Noam Maggor
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Noam Maggor is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. He is a historian of the United States during the ‘long’ nineteenth century, with interests in the history of capitalism, the state, business, populism, and comparative political economy. His first book, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age, published by Harvard University Press in 2017, examined how an illustrious cohort of Bostonian financiers helped transform American capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Maggor is more generally interested in rethinking economic change as politically driven and deeply ideological, transcending conceptual divides between economics, politics, culture, and society. He has held fellowships at Harvard, Cornell, Vanderbilt, and Tel Aviv University.
In September 2022, he joined the Paris IAS as part of the French Institutes for advanced Study fellowship program - FIAS - co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945408. His fellowship also benefits from the support of the RFIEA+ LABEX, with a national funding (Grant ANR-11-LABX-0027-01).
Research interests
History of the United States, Urban/Spatial History, History of Capitalism, History of Globalization.
The Great American Leap Forward: Yankee Leviathan and the Making of Modern Capitalism
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the United States went through a dramatic transformation as the former cotton-exporting slave republic emerged as the world’s foremost industrial nation. How did this sharp turn from agricultural exports to large-scale industry come about? This research demonstrates the centrality of American government policies in nurturing this shift. It shows how government institutions deployed an array of promotional policies to orchestrate economic development. Far from subordinate to business interests, the state not only created markets but more proactively shaped market activity, adding up to a veritable developmental state. The research explores the U.S. alongside other frontier economies in the late nineteenth century, examining the U.S., not as an incipient world hegemon, but as a developing nation. It interrogates why the U.S. industrialized while other rapidly expanding nations became ever more dependent on agricultural exports.
Given the dominant place of the U.S. in how modern capitalism has long been theorized and understood, this research aims to engage with a range of research fields in the social sciences. It uncovers a more complicated history of state and market relations under capitalism than existing paradigms have been willing to fathom. Especially given the rise of China and the policy reverberations of Covid, which softened the resilience of the Washington Consensus, the project aims to be part of an urgent rethinking of capitalism, not strictly as a market-led system, but as a co-production of private and public actors.
Key publications
“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.
Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Harvard University Press, 2017)
Latest publication
“The United States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting the Peculiarities of American History,” co-authored with Stefan Link, Past & Present (February 2020).
 Roundtable organized by Noam Maggor (Queen Mary University of London, Paris IAS Fellow), with the participation of Thomas Piketty (EHESS), Felicia Wong (Roosevelt Institute), and Gary Gerstle (Cambridge University)  Conference organized by Noam Maggor, 2022-2023 Paris IAS Fellow, Sofia Valeonti, American University of Paris, Nicolas Barreyre, EHESS, Ariel Ron, Southern Methodist University, with the support of the Paris IAS  Workshop organized by Noam Maggor, Paris IAS Fellow, and the United States Political Economy Lab, with the participation of Emma Teitelman (Penn State)  Lecture organized by Noam Maggor, 2022-2023 Paris IAS Fellow, with the participation of Camille Cole, Jesus College Cambridge, as part of the seminar series of the United States Political Economy Lab, AUP  Presentation organized by Noam Maggor, 2022-2023 Paris IAS Fellow, and the United States Political Economy Lab, with the participation of Pr. David Edgerton, King’s College London |
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