Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcas‪t‬ Jessica Levy

The iconic Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps, created during the New Deal, have served as powerful illustrations of red-lining. Yet, they suggest a more static relationship between financial institutions and cities than actually existed. In this episode, Rebecca Marchiel offers a riveting account of the urban reinvestment movement, a multi-racial coalition of activists that opposed redlining, while also revealing the obstacles they faced from bankers and government officials in implementing their vision.

Modern telecommunications is often beset with concerns about privacy of information. Such concerns are not new. Rather, as Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, they have long plagued information workers whose bodily and gendered labor was central to the development of Victorian-era London's telecommunications industry. Through tales of misbehaving telegraph boys and "wicked" telephone girls, she offers a cultural and gendered history of telecommunications work with deep implications for today's service economy.

In this episode, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank’s success and the challenges this success wrought, including bureaucratic violence that targeted the bank. Through recounting the history of the St. Luke Bank, Garrett-Scott gives black women in finance the attention they deserve.

In Egypt's Occupation, Aaron Jakes challenges longstanding conceptions of Egypt as peripheral to global capitalism based on its role as a cotton producer through showing how Egypt functioned as a laboratory for colonial economism and financial innovation amid the turn of the twentieth-century boom and bust. In doing so, Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism and the role of political-economic thought during the British occupation of Egypt. 

In From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, Casey Lurtz tells the history of how a border region, the Soconusco, became Mexico’s leading coffee exporter. In doing so, she complicates narratives of globalization and economic liberalization that tend to prioritize national and global elites. Rather, as the title suggests, she digs below the surface of these processes in order to tell a powerful story about local engagement with capitalism and the state.

For those that argue that reparations are not possible or that too much time has passed, Caleb McDaniel has an important story to tell about a formerly enslaved woman named Henrietta Wood who sued for restitution in 1870 and won; paid $2,500, the largest known sum awarded by a U.S. court for restitution for slavery. Wood’s story offers valuable lessons about the history of slavery and freedom, and the lengths that different people went to in order to achieve both.