitalism. He was not alone in his anxiety. Following World War II, in the face of global socialist movements and a rise in government interventionism, many scholars worried, unnecessarily, about the demise of capitalism, predicting, for example, the end of British capitalism by 1950.⁵

As business history took off in the 1960s, historians began debating the definitions and conditions of capitalism—a debate that the later NHOC scholars would dismiss. Economic historian Frederic C. Lane lamented capitalism’s inexact application, a criticism with which today’s historians of capitalism are familiar. He also lambasted Alfred Chandler and other “proponents of entrepreneurial history” for privileging administrative and entrepreneurial activity above all other factors of production.⁶ Today’s historians of capitalism do not worry so much about factors of production. They focus instead on power relations, commodities and commoditization, and financial abstractions.

Although social scientists and historians of business dominated the ranks of the early theorists of capitalism, social historians increasingly took up the subject during the Cold War. Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism refuted Marxist interpretations while detailing ordinary people’s experiences of economic changes. Like many of his predecessors in the NHOC today, Braudel highlighted the role of the state and contested the linear view of history held by both Marxists and liberal economists. He challenged economists and business historians who perceived the role of central governments under capitalism as protecting free markets; instead, he characterized governments as protectors of capitalist monopolists.

Braudel’s work influenced another ancestor of the NHOC, world systems theory, which emerged as an interdisciplinary critique of capitalism in the 1970s. This neo-Marxist field uses the capitalist world economy as its mode of analysis to explain developments between and within different countries, all of which are dependent on their position as core, semi-periphery and periphery. Despite sharing with world systems theorists a skepticism of linear development and a concern with inequality, new historians of capitalism criticize the field for neglecting human agency. They are much more concerned with individuals’ experiences and decision-making, drawing from new social history’s attention to the lived experiences of diverse or marginalized groups of people. The “new labor history,” spearheaded by David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, focused on workers’ experiences under capitalism. Other social historians, however, criticized the field’s privileging of certain kinds of labor, its assumptions about working-class identity, and its general inattention to different social identities and sources of conflict, such as race and gender. The working class as a subject of study gradually fell out of favor by the 2000s, replaced by other marginalized groups whom capitalism subjugated.⁷

This dissatisfaction with the explanatory limitations of labor history, combined with the recognition of the failures of capitalism during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, culminated in the emergence of the NHOC. This “new” approach to capitalism is especially attuned to power, inequality, and the existence of slavery and other forms of coerced labor.⁸ (The scholarly trend to which this name applies predated the crisis: Harvard launched a seminar on the political economy of modern capitalism in 2005, and works by such historians as Seth Rockman, Louis Hyman, Julia Ott, Bethany Moreton and Stephen Mihm, and Jonathan Levy either began or were published before the crisis.)

Slavery has become central to the field, highlighted by the 2016 publication of Slavery’s Capitalism, many of whose contributing authors have written books on the subject. These works, as well as Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, draw from a long history of scholarship on the relationship between slavery and capitalism, most notably Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery. Many of their claims about the profitability, modernity, and brutality of the institution of slavery have either already been made or have been refuted by economic historians.⁹

Is anything, then, actually new about the NHOC? Much has been written to answer this question in both the affirmative and the negative. The newest thing about the field is the label and the attention it has received, both publicly and from other historical fields.¹⁰

There have long been studies of capitalism, of social and cultural aspects of the economy, and of the relationship among slavery, capitalism, and democracy, and early Americanists engaged in vigorous debates throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s about the emergence of capitalism.¹¹ However, within the past decade, in addition to an outpouring of articles, new publishing venues devoted specifically to capitalism have emerged, notably, the series Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism and Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics. Each venue stresses the interdisciplinarity of the works they publish, acknowledging the field’s indebtedness to wide-ranging scholarship. Each also acknowledges what is new or unique: The former “aims to publish canon-questioning research that challenges and denaturalizes existing categories and modes of analysis”; the latter aims to publish works that “take history ‘from the bottom up’ all the way to the top.” Both assertions recognize what sets the NHOC apart from previous scholarship. The field’s foundational works “denaturalize” capitalism, delineating the specific decisions and circumstances that built our modern economy, and showing how such hallmarks of capitalism as consumer debt, investment, and risk became regularized. More recent scholarship continues to explain the system’s “hows” and to challenge assumptions about capitalism’s inevitability.¹²

