Buying time

Futures trading and telegraphy in nineteenth-century global commodity markets

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12876602
AutoresAlexander Engel (0000-0003-3994-1994, University of Göttingen, autor de correspondencia)
Año2015
Volumen10
Número2
Páginas284-306
Fecha de publicación2015-06-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Global History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1740-0228 • E-ISSN: 1740-0236
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1740022815000078
OpenAlexW2203146407
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12
Referencias citadas34

Adapting the dictum that ‘time is money’, Western merchants have long promoted and welcomed technologies to accelerate commerce. Thanks to revolutionary changes in communication in the nineteenth century, including the telegraph, information could for the first time travel much faster around the globe than goods. This asymmetric time–space compression created new problems for agents of global trade, as transactions could occur faster than the handling of the goods. Yet this problem also presented an opportunity to establish new forms of trading and ways of thinking about time. In the case of world markets for primary products such as grain or cotton, the new technique of futures trading at commodity exchanges became a tool to redress the time differential between the movement of goods and information. It pushed the commercial community to think in a ‘double time’ of a dematerialized present and a material future with physical goods, and centred global commodity markets on a few marketplaces. The article thus argues that historians need to examine economic understandings of the future alongside political, cultural, and social understandings

Algorithmic trading · Business · Commerce · Commodity · Commodity chain · Economics · Economy · Electronic trading · Financial economics · Futures contract · Globe · Market economy · Microeconomics · Open outcry · Political science · Politics · Redress · Telecommunications · Telegraphy · Trading turret · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Engineering · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Finance