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

Mark Bevir · Frank Trentmann

feb 2004 · Cambridge University Press

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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.

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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.