Markets in Historical Contexts Ideas and Politics in the Modern World

Leading academics offer a historically informed, interdisciplinary inquiry into markets and their social and political relations.

Markets in Historical Contexts is the result of a dialogue between historians and social scientists thinking about markets in modern society. How should we approach markets after the collapse of Marxism? What alternative ways of thinking about markets can we recover from the past? The essays in this volume set out to challenge essentialist accounts of the market. Instead they suggest that markets are always embedded in distinctive traditions and practices that shape the ways in which they are conceived and the manner of their working. The essays range widely over European and non-European societies from the eighteenth century to the present, from the great transformation to globalization. Rational peasants, republican economists, popular conservatives, guild theorists, early environmentalists, communitarians, progressives, consumers, Gandhi's descendants and others are all revived. The volume thus recovers alternative ways of thinking about markets, many of which are neglected or marginalized in contemporary debates.

Acknowledgements; List of contributors; 1. Markets in historical contexts: ideas, practices and governance Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann; 2. Improving justice: communities of norms in the Great Transformation James Livesey; 3. The politics of political economy in France from Rousseau to Constant Richard Whatmore; 4. Tories and markets: Britain 1800–1850 David Eastwood; 5. Guild theory and guild organisation in France and Germany during the nineteenth century Heinz-Gerhard Haupt; 6. Thinking green, nineteenth-century style: John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin Donald Winch; 7. Tönnies on 'community' and 'civil society': clarifying some cross-currents in post-Marxian political thought Jose Harris; 8. German historicism, progressive social thought, and the interventionist state in the United States since the 1880s Axel R. Schäfer; 9. Civilising markets: traditions of consumer politics in twentieth-century Britain, Japan and the United States Patricia Maclachlan and Frank Trentmann; 10. The ideologically embedded market: political legitimation and economic reform in India Rob Jenkins; 11. The locational and institutional embeddedness of electronic markets: the case of the global capital markets Saskia Sassen; Index.

This book presents a much-needed corrective to the model of the 'free market' which has come to dominate public and academic life. Leading historians, theorists and social scientists offer historically informed, interdisciplinary inquiries into the embeddedness of markets in social, cultural and political relations from the eighteenth century to the present.

MARK BEVIR is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999).
FRANK TRENTMANN is Senior Lecturer in History at Birkbeck College and Director of the ESRC- and AHRB-funded Cultures of Consumption Research Programme.