In Chapter 3, I address religion as a moral foundation for capitalism by discussing the lives and writings of Max Weber and R. H. Tawney. Classical economists after J. S. Mill limited the motivations of economic man to narrow self-interest and increased the mathematical formalism of their discipline, which tied their hands in arguing for capitalism. I begin by discussing the narrowing of arguments for capitalism in the nineteenth century by classical economists and the resistance to this narrowing by historical economists in Germany. Next, I discuss Max Weber and his broad critique of capitalism which included important social and moral issues as well as economic considerations. Given their opposing views, I contrast Weber’s critique of capitalism with that of Karl Marx. I then discuss the British economist R. H. Tawney and his critique of capitalism as a devout Christian on the political left. Tawney’s attempts to address the social injustices of the British industrial revolution led him to support the British Labour Party, but he rejected Marx’s anti-religious views and his emphasis on class division. This sets up a discussion of the role of religion in the development of capitalism based on Weber and Tawney’s two seminal works.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, members of an established, English-speaking middle class built a new category of work for themselves. This book uses US, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand occupation statistics, archives, professional journals, and newspapers to understand what the history of nursing, accountancy, teaching, medicine, law, engineering, journalism, and social work can tell us about class in the ‘long twentieth century’. This chapter gives a historical and theoretical introduction to the rise of the professional class as a distinctly transnational event. The Anglo world is not a matter of comparative ‘case studies’, but a network of English-speaking communities that were regionally distinctive but operated as part of a shared cultural and economic world. It was a world built on Indigenous dispossession. Settlers brought their moral frameworks to bear on the ‘civilizing’ that they believed they needed. The virtues that they built into each profession, such as duty, probity, and charity, were performed as real, embodied work in every settlement. Their morality was made material and invested for social and economic profit. They became virtue capitalists.