2 - Civilizing Capitalism

Summary

Chapter 2 explores the patterns of late nineteenth-century global capitalism through which a progressive, moral middle class built a system of professions. It uses the 1880s Melbourne land boom to show the sustained effect of the ‘great heaves’ of investment from the City of London into Australia, Canada, and the United States. This financializing economy – unlike earlier, short-term bubbles like Chicago’s in the 1830s – stimulated the global expansion of professional occupations. Older moral values infused the professions across the Anglo world as they grew and institutionalised. Retaining capitalism’s model of return on investment, the professional class made investment in humans the central professional ideal. Their class status was often concealed beneath layers of rationality and claims to expertise, but in the settler colonies they transformed capitalism into a form of moral investment for social return in ways that served their own interests first. As part of a global bourgeoisie, these transformations at the periphery of the Anglo world were soon also felt in the British metropole.