Plastic Capitalism

Sean H. Vanatta is a senior lecturer in financial history and policy at the University of Glasgow and a non-resident fellow at the Julis-Rabinowitz Centre for Public Policy & Finance at Princeton University. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

“As much as it enriches our scholarship, Vanatta’s history should also inspire our policymaking.”—Carey Mott, Los Angeles Review of Books“Vanatta does a brilliant job describing how disruptive, dangerous and complicated it was to move from store credit in the 1950s to the Visa and Mastercard we have today. . . . I cannot recommend [his] book highly enough.”—Erik Jones, SurvivalReceived honorable mention from the  Ralph Gomory Prize, sponsored by Business History ConferenceFinalist for the 2025 Hagley Prize in Business History, sponsored jointly by the Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History Conference“How did the US make its way toward an increasingly cashless economy, where consumers overwhelmingly rely on credit and debit cards for transactions—and often wrack up substantial debt along the way? Plastic Capitalism tells the story of how banks’ efforts to navigate the landscape created by New Deal financial regulations, which were intended to keep finance small and local, ended up creating an economy where credit cards are both placeless and pervasive. Those plastic cards we carry, claiming an address in South Dakota or Delaware, tell a distinctly American story of finance, power, and politics.”—Jerry Davis, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan“Sean Vanatta’s remarkable Plastic Capitalism is the finest account we have yet of the rise of the now-ubiquitous credit card and the steady expansion of its role in American capitalism and in our own financial lives. In a narrative history that draws on deep archival research, Vanatta shows clearly how our financial technologies and economic world are built by law and politics, instead of emerging through consumer desire.”—Kimberly Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics“Vanatta illuminates the complex tapestry that is the US financial system by following one important thread—the history of the credit card industry. In this way he provides a novel and compelling account of how bankers made use of our divided federal system of government to break free of the constraints imposed on them by New Deal regulation. The mountains of credit card debt under which American households have come to labor was the unhappy result.”—Naomi Lamoreaux, Yale University