Collaboration takes trust, and big breakthroughs came in the antebellum United States. Some historians of the period have depicted that age as characterized by a fear of deceit and a lack of trust. The era is better described as a time when people were learning and practicing new ways to trust—in business, in politics, and at home. Recent scholarship in business history has shown many ways that the era’s capitalists built the requisite trust to keep betting on each other—for example Laird on networking, Balleisen on bankruptcy and fraud, Mihm on counterfeit money, the growing literature on credit and credit reporting (Olegario, Hyman, Lauer, etc.), all the work on business networks.
This paper suggests that antebellum service sector industries—restaurants and oyster cellars, hotels, barbershops, saloons and bars, maybe even stables—were trust-building institutions, just like credit reporting agencies or, eventually, the US Secret Service, institutions that helped people at all levels of the economy learn to trust enough to buy, sell, and work with each other. By providing a place, a neutral host, a set of rituals, and a variety of mind-altering substances (alcohol, tobacco, sugar, tryptophan, etc.), service sector firms helped with deal-making and all the trust-building that preceded it.
This paper also attempts a more precise theoretical description of trust than most other histories of capitalism. I define trust as an emotion. Drawing especially on recent developments in the psychology of emotions (but also touching on the sociology of emotional labor, affect studies, and histories of sentiment and emotion), I propose that trust and trust-building institutions warp truth and create emotional states that helps make capitalism work.