Dividends of Development: Securities Markets in the History of U.S. Capitalism, 1866-1922
Mary A. O’Sullivan
Abstract
This book, Dividends of Development: Securities Markets in the History of US Capitalism, 1866–1922, explains how securities markets became central to the institutional fabric of US capitalism. After the Civil War, these markets had a narrowly circumscribed relationship to the country’s real economy, being largely dominated by railroad securities. Moreover, their role in the US financial system was of limited significance given the relatively modest resources that financial institutions committed to investment in, and lending on, corporate securities. That situation was to undergo fundamental c ... More
This book, Dividends of Development: Securities Markets in the History of US Capitalism, 1866–1922, explains how securities markets became central to the institutional fabric of US capitalism. After the Civil War, these markets had a narrowly circumscribed relationship to the country’s real economy, being largely dominated by railroad securities. Moreover, their role in the US financial system was of limited significance given the relatively modest resources that financial institutions committed to investment in, and lending on, corporate securities. That situation was to undergo fundamental change from the Civil War through the end of the First World War but the development of US securities markets did not occur as a result of a smooth, or even linear, process. Instead, the book shows that the transformation of US securities markets was a process that was volatile and time-consuming, unscripted by powerful actors, and driven, above all else, by the dramatic and unstable character of the nation’s economic development. These claims about the trajectory, the operation, and the underlying dynamics of the development of US securities markets are brought together in a novel synthesis that portrays the historical evolution of securities markets in the United States as the ‘dividends’ of the country’s distinctive trajectory of economic development.
Keywords:
securities markets,
financial system,
corporations,
United States,
First World War
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199584444 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584444.001.0001 |
