Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast is a monthly program devoted to bringing you quality, engaging stories that explain how capitalism has changed over time. We interview historians and social and cultural critics about capitalism’s past, highlighting the political and economic changes that have created the present. Each episode gives voice to the people who have shaped capitalism – by making the rules or by breaking them, by creating economic structures or by resisting them.
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Ben Waterhouse on the Dream and Reality of Self Employment
04/02/2024
Ben Waterhouse on the Dream and Reality of Self Employment
One recent study found that 81% of businesses in the United States have zero employees. That is, they are run by sole proprietors, working for and by themselves, The ideal of self-employment has become dominant in our culture, too. More Americans than ever dream of becoming an entrepreneur, an independent owner, a founder. But for all of its prevalence in our economy and in our imaginations, the origins of this impulse are a bit hazy. When did so many of us begin to idolize self-employment? What might it reveal about broader shifts in the employment landscape in the 20th and 21st centuries? In his new book, One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America, Ben Waterhouse answers precisely those questions. He explains how the rise of self-employment dates back to the economic transformations of the 1970s and intensified during the decades of precarity that followed. In our wide-ranging conversation, we touch on everything from franchise jurisprudence to the gig economy to the surprising story behind the Sam Adams beer company.
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Brent Cebul on Business, Inequality, and American Liberalism
03/05/2024
Brent Cebul on Business, Inequality, and American Liberalism
Most scholars would date the origins of neoliberalism to the 1970s, when a range of crises gave rise to new forms of market-oriented governance. But Brent Cebul, our guest on this month's episode, argues that liberalism’s sharp turn towards neoliberalism wasn’t so sharp after all. In fact, as early as the New Deal, liberals tried to realize their policy goals through market means. And officials in Washington worked hand-in-hand with otherwise conservative business and municipal elites on those development programs. Throughout the entirety of the long twentieth century, liberals have bound their visions of progress to the local needs of capital. In the process, they’ve ended up entrenching the very inequalities that they had set out to solve in the first place.
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Tim Keogh on Suburban Poverty and the Roots of Postwar Inequality
02/06/2024
Tim Keogh on Suburban Poverty and the Roots of Postwar Inequality
In 2022, roughly one in 10 suburban residents lived in poverty (9.6%), compared to about one in six in primary cities (16.2%), according to a recent study by the Brookings Institute. The issue of suburban poverty has garnered significant attention, prompting more than a bit of nostalgia for the good ole days of when suburbs were prosperous, living proof of the American dream. This narrative of postwar suburbia as prosperous, if also exclusive places, has been reinforced by historians and other scholars who, over the years, have shown how the federal government via FHA-insured mortgages and other programs facilitated a dramatic rise in suburban homeownership after WWII, while laregely restricting access through covenants and zoning laws to White Americans. But is this the full story? In this month's episode, Tim Keogh challenges this narrative, demonstrating that for many the postwar American suburban dream was more myth than reality. Alongside exclusive white middle-class communities, Keogh explains how the suburbs have long served as home to low-income residents, whose labor in construction, retail, childcare and a range of other low-wage jobs helped enable suburban prosperity in the absence of a robust welfare state. Along the way, we explore the policy decisions that helped to ensure poverty's persistence alongside prosperity and what we can do today to eliminate poverty wherever it might appear.
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Premilla Nadasen on the Care Economy and the Potential for Radical Care
01/08/2024
Premilla Nadasen on the Care Economy and the Potential for Radical Care
Today, discussions of care are ubiquitous. From employer-programs promoting self-care to the $800 billion healthcare industry, care forms a central part of our lives and the economy. But, are the systems and structures currently in place to care serving those who need it the most? This month's episode, featuring historian and activist Premilla Nadasen, takes a close look at the care economy and its relationship to racial capitalism and the reconfiguration of the welfare state. Along the way, we talk about the rise of the care-industrial-complex, wherein private corporations and non-profits benefit from public investment in care; what it's like for those who work in the care industry; and what a caring society built on radical care, as opposed to care-for-profit, might look like.
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Hannah Forsyth on the Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World
11/07/2023
Hannah Forsyth on the Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World
Are you a professional living and working in an English-speaking country? If so, this episode is for you. Teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, engineers, lawyers, social workers, the list goes on, professionals play an important role in our society. This wasn't always the case. This episode explores the rise of the professional class in the Anglophone world, including engaging in a decades-old question of whether or not professionals constitute a class. Topics covered include the role that professionals played in the rise of Anglo-settler colonialism; the relationship between the professions and virtue; racial, gendered, and class identities among professionals; and the intensifying battle between professionals and managers. Once seen as allied in administering the global welfare state, professionals and managers, in recent decades, have increasingly found themselves on opposing sides—a conflict made pronounced, in the United States, at least, by a series of recent teachers and nurses strikes, among other examples.
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Bart Elmore on Southern Companies Remaking our Economy and the Planet
09/04/2023
Bart Elmore on Southern Companies Remaking our Economy and the Planet
An iced cold Coca-Cola. A cross-country flight on Delta to visit friends. A much-needed medication overnighted via Fed-Ex. Bulk toilet paper purchased at Wal-Mart. What do these items have in common? In today’s modern economy, each of these can be purchased from the comfort of the couch, frequently with a credit card pioneered by Bank of America. They are all also from companies headquartered in the American South. In this month's episode, historian Bart Elmore explains how corporations from the American South helped make it possible for us to satisfy our desires from the convenience of our home and/or hometown, no matter how remote, and the environmental costs associated with each.
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Mark Erlich on the Way We Build and Restoring Dignity to Construction Work
08/02/2023
Mark Erlich on the Way We Build and Restoring Dignity to Construction Work
This month's episode gives a nod to one of the figures in our logo: the construction worker. Our guest, Mark Erlich has worked in the construction industry as a carpenter and union leader for a half century. In this episode, he shares his insights on the industry's past, present, and future, paying particular attention to the politics and material conditions surrounding construction work. In response to those who argue that today's labor shortages in the construction industry are the result of societal preferences, Erlich points to the decades-long degradation of construction work, including declining pay and protections. Fix those and you'll solve the labor problem.
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Chelsea Schields on Oil, Intimacy, and the Offshore
07/03/2023
Chelsea Schields on Oil, Intimacy, and the Offshore
In this month's episode, guest Chelsea Schields discusses oil refining and intimacy, illuminating the social ties and affective attachments engendered by oil in the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curaçao. Known today for their gorgeous beaches and sunny weather that attract tourists year-round, during the mid-twentieth century these islands were home to some of the largest oil refineries in the world. Along the way, we cover topics such as the role of race and gender in structuring labor relations; inter and intra imperial politics; migration; anti-colonial and anti-welfare movements; the 'offshore'; and much much more.
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Joan Flores-Villalobos on How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal
05/04/2023
Joan Flores-Villalobos on How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal
When it was completed in 1914, the Panama Canal nearly halved the travel time between the U.S. West Coast and Europe and revolutionized trade and travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It’s construction, overseen by the U.S. government-Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC), has long been hailed as a marvel of American ingenuity. Less well-known was the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. In this episode, Joan Flores-Villalobos demonstrates how Black West Indian women’s intimate lives and labor were at the center of the Panama Canal’s construction, explaining how they built a provisioning economy that proved critical to the canal’s development and the maintenance of the West Indian diaspora.
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Christy Thornton on Mexico, Development, and Governing the Global Economy
04/05/2023
Christy Thornton on Mexico, Development, and Governing the Global Economy
In this month's episode, Christy Thornton discusses the surprising influence of post-revolutionary Mexico on some of the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Triangulating between archives in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Thornton traces how Mexican officials repeatedly led the charge among Third World nations campaigning for greater representation within and redistribution through multilateral institutions created to promote international development and finance. In doing so, she recovers the crucial role played by Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians in shaping global economic governance and U.S. hegemony during the mid-twentieth century.
