In this sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov boldly trace the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical yet understudied decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage-worker class and the formation of an industrial middle class. Jentz and Schneirov demonstrate how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan manufacturing. The new social movements that arose in this era--labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and feminism--constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and '70s. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of industrialization, Chicago in the Age of Capitalvividly depicts the human and political costs of building a city economy.