In our late capitalist modernity, profit-making and individualism have been so thoroughly linked that it is hard to grasp a time when these concepts were still separable. Michael Genovese argues that these concepts did not emerge together as a necessarily linked pair, and that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw an attempt to bolster profit-making while decrying individualism. The Problem of Profit excavates a tradition of protest against individualist capitalism that Genovese identifies as unique because it does not denounce profit-making. He looks at texts that scathingly criticize the individual and self-interested drive to make profit at the expense of all else, but that nevertheless hold that making profit is a legitimate and socially beneficial activity. He names this collective alternative to self-interest “sociable profit” and locates its development as an idea in the early part of the eighteenth century. The Problem of Profit explains how this ideal of sociable profit, with another form he names “affective finance,” was constructed alongside theories of sentimentality. He traces its presence in a range of literary genres, from georgic poetry and the sentimental novel, to periodical newspapers and philosophical essays. Genovese also demonstrates that the limits of sociable profit and affective finance were domestic and white. Sociable profit and the sharing of affect stopped at England's borders, and were incapable of incorporating the African slave into their functioning. The book consists of five chapters, all of which explore how the ideology of sociable profit functions in England, as well as an introduction and epilogue, which place these domestic concerns in the context both of England's position in the Atlantic world, and of its participation in the slave trade and in slavery. In this sense, Genovese provides both a new account of discourse about emergent eighteenth-century capitalism in England, and an important contribution on the way domestic discourses about English society relate to England's role in the transatlantic economy.One of the most interesting things about The Problem of Profit is its consistent focus on social relations and communities that hover between the familial and the national. This study of sociability, which Genovese lays out in the first chapter, helps to fill out our understanding of forms of eighteenth-century discourse that exist between the public or political and the private or domestic. In this sense, Genovese's book moves over the same terrain as the work of Lawrence Klein on politeness, John Mullan on sentiment, and Deirdre Lynch on character. But his treatment of profit is interesting precisely because it demonstrates that a concept usually associated with England's public, national, and (especially at the level of the national debt) international engagements was also discussed as functioning in networks “marked by intimacy and a sense of localness” (11). The general historical scope of what Genovese calls “sociable profit,” a concept that entails us imagining economic activity as a way in which “people do something with people, not just with paper or metal” (35), is set out in the first chapter of the book. He sees sociable profit as an ideal arising in the seventeenth century in a diverse group of authors such as Sir Richard Weston, Roger Fenton, Edward Misselden, and George Lillo, who decried usury and individualism in favor of a communal model of profit. Genovese marks the endpoint of this ideal in the work of Adam Smith. Like many recent critics, he regards Smith's two great works, A Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, as complementary. He argues that they are so not because Smith's economics is sentimental and sociable, but because both texts “have a shared vision of people as individuals profiting and feeling on their own, for and through themselves” (34). This is a sound reading of Smith, which stresses the individualism that lies behind his sentimentality. However, one does get the feeling that this ungenerous and individualist reading of Smith (in contrast to the quite optimistic and liberal readings of most other texts in The Problem of Profit) works as much to provide a neat historical sense of closure for the book as it does to provide a full account of the complexities of Smith's work. Smith certainly has individualist tendencies, but there is perhaps more intersubjectivity in his moral and economic theory than Genovese allows for here.Chapters 2 and 3 of The Problem of Profit are focused respectively on the rural economies that georgic poetry celebrates, and on the urban economy that journalism advocates. These chapters creatively bring together these two distinct genres and geographical settings, while also tracing the development of a positive ideology of profit that eschews and repudiates self-interest and individualism. When discussing the georgic, Genovese considers how poems by John Philips, Christopher Smart, Robert Dodsley, and John Dyer describe networks of profit and production that were aimed at producing a local interdependence. Genovese carefully demonstrates how these poems aim to create a community that crosses lines of class and rank, and even connects humans to the nonhuman environment. He also decisively shows that this community has its limits and that claims for intersubjectivity stop at England's borders.In moving to the urban context in chapter 3, Genovese reads periodicals such as The Spectator, The Tatler, and The Review as advancing an ideology of mutual indebtedness that held the community of credit together. Distinct from rational self-interest, the ideal of mutual indebtedness meant that creditor and debtor were part of a system in which everyone was exposed to and compromised by debt, and thus, that the credit of any individual depended on the credit of everyone else. Because of this interdependence, creditors and debtors were linked with a sentimental form of economic bond that he names “affective finance.” In his reading of periodicals, he argues that this kind of “literary interdependence” (110) was built into such writing, in which readers as correspondents, and writers as readers of correspondence, were mutually indebted. In turning to A Journal of the Plague Year, Genovese maintains that Defoe wants to show how, even during the plague, relations of sentiment and affect outweighed claims of individual self-interest and self-preservation. While the interpretations of individual texts in these chapters are convincing, the most arresting claim is that, counterintuitively, urban