The financial crisis of 2008, which initiated a global slump in profitability and accumulation, profoundly shook the neoliberal consensus. Waves of bankruptcies, stagnant output, and growing unemployment challenged the blind faith in unregulated markets and produced a renewed interest in critical accounts of capitalism, exemplified by the astounding success of Piketty’s provocative Capital in the Twenty-First Century.¹ Perhaps most strikingly, Karl Marx, long dismissed as a utopian thinker whose alternative to capitalism failed with the collapse of the bureaucratic economies, experienced a very real rehabilitation. Even TIME admitted that “if you leave aside the prophetic, prescriptive parts of Marx’s writings, there’s a trenchant diagnosis of the underlying problems of a market economy that is surprisingly relevant even today.”²

Against this newly favorable backdrop, the New York Times recently declared that “a specter is haunting university history departments: the specter of capitalism.”³ The Times was referring to the growing intellectual influence of the “New Historians of Capitalism” (NHC) group across academia and their assumption of strategic positions in prestigious history departments such as Harvard, Cornell, Brown, and the New School. Long neglected during the “linguistic turn” of the historical profession away from the systematic investigation of social and economic structures and processes, capitalism had once again become an object of serious historical inquiry thanks to the NHC.

The New Historians promise to reinvent the study of capitalism, yet they insist that the best way to accomplish this is to refuse, at least for the time being, to specify what they mean by it. As Seth Rockman of Brown University, a central figure in the new movement, puts it: