Book Review

Canada and the United States

This a study of New York's upper class in the second half of the nineteenth century. This metropolitan establishment was at first commercially and then industrially and financially based and expanded to exert hegemony over politics, philanthropy, and culture. At the turn of the century, by dint of its economic and political power, it wielded virtually national leadership. Sven Beckert explores the consolidation, largely through control of capital, of New York's upper class, and, given its commanding position in this quintessentially capitalist and bourgeois nation, seeks to illuminate the emergence of modern America through tracing the trajectory of this enclave.	1
In a historiographical era predominantly devoted to microtopicality, this is a bold and welcome venture. Beckert also departs from the current trend in historiography by returning to structural history (the making of an upper class) instead of featuring cultural analysis. As an exploration in political economy, his book is a methodological reversion to an earlier mode of scholarship. Similarly its concern with the rich and the powerful, rather than the marginalized and their struggle for agency, harks back to older historical concerns. Beckert's sympathies, however, which lie with the proletarianized workers, are more current.	2
Beckert deftly traces the consolidation of the enclave, properly labeled a bourgeois archetype. Elites in a nation lacking feudal traditions and almost universally proclaiming middle-class values would epitomize the bourgeois outlook. He exhaustively traces its economic rise and cohesion and superbly delineates the interaction between its economic interests and its political defense of these interests. The discussions of laissez-faire and antilabor politics and the political interaction between upper-class New Yorkers and the South are excellent, and other examples of exceptional analysis and research could easily be summoned. As a study in political economy, there is no superior rendering of Gotham's haute bourgeoisie.	3
Beckert falters only at the most elevated levels of historical endeavor. His book is a major contribution to an important topic (urban upper classes), but it does not reconfigure the field (elite studies). The interpretation of upper-class formation, consolidation, and cohesion is derivative. The notion that urban elites first established economic hegemony, added political functions to fortify their business base, and subsequently acquired positions of social and cultural leadership—thus expanding from an economic elite into an upper class—was advanced twenty years ago.	4
Beckert might have made some theoretical contribution by comparing other urban elites. Charleston, South Carolina, had an elite mostly in foreign trade and agriculture, Chicago chiefly in industry, banking, and retail trade, and Boston in foreign commerce, industry, and banking. Did the establishments in these cities follow the same trajectory as in New York? If not, in what ways did they differ and what caused these differences? An attempt at comparative typology may have yielded insights into the rise and decline, the cohesion and continuity of elites both on the conceptual level and with respect to New York and even on the bourgeois and patrician components in American upper classes. While enclaves were essentially bourgeois, they also had patrician elements: conspicuous display, ascriptive features such as family ties and endogamous marriage, and the assumption of setting standards of etiquette and style in culture and society. Beckert pays some attention to these dimensions of elite behavior but neglects to mention that these are aristocratic rather than bourgeois in origin and nature.	. . .