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Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–18981
by Richard Schneirov, Indiana State University
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There was once a time in the not too recent past when scholarly discussion and debate over periodization was central to the task of writing and thinking about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and Samuel P. Hays applied versions of modernization theory to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce what came to be known as the "organizational synthesis." A competing periodization centered on the rise of the large business corporation appeared in works by Martin Sklar, James Weinstein, and James Livingston.2 Since the 1970s, however, the new social and cultural history has introduced a multitude of new fields and perspectives. By the 1980s, the perceived fragmentation of history had generated an appeal for "synthesis." In 1986 Thomas Bender called for new and intelligible narrative plots that would transcend "recent scholarship with its intensive specialization, fragmentation, and preoccupation with groups." Yet, since then, occasional attempts to synthesize have been stillborn, and for the Gilded Age as well as for the Progressive Era the search for synthesis seems to have reached a cul-de-sac with no exit in sight.3 |
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This essay does not attempt to bring unity and coherence to the proliferating new histories and to create out of them a synthesis of the late nineteenth century or Gilded Age. Such an endeavor may well be Sisyphean. The new perspectives, topics, and exploding information that have been produced in the past three decades are too heterogeneous and many of the monographs of these new histories too specialized to be susceptible to "synthesis." In any case, periodization does not depend on synthesizing all the work in the field of history into a single comprehensive narrative. Rather, it involves creating a theoretically based framework in narrative form delimited by time boundaries. Such a framework must make enough sense to historians working in a variety of sub-fields and perspectives to generate questions and hypotheses of common interest, allowing them to speak to one another across the boundaries of their scholarship in the service of this larger paradigm.4 |
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This essay offers some thoughts and suggestions relevant to constructing a historical paradigm or periodization for the Gilded Age. It begins with a discussion of the need for a more rigorous periodization of this period and why the last major attempt to periodize late-nineteenth-century American society using modernization theory was flawed. After considering the limits of more recent approaches, the essay proceeds to discuss the much-debated antebellum transition to capitalism, examining the historiography positing the existence of a pre-capitalist household economy and the more recent work arguing for a "market revolution." It then argues for using Karl Marx's concept of simple commodity production, a non-capitalist mode of production lacking both capital accumulation and the social relations of capitalism, to describe the small family commercial farms on which most white Americans worked and lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. The essay proceeds to examine recent work providing evidence supporting that contention and detailing how simple commodity production with its close interrelations to slavery, household manufacturing, and emergent capitalist enterprise dissolved, giving way to a political economy of capital accumulation by the early 1870s. |
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