In general, the field shies away from defining capitalism, but investigates its many “varieties.” The NHOC’s subjects range widely, from “ordinary” Americans to business tycoons. Influenced by the new social history, the field is concerned with marginalized groups yet has received criticism for neglecting gender, as well as for the fact that many of its writers and subjects are white men. NHOC scholars, however, do not privilege elite white men in the same way that traditional histories have. Rather, their subject choice reflects an interest in studying elites from a critical rather than a normalizing or hagiographic perspective.¹³ To understand capitalism, one must understand the capitalists themselves. The field’s inclusion of both the marginalized and the marginalizing is emblematic of its capaciousness. The sum total of its coverage of commodities and commoditization, high finance and everyday transactions, the environment and ideology, to name just a few subjects, provides an expansive yet amorphous picture of capitalism.

For this reason, we need more precise definitions. This brings me back to the concept of martial capitalism, which contributes to, challenges, and clarifies the existing NHOC literature. Like other aspects of capitalism described by this literature, martial capitalism rests on power, as well as the centrality of slavery, violence, and the state. Unlike the capitalisms described by the NHOC, martial capitalism has a definition and an origin. This system of political economy, in which military power undergirds the efforts of government officials and private citizens to acquire resources, knowledge, territory, and “free trade” agreements in the service of aggressive economic opportunism and under the guise of liberal democracy, began with U.S nationhood. I have written elsewhere about national security capitalism, a mixed enterprise system in which U.S. officials adapted policies, informal decision-making, and foreign relations to meet the nation’s current economic and military needs. Martial capitalism connects the broader structural system of national security capitalism to the individual, explaining the intersection of state power, violence, gender, and labor in U.S. development. Although many studies of capitalism have neglected gender, martial capitalism allows us to see the manly, paternal, honor-bound aspects of capitalist development. This development depended on the contributions of unequal laborers, from enslaved individuals, to lowly paid women and children, to skilled wage workers.¹⁴

Capitalists’ reliance on multiple forms of labor, and their performance of masculinity, helps explain the political contradictions that accompanied the economic transitions of the early United States. Despite the importance of political parties and sectionalism in the early national United States, many individual choices reflected political and economic pragmatism. In general, there was little ideological consistency among politicians of the era.¹⁵ Historians question why John C. Calhoun switched from being a nationalist to a states’ rights proponent, and why John Quincy Adams was a champion of antislavery, as well as a sometimes defender of slaveholders’ interests. Partisanship was often rooted in political pragmatism. Whether men were slaveholders or not, northerners or southerners, their interests were ultimately about capital and control, and as Paul Frymer has noted, most politicians agreed on the virtues of a white settler nation. Martial capitalism, like all other economic systems, spanned geographies and political parties, and it helps explain how and why political expediency often trumped moral and ideological stability.¹⁶ As a system, it encompassed everyone under the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal government; the labors, and compelled compliance, of all these people made martial capitalism possible. However, white men with capital perpetuated the system because it benefitted them, and because they had the power to do so.

Martial capitalism was gendered and racialized. It accorded with early national cultures of honor and masculinity. Early national codes of honor mandated white masculine control over family, property, labor, and reputation.¹⁷ White men’s economic prosperity was predicated on both the cult of domesticity and the labor of subordinates inside and outside the home.