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Special Episode on the Military and the Market
03/07/2023
Special Episode on the Military and the Market
This month, we welcomed Jennifer Mittelstadt back to the show, joined by Mark Wilson, to discuss their new edited volume, The Military and the Market. Moving beyond familiar topics like defense spending, the volume takes an expansive approach to examining military-market relations in a wide range of contexts--from family business in the Civil War to managing post-World War II housing construction for U.S. soldiers and their families, and much more. Alongside Jennifer and Mark, listeners will hear from Kara Dixon Vuic, whose chapter explores the U.S. military's managment of markets for sex. Taken together, The Military and the Market challenges scholars and military policymakers alike to really grapple with the breadth and complexity of U.S. military-market relations over the course of two centuries.
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Allan Lumba on Monetary Authorities in the American Colonial Philippines
02/02/2023
Allan Lumba on Monetary Authorities in the American Colonial Philippines
In this episode, historian Allan Lumba explores how the United States wielded monetary authority in the colonial Philippines, including the role of money as a tool for countering decolonization, entrenching racial and class hierarchies, and directing the profits of colonialism towards the U.S. and Wall Street, in particular, with long-lasting consequences for Filipinos and Americans still dealing with the aftermath of what Lumba calls conditional decolonization.
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Chad Pearson on Klansmen, Employer Vigilantes, and Labor Suppression in the Long Nineteenth Century
12/05/2022
Chad Pearson on Klansmen, Employer Vigilantes, and Labor Suppression in the Long Nineteenth Century
This month’s episode takes listeners back in time to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time of significant labor unrest. At the time, employers, often with government support, went to great lengths to put down dissent, including employing violent tactics such as whippings, kidnappings, shootings, and imprisonment. Among those that helped to spear-head this violent suppression of workers and their allies were groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Law & Order Leagues, and Citizens Alliances. Though usually discussed separately, all of these groups used similar language to tar their lower-class challengers as menacing villains and deployed comparable tactics to suppress them. Calling into question a narrative of business management in this period centered on the adoption of scientific management principles and welfare capitalism, Pearson illuminates the repressive, and often terrifying, tactics undergirding industrial-labor relations at the turn of the 20th century.
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Ghassan Moazzin on Foreign Banks and the Making of Modern China
10/03/2022
Ghassan Moazzin on Foreign Banks and the Making of Modern China
This month’s episode picks up on a theme previously explored on the podcast: international finance. Drawing on a broad range of German, English, Japanese, and Chinese sources, Ghassan Moazzin traces the rise of foreign banking in China during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period that saw a dramatic increase in international trade and investment in the country. Particular attention is paid to the role of foreign banks in integrating China into global financial markets, including marketing China's sovereign debt, and their involvement in the 1911 Revolution and other events in modern Chinese history.
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Claire Dunning on Nonprofit Neighborhoods and Urban Inequality
08/02/2022
Claire Dunning on Nonprofit Neighborhoods and Urban Inequality
In this month's episode, Claire Dunning explains how and why non-profits came to play such an important role in U.S. cities after World War II. In doing so, she explores the emergence of non-profit neighborhoods amid various changes in urban policy, starting with urban renewal and continuing through the War on Poverty and the rise of community development corporations. While acknowledging all of the important work done by non-profits, the book also draws attention to a central paradox of our reliance on non-profits to address a range of social issues: the dramatic expansion in non-profits has coincided with rising poverty and inequality, rather than their eradication.
