Brecht Forum, December 8, 2011. Many US historians assume that capitalism either ?came in the first ships? or was the inevitable result of the expansion of the market. Unable to analyze the dynamics of specific forms of social labor in the antebellum US, most historians of the US Civil War have privileged autonomous political and ideological factors, ignoring the deep social roots of the conflict. This book, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877,--short-Listed for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize--applies theoretical insights derived from the debates on the transition to capitalism in Europe to the historical literature on the US to produce a new analysis of the origins of capitalism in the US, and the social roots of the Civil War. Author Charles Post is Associate Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College-CUNY. He has published in New Left Review, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change,Against the Current and Historical Materialism. Vivek Chibber teaches sociology at New York University and is author of Locked in Place: State Building and Late Industrialization in India. David McNally teaches political science at York University Toronto and actively supports numerous social justice movements in that city. He is author of Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism among other works.
