Capitalism

Review Essays

Publishers wishing to submit their books for consideration should mail them to the following address:

Carolyn Biltoft
The Joseph H. Lauder Institute
256 South 37th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6330

The journal does not publish book reviews, but rather exploratory and conceptually driven review essays that place a single or series of older texts in conversation with a single or series of more recent publications and ideally across disciplinary boundaries. Please read the call Against Scholarly Enclosures: Reconsidering the Art and Economics of Review in Capitalism volume 1, issue 1 for the theory behind and also the perimeters of the experiment.

If you have an idea for a review essay along these precise lines please contact the Review Essay Editor, Carolyn Biltoft.

Style Sheet

Download our style sheet.

Submission Guidelines

At this stage the journal will accept paper proposals, of between 1,000 to 2,000 words sent by email to secretariat-capitalism@sas.upenn.edu and which the editors will carefully consider. The journal will not consider paper proposals submitted by PhD candidates. Each proposal should include a clear statement of the paper’s thesis, its relation to the existing literature, and an illustration of the methods and sources utilized in the paper. If the author’s proposal is of interest to the editorial team, the author will be invited to submit a full article, or a draft if available. Similarly, no unsolicited full review essays will be considered without submitting an initial proposal to the review essay editor.

Essays and Inter-texts

The journal does not publish book reviews, but rather exploratory and conceptually driven essays and inter-texts that place a single or series of older texts in conversation with a single or series of more recent publications and ideally across disciplinary boundaries. Please read the call « Against Scholarly Enclosures: Reconsidering the Art and Economics of Review » in CAP issue 1:1 for the theory behind and also the perimeters of the experiment.

If you have an idea for an essay along these precise lines please contact the Review Essays Editor, Carolyn Biltoft. carolyn.biltoft@graduateinstitute.ch

Peer Review

Editorial Board & Publication Staff

EXECUTIVE EDITORS

C. N. Biltoft
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

Kimberly Bowes
University of Pennsylvania

Marc Flandreau
University of Pennsylvania

Timothy Guinnane
Yale University

Julia Ott
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School

Francesca Trivellato
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

MANAGING EDITOR

Damian Clavel
University of Zurich

EXECUTIVE BOARD

Vincent Bignon – Banque de France

Edhem Eldem – Boğaziçi University and Collège de France

Anna Gelpern – Georgetown Law

Bishnupriya Gupta – University of Warwick

Eric Hilt – Wellesley College

Trevon Logan – Ohio State University

Jennifer L. Morgan – New York University

R. Bin Wong – University of California-Los Angeles

ADVISORY BOARD

Jeremy Adelman – Princeton University

Sunil Amrith – Yale University

Sven Beckert – Harvard University

Ritu Birla – University of Toronto

Warren Breckman – University of Pennsylvania

Charles Calomiris – Columbia Business School

Patricia Clavin – University of Oxford

Martin Daunton – University of Cambridge

Joan DeJean – University of Pennsylvania

Christine Desan – Harvard Law School

Barry Eichengreen – University of California-Berkeley

Nan Enstad – University of Wisconsin-Madison

Charles Goodhart – London School of Economics

Gary Gorton – Yale School of Management

Toby Green – King’s College London

Sumit Guha – University of Texas-Austin

Susanna Hecht – GIIDS, Geneva and University of California-Los Angeles

Julian Hoppit – University College London

Harold James – Princeton University

Naomi Lamoreaux – Yale University

Kenneth Lipartito – Florida International University

Carlos Marichal – El Colegio de México

Larry Neal – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Prasannan Parthasarathi – Boston College

Kevin O’Rourke – NYU Abu Dhabi

Daniel Raff – The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Emily Rosenberg – University of California-Irvine

Jean-Laurent Rosenthal – California Institute of Technology

Emma Rothschild – Harvard University

Andrew Sartori – New York University

Catherine Schenk – University of Oxford

William H. Sewell, Jr. – University of Chicago

Jacob Soll – University of Southern California

Rebecca L. Spang – Indiana University-Bloomington

Shirley Thompson – University of Texas-Austin

Carl Wennerlind – Barnard College

Mira Wilkins – Florida International University

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ToC and Abstracts for Volume 4.2

