The Monied Metropolis
New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896

This book, first published in 2001, is a comprehensive history of nineteenth-century New York City's powerful economic elite.

Sven Beckert (Author)

9780521524100, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 3 February 2003

516 pages, 47 b/w illus. 4 maps
22.2 x 15.3 x 3.1 cm, 0.67 kg

'… a significant contribution to the study of the elite, corporate power and political economy, and urban history.' Business History

This book, first published in 2001, is a comprehensive history of the most powerful group in the nineteenth-century United States: New York City's economic elite. This small and diverse group of Americans accumulated unprecedented economic, social, and political power, and decisively put their mark on the age. Professor Beckert explores how capital-owning New Yorkers overcame their distinct antebellum identities to forge dense social networks, create powerful social institutions, and articulate an increasingly coherent view of the world and their place within it. Actively engaging in a rapidly changing economic, social, and political environment, these merchants, industrialists, bankers, and professionals metamorphosed into a social class. In the process, these upper-class New Yorkers put their stamp on the major political conflicts of the day - ranging from the Civil War to municipal elections. Employing the methods of social history, The Monied Metropolis explores the big issues of nineteenth-century social change.

Introduction
Part I. Manners, Fortunes, Politics: 1. Accumulating capital
2. Negotiating the New Metropolis
3. The politics of capital
Part II. Reluctant Revolutionaries: 4. Bourgeois New Yorkers go to war
5. The spoils of victory
6. Reconstructing New York
Part III: 7. Democracy in the Age of Capital
8. A Bourgeois world
9. The rights of labor, the rights of property
10. The power of capital and the crisis of legitimacy
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Urban communities [JFSG], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]