Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 492 pp. $35.00 cloth; $22.00 paper.

Extract

When New York's World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, the reverberations of the attack highlighted the city's enormous importance to the nation's economic, political, cultural, and social life. How New York City came to function as both the symbolic and actual “capitol” of American capital is a story that has been researched and written about from many different angles. Good history always contains one or both of two elements: either a corrective to accepted historical knowledge or the filling of a void in the historical record. Sven Beckert attempts both elements and succeeds. Beckert fills the historical void with a comprehensive analysis of the formation of a diverse urban merchant and industrial sector into a class, the bourgeoisie of the title. His goal is to provide “an adequate study of the political attitudes of northern industrialists” (11). He provides his corrective by showing how this class coalesced around social and cultural issues, avoiding a purely economic explanation. While steering clear of American exceptionalism, Beckert illustrates what is unique in New York's bourgeois class formation and explains its vital role in the history of the city and of the nation.