This book, a sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, traces the evolution of a modern social order. Combining historical and political detail with a theoretical frame, the book examines the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class. The book demonstrates how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The new social movements that arose in this era—labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism—constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and 1970s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, this book vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.
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