Brahmin Capitalism: Bankers, Populists, and the Making of the Modern American Economy

This project charts the business and politics of Boston’s late-nineteenth-century transformation from an anchor of an industrial region into the second largest banking center in North America. It explores how a vanguard of financiers from the city’s old elite created a wide-ranging network of capital flows that funded railroads, mines, agriculture, and industry across the continent, and how this process of capital migration, in turn, redefined urban politics on the local level. Far from seamless, this transformation triggered an array of political controversies over the priorities of city government, and more broadly, over the future shape of American capitalism.