Throughout its history, the U.S. military has worked in close connection
to market-based institutions and structures. It has run systems of free
and unfree labor, taken over private sector firms, and both spurred and
snuffed out economic development. It has created new markets--for
consumer products, for sex work, and for new technologies. It has
operated as a regulator of industries and firms and an arbitrator of
labor practices. And in recent decades it has gone so far as to
refashion itself from the inside, so as to become more similar to a
for-profit corporation.
The Military and the Market covers two centuries of history of the
U.S. military's vast and varied economic operations, including its often
tense relationships with capitalist markets. Collecting new scholarship
at the intersection of the fields of military history, business history,
policy history, and the history of capitalism, the nine chapters feature
important new research on subjects ranging from Civil War
soldier-entrepreneurs, to the business of the construction of housing
and overseas bases for the Cold War, to the U.S. military's troubled
relationships with markets for sex. The volume enriches scholars'
understandings of the depth and complexity of military-market relations
in U.S. history and offers today's military policymakers novel insights
about the origins of current arrangements and how they might be
reimagined.
Contributors: Jessica L. Adler, Timothy Barker, Patrick Chung,
Gretchen Heefner, Jennifer Mittelstadt, A. Junn Murphy, Kara Dixon Vuic,
Sarah Jones Weicksel, Mark R. Wilson, Daniel Wirls.
