After the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution was also in full swing as a new form of capitalism took hold and the American economy leaped forward. The country also experienced sudden urbanization as immigrants from Europe and Americans flocked to the cities from the farms in search of better employment. At the same time, large corporations, with sophisticated Wall Street financing, were able to amass great wealth, often by using anti-completive means to eliminate competitors. Finance capitalism also brought a rash of social ills including slums, dangerous foods and drugs, dangerous workplaces, and increasing poverty as workers were forced to yield to the low wages offered by corporate employers. In response to the concentrated power held by private corporations, Progressive reforms urged countervailing power that was needed in the form of the federal government. Federal legislation was passed to control monopolies, monitor unfair railroad rates, and regulate tainted foods and meats among other forms of new regulation, as the federal government took on a new role of policing markets in addition to supporting economic prosperity.

The North Atlantic is best considered as an increasingly integrated economic and social region during the late nineteenth century, and this approach helps to clarify Ireland’s geopolitical place during the ideologically tumultuous 1880s. Using this framework, this chapter explores the place of Henry George and of the Irish Land War in this fractious period, detailing how technological and political developments reshaped long-standing assumptions. It explains how the Land War became an international event, with significance extending far beyond Ireland itself. The chapter also recounts George’s intellectual biography, setting the scene for the development of his most famous work, Progress and Poverty. The reaction to this book is assessed, particularly the most common arguments made by critics, and the ways in which these critiques developed commonalities across the political spectrum.

Chapter one maps out a national conversation about poor white southerners that took shape in the pages of late nineteenth-century literary magazines. In this section, I argue that nonfiction essays in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras launched a lively debate about poor white southerners’ roles in the nation that continued in the dialect fiction tales published by the august and influential Atlantic group of magazines during the 1880s and 1890s.I analyze how classist portrayals of poor white southern identity shaped the work of local colorists and plantation fiction writers in order to set the backdrop for how Charles Chesnutt pioneered literary forms capable of representing poor white characters in new ways. Chesnutt adapts the frame narrative structure—the hallmark of plantation stories—with an eye toward challenging the denigrating representations of poor white southerners promulgated by writers including Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page.

Black Americans sing of their hope in the promise of Reconstruction, which is eventually betrayed as the white North and South sing their way into the “romance of reunion.” The Indigenous peoples to the west face a US government hostile to their songs and dances, Mexican vaqueros are immortalized in corridos, Chinese and Irish railroad workers are pitted against each other in minstrel songs, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduce the spiritual to the world (even as the Ku Klux Klan churns out its earliest sheet music). Woman suffragists and former abolitionists join hands in song; and as the country descends into the corrupt mire of a Gilded Age, Grange farmers take on the monopolies of railroad magnates and “robber barons” in songs that ring into the present century. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, the executed Molly Maguires are memorialized in powerful balladry, and the Knights of Labor provide the musical soundtrack to the greatest fight between labor and capital that the country has yet seen.

This chapter explores Robert Herrick’s Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905) and its distinctive elements within the larger emergence and development of the American business novel genre at the turn of the twentieth century. Herrick’s novel uses Chicago – a city representative of the country’s emerging economic growth and social disparities – as a canvas to chronicle the rise of its archetypal businessman, the influence of its powerful business and political elites, and the capitalist ideology that sustained them, while at the same time questioning the lack of social responsibility in a market-driven economy. The chapter traces how Herrick, as a traditionalist and reserved writer from New England, ventured into the business novel genre to ingeniously depict in Memoirs a psychological portrait of a businessman, which is both compelling and troubling, and an authentic representation of Chicago’s economic landscape filled with opportunity and excesses. The tropes of the personal search for economic improvement and the desire for business success explored in Herrick’s novel remain as topical today as when they were first conceived.

The American railroad circus during the Gilded Age (1865–1900) and the Progressive Era (1900–1920) experienced a vibrant and hugely successful golden age. During that time of tremendous national growth, the circus industry reached its highest number of touring companies, boasted the largest number and variety of acts, and made the industry’s most significant number of advancements in technology and management. It connected urban and rural areas, rich and poor, and national and international audiences of all colours and races. However, this was the height of the Jim Crow era in which racial minorities, especially African Americans, experienced legal forms of discrimination and brutal violence. All aspects of American life were affected by strict racial limitations as citizenship was irrevocably linked to whiteness. This chapter argues that the American railroad circus of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era embodied the budding imperialistic spirit of the nation and reflected, supported, and challenged the race norms of the age. It reveals how African Americans, a large American minority racial group, used the circus to advance their own careers and goals in an everchanging cultural landscape. These challenges often took the forms of economic and cultural independence.

In Chapter 7, I review my key arguments and revisit the comparison of reform-era China to America’s Gilded Age using historical data on reported corruption to highlight their similarities and differences. Finally, I explore the implications of this book for big questions in Chinese political economy and in corruption and capitalism more broadly.

Chapter 1 examines the court-based system of employee injury law that existed in the United States prior to the introduction of workers’ compensation in the 1910s. The purpose of this examination is to set up the rest of the book’s treatment of compensation laws. The chapter discusses the deficits and injustice of that system, but places particular emphasis on how this prior system included a wide range of meanings for injury and ways that injured people could make justice claims. The chapter also draws on philosopher Nancy Fraser’s writing to argue that a full treatment of injury requires us to have a multifaceted concept of justice concerned with issues of inequality and poverty but also respect and human dignity.

This chapter examines black women’s increased participation in the sex trade in the aftermath of the Civil War. During the 1860s, thousands of black women, children, and men arrived in Baltimore as refugees from war and enslavement. As police increasingly pushed brothels out of “respectable” neighborhoods, black Baltimoreans who faced limited housing prospects found themselves occupying the same neighborhoods as sex establishments. As the overlap between brothel districts and black neighborhoods grew, black women entered the indoor sex trade in larger numbers and began to remake it to suit their needs and preferences. Although selling sex was an important part of personal economies of makeshifts for black sex workers, sex work fueled long-standing racial stereotypes about black women’s libidinousness and black men’s unfitness as patriarchs. Middle-class black Baltimoreans who founded the city’s Colored Law and Order League attempted to resist these stereotypes by publicizing their efforts to clean up their neighborhoods, but they failed to sway the city’s white politicians, who used the alleged “disorder” of black residential enclaves to argue for racial segregation of housing.

Robert Penn Warren produced in the early 1950s a classic portrait of New Orleans during the 1860s, particularly during its occupation by Union troops. The novel is subtly preoccupied by the events of its own time, as Warren addressed them explicitly in other texts composed while this novel was in process. The novel engages the long-established tradition of the tragic mulatress through a main character who had grown up in Kentucky with the assumption that she was white but discovered, upon her father’s death, that she is black and will be sold at auction in New Orleans; the novel then follows her experiences through the Federal occupation of the city and into Reconstruction and The Gilded Age, each step of the way conjuring in vivid detail its historical setting and the complex persistence of racism even in those who wouldpresume to fight hard against it.