Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on June 21, 2007
Enterprise and Society 2007 8(3):756-758; doi:10.1093/es/khm056
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Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference.
Frank J. Byrne. Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865
Frank J. Byrne. Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. x + 297 pp. ISBN 0-8131-2404-2, $50.00 (cloth)
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Eschewing business history for a cultural exploration of merchant families, Frank J. Byrne provides a twenty-two county sample and numerous primary sources to showcase southern merchants anxiously working for their social position in the antebellum and Civil War years. He argues that southern traders' process of Becoming Bourgeois was incomplete before 1865, but that their liberal capitalist values increased in significance, laying the foundations for the New South. This interesting investigation of merchant culture and families echoes the newest historical research
Central Michigan University