Book review: accounting for capitalism: the world the clerk made

In Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made, Michael Zakim, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, carefully examines how a new class of finance professionals within the emerging industrial order of the nineteenth century fundamentally transformed the ideological underpinnings of the American economy and democracy. From his rigorous and insightful investigation, the rise of the bookkeeper as a progenitor of modern capitalism may also be credited with refounding the nation on the basis of mobility and opportunism.