Amy Greenberg has identified two main types of masculinity in the nineteenth-century United States in her work on the gendered dimensions of U.S. expansionism and imperialism. “Martial” men embraced physical strength, domination, and aggression as markers of manhood, whereas “restrained” men valued self-discipline, morality, and the virtues of the private sphere (made possible by female domesticity). Martial capitalism thrived on masculine entitlement and aggression, as well as more subtle forms of masculinity. Because political and economic success required both strategic aggression and respectability, many elite merchants and men in government positions tempered some of the bellicose aspects of their manhood with gentility. These demonstrations of respectability and refinement mirrored the activities of England’s “gentlemanly capitalists,” and conformed men to a “transnational business masculinity” (a type of “hegemonic masculinity”).¹⁸

In the United States, this masculinity hinged on whiteness. The nation was a “settler colonial slavery complex” that sought to absorb or eliminate Natives and marginalize African Americans. A major source of American economic opportunity—westward expansion—was fueled by government sponsorship of white settlement and violence. This included the “removal” of Native Americans and the expansion of African American slavery. During and after the Civil War, when African American men used their “martial performances” to demonstrate their “worthiness for freedom” and argue for economic and political rights, white Americans still derived economic value from them, as well as other nonwhites. Systems of inequality persisted beyond the slavery/freedom divide because, as some historians have argued, all capitalism is racial capitalism.¹⁹ How economic system are racialized, however, varies. Race operated in specific ways under martial capitalism, and to understand how, we need to go back to the founding era. There, we can see how restrained violence and economic opportunism became intertwined in the cultural development of the U.S. political economy.

As a national economic system, martial capitalism started with the Northwest Ordinance’s establishment of federal power over new territories and the assumption that the government would promote economic opportunity through access to land. This precedent ultimately involved conflict and economic prospects, not only in North America but overseas as well. Both government officials and private citizens engaged in economic and military aggression, and all presidents played some role in protecting martial capitalism. The most extreme example was perhaps Andrew Jackson. Although his brutal warfare against the Creek and Seminole Indians in the 1810s was not representative of the military subtleties of martial capitalism, he helped perpetuate the system by supporting white settlers’ economic opportunity at the expense of others and signing the Indian Removal Act. Even Thomas Jefferson, who is considered by some historians as anti-capitalist, and often professed to dislike the military, engaged in martial capitalism by purchasing the Louisiana Territory for commercial opportunities and sponsoring an expansion of the nation’s war-making capabilities.²⁰ Jefferson and other presidents responded to, and bolstered, what was happening on the ground among government officials and American citizens as they navigated the uneven transition to a market-based, “modern” economy. To explain this ad hoc development, I will briefly sketch some examples of individual participation in martial capitalism through land speculation, filibustering, diplomacy, military service, and exploration.

First, it should be noted that the most successful agents of this system were not those who engaged in egregious violence. Violence was endemic in early America; its spectrum included dueling, homicide, and genocide, as well as domestic, workplace, political, and racial violence. However, the development of capitalism was most palatable to the majority of Americans when extreme brutality was veiled behind the illusion of minimal, honorable military engagement. Under martial capitalism, the myth of noble violence prevailed, which was why Lewis Wetzel, a frontiersman who participated in military campaigns against Native Americans in the Ohio region and was a member of Aaron Burr’s 1805–1807 expedition to conquer Spanish Texas, received public criticism for murdering Native allies and was later imprisoned for counterfeiting.²¹ The military campaigns in which Wetzel participated were generally associated with increased opportunities and power for white settlers, yet his aggression exceeded what mainstream white Americans approved of for economic development. His obsession with Native obliteration and revenge overshadowed any profit motive.

Instead, the Andersons, a Kentucky family whose economic prosperity was tied to post-Revolution land speculation, slavery, and Indian removal, embodied the violent subtleties, persistent traditions, and wealth acquisition of the transition to capitalism. Historian Harry S. Stout has chronicled two generations of the Anderson family, arguing that land was central to their livelihood.²² He argues that the family existed at the intersection of traditional and modern economic practices and that they embodied “republican capitalism,” a term he uses only once and does not define. The family’s economic activities can, I think, be more comprehensively described by martial capitalism. Family patriarch Richard Clough Anderson Sr., a Virginia Revolutionary War veteran, used his military service to acquire valuable plots of land, which he passed on to his descendants, who, as statesmen and army officers, fought racial warfare and garnered trade deals to enhance the profitability of stolen land.

Members of the Anderson family exemplified the interrelationship among capitalism, liberalism, and violence. Richard Clough Anderson Sr., for example, became surveyor general of the Virginia Military District and served as a militia commander on the frontier. His son, Robert, was an army officer who fought in the Black Hawk War, Seminole War, and Mexican War. Robert’s older brother, Richard Clough Anderson Jr., served as the United States’ first minister plenipotentiary to Colombia, where he negotiated a treaty that gave the United States “most-favored-nation” status.²³ The treaty that Anderson and Gran Colombian minister Pedro Gual Escandón signed served as the template for subsequent treaties in other Latin American nations, and marked an increase in American economic aggression overseas. When Richard died, his younger brother Larz became head of the family, and became extremely wealthy because of land, banking, and strategic ties to northerners.

In general, the Anderson family illustrates how white Americans maintained aspects of a traditional political economy—valuing landed wealth, honor, and family connections—while embracing aspects of militarized masculine capitalism and cultivating far-flung business and political connections. The experiences of the Anderson family occurred among other individuals in other domestic and international regions.

One of these regions was the Mediterranean—an important, yet problematic, area for U.S. commerce—and one of these individuals was James Leander Cathcart, a young sailor in the 1780s, and a future merchant and diplomat. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, required tribute payments for safe trade, seizing cargoes and sailors from noncompliant nations. Following independence, when the United States no longer received protection from the British navy, Boston- and Philadelphia-based ships were captured and their crews enslaved off the Barbary Coast. Cathcart was one of the first of these American prisoners. During his captivity, he worked as a prison clerk and borrowed money from a Swedish diplomat, which he used to purchase wine and open several taverns. He eventually became a secretary to the dey, helped negotiate prisoner releases, and became wealthy enough to purchase a ship to sail back to Philadelphia. In 1798, Cathcart was appointed as a diplomatic agent in Tunis and Tripoli, and in 1807 as a consul to Madeira and then Cádiz, where he ran a mercantile business. Cathcart used his influence to recommend an escalation of U.S. strategy in the Mediterranean from one of defense to one of offense, suggesting Robert Fulton’s torpedo “to have the whole of their Navy destroyed by an invisible agent.” Cathcart argued that the United States “must act independent of every nation on earth and trust to God and the strength of our own arms for a happy result.” Cathcart got his wish when Congress voted to send naval power to Algiers in March, and the United States won a battle against Algiers several months later. The subsequent peace treaty ended tribute payments.²⁴ This is not to say that Cathcart singlehandedly caused this outcome, rather, that martial capitalist actions accorded with U.S. government decision-making.

Cathcart was just one of many Americans who combined economic profit and bellicosity overseas. U.S. citizens were increasingly involved, for example, in South America’s independence wars. Enterprising men took advantage of the wars as an opportunity for military adventure and financial profit. Many U.S. merchants were eager to eradicate Spain’s commercial policies, which included privileged contracts for Spanish commercial houses and onerous duties and restrictions on foreign vessels. Men like Philadelphia financier and slaveowner Stephen Girard invested fortunes in Spanish American independence, shipping arms and supplies in the hope of patriot profits and lucrative trading relationships, whereas others joined filibustering expeditions.²⁵

When Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda visited New York City in 1805, he had little trouble finding men to support a potentially profitable expedition to overthrow Spanish colonial rule. Participants had varying degrees of knowledge about the expedition, but all had martial capitalist motives. Samuel Ogden, a wealthy merchant, and William Stephens Smith, surveyor of the port of New York (and son-in-law of John Adams), were Miranda’s two biggest supporters. Ogden provided the merchant ship Leander and assumed $30,000 of debt outfitting it with military supplies, and Smith recruited roughly two hundred men to serve as the crew. These men rarely knew the destination but signed on for some combination of military adventure and financial betterment. Twenty-one-year-old Moses Smith, for example, had traveled with his sister from their family’s farm on Long Island to visit an uncle in Brooklyn, when he heard about job opportunities on a naval expedition. He claims to have been lured by the promise of “good pay and fine uniform, lands and a horse.”²⁶ Most of the investors had more knowledge and specifically sought free trade with what they hoped would be Spain’s former colonies. One of these investors was John Swartwout, a New York businessman and former assemblyman, who served with Aaron Burr as one of the largest shareholders of the Bank of the Manhattan and was allegedly involved in Burr’s concurrent expedition to conquer Spanish Texas. As federal marshal for the city, Swartwout protected Miranda’s supporters from criminal consequences. When Smith and Ogden were tried for organizing an expedition against a nation with whom the United States was at peace, Swartwout packed the jury with people who were sympathetic to Miranda’s cause, and Smith and Ogden were found not guilty.²⁷ Although Miranda’s expedition failed, it set a precedent for U.S. economic and military intervention in the region.

Five years after Miranda’s expedition, the future minister plenipotentiary to Mexico and secretary of war, Joel Roberts Poinsett, was appointed on a diplomatic mission to what are today the nations of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay to “attend to the commercial and other concerns of our citizens,” and to “explain the mutual advantages of a commerce with the United States.” During Poinsett’s travels to promote U.S. trade, he became involved in military conflict: When royalist troops from the Viceroyalty of Peru invaded Chile in early 1813, Poinsett assumed unauthorized command of a division of the Chilean army. Poinsett said that he intervened because American ships had been detained under the orders of the viceroy of Peru, who had nullified the free trade provisions of Chile’s new constitution. He wanted honor and profit for Americans; as he later claimed, he “could not wait tamely and see our flag insulted, our ships seized and our citizens loaded with irons.”²⁸

U.S. involvement increased throughout the 1810s as private citizens and state agents saw the opportunity for profit and power in the region’s wars for independence. They abetted revolutionaries and engaged in profiteering by providing military supplies, and pushed the U.S. trade agenda by aggressively lobbying for favorable trade arrangements and security. Baltimore shipping firm D’Arcy and Didier, for example, sold arms with the help of U.S. Consul to Valparaiso Henry Hill. The firm often purchased surplus arms at auction in the United States and when they shipped three thousand muskets to Valparaiso, Hill arranged with the patriot government for their sale to Chilean soldiers and citizens.²⁹ Other consuls took advantage of the unequal power dynamic that developed as a result of the United States’ supplying military provisions and political support to strong-arm favorable trade arrangements for U.S. merchants. For example, U.S. officials and merchants refused to accept Peru’s efforts to support its domestic manufacture of tucuyos, a type of woven plain cotton that often appeared similar to plain white cloth from the United States, by levying a prohibitive duty of 80 percent on white sheetings produced in the United States. In a letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs José Manuel de Pardo, U.S. Consul to Lima William Tudor made subtle threats about the consequences of this trade policy. He argued that the encouragement of tucuyos would drive American domestics out of the market, which would negatively impact Peruvian consumers because Peruvian manufacturers could not produce the type or the quantity of cloth that the United States could. Tudor accused Peruvians of “unmanly boasting,” and then later bragged that Peruvian consumers preferred American cloths to those from India or Britain. He complained that British cloth dominated the market only because of the discriminatory tariff policy, and that American manufacturers would better serve Peruvian consumers if the policy changed. To further pressure the minister, Tudor reminded him that half of all the foreign duties that Peru’s treasury received came from American trade, lest the minister forget Peru’s most important trading partner. When the government equalized the tariff on all foreign goods, tucuyo sales (which had dominated Peruvian markets since at least the early 1820s) dropped in comparison to American imports.³⁰

While Tudor coerced commercial arrangements in Lima, two men employed by the U.S. State Department in Mexico served as agents of martial capitalism by upholding Americans’ property rights and honor. James Smith Wilcocks, a wealthy Philadelphian who worked as U.S. consul to Mexico from 1822 to 1834, and James Wilkinson, a former army officer from Maryland who was U.S. envoy to Mexico from 1816 to 1825, embodied the contradictory aspects of martial capitalism. Both men supported aggressive American interests, but Wilcocks emphasized the honor and reputation aspect of martial capitalism—criticizing U.S. Minister to Mexico Anthony Butler for being a “disgrace to the office he now holds”—whereas Wilkinson favored militarism: Twenty years earlier he had used his status as an army officer and governor of Louisiana to help Aaron Burr organize an expedition to seize Spanish land in North America, and subsequently sold Burr out and placed New Orleans under martial law.³¹

Wilcocks’s and Wilkinson’s interests converged in protecting American economic interests. Wilcocks owned several mines in Mexico; Wilkinson was an agent for various land companies in Texas and hoped to become an empresario himself. Baltimore investor Dennis A. Smith employed both men to represent his claims to the Mexican government for lending money to the revolutionary cause. Smith had paid for the heavy artillery, munitions, construction supplies, and 18-gun brig for revolutionary Francisco Xavier Mina’s expedition in 1816, in the hopes of profiting from independence. Spanish forces executed Mina the following year, but after the Mexican independence struggle succeeded in 1821, Smith and others moved to capitalize on their investments by presenting their claims to the new Mexican government. They were not successful, but they were persistent, believing they were entitled to profit from Mexican independence. Wilcocks had more success protecting private property when he applied to Mexican officials to safely escort $200,000 worth of American property out of the city during the transition of power between Augustín Iturbide’s imperial government and his republican successors.³²

The diplomatic aggression and entitlement of officials like Wilkinson, Wilcocks, and Tudor had parallels among U.S. citizens abroad. For example, an American man named John Vernon was imprisoned in Mexico several times for his relations with a young woman whom he met during his travels in the country. Vernon first “eloped” with the woman without the consent of her family, who subsequently had Vernon arrested and put in jail. After posting bail, Vernon allegedly threatened to take his desired bride away by force. A town official and two soldiers found him carrying a pistol and apprehended him. Vernon admitted readily to possessing firearms but claimed not to realize they were illegal. He also claimed the woman’s family had misunderstood his intentions and had unjustly imprisoned him as revenge. Vernon accused Mexican officials of corruption and begged U.S. diplomats to secure him a fair trial in Mexico City, pleading that the longer he was in jail, the more money he lost on his store.³³ Vernon’s assumption of entitlement both to the woman and to a fair trial were emblematic of martial capitalism. He linked masculine aggression, economic profitability, and diplomatic favors with his rights as an American abroad.

Although some U.S. citizens and government agents worked to promote American economic interests with aggressive foreign relations, others did so through scientific ventures. Exploration was always important for U.S. economic interests, but it intensified in the late 1830s, when the term manifest destiny received its rhetorical framing, Indian “removal” began in earnest, and the government sponsored continental and oceanic surveys. Knowledge made possible U.S. military security and economic conquest, and two major initiatives were directly linked to martial capitalism: a reconnaissance of territory between and beyond the Missouri and Mississippi for settlement and science, and an extensive survey of the Pacific to aid American business, particularly the whaling industry.³⁴

The first initiative was part of a broader undertaking to update maps of the Louisiana Purchase territory and assemble intelligence for a chain of military forts across the continent to protect white settlement. The U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, led by Joseph N. Nicollet and assisted by John C. Frémont, set out to map this area in 1838. Despite long-standing resistance to military expenditures, there was a general enthusiasm for, and romanticization of, exploratory expeditions, and the corps received patriotic support. The U.S military had actually already done much to make possible exploratory expeditions. On the corps’ journey west to create a hydrographical map of the Upper Mississippi River Basin, Frémont noted that it seemed as if “an invisible hand smoothed and prepared our way.”³⁵ This “invisible hand” (quite different from the “invisible hand” associated with Adam Smith’s classical economic theories) was the military; the “smoothing” was violence against Native Americans (such as the Black Hawk War) in the service of economic development. Combined, the work of the U.S. military and Army Corps of Topographical Engineers helped fulfill the economic promises of Indian removal by making Native lands more familiar to white Americans.