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Mircea Raianu on Tata and Global Capitalism in India
07/07/2022
Mircea Raianu on Tata and Global Capitalism in India
In this episode, Mircea Raianu traces the rise of the Tata Group, one of India's largest and oldest companies, from its early days involved in cotton and opium trading to multinational conglomerate invested in everything from salt to software, and, notably, steel. Among the topics discussed, include Tata’s involvement with colonial and anti-colonial developments; international networks of finance capital and scientific management; and Cold War geopolitics. Ultimately, Raianu offers a model for how to study global capitalism in the global South, explicating Tata’s connections to the world and India, while also avoiding the traps of exoticism and over generalization.
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Holger Droessler on Coconut Colonialism, Labor, and Globalization in Samoa
05/27/2022
Holger Droessler on Coconut Colonialism, Labor, and Globalization in Samoa
This month's episode centers Samoa, including the Pacific islands comprising the present-day independent country of Samoa and American Samoa, examining capitalism, globalization, and coconut colonialism at the turn of the 20th century. In doing so, it pays close attention to the lives of workers, including plantation laborers, ethnographic edutainers, and service workers, revealing how Samoans navigated colonialism and capitalism, contesting exploitative labor conditions, while, at the same time, articulating their own forms of Oceanian globality.
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Keith Wailoo on Racial Marketing and the Rise of Menthol Cigarettes
04/05/2022
Keith Wailoo on Racial Marketing and the Rise of Menthol Cigarettes
In 2020, George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Of Black Americans who smoke, eighty-percent smoke menthol cigarettes. In this episode, Keith Wailoo explores the history of menthol cigarettes and their marketing to Black Americans. In doing so, he ties together the history of tobacco companies and the disproportionate number of Black deaths at the hands of police violence, COVID-19, and other forms of racial violence and exploitation, giving new meaning to the cry: “I can’t breathe.”
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Jason Resnikoff on the Automation Discourse and the Meaning of Work
03/07/2022
Jason Resnikoff on the Automation Discourse and the Meaning of Work
This month's episode takes a deep dive into the history of work and automation in the post-World War II era. It traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. Countering automation's proponents, who prophesize that robots will soon replace human labor, Jason Resnikoff reveals how the automation discourse has tended to obscure the human beings who continue to labor, often in sped up and intensified manners, alongside machines.
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Gregg Mitman on Firestone's Rubber Empire in Liberia
02/04/2022
Gregg Mitman on Firestone's Rubber Empire in Liberia
This month's episode focuses on a popular commodity, namely rubber. Despite consuming a large share of the world's rubber supply, the United States has long relied on the global market to meet American demand for rubber. During the early twentieth-century, this dependence on foreign rubber led the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to the West African nation of Liberia, where the company built one of the largest rubber plantations in the world. What follows is a tale of land expropriation, medical racism, and corporate power that stretches from the 1920s to the 2020s.
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Destin Jenkins on Municipal Debt and Bondholder Power
01/04/2022
Destin Jenkins on Municipal Debt and Bondholder Power
Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities’ dependence on municipal debt. Focusing on San Francisco, this month's guest, Destin Jenkins, traces the evolving relationship between cities, bondholders, banks, and municipal debt from the Great Depression to the 1980s. In doing so, he sheds new light on the power arrangement at the center of municipal finance, and offers some suggestions on how to contest it.
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Elizabeth Tandy Shermer on Student Loans and Higher Education
10/04/2021
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer on Student Loans and Higher Education
It is no secret that the United States is facing a crisis with regards to higher education. In this month's episode, historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer explains the long history that gave rise to the current situation in which many institutions are struggling financially, and students and their parents are often the ones left to pay the bill with the help of loans.
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Justene Hill Edwards on the Slaves Economy and the Limits of Black Capitalism
08/04/2021
Justene Hill Edwards on the Slaves Economy and the Limits of Black Capitalism
In this month's episode, Justene Hill Edwards takes listeners on a journey through the slaves' economy. From bustling urban marketplaces to back-country roads, she reveals the myriad ways enslaved people participated in South Carolina's market economy prior to the Civil War. In doing so, she never loses sight of the limitations of the slaves’ economy, revealing how enslaved peoples’ investments in capitalism, while providing temporary relief, ultimately benefited the very people who denied them freedom.
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Joshua Greenberg on the Rage for Paper Money and Monetary Knowledge in Early America
07/06/2021
Joshua Greenberg on the Rage for Paper Money and Monetary Knowledge in Early America
In this month's episode, Joshua Greenberg explores the chaotic and volatile monetary system of early America and the extensive financial knowledge required to navigate it. This monetary know-how was needed not only by financiers and merchants operating at a high-level of the economy, but also by those who may never have stepped foot inside a bank themselves, and yet, were nevertheless compelled to constantly evaluate the value and authenticity of the paper money being handed to them or risk losing out.
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Gabriel Winant on the Rusting of 'Steel City, USA' and the Rise of Healthcare
06/03/2021
Gabriel Winant on the Rusting of 'Steel City, USA' and the Rise of Healthcare
Today, healthcare workers account for the largest percentage of U.S. workers. Yet, their power pales in comparison to the unionized industrial workforce that preceded them, and whom it is their job now to care for. In this episode, Gabriel Winant explains how these two worlds--the industrial economy and the post-industrial service economy--came together in 'Steel City, USA,' revealing how the healthcare economy emerged to take advantage of the social hierarchies engendered by the American welfare state.
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Cristina Groeger on Education, Labor, and Inequality in Boston
05/03/2021
Cristina Groeger on Education, Labor, and Inequality in Boston
This episode centers on a paradox in contemporary American society, namely the coexistence of high rates of educational achievement alongside growing inequality in the United States. In order to address this paradox, Cristina Groeger takes listeners on a journey back in time to the turn of the twentieth century and explains how it is that education came to replace other forms of training as a major pathway into employment, while revealing the consequences of this transformation, including for labor.
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Ronald Schatz on the Labor Board Vets and the Rise of Industrial-Labor Relations
03/27/2021
Ronald Schatz on the Labor Board Vets and the Rise of Industrial-Labor Relations
In this episode, Ronald Schatz discusses the history of the National War Labor Board vets. Recruited by the U.S. government during WWII to help resolve union-management conflicts, many labor board vets went on to have long and illustrious careers arbitrating conflicts in a wide-range of sectors from the steel industry to the public sector. While not traditional labor activists, the history of the labor board vets offers important lessons for understanding the rise of industrial-labor relations in the U.S.
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Rebecca Marchiel on Redlining, Financial Deregulation, and the Urban Reinvestment Movement
02/14/2021
Rebecca Marchiel on Redlining, Financial Deregulation, and the Urban Reinvestment Movement
The iconic Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps, created during the New Deal, have served as powerful illustrations of red-lining. Yet, they suggest a more static relationship between financial institutions and cities than actually existed. In this episode, Rebecca Marchiel offers a riveting account of the urban reinvestment movement, a multi-racial coalition of activists that opposed redlining, while also revealing the obstacles they faced from bankers and government officials in implementing their vision.
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Katie Hindmarch-Watson on London's Telecommunications Work and Serving a Wired World
01/04/2021
Katie Hindmarch-Watson on London's Telecommunications Work and Serving a Wired World
Modern telecommunications is often beset with concerns about privacy of information. Such concerns are not new. Rather, as Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, they have long plagued information workers whose bodily and gendered labor was central to the development of Victorian-era London's telecommunications industry. Through tales of misbehaving telegraph boys and "wicked" telephone girls, she offers a cultural and gendered history of telecommunications work with deep implications for today's service economy.
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Shennette Garrett-Scott on Black Women in Finance
12/02/2020
Shennette Garrett-Scott on Black Women in Finance
In this episode, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank’s success and the challenges this success wrought, including bureaucratic violence that targeted the bank. Through recounting the history of the St. Luke Bank, Garrett-Scott gives black women in finance the attention they deserve.
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