Description
Book SynopsisAn important examination of the foundational American ideal of economic equalityand how we lost it.
Winner of the Missouri Conference on History Book Award for 2021
The United States has some of the highest levels of both wealth and income inequality in the world. Although modern-day Americans are increasingly concerned about this growing inequality, many nonetheless believe that the country was founded on a person''s right to acquire and control property. But in The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 16001870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that, in fact, the United States was originally deeply influenced by the belief that maintaining a rough or relative equality of wealth is essential to the cultivation of a successful republican government.
Mandell explores the origins and evolution of this ideal. He shows how, during the Revolutionary War, concerns about economic equality helped drive wage and price controls, while after its end Americans
Trade Review
Mandell successfully recovers the often obscured legacy of economic equality and moral economy that emerged from the English Civil War, as it informed debates about proper republican polity during the American Revolution . . . Highly recommended.
—Choice
Widening economic inequality has been one of the most striking and significant problems facing the United States during the past half-century . . . Mandell's useful book belongs on the reading lists of the scholars, elected officials, and others who will be engaged with figuring out a path ahead.
—Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Specialists and researchers will find Mandell's sophisticated and insightful analysis deeply engaging, yet the book's writing is so clear that it could be assigned to advanced undergraduates. The fact that economic inequality is one of the great issues of the twenty-first century makes Lost Tradition especially timely and important.
—Journal of the Early Republic
Mandell usefully recovers the many and varied attempts to forge a link between economic and political equality in American culture from colonial times to the Reconstruction era, and he reminds readers that there have been numerous cries for greater economic justice since.
—Rowena Olegario, University of Oxford, Journal of British Studies
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. English Origins
Chapter 2. Indians and Anglo-American Egalitarianism
Chapter 3. Revolutionary Ideologies and Regulations
Chapter 4. Wealth and Power in the Early Republic
Chapter 5. Raising Republican Children
Chapter 6. Clashes over America's Political Economy
Chapter 7. Separating Property and Polity
Chapter 8. Reviving the Tradition
Chapter 9. Reconstruction and the Rejection of Economic Equality
Epilogue
Notes
Index
