When we talk about the economy, "the market" is often just an
abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a
particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to
create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma
Hart argues that Britain's colonization of North America was a key
moment in the market's shift from place to idea, with major consequences
for the character of the American economy.
Hart's book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs,
and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America--places where
new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or
adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier
conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial
offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less fettered brand
of capitalism. By the nineteenth century this had evolved into a market
economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To
tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be,
Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting
these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific
commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading
spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of
commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.
