Introduction: an American revolutionary tradition / Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith -- The agrarian context of American capitalist development / Christopher Clark -- The mortgage worked the hardest: the fate of landed independence in nineteenth-century America / Jonathan Levy -- Toxic debt, liar loans, collateralized and securitized human beings and the panic of 1837 / Edward E. Baptist -- Inheriting property and debt: from family security to corporate accumulation / Elizabeth Blackmar -- Slave breeding and free love: an antebellum argument over slavery, capitalism, and personhood / Amy Dru Stanley -- Capitalism and the rise of the corporation nation / Robert E. Wright -- Capitalist aesthetics: Americans look at the London and Liverpool docks / Tamara Plakins Thornton -- William Leggett and the melodrama of the market / Jeffrey Sklansky -- Producing capitalism: the clerk at work / Michael Zakim -- Soulless monsters and iron horses: the Civil War, institutional change and American capitalism / Sean Patrick Adams -- Afterword: Anonymous history / Jean-Christophe Agnew.