This article begins by examining the historiography of Shanxi piaohao and asking how modernist financial discourse gradually took shape over the past century. It then counters the persistent modernist discourse and its anachronistic application to the history of piaohao and the north Chinese interior from two aspects. First, how piaohao managed to build an empire-wide financial network and facilitated flows of capital and goods during the nineteenth century. Second, how family-centered capitalist and non-capitalist histories countered piaohao's unrealized path to modern Western-style banking. This article challenges the perceived universalism of the Western European economy and adopts a Braudelian emphasis on an essential feature of the history of capitalism in a global context—that is, capitalism's unlimited flexibility and capacity for change and adaptation, as seen throughout the history of the Shanxi merchants and piaohao firms, not confined to the singular future of transformation into modern Western-style banks.

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s essay “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” attempts to provide more structure to the field known as the new history of capitalism (NHOC) by defining martial capitalism as a new variant. In contrast, this essay asserts that the lack of definitional precision within the NHOC is not a bug, but rather one of its key features. To define capitalism would be to delimit where it was and was not present historically. If part of the argument of the NHOC is that capitalism pervaded—indeed infected—all aspects of American life, then defining the term would be self-defeating. In the end, martial capitalism suffers from the same shortcomings of the NHOC more generally, in that it places all “warlike activities” of the state under the undefined umbrella of something vaguely called “capitalism.”

This essay traces the diffusion of pigs and the introduction of new practices of pig husbandry in East Asia and the Pacific, with particular attention to the cases of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Japan. Countering the trend in animal history to emphasize environmental and genetic factors, it demonstrates that discourses of property, sovereignty, freedom, and slavery, brought to the region with modern imperialism, played a decisive role in shaping relationships between people and domesticated animals. The essay concludes that global diffusion of capitalist forms of animal husbandry depended on a process of disembedding animals from earlier social roles. This process took different forms in different places. It was in part ecological and in part economic, but must be understood first in the context of the movement of political ideas.

In the early twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States. Operating before the rise of mechanically reproduced entertainment, its centralized booking offices moved tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of stages to an audience of millions. Designed to gather and analyze data about both audiences and performers, these offices created a complex informational economy that defined the genre—an internal market that sought to transform culture into a commodity. By reconstructing the concrete details of these business practices, it is possible to develop a new understanding of both the success of the vaudeville industry and its influence on the evolution of American mass culture.

This article investigates the history of the Progressive Era effort to develop new techniques and technologies of control over American business and corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A revolution in Progressive economic regulation was rooted in the intellectual work of the so-called institutional economists—particularly in the context of what economists and lawyers like Richard Ely, John Commons, and Walton Hamilton ultimately talked about as the movement for the “social control” of business, with distinct emphasis on the legal and regulatory “foundations” of modern capitalism. With increased attention to dynamics rather than statics, the real social economy rather than ideal rational actors, and historical and institutional rather than theoretical and abstract renderings of business, industry, and the market, the institutionalists were directly concerned with problems of control, particularly those mechanisms of control available through law, politics, the state, and new technologies of legislative and administrative regulation.

The map of the American petroleum industry shifted rapidly from the Northeast to the Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century when spectacular gushers were struck first in Texas and soon in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The flood of small and mid-size oil producers broke the hold that the Standard Oil Company had for decades held on the industry. Competition defeated monopoly. Or so the conventional story goes. This article offers a more complicated narrative by focusing on conflicts between Standard Oil and independent producers in the booming towns of southeast Kansas in 1904 and 1905. In those years, John D. Rockefeller's firm established a monopoly through technologies of distribution and distillation and the production of scientific knowledge and opaque classifications of commodities. Oil producers revolted. A reform movement turned to the rhetoric and policy ideas of Populism as it sought to use state power to challenge the stranglehold of the “octopus.” This article explores the previously unrecognized significance of this movement by showing how the Kansas oil war contributed to the breakup of Standard Oil by the Supreme Court in 1911 and constituted one of the bottom-up sources for the reconstruction of American capitalism.

The financial crisis of 2008 brought with it a renewed interest in the study of capitalism across disciplines. While historians have since led the way with writings on commodities, labor, finance, and institutions, these have been largely conveyed from the Euro-American perspective without necessarily probing other values, parameters, and conditions beyond western political economy that have shaped business over time. This article suggests that to assess the benefits and limits of the global capitalist experience, we must prioritize unconventional subjects, sources, and styles in how we frame research questions, analyze evidence, and cast narratives. Such an endeavor is especially timely given the growing influence of regional markets around the world and the increasing prominence of computational tools to generate and analyze novel datasets.

In light of the emergent “history of capitalism” field in Euro-American history, this article reviews and critically situates how the category “capitalism” has been debated within the historiographies of China and South Asia. In discussions paralleling European historiography, Sinologists and Indologists explored whether the “prime mover” of capitalism was changes in production or in circulation. The example of South Asian studies shows how, from the 1960s through the 1980s, the dominant production-centered approach—drawing upon Marxist theory—produced stories of economic “failure” in Asia. The example of Chinese history since the 1990s points to the resurgence of a Smithian circulation-centered approach that challenges the Eurocentric story of failure. Each of these approaches emerged out of distinct eras of capital accumulation in the twentieth century: mid-century state-supported industrialization and late-century deregulated globalization. The tension between these approaches points towards a more integrative reinterpretation that sees the core dynamics of capitalism as a cyclical process of “capital accumulation,” one that integrates both production and circulation-centered approaches and also challenges Eurocentric histories of capitalism. This article's conclusion provides speculative thoughts on writing the histories of capitalism for China and South Asia today.