Calculating Worth
A History of Value in Nineteenth-Century North America
Calculating Worth
A History of Value in Nineteenth-Century North America
Explores the history of value as a concept, one that we regularly use but tend to take for granted as the monetary expression of market mechanisms.
Calculating Worth, a collection of essays edited by historians Joanna Cohen and Laura F. Edwards, reshapes our concept of what “value” meant in the past. Collectively, the essays reorient conventional narratives and reveal multiple methods of determining value, some traditional, some new, but all based in human agency. Calculating Worth brings together scholars of legal history, Native American history, women’s history, material culture, the history of slavery, and African American history, with topics that range widely over the nineteenth century, across North America and beyond.
Through studying subjects as varied as personal property, land, enslaved people, and intangibles such as prayer, reputation, and suffering, this portrait of value is diverse, humanistic, and far more capacious than what typically fits within the bounds of the concept of capitalism. Rather, value turns out to be a question of power—and how it is used.
320 pages | 3 halftones | 6 x 9
Economics and Business: Economics--History
History: American History
Table of Contents
Introduction: Rethinking Value in Nineteenth-Century North America, by Joanna Cohen and Laura F. Edwards
Part I. Securing Value
1. Writing Out Value: Textiles, Law, and Economic Exchange, by Laura F. Edwards
2. “There Is No Land That Can Be Called to Be Out of Community”: Abenaki Proprietorship and Seigneurial Valuation in Nineteenth-Century Quebec, by Julia Lewandoski
3. Investigating Infanticide: Gender, Race, and the Value of Healthcare Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America, by Felicity M. Turner
4. “A Murder and Some Furniture”: Gender, Value, and Household Objects in the Early United States, by Alexandra Finley
Part II. Communities of Value
5. Speculative Bodies and the Gender of Value in the Nineteenth-Century United States, by Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor
6. “A Young Dog Puppy, Remarkable for His Ugliness”: Constructing and Negotiating Value in London, 1750–1845, by Kate Smith
7. Polly Spaniard’s Whiskey Establishment: Morality, Sovereignty, and the Alcohol Trade in Early Indian Territory, by Jacob F. Lee
8. Valuing “Wealth-in-People” in the Nineteenth-Century United States, by Bronwen Everill
Part III. Limits of Value
9. The Value of Prayer, by Susanna Blumenthal
10. The Role of “Value” in Moral Nuisance Cases, by Maureen E. Brady
11. The Value of Suffering in Nineteenth-Century America, by Joanna Cohen
Conclusion: (Re)placing Value, by Joanna Cohen and Laura F. Edwards
Acknowledgments
Notes
Contributors
Index