The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity. By Anat Rosenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 432 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. Hardcover, £70.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-285891-7.

Abstract

rities quickly matured, and the burgeoning marketplace for railroad securities was barred to small-scale investors (p. 199). Did Cooke mine the “sort of emotional commodity” of confidence in the Union, or manufacture it (p. 8)? Its “strange surge” likely correlated to battlefield outcomes but also, argues Thomson, to the “faith” that salesmanship instilled (pp. 195, 132). A new culture of finance in America, and the success of war bonds, then, were mutually dependent processes. Several questions come to mind: whether intent or opportunity determined civic investment, what kind of profitability patriotism required, and what ideals replaced the Civil War’s financial citizenship in the Reconstruction era. Regular readers of this journal might criticize that institutional changes and business innovations get short shrift in the growth of American finance, or that Thomson only hints at the immensely important function of credit. And the profitable globalization of US financing, not least, may leave one wondering about the transnational marketing of the Union, the national and imperial attachments of capital networks, or the increasingly crucial role of railroad, state, andmunicipal debt in nation-building. These questions, however,merely evidence the fact thatBonds ofWar is a deeply researched and neatly argued book that successfully retells the Civil War moment in financial history, repositionsWall Street firmly within transatlantic networks, and enables further work.