E mma H art . Trading Spaces

For more than a quarter century now, historians have been arguing that American capitalism’s emergence was not part of a general phenomenon with an inevitable development but a process governed by culture and contingency and that varied across time and space. Emma Hart’s Trading Spaces provides a nuanced, original, and important contribution to this burgeoning historiography by tracing how the colonization of British North America revolutionized “the market” between 1660 and 1800. The market in North America became less a place and more an abstraction, and the interests of property holders ascended often and sometimes uneasily at the expense of notions of the common good. Unanchored to particular places, colonial markets resembled more those of today than the narrowly circumscribed and tightly regulated spaces of early modern Britain. Colonial market culture, according to Hart, laid the foundation for the United States’ less fettered form of capitalism and its ongoing debates...

Capitalism · Colonialism · Contingency · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Epistemology · Historiography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies