| Reading Guide for Week 15 | |
|
Last week we looked at an evolution in the function and position of corporations in American economic life, from serving a notion of the “public good” to serving the accumulation of private investment capital and the scaling up of business enterprise to a national level. By the end of the nineteenth century, corporations had amassed not only extraordinary economic leverage over employees and consumers, but they had gained the financial means to corrupt every branch and every layer of government: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and federal, state, and local governments. The late nineteenth century was the First Gilded Age; we are living through the Second Gilded Age in the early twenty-first century. The reading for this week will serve as background for our topic this week: capitalisms and empire. We shall focus on the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the chronological endpoint of this course, but Kristin Hoganson starts from this point in order to examine the long 20th century. The study of empire, American and otherwise, has long focused on the horrific damage inflicted by empire on other countries through, for instance, military, political, and economic dominance. Hoganson brings the story of empire back home, as it were, as one way to connect empire to ordinary, everyday life especially for those on the giving end of empire. Especially so as the elaborate workings of empire have remained largely invisible to the American public. (Such invisibility is the focus of an excellent recent book: How to Hide an Empire.) The same might be said about the elaborate workings of capitalism, much of which happens beyond view, in part precisely because of the “consumer effect” that Hoganson interrogates. |