A maritime expedition overseen by the navy and war departments, known as the United States Exploring Expedition (Ex. Ex.), sailed from Virginia soon after the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers set out to map the West. Although the Ex. Ex. was considered a scientific expedition, and its organizers consulted learned societies to determine the expedition’s scientific objectives, it was also martial and economic. Science was inseparable from chauvinism and the economy. Chief promoter Jeremiah Reynold wanted “national glory,” and a main goal of the expedition was to make the Pacific, an integral arena for expanding martial capitalism, a “knowable commercial space safe for the nation’s maritime commerce.” Tellingly, the expedition employed military stores and a sloop of war.³⁶

In addition to mapping the unfamiliar parts of the Pacific and South Sea, the expedition conducted a survey of the Fiji Islands, where Americans had begun traveling in the early 1800s for sandalwood and bêche-de-mer. The islands remained a maritime wilderness because of dangerous reefs and a supposedly cannibalistic population, and the difficulty doing business in the area—shipwrecks and massacres—was a major reason for the expedition. Just as scientific “discovery” was important, so were the major profits American merchants could make selling sea cucumbers as a luxury product to the Chinese.³⁷

When the Ex. Ex. arrived in Fiji in May 1840, they were helped by a former Nantucket sailor named David Whippy, who had been living in Fiji since being shipwrecked over fifteen years prior and was now serving as a liaison for American merchants. Historian Nancy Shoemaker analyzes Whippy as an embodiment of American desires for respectability, but he also can be described through the lens of martial capitalism, which explains both his valuing of respectability and honorable reputation, as well as his entrepreneurial ventures, his commercial coercion, and exploitation of labor. Commander Charles Wilkes relied on Whippy as an interpreter, mediator, and advisor on local affairs. The expedition’s objective was to assert sovereignty over Fijian commerce through both diplomacy and scientific survey, yet it was impossible to fully control oceanic territory. When the Ex. Ex. encountered resistance from Fijians, it resorted to force. As retribution for two American deaths, Commander Charles Wilkes, in accordance with notions of honor and vengeance, ordered one of his lieutenants to kill all Fijian men capable of providing armed resistance. Eighty Fijians died and two villages were destroyed.³⁸ When the expedition concluded in 1842, the Navy court-martialed Wilkes for his aggressive and reckless conduct. He was acquitted of most allegations, except for the illegal punishment of some of his subordinates.

The expedition became known for both Wilkes’s controversial behavior and the sixty thousand specimens it collected in the service of American science. Its results, however, were martial and capitalistic. Maritime knowledge improved global trade, and Wilkes’s authorization of the massacre of almost one hundred Fijians ultimately facilitated American business in the South Pacific by instilling fear of American militarism among locals.³⁹ The expedition cemented the relationship among violence, honor, and business.

The subtleties of this relationship became more overt over time. Although the United States did not officially declare war between 1812 and 1846, its military engagements became increasingly violent and expensive. Indian removal, for example, began as an ad hoc series of “voluntary” emigrations during the 1820s, to make coveted land available for gold mining and cotton plantations. On March 28, 1830, Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act (An Act to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi), formally shifting U.S. policy from one of “civilization” and assimilation to extermination.⁴⁰ Historians have depicted the tragedies of removal as the results of settler colonialism, Jackson’s vengeance, and bureaucratic mismanagement.⁴¹ Emilie Connolly has recently linked removal to the federal government’s practice of fiduciary colonialism, describing “the critical role of governments in claiming Indigenous homelands and engineering the speculative markets that spun out from the treaty process.”⁴² Connolly’s analysis of Native displacement accords well with that of Claudio Saunt, who argues that removal was not inevitable; rather, white greed, in conjunction with government planning, overpowered both opposition to Jackson’s Removal Act, and any humanitarian concern for removal as a process.

