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

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.

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.