credit works in a very similar way to the rural economies described in georgic poetry. The interdependence required of credit means that the trust that supports it “would normally have come from immediate or local ties” (86). This examination of interdependence and locality opens up ways to think about economics in less “macro” terms. Economics is instead described as a system that produces community and social ties, rather than as a system that divides populations into classes, or labor into specializations.The next chapter of The Problem of Profit takes an intriguing turn, both in terms of its content and its argument. Taking as its starting point two oft-maligned midcentury sentimental novels of the Fielding siblings, Sarah's David Simple and Henry's Amelia, Genovese looks at some of the ideological limitations of the critique of self-interest. He shows that both these novels demonstrate that some limited form of self-interest may be necessary to maintain or achieve economic independence in the face of the kind of radical economic inequality characteristic of eighteenth-century society. In David Simple, Genovese accomplishes this by a close reading of the minor characters in the novel. He argues that Sarah Fielding asks us to read these characters “metaphorically” rather than sympathetically. Doing so means maintaining the difference between these characters “while allowing readers to identify, if only partially, with otherness” (137). Readers can thus understand characters whose positions in an economic structure may differ significantly from their own in a way that stronger identifications associated with sympathy may not allow. The best thing about this reading is the way Genovese distances Sarah Fielding's position as author from her protagonist David Simple. While the “myopia of [his] sympathy” (127) leads to his broad disdain for all self-interest, Sarah Fielding invites readers to identify with minor characters who make decisions “independent of us” (137). In his reading of Henry Fielding's Amelia, Genovese similarly demonstrates that the protagonist can only escape her heavily gendered economic dependence once she acts with a limited and deliberate self-interest. Ultimately, this chapter provides nuance to Genovese's argument both by detailing some of the many areas of structural economic inequality in eighteenth-century British society, and by showing how the ideology of self-interest is articulated differently amongst these separate economic groups.The final chapter of The Problem of Profit turns to money, and specifically specie, as a medium of sympathetic exchange. Money, as an object of exchange and circulation, according to Genovese, is a solution to what he calls the problematic figure of the “sensible knave,” most fully examined in the essays of David Hume. This figure hoards both sentiment and money, taking them out of exchange. In reading the debates about recoinage in the 1690s, Genovese discovers that the dominant concept of value to emerge was the idea that the value of coins, though based on a real substrate of bullion, must be negotiated between subjects. This means that value is intersubjective, based neither on a metaphysical intrinsic value of silver, nor on the mere authority of the sovereign. What is important about specie is that its neutral substrate in bullion allows for a commerce between strangers in a way that paper money, based on credit, does not. What I especially like about the chapter is the way it spreads the idea of sociable profit, and the interdependence that goes along with it, beyond local and national borders. But this is the chapter in which Genovese's generally optimistic reading of sociable profit seems most strained. In his example of Hume's man of property who receives pleasure from others’ admiration of his riches, Genovese sees a mutual dependence that draws the rich man away from a solipsistic indulgence of his own goods, toward a community of feeling; nonetheless, this seems to underplay the extent to which this form of intersubjectivity works to keep his material riches right where they are. In his readings of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas and Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Genovese does an admirable job of demonstrating how the neutrality of currency allows for commerce among strangers. Yet here, too, the readings seem sometimes partial. Of Yorick's several economic encounters with lower-class women in France, Genovese focuses on his interaction with a grisette in a shop, rather than with the more sexually charged encounters with the chambermaid in the street and the ribbon seller in his bedroom. This allows Genovese to emphasize the commerce between strangers, while deemphasizing Yorick's private, sensual, exploitative pleasures. This chapter is one of the most interesting of the book, precisely because it expands the limits of sociable profit beyond the local and national, while also perhaps confronting the internal, subjective limits to the sociability of sociable profit.The work of defining the external, objective limits of sociable profit is continued in the epilogue, which includes some of the book's strongest insights. Reflecting on Britain's participation in the slave economy, Genovese argues that the slave is granted entry to Britain's “profit seeking collective . . . only as an excuse for affective outburst, not outreach” (183). The slave economy thus reaches the external and objective limit of sociable profit and affective finance. It is the realm in which profit and sentiment are definitively separated. In between Genovese's scathing readings of James Grainger's The Sugar Cane and William Earle's Obi, or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, we learn that it is Olaudah Equiano's autobiography, in fact, that outlines for us the truth of capitalist modernity. Equiano's cordoning off of affect from economic activity, shows us “the inevitability of those forms of self-interested moneymaking and individualized, introspective affect that would come to characterize the modern capitalistic world” (189). This conclusion to Genovese's book is thought provoking, not only for the way it centers Equiano's knowledge and experience of modern capitalism, but also for the way it encourages us to look beyond the social and the domestic as we think about life in eighteenth-century England. In so precisely outlining the limits of his own argument about sociable profit and affective finance, Genovese demonstrates the expansiveness of his thought about eighteenth-century economies.