Martial capitalism lends even more precision to our understanding of the militarization of Native displacement. What the Cherokee people would refer to as “the Trail of Tears” had roots in capitalist greed and patronizing pretensions to humanitarianism.⁴³ The policy and subsequent violence of removal was the result of acquisitiveness on the part of white planters and investors, state officials’ permission for violence, and the federal government’s willingness to use force. ⁴⁴ These individuals operated in a culture of racialized, masculinized aggression, which presented at times as paternal honor and at other times like business acumen. Martial capitalism explains how the goals and strategies of speculators like Eli Shorter and J. D. Beers, who engaged in fraud and coercion to acquire Creek lands for cotton planting, intersected with those of U.S. agent William Ward, who ignored hundreds of Choctaw appeals to remain on their lands. In the United States, economic opportunity was tied to land, and many whites believed that they were the fittest occupants of that land and that violence was necessary, or even honorable. The sum total of these individuals’ actions was mass deportation, supervised by the U.S. army and perpetrated by investors, who used intimidation tactics and militia who wielded guns.

In some cases, war facilitated this deportation. For example, the Black Hawk War began when the governor of Illinois used militia against the Sauk individuals Indians who attempted to reclaim their land after it had been settled by white Americans. About two hundred Sauk died and the remainder gave up their land to the U.S. government.⁴⁵ A much larger war occurred in Florida, where Seminoles were determined to remain on their land after the United States signed an 1832 treaty that required them to move west of the Mississippi over the following three years. ⁴⁶ In 1835, a group of Seminoles ambushed the U.S. soldiers who were sent to “remove” them and, over the following year, launched attacks throughout the region. The Seminoles effectively interfered with white Americans’ profits in the territory. Aspiring planters wanted their land; many had moved to Florida specifically because the average yield of Sea Isle Cotton (whose market price was about twice that of short staple) was six hundred pounds per acre in Florida, versus South Carolina’s three hundred.⁴⁷ Even more than in South Carolina, planters’ well-being was tied to cotton. Cotton functioned as cash, collateral, and credit, which meant that when cotton prices plummeted in 1837, planters needed to produce ever greater amounts to stay financially solvent. The renewal of “hostilities” with Seminole people Indians made this impossible.⁴⁸ After several years failing to defeat the Seminoles, the commander of U.S. troops declared the war over; at the same time, Congress passed a law for the “armed occupation” of Florida by settlers who would receive federal money to defend their land. Although the United States struggled militarily against the Seminoles, this armed capitalism was ultimately successful. By the end of the Third Seminole War a decade later (initiated by armed white settlers), only three hundred Natives remained in Southwest Florida, slavery expanded in middle Florida, and the state became a profitable cotton exporter.⁴⁹

In 1846, when the United States finally formally declared war to promote racial, economic, and territorial ambitions, the “martial” aspect of political economy gave way to more overt militarism. However, the structures of power and economic inequality of the previous decades remained in place.⁵⁰ Martial capitalism existed alongside agrarian, merchant, and emerging industrial capitalism and laid the foundation for other forms of coercive, gendered capitalism to predominate following the Civil War into the twentieth century. As corporate capitalism, for example, prevailed, martial capitalism never went away. Its manly aggression and exploitation underpin the foundations of twentieth and twenty-first century capitalism in the United States.

Political economies change over time, across space, and among different populations; capitalism cannot and could not be universalized. For this reason, we need as much specificity as possible for different eras, regions, and populations. Martial capitalism describes the masculinized, honor-bound, and coercive features of the U.S. political economy from the nation’s founding through the antebellum era, and brings us closer to understanding capitalism’s historical nuances.