ToC and Abstracts for Volume 4.1

ToC and Abstracts for Volume 3.2

ToC and Abstracts for Volume 3.1

ToC and Abstracts for Volume 2.2

ToC and Abstracts for Volume 2.1

ToC and Abstracts for Volume 1.2

ToC and Abstracts for Volume 1.1

From the back covers

READING

Mark Twain, that deep student of hypocrisy, called it: “I don’t believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don’t want to. That’s something that you just want to take on trust. It’s a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

(Mark Twain, “Disappearance of Literature,” address given at the dinner of the Nineteenth Century Club, held at Sherry’s Restaurant, New York, November 20, 1900)

– TG

Mixed Signals Vol. 4.1

Here we see a depiction of the first telegraphic message sent from California in 1861. An angelic courier, tiptoeing across a live wire, brings a message of peace for a “Union” on the precipice of civil war. Less ironic than coincidental, the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean became knit together by (lucrative and costly) cables in the same year as the start of that internecine confl ict, though the war’s global roots were nearly as old as the printing press. The angel also carried other tidings over those wires: a host of mixed signals and divergent equations for the valuation of many things—the price of wheat, or of a piece of some prairie, or of a whole human life. Hark! The staccato of per-word pricing. STOP. Truncated love letters, bills of sale, death notices. FULL STOP.

–CNB

Blindspots Vol. 1.1

It was the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw who perhaps said it best: “The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.” In this idyllic image of a nineteenth-century plantation (Cardiff Hall from James Hakewill, Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, 1825), we see the verdant outlines of a bucolic dream, where pleasure and profi t appeared to walk placidly, hand in hand. Nowhere, the sight of bondage. Nowhere, the perturbing human face on what was deemed mere “property.” Nowhere, the horrors of the middle passage. As it is with the sources of revenue, so it is with a wider variety of epistemological gardens that we cultivate simply for the purpose of shielding our eyes from that which disturbs us. This fi rst issue of Capitalism seeks to illuminate how ways of seeing or not seeing have been integral to the historical (and ongoing) distribution of power, plenty, and poverty. – Carolyn N. Biltoft

Balance Sheets. Vol. 1.2

“‘Poor and yet happy’—these words have been a source of confusion for men who study
letters and search for rhymes.” So speaks a rich samurai’s money when it appears before him, incarnated as a strange little human-like creature, in Ueda Akinari’s On Poverty and Wealth (Osaka and Kyoto, 1776). In the small hours of the night, money appears to the samurai and, until dawn, money and man debate poverty and wealth and the morals thereof. This book was published the same year as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: the matter of money was on everyone’s minds, it seems. Haruki Murakami, an admirer of Akinari, recently borrowed this literary technique in Killing the Commendatore. In volume 1, “The Idea Made Visible” (顕れるイデア編, Arawareru idea hen), an idea materializes and speaks to the narrator. As both Akinari and Murakami remind us, ideas hold the key to great mysteries. They can certainly converse, but they don’t feel like us. And their morals differ from ours. But maybe balance sheets can rhyme? – MF

Inequalities. Vol. 2.1

Following the publication of James Mill’s History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817), David Ricardo offered the author, in a private letter, a few doubts of his own about the ability of one people to govern another:

In the Government of so distant a country as India, connected with us as it is by very peculiar ties, there must be the greatest difficulty in securing it against misrule. The people of England, who are governors, have an interest opposed to that of the people of India, who are the governed, in the same manner as the interest of a despotic sovereign is opposed to that of his people. In both cases there are no other limits to the abuse of power but those which the Governors themselves chuse to impose. That apathy of the public which you deplore as one of the causes of bad government in the country in which almost all their interests are centered, acts with tenfold effect when the question is respecting a foreign government which is chiefly regarded as it will afford revenues and power. On the mal administration of such a government public opinion will not be very active and will therefore not much tend to the correction of abuses (The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, vol. 7, letter 246).

Why was so much that was known in 1817 forgotten later?

-MF

To purchase a print copy of Capitalism 1.1, click here, and enter invoice # 590

Note to Librarians:

• The inaugural issue was published January 2, 2020 and is currently available for free on Project MUSE until June 30, 2022.
• Thereafter it will not be available in any of the collections sold to MUSE library subscribers. MUSE is hosting the journal only as a stand alone contract with UPenn Press.
• Therefore, the only option for online access after June 30 will be through the publisher’s website at http://cap.pennpress.org. (Using IP address authentication)

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