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Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Hannah Forsyth, "Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Description: Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008 (Cambridge UP, 2023) 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 tha...