In early modern Europe, the rapid circulation of commercial and financial information signified the rise of capitalism. It took place in a swath of territory that straddled the Alps from northern Italy to Lyons, Geneva, and Basel. It forked out to Paris on the one side and Frankfurt am Main on the other. But capitalism cut the deepest channels down the Rhine River basin to the Low Countries, from there arcing out across England and southern Scotland, and flowing east along the Baltic Sea coast to Stockholm.

In this territory, relatively small and politically open societies with strong but not oppressive central governments and good access to maritime, riverine, or overland communications routes held the advantage that they had accrued from abundant trade and a sense of widening economic horizons. Great Britain and the Dutch Republic were the most advanced of these information societies, as news and commerce traveled most voluminously in, around, and between Amsterdam and London.

The capitalist firmament expanded suddenly in the nineteenth century, when the railroad and the telegraph turned the United States into an immense, steam-powered, and electrified version of Holland or England. A compact coastal territory was no longer the requirement for rapid communications and intensive exchange of goods and information. Capitalism could now exist on a continental scale – wherever political conditions tolerated the freest and fullest transmission of information.

The size of the American economy – whose productive capacity was supercharged by industrialization after the Civil War – brought the first full-fledged mass market into existence. The mass market entailed new ways of doing business as new transportation and communications systems accelerated both supply and demand. Information technologies thus shaped the salient contours of capitalism in our time: internationally linked commodity markets; factory-based mass production; mass distribution in new types of retail stores; mass marketing; large corporations; and the meteoric rise of the stock market.

These are all the subjects of the current chapter, the first to interpret American capitalism from the perspective of the information nexus. But the story begins with the technological advances that generated the modern information nexus and undergirded capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.