The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians

Appleby believes that the insights of cultural history with its emphasis upon recovering meanings in the past and exploring how men and women communicated those meanings offers a promising way to reassess the career of capitalism and its conceptual cousins, trade, commerce, and enterprise. She approaches the "vexed story of capitalism" as an intellectual and historical phenomenon, involving the myriad of convictions of those who wrote on the subject at various times, as well as the theories then available for analyzing the economy and the motives that may have prompted the historians' work.