Nobody Panic:The Emerging Worlds of Economics and History in America Hannah Farber Jonathan Levy. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2012. 414 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-04748-8, $35.00 (cloth). Jessica M. Lepler. The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xvii + 337 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-11653-4, $85.00 (hardback); 978-1-107-64086-3, $29.99 (paper). Two important new histories of nineteenth-century American finance are built around single words: one around “risk” and the other around “panic.” Jonathan Levy and Jessica M. Lepler use these words to organize their investigations into the interconnected financial, legal, and institutional transformations of the nineteenth century, and into the concurrent transformations of the human mind. In Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, Levy argues that the word “risk,” and with it, the idea of risk as a commodity, migrated from the world of maritime commerce into American society as a whole during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis, Lepler defines the heretofore poorly understood Panic of 1837 in terms of human emotional response: It was the period in which people panicked. Both books are productive, historically grounded examinations of the ways in which feelings and ideas made and were remade by the history of finance capitalism. Both reveal the possibilities, as well as the hazards, of writing histories of economic transformation centered on subjectivities rather than on social and economic conditions, and both can tell us something about the state of the periodically vexed relationship between history and economics.1 The question that drives Jonathan Levy’s sweeping investigation is how two seemingly contradictory nineteenth-century transformations took place at the same time: the rise of the idea of liberal personhood [End Page 686] and the rise of corporate capitalism. These developments, Levy argues, actually drove each other forward. What linked them was the emergence of risk, both in the sense of a commodity that could be bought and sold, and as an important new discourse in American life. Levy argues that in the 1830s “risk … exploded in everyday language” (p. 3). As Americans began to talk about risk more often, they also began to respond to risk in new ways. Most importantly, they “enclosed” their risks in order to buy and sell them in an expanding marketplace increasingly dominated by financial corporations. In other words, Americans began using financial instruments “born of capitalism itself” to offset the financial risks that capitalism had created. Thus, in a world in which Americans were increasingly thought (and legally held) to be responsible for themselves, they actually became more dependent on the vehicles of capitalism—“new financial institutions, markets, and forms of wealth”—for their security. By the end of the nineteenth century, for-profit corporations ruled the world of risk, and dominated what Levy understands as the modern system of American corporate finance (p. 5). To illuminate this transformation, Levy offers a variety of fascinating episodes in American legal, political, and business history, ranging from lawsuits over the insurance of self-liberated slaves to political debates about the legality of futures trading. In Farwell v. Boston and Worcester R. R. Corp., 45 Mass. 49 (Mass. 1842), the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that an engine-man was the owner of his own risk, and thus that the railroad company that employed him was not obligated to compensate him for losing a hand in an on-the-job accident (p. 8). The court drew on venerable maritime law but set a peculiar precedent: It equated the injured man not to a wage-earning member of a ship’s crew but to a vessel’s owner, whose risks were his own unless he deliberately assigned them to someone else (p. 12). Following the Farwell ruling, a host of new accident insurance corporations swiftly emerged, allowing wage workers to buy security against the risks that American law had so precipitately conferred on...