Dr Noam Maggor

Profile

Dr Noam Maggor joined Queen Mary in 2017. Prior to this, he taught at Cornell University and Vanderbilt University. He also held fellowships at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University and the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University.

His broad interests include the history of capitalism, the history of globalisation, the history of the state, business history, urban history, history of the United States, and the history of the American west.

Teaching

HST5395 – Race in the United States: Plantation Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter

HST5380 - America in the Age of Capital: From the Gilded Age to the Great Depression

HST6766 – The First Age of Globalisation: Money, Race, and Empire 1850-1933

HST5705 – Globalisation: Capitalists, Colonisers, and Crises in the Long Twentieth Century

Research

Research Interests:

Noam Maggor is a historian of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the emergence of industrial capitalism. His book Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age, is a finance-driven and urban-centered account of the transformation of American capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century. It explores how the United States shifted from its former position in the world economy as an exporter of agricultural commodities – cotton, above all – to an industrial nation and imperial power on the world stage. In particular, the book analyzes the creation of an interconnected national market, which has long been viewed as immutable and technologically-driven, as a contentious and highly malleable political project. It more generally examines economic change as politically constituted and deeply ideological, transcending conceptual divides between economics, politics, culture, and society.

His new project, tentatively entitled "The United States as a Developing Nation" interrogates the integration of vast territories of what became the American West into the economic orbit of the United States. With renewed attention to the core concerns of political economy, it aims to position the Western U.S. comparatively alongside other global peripheries – in Russia, Egypt, India, and Latin America – that were aggressively pulled in this period into the world economy.

Publications

• “Escaping the Periphery: Railroad Regulation as American Industrial Policy,” Critical Historical Studies (June 2024).
• Review of Mark Peterson's The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 in Business History Review (November 2020)
• "Fiscal Federalism: Local Debt and the Construction of the Modern State in the United States and France" in A World of Public Debts: A Political History, eds. Nicolas Barreyre and Nicolas Delalande. Co-authored with Stephen W. Sawyer (2020)
• “The United States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting the Peculiarities of American History,” co-authored with Stefan Link, Past & Present (February 2020).
• "Bringing (The History of) Capitalism Back In" in Reviews in American History (March 2019)
• Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Harvard University Press, 2017)
• “To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Populism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West,” American Historical Review (February 2017) - Winner of the William Nelson Cromwell prize for best article in American legal history.
• “History of Capitalism,” chapter for Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: The Making of Modern America (February 2017).
• “The Great Inequalizer: American Capitalism during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era” introduction as guest editor of a special issue on the history of capitalism, Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era (July 2016). 
• “Politics of Property: Urban Democracy in the Age of Capital,” Enterprise and Society (December 2012).
• “Democracy and Capitalism in the Modern American City,” Zmanim Historical Journal (Summer 2012).

Public Engagement

• Dr Maggor has written on the history of the Federal Reserve with Anton Jäger for Phenomenal World and on the New Deal for the Mile End Institute Blog.
• He recently appeared on the Cambridge American History Seminar Podcast to talk about my new project on the "U.S. as a Developing Nation"
• He was interviewed for American Experience on PBS: "The Gilded Age: GILDED IS NOT GOLDEN"
• He has written on the Amazon dilemma for the Guardian.
  
• See reviews of his book in The Nation, Dissent, and the Wall Street Journal.
• He was interviewed about my book by the New Books Network.
• He is the co-convener of the United States Political Economy Lab and a member of the Editorial Board of Past & Present.