Virtue Capitalists 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 that, by the mid twentieth century, the professional class ruled the world in alliance with managers whose resources enabled the implementation of virtuous strategies. Since morality and capital had become materially entangled, the 1970s economic crisis also presented a moral crisis for all professions, beginning a process whereby the interests of expert and managerial workers separated and began to actively compete.

Short-listed, 2024 Premier's History Awards - Australian History Prize, New South Wales

‘Bold and original, brilliantly conceived and deeply researched, Virtue Capitalists shows the necessity of a transnational historical perspective to understanding the rise and decline of the professional class in the modern world. The book also illuminates the vanguard role of paradoxically progressive settler colonial societies in this dynamic process.’

Marilyn Lake - The University of Melbourne

‘Hannah Forsyth’s book is an original and enlightening examination of the crucial role of globalising professional classes in the development of capitalism from the late nineteenth century onwards. In particular, she shows that these groups developed their own form of class consciousness through values like duty, charity, thrift, probity and cleanliness. Later, welfare states were built by these professionals as the progressive foundation for advanced societies in the postwar years. Dr Forsyth has produced a challenging and intellectually sustained argument that will be read with considerable interest and attention.’

Christopher Llyod - University of New England

‘… the volume is a great accomplishment. Forsyth not only traces the career of the professional class, but further establishes its importance to the history and transformations of capitalism. Virtue Capitalists makes an important contribution to these fields of research. I hope also that it will serve as an inspiration for students of other topics, for it can be considered as a model of innovative historical scholarship marked by several impressive features: a transnational framing and range of investigation; a sensitivity to the material as well as the cultural and to their interpenetration; a capacity to place historical processes and relations (not merely institutions and actors) at the centre of analysis; a clear and fluent writing style; a dedication to explanation along with description; and a commitment to the value of historical research to the struggle for future justice.’

Sean Scalmer Source: Australian Historical Studies

‘Virtue Capitalists is a densely researched, provocative and important book; it both excavates the connected histories of the rise and fall of the professions across the Anglophone World and develops a convincing argument about the way professional virtue had materiality and was subject to exchange across the period … Virtue Capitalists offers a vital, critical and historically rich reflection on the professionalisation that shaped the twentieth-century economy and which continues to have consequences today.’

Christina de Bellaigue Source: Cultural and Social History

‘There are dozens of books trying to answer some of the same questions by offering a history of the economic and class stresses of the present. Forsyth’s work is among the most compelling, offering concrete examples and a set of hypotheses for other scholars to debate and test.’

Toby Harper Source: American Historical Review