Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World

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.

• A critique of the centrality of the model of the ‘free market’ in public and academic life • Features contributions from leading historians, theorists and social scientists • Has methodological implications for contemporary debates about globalization and markets

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.

\'An important contribution to the literature of the new political economy, this collection of essays speaks directly to the current debate about globalisation … this collection of diverse yet commonly themed essays will be most useful to scholars and graduate students, but its ideas are important and should trickle down.\' Business History