The first book-length study of its topic, “Economies of Scale: Capitalism and Containment in Contemporary North American Poetry,” argues that economic language and imagery in diverse 21st century poems enables poets to comment on the relation between the arts and contemporary finance-based capitalism. These poems also reveal something surprising: they repeatedly disrupt the traditional poetic figure of synecdoche, in which the part stands for the whole, in ways that destabilize notions of value, containment, and scale.

This project broadens our understanding of what can and cannot be considered money by exploring the use of a commodity (in this case, the South American beverage, yerba mate) as a form of money in a region lacking coinage. And in this role, yerba mate took on further importance as a tool for empire building. Such a development entailed significant cultural change. Europeans first found the indigenous (Guaraní) caffeinated beverage repulsive but consumption spread so widely that within decades many claimed it a basic necessity.

Early landmark studies of the economic context of the English Renaissance stage presented its drama as reflections of large-scale economic changes, such as price inflation, urbanization, the supersession of customary forms of land tenure by leaseholds, and the rise of merchant capital. Recent scholarship has favored more focused analyses of material, legal, and social practices specific to different domains of economic activity.

Contemporary sustainability challenges are exacerbated by a widespread belief among academics, policymakers, and the broader public that economic growth can continue indefinitely without accounting for environmental stocks and sinks. My historical investigation argues this divide between ecology and economics is not inevitable. Instead, I demonstrate economists used to factor the natural world into their analyses, and only ceased doing so over the last century and a half.

Money and banking was a tumultuous subject in the early United States. In the decades after independence, the country underwent a monetary revolution: from only four banks in 1790, the United States boasted over three hundred banks by the late 1810s, each issuing their own paper currency.