When business historians discarded the melodramatic mode of analysis more than a half century ago, transcending a stale debate over whether business leaders were “heroes” or “villains,” they also shifted emphatically away from finance as a topic of inquiry. A generation of muckraking accounts, culminating in Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons, had dramatized American industrialization as a story of stock market manipulation and abuse of power. These narratives featured financiers, not as full participants in the formation of the new industrial system, but as an external and almost entirely disruptive force. They attached a stigma to finance that prompted scholars, inspired by the work of Alfred Chandler, to turn elsewhere for insights about the rise of modern business. More recently, a new cohort of historians—Stephen Mihm, Julia Ott, Jonathan Levy, Louis Hyman, and Richard White, to name a few of the more prominent names—has rediscovered finance as an analytical perspective and subject of immense significance. With a more subtle and nuanced approach than their Progressive-era forebears, they have moved bankers, investors, and stockbrokers from the margins and positioned them at the very core of American capitalism.
