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

Tracing the shifting fortunes and changing character of New York City’s economic elite over half a century, Sven Beckert brings to light a neglected–and critical–chapter in the social history of the U.S.: the rise of an American bourgeoisie. The Monied Metropolis is the first comprehensive history of New York’s economic elite, the most powerful group in nineteenth-century America. Beckert explains how a small and diverse group of New Yorkers came to wield unprecedented economic, social, and political power from 1850 to the turn of the twentieth century. He reveals the central role of the Civil War in realigning New York’s economic elite, and how the New York bourgeoisie reoriented its ideology during Reconstruction, abandoning the free labor views of the antebellum years for laissez-faire liberalism. Sven Beckert is the Dunwalke Associate at Harvard University. He is the recipient of several honors and fellowships, including the Aby Warburg Foundation prize for academic excellence, a MacArthur Dissertation Fellowship and a Andrew W. Mellon fellowship. This is his first book.