Howard Bodenhorn - Böcker

This manuscript represents the first book-length treatment of early American banking in over 40 years. During that time economic historians have offered new interpretations of several important developments in antebellum American banking practice and policy. Such features of early American financial markets as free banking, branch banking, deposit insurance, and micro-banking have been radically reinterpreted since Redlich and Hammond wrote. Moreover, economic theory has made significant advances, and this manuscript incorporates those theoretical insights into every chapter. The so-called "information-theoretic" approach links the chapters into a unified whole. Early sections of each chapter synthesize the extant research; later sections present extensions, new finding and new interpretations.

South Carolina's Indian-American governor Nikki Haley recently dismissed one of her principal advisors when his membership to the ultra-conservative Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) came to light. Among the CCC's many concerns is intermarriage and race mixing. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2001 the CCC website included a message that read "God is the one who divided mankind into different races.... Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God. " Beyond the irony of a CCC member working for an Indian-American, the episode reveals America's continuing struggle with race, racial integration, and race mixing.The Color Factor shows that the emergent twenty-first-century recognition of race mixing and the relative advantages of light-skinned, mixed-race people represents a "back to the future " moment---a re-emergence of one salient feature of race in America that dates to its founding. Each chapter addresses from a historical perspective a topic in the current literature on mixed-race and color. The approach is economic and empirical, but the text is accessible to social scientists more generally. The historical evidence concludes that we will not really understand race until we understand how American attitudes toward race were shaped by race mixing.

Previous banking histories have focused on the money supply function of early American banks and its connection to the recurrent boom-bust cycle of the antebellum era. This history focuses on the credit generating function of American banks It demonstrates that banks aggressively promoted development rather than passively followed its course. Using previously unexploited data, Professor Bodenhorn shows that banks helped to advance the development of incipient industrialization. Additionally, he shows that banks formed long-distance relationships that promoted geographic capital mobility, thereby assuring that short-term capital was directed in socially desirable directions, that is, where it was most in demand. He then traces those institutional and legal developments that allowed for this capital mobility. The result was that America was served by an efficient system of financial intermediaries by the mid-nineteenth century.