Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

Author: Bhu Srinivasan

You are probably wondering, what more is there to write about American History? Anything and everything about US History is probably written, narrated and made into a movie by now. Children learn about this in school and maybe that is one reason why this is really a poor choice of topic to write a book on. I, however, didn't go to high school in the United States, and found the premise of the book interesting. It narrated American History from a purely economic and capitalistic point of view. 

Bhu starts by telling his personal story of how he landed up in the United States and a college assignment to write an essay that reflected on the relation between American History and his own story, had him stumped initially. I can safely say that by writing this book on American History, he far exceeded his college professor's expectations.

The book starts at the very beginning of how the first Pilgrims raised capital to contract the Mayflower and fund their journey to America.  Bhu dives into the details of the contracts to demonstrate how they were written to benefit the investor with little provision for the welfare of the Pilgrims. In many ways the investors resembled Venture Capital firms, that I am all too familiar with, having lived the past two decades in Silicon Valley. 

Once the Pilgrims land on American soil, they are in for some rude awakening. Most likely these circumstances are much better documented in many other books. However, for completeness, Bhu gets into some of the details so we can understand the economic motivation for their actions. He has a writers sense of keen observation. Rather than just narrate events, Bhu gives his perspective on the prevailing state of affairs and does not hesitate to reach out to a popular novel of the time to make his point. He uses Upton Sinclair to make his case about the state of the meat-packing industry, or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to illustrate how even poor families all had cars in the late 1930s US, an unusual standard relative to the rest of the world. 

On the topic of Slavery, Bhu underscores how slaves formed the single biggest asset class in the 1800s. "At an average price of $700, the nearly 4 million slaves in the American South in 1859, can be estimated to be worth $2.8 billion collectively".   Much like we take out loans with our homes as collateral today, the landowners in the south were loaned money based on their slave assets. These loan contracts, would have made it impossible for them to free slaves even if they were inclined to do so.  Bhu observers how slavery had an outsized impact on the American economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

In describing the lack of America’s appetite for big spending on defense, he offers up that it “made perfect sense considering that America’s two most formidable defensive assets didn’t cost anything to maintain”.  He is referring to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that border the east and west coasts from North to South. 

Bhu is a big fan of Alex de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” and often quotes from it marveling at how accurately it describes America even a century later!  While reading this book, I couldn't help but wonder how Bhu made his choices of whom to pick when he described a particular timeline in America’s history. For example, he could have talked about the technological war being waged by the different computer companies in the seventies.  Instead he chose to focus on just IBM and EDS. The latter resulting in making its founder, Ross Perot, the first tech billionaire of all time. 

Overall, I enjoyed Bhu's fresh perspective on American History.  His assumption that people do things for economic gain seems quite reasonable to me.  He interprets all of American History through this capitalistic lens and it makes for a wonderful retelling of American History.