I would like to bring your attention to a collaborative scholarly project called the Culture of the Market Network. This project, which is funded by Britain`s AHRC, will look at the evolution of economic culture in 19th century America. The project will run 2009-11 and will bring together scholars from various disciplines (literary studies, history, business and management studies, geography, sociology, anthropology) to explore the cultural dimensions of market capitalism. The focus is primarily on the long nineteenth century in the US, but the network seeks to develop comparative insights from other regions and periods—most obviously, the current crisis.
The network will organise four two-day symposia. There will be 12-15 speakers at each event, with room for c. 25-30 participants altogether. There will be limited travel and accommodation funding for core participants, and some bursaries for PhD students. Some of the papers will be delivered by videoconference, with selections from each event available by podcast.
Here is a list of their upcoming events:
1. Reputation, Emotion and the Market (University of Oxford, 19-20th March 2010)
This event will focus on the role that seemingly non-economic factors such as reputation, trust and confidence play in shaping conceptualisations of the market and economic behaviour—both individual and corporate—in the long nineteenth century in America. It will consider what the financial panics of the 19th Century can teach us about the present and vice versa, as well as looking at the changing nature of corruption and scandal.
2. Reading the Market (University of Manchester, 10-11th September 2010)
This symposium will be centred on the ways that both experts and non-experts learned to “read” the emerging market in securities. It will look at the epistemologies and forms of subjectivity shaped by market engagement, and will investigate e.g. the forms of financial knowledge, statistical information, visualisation and financial forecasting as ways of representing the market.
3. Power and the History of Capitalism (New School, New York, April 15-16th 2011)
This conference seeks to sharpen our long-term historical perspective on relations of power, politics and modern capitalism, with a special emphasis on United States history from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. We ask how capitalism and its periodic crises have revised political rights and responsibilities, reconfigured political practices and institutions, and redistributed wealth. Conversely, we aim to analyze how power relations – whether organized by state policy and laws, or structured by social norms and institutions, articulated in ideology, or embedded within racial, gender and class relations — have shaped economic outcomes. The ongoing crises of contemporary capitalism – as well as the heightened emphasis on questions of power within the social sciences and humanities – invest these questions with new urgