A History of Capitalism Done the Right Way

In Fear City, Kim Phillips-Fein has created a blueprint for how to write an inclusive and accessible study within the ascendant “history of capitalism” field. The history of capitalism is often seen as a kind of amalgam of business history, which puts companies and markets at its center, and labor history, which centers workers, their communities, and their organizations. The history of capitalism is supposed to offer us a larger and more holistic view, one that looks at all the moving parts and crosses methodological boundaries. The way the field has developed, however, often neglects waged workers and labor as historical actors, perhaps, in part, because of the field’s roots in the history of slavery, or perhaps because of the weakening of the labor movement in our own time.¹ Workers, however, are fundamental to capitalism and any complete history of it must take labor seriously as an analytical...