A Financial History of the United States: From Christopher Columbus to the Robber Barons (1492-1900)

Volume I covers the period from 1492 to 1900. Markham uncritically recounts the secondary literature published through the 1980s. However, he misses much of the fresh scholarship produced in the last decade. As a consequence, the author fails to draw upon the recent earth-shattering contributions of Richard Sylla, Peter Rousseau, Bob Wright, various collaborators, and myself on the vital importance of the financial services sectors in stimulating economic growth in the early national period (1790 to 1825). Indeed, Markham was trapped by the nay-saying attitude of most of his predecessors. I would contend that a great deal of what earlier generations of financial historians wrote about events through the end of the nineteenth century should be read with a great deal of skepticism. The more recent scholarship has a different tone. Maury Klein's revisionist biography of financier Jay Gould is a case in point.

This three-volume publication defies a normative description. Covering the entire span of U.S. history from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, it is perhaps best identified as a chronologically organized encyclopedia, or a gazette, of American financial services. The coverage is undeniably comprehensive. Jerry Markham focuses broadly on the monetary system, commercial banking, savings and loans, investment banking, securities brokerage, consumer credit, insurance companies, and many of their precursors. Totaling over 1,300 pages, the detail is overwhelming and intimidating.

The first comprehensive financial history of the United States in more than thirty years. Accessible to undergraduate level readers, it focuses on the growth and expansion of banking, securities, and insurance from the colonial period right up to the incredible growth of the stock market during the 1990s and the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

The author traces the origins of American finance to the older societies of Europe and Northern Africa, and shows how English merchants transferred their financial systems to America. He explains how financial matters dominated the founding and development of the colonies, and how financial concerns incited the Revolution. And he shows how the Civil War began the transformation of America from a small economy largely dependent on foreign capital into a complex capitalist society. From the Civil War, the nation's financial history breaks down into periods of frenzied speculation, quiet growth, periodic panics, and furious periods of expansion, right up through the incredible growth of the stock market during the 1990s.