Overview

Virtue Capitalists explores the rise of the professional middle class across the Anglophone world from c. 1870 to 2008. With a focus on British settler colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States – Hannah Forsyth argues that the British middle class structured old forms of virtue into rapidly expanding white-collar professional work, needed to drive both economic and civilizational expansion across their settler colonies. They invested that virtue to produce social and economic profit. This virtue became embedded in the networked Anglophone economy so that, by the mid twentieth century, the professional class ruled the world in alliance with managers whose resources enabled the implementation of virtuous strategies. Since morality and capital had become materially entangled, the 1970s economic crisis also presented a moral crisis for all professions, beginning a process whereby the interests of expert and managerial workers separated and began to actively compete.

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9781009206488

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Reviews

'Bold and original, brilliantly conceived and deeply researched, Virtue Capitalists shows the necessity of a transnational historical perspective to understanding the rise and decline of the professional class in the modern world. The book also illuminates the vanguard role of paradoxically progressive settler colonial societies in this dynamic process.' Marilyn Lake, The University of Melbourne 'Hannah Forsyth's book is an original and enlightening examination of the crucial role of globalising professional classes in the development of capitalism from the late nineteenth century onwards. In particular, she shows that these groups developed their own form of class consciousness through values like duty, charity, thrift, probity and cleanliness. Later, welfare states were built by these professionals as the progressive foundation for advanced societies in the postwar years. Dr Forsyth has produced a challenging and intellectually sustained argument that will be read with considerable interest and attention.' Christopher Llyod, University of New England

Author Information

Hannah Forsyth is a historian at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney. She was President of Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society 2020-1. Her first book was A History of the Modern Australian University (2014).

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