The American Road to Capitalism
Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877
Most US historians assume that capitalism either “came in the first ships” or was the inevitable result of the expansion of the market. Unable to analyze the dynamics of specific forms of social labour in the antebellum US, most historians of the US Civil War have privileged autonomous political and ideological factors, ignoring the deep social roots of the conflict. This book applies theoretical insights derived from the debates on the transition to capitalism in Europe to the historical literature on the US to produce a new analysis of the origins of capitalism in the US, and the social roots of the Civil War.
Biographical note:
Charles Post, Ph.D. (1983) in Sociology, SUNY-Binghamton, is Associate Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College-CUNY. He has published in New Left Review, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Against the Current and Historical Materialism.
Political Marxism and the Social Sciences 
The American Road to Capitalism was short-listed for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. Congratulation to Jairus Banaj, who won for his Theory as History.
The paperback will be available from Haymarket Books in March 2012! http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/The-American-Road-to-Capitalism