1st Edition
The Cultural Life of Risk and Innovation Imagining New Markets from the Seventeenth Century to the Present
How did "innovation" become something to strive for, an end in itself? And how did "the market" come to be thought of as the space of innovation? This edited volume provides the first historical examination of how innovations are conceived, marketed, navigated and legitimated from a global perspective that highlights contrasting experiences. These experiences include: colonial "projecting" in the Dutch New Netherlands, trust networks in the early US securities market, female investors during the Financial Revolution, life insurance in nineteenth-century France, "bubbles" and trusts in 1920s Shanghai, government regulation of the pre-Revolutionary stock market and the checkered success of today’s bit-coin technology. By discussing these diverse contexts together, this volume provides a pathbreaking reconsideration of market and business activities in light of both the techniques and the emotional vectors that infuse them.
Part I: Imagining New Markets 1. Dealing with Uncertainty: The Practice of Projecting and the Colony of New Netherland, 1609–1664 2. Looking for New Markets in a Time of Revolution: The U.S. Securities Market, 1789–1804 Part II: Navigating Markets: Strategies and Affects 3. Navigating the Spaces and Places of England’s First Stock Market: Women Investors and Brokers during the Financial Revolution, c. 1690–1730 4. A Criminal Enterprise: Murder, Life Insurance, and the La Pommerais Case in Second Empire France 5. Trust: The Latest Hot Ticket in a Shanghai Bubble Part III: Controlling Markets: The State and its Discontents 6. An Eighteenth-Century Big Bang? The Liberalization of the Paris Stock Market, 1774–1793 7. Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the Distributed Technologies of Trust
Biography
Chia Yin Hsu is Associate Professor of History at Portland State University, USA.
Thomas M. Luckett is Associate Professor of History at Portland State University, USA.
Erika Vause is an Assistant Professor of European History at St. John’s University, USA.
