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A new class of “merchant clerks” appeared on the historical stage in the middle of the nineteenth century, collectively charged with administering the most important production project in America’s emerging capitalist economy, production of the market. In so doing, they manned a labor-intensive regime of writing operations and accounting procedures that transposed a general miscellany of goods into standard sets of commensurable values, re-inventing trade as a far more universal and abstract grid of relations than anything previously known in the marketplaces and seasonal fairs of older systems of exchange. At the same time, these ambitious young men were no less devoted to producing a new version of selfhood as well, one that matched the mobility and mutability so essential to the commodity form. Crossing the thresholds that divided farm and metropolis, homestead and boarding house, and, most significantly, growing things and selling them, they redefined the relationship between “Mammon and Manhood,” and personified that most evocative of modern keywords, human capital.

This transnational history explores how postwar fishing changed from a coastal, in-shore activity into a global industry. Fueled by the new technologies developed during the war and by government subsidies, nations went fishing on an industrial scale. As Cold War policies hardened, fishing became a territorial claim in the oceans, and many nations, including Japan, the Soviets, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and a host of Eastern European states industrialized their fisheries. Governments provided subsidies to modernize moving fishing from salting to freezing and the creation of new fish forms. Post-war trade agreements linked Icelandic cod and Japanese tuna; as imports of both increased, fishermen in New England and Southern California were priced out of their domestic markets. The massive explosion in fishing power created pressure for nations to expand their territorial limits in the 1970s, to regulate foreign fishing in their waters. The expansion of fisheries in the Pacific during the Cold War stimulated the globalization of fishing and the creation of international fisheries management. While most histories of fishing deal with the primacy of the Atlantic, this book looks at the post-war movement of boats from the Pacific into the Atlantic.

Bankers and Empire reconstructs the history of the expansion of Wall Street’s banking houses and financial institutions (including the precursors to Citigroup and JPMorganChase) into the Caribbean region (including Haiti, Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico) during a period stretching from the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression. The period represents an initial, exploratory era of the internationalization of US banking, and the Caribbean region was Wall Street’s laboratory for foreign expansion. As such, the period was marked by experimentation in the organizational and managerial apparatus of foreign banking, challenges to the legal orders governing the regulation of international trade and finance, and the development and training of a first cohort of international managers and bank officers. In addition, Bankers and Empire demonstrates that this history was as much one of race and culture as it was of economics and money: the putatively financial concerns of Wall Street were embedded in and understood through racist discourses and ideas of racial difference. The book argues that the history of US imperialism, Wall Street’s internationalization, and the development of finance capitalism was braided through the history of racial capitalism. Finally, while the early twentieth century history of Wall Street’s internationalization rode a euphoric wave of US nationalism and expansionism, in reality it was a period marked by its repeated failures. Corruption, military interventions and occupations, financial and economic crises, and Caribbean resistance to imperialism put a brake on Wall Street’s ambitions.

Examines rising alarm over waste of natural resources, and its use by Theodore Roosevelt and his administration to further objectives of conservation and an American form of empire. These objectives encompassed both preservationist and utilitarian approaches, centered on efficiency, but interpreting efficiency in social and political rather than economic terms. These policies revealed an emerging idea of environmental “habitability” that presaged modern interest in sustainability. The suite of policies closely tracked a developing geopolitical worldview, c. 1898-1910. Anxieties over resource shortage were stimulated by acquisition of a formal colonial empire, and the concurrent emergence of the United States as a world power. Connects this awareness to international fears over European powers’ impact upon the non-western world, and concerns over international competition for resource dominance. Documents work by Gifford Pinchot and other government officials, politicians and conservation minded-reformers to curb and/or rationalize resource use. Deals with forests, waterways and irrigation, fossil fuels, soils and rural problems, national parks and other “preservationist” initiatives, and public health. Shows the relationship between this conservationist agenda and similar concerns in other countries. Advances the idea of settler colonialism within an Anglo-Saxon racial hegemony as foundational to Roosevelt’s response to the perceived crisis. Examines contradictions within Progressive conservation over intergenerational equity and over the international outlook that conservationists advocated. Traces the post-1910 attenuation of the conservationist agenda resulting from internal politics conflicts, economic demands within a consumer oriented market system, and external events, especially World War I.

Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a coterie of fire ants came ashore from South American ships docked in Mobile, Alabama. Fanning out across the region, the fire ants invaded the South, damaging crops, harassing game animals, and hindering harvesting methods. Responding to a collective call from southerners to eliminate these invasive pests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture developed a campaign that not only failed to eradicate the fire ants but left a wake of dead wildlife, sickened cattle, and public protest. With political intrigue, environmental tragedy, and such figures as Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson, this book presents a perceptive tale of changing social attitudes and scientific practices. Tracing the political and scientific eradication campaigns, this study uses the saga as a means to consider twentieth-century American concepts of nature and environmental stewardship. In telling the story, the book explores how human concepts of nature evolve and how these ideas affect the natural and social worlds.

The Nature of the Future examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. The book shows that these improvers saw profit and agricultural development not only as a goal but also as the underlying purpose of the natural world. However, their sense of the natural future was not unified—improvement began as a developmental tool for large landholders but its meanings split and fragmented as wealthy urbanites, middling farmers, and agrarian radical tenants took hold of improving institutions. This disparate group was bound together by a commercial network of warehouses, nurseries, printers, and manufacturers who acted as experts and focused improving attention more and more upon saleable goods. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, improvers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession, where theories of value were contested. Improving networks laid the groundwork both for later industrial agriculture and organic “alternative” agriculture.

The rapid growth of the American environmental movement in recent decades obscures the fact that long before the first Earth Day and the passage of the Endangered Species Act, naturalists and concerned citizens recognized—and worried about—the problem of human-caused extinction. This book shows that the threat of species loss has haunted Americans since the early days of the republic. From the time of Thomas Jefferson through the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir, the book shows how Americans came to understand that it was not only possible for entire species to die out, but that humans themselves could be responsible for their extinction. With the destruction of the passenger pigeon and the precipitous decline of the bison, professional scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike began to understand that even very common species were not safe from the juggernaut of modern, industrial society. That realization spawned public education and legislative campaigns that laid the foundation for the modern environmental movement and the preservation of such iconic creatures as the bald eagle, the California condor, and the whooping crane.

This book is an account of that most generic and underappreciated site in American commerce and industry: the warehouse. It traces the progression from the nineteenth century's bonded warehouses to today's foreign-trade zones, enclaves of warehouses and factories where goods can be simultaneously on US soil and off US customs territory. These zones--nearly 800 of which are scattered across the country, and which constitute a significant if little-known subset of the 3,000 that dot the world--anchor the book because they are emblematic of why warehouses have begun to supplant factories in the age of Amazon and Walmart. Circulation is so crucial to the logistics of how and where goods are made that it is increasingly inseparable from production, to the point that warehouses are now some of the most pivotal spaces of global capitalism. Drawing from cultural geography, cultural history, and political economy, Out of Stock demonstrates the centrality of warehouses for corporations, workers, cities, and empires.

The Profit of the Earth is a new history of American agricultural development, characterizing crop seeds as deep time technologies transformed by millennia of human intervention. While the contemporary United States is a patchwork of large-scale monocultures, the book explores unrealized alternatives, from a Midwestern prairie harvested for production of botanic medicines to an American South populated by smallholders cultivating tea. Understanding why these futures were unrealized, and at what cost, conjures the histories of diverse people, plants, and knowledge on the move. Weaving together the lives of German and Russian immigrant farmers, British colonial officers, prairie plant collectors, and Ohio pharmacists, the book explores how institutionalized research and development represented and transformed diverse local knowledge of plants and their cultivation. Fullilove recasts the amber waves of grain immortalized in "America the Beautiful" not as an inherited Eden, but rather a novel landscape constructed by transplanted seeds and the skilled labor of willing and unwilling immigrants. Through narratives of improvisation, appropriation, and loss, the author explores contradictions between ideologies of property rights and common use that persist in national and international development, challenging readers to rethink fantasies of global agriculture’s past and future.

Over the last century, the Everglades have undergone a metaphorical and ecological transition from impenetrable swamp to endangered wetland. At the heart of this transformation lies the Florida sugar industry, which by the 1990s was at the center of the political storm over the multi-billion dollar ecological “restoration” of the Everglades. This book situates the environmental transformation of the Everglades within the economic and historical geography of global sugar production and trade. Using, among other sources, interviews, government and corporate documents, and recently declassified U.S. State Department memoranda, the author demonstrates that the development of Florida's sugar region was the outcome of pitched battles reaching the highest political offices in the United States and in countries around the world, especially Cuba—which emerges in her narrative as a model, a competitor, and the regional “other” to Florida's “self.” Spanning the period from the age of empire to the era of globalization, the book shows how the “sugar question”—a label nineteenth-century economists coined for intense international debates on sugar production and trade—emerges repeatedly in new guises. The author uses the sugar question as a thread to stitch together past and present, local and global, in explaining Everglades transformation.

Certain images stand out as icons of American environmentalism: a 1971 public service announcement featuring the “Crying Indian,” who sheds a tear in response to litter and pollution; the cooling towers of Three Mile Island, site of a notorious nuclear power accident in 1979; the sorrowful spectacle of oil-soaked wildlife following the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill; and, more recently, Al Gore delivering his global-warming slideshow in An Inconvenient Truth. These images, and others like them, have helped make environmental consciousness central to American public culture. Yet most historical accounts ignore the crucial role images have played in the making of popular environmentalism. This book looks at a wide array of visual texts—including pictures in popular magazines, television news, advertisements, cartoons, films, and political posters—to show how popular environmentalism has been entwined with mass media spectacles of crisis. Yet, even as media images have made the environmental crisis visible to a mass public, they often have masked systemic causes. Deflecting attention from corporate and government responsibility, popular images have instead emphasized the idea that individual Americans are personally culpable for pollution and other environmental problems. The visual media have thus offered environmentalists a double-edged sword: Images have helped them popularize their cause, but also distorted their ideas by portraying their movement as a moralistic crusade to absolve the nation of its guilt. Ultimately, this dual focus on spectacles of crisis and individual moral choices has hidden underlying causes and structural solutions behind a veil of inattention.

What should serve as money, who should control its creation and circulation, and according to what rules? For more than two hundred years, the “money question” shaped American social thought. This book explores how and why the means of payment became a central subject of political debate and class conflict over market relations in early America. The book comprises three parts devoted to major episodes in the career of the money question. Part I focuses on the political economy of paper money in colonial New England, Part II turns to the battle over commercial banking in the new United States, and Part III concerns the struggle over the national banking system and the international gold standard in the late nineteenth century. Each section explores a broader problem of power that framed the conflict over currency, considering the money question as a question of circulation raised by the growth of commerce in the colonial British Atlantic, a question of representation arising from the emergence of popular democracy along with industrial capitalism in the Jacksonian era, and a question of association tied to the ascendance of big business in the Gilded Age. More concretely, each part consists of intellectual biographies of two leading reformers who staked out opposite sides of the issue in their respective periods. These paired essays pursue the connections between the money question and other aspects of early American culture including natural law and natural history, melodramatic literature and neoclassical architecture, and Christian fellowship and fiduciary trust.

This book is a critical history of the concept of environment from the late eighteenth century to the present. Situating key episodes of that history in their material, social, cultural, and political contexts, it makes an argument for environmental pluralism—that is, for recognizing the profound variations in the way the concept of environment has been defined and put into practice in different times and places. Adopting this pluralistic perspective, the book argues, has several benefits. First, it provides both a more accurate and a more capacious account of the history of this multifarious concept than any attempt to identify a single dominant tradition or overarching trajectory could do. Second, it helps us recognize the diversity of concepts of environment and forms of environmentalism that are emerging at the present time, many of which diverge from those associated with the modern environmental movement. The episodes discussed in the book include research at the Paris Museum of Natural History following its founding in 1793, imperial medicine in the British Caribbean, urban reform in Progressive Era Chicago, resource management and ecology from World War I to the early Cold War, consumer protection and the environmental movement in the postwar United States, and climate change science and activism since the 1970s. The book concludes by describing several promising forms of environmentalism that are emerging today, each of which defines the concept of environment and puts it into practice in its own distinctive way.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British sought to master the physical properties of the oceans; in the second half, they lorded over large portions of the oceans' outer rim. The dominance of Her Majesty's navy was due in no small part to collaboration between the British Admiralty, the maritime community, and the scientific elite. Together, they transformed the vast emptiness of the ocean into an ordered and bounded grid. In the process, the modern scientist emerged. Science itself expanded from a limited and local undertaking receiving parsimonious state support to worldwide and relatively well financed research involving a hierarchy of practitioners. Analyzing the economic, political, social, and scientific changes on which the British sailed to power, this book shows how the British Admiralty collaborated closely not only with scholars, such as William Whewell, but also with the maritime community—sailors, local tide table makers, dockyard officials, and harbormasters—in order to systematize knowledge of the world's oceans, coasts, ports, and estuaries. The book notes that Britain's security and prosperity as a maritime nation depended on its ability to maneuver through the oceans and dominate coasts and channels. The practice of science and the rise of the scientist became inextricably linked to the process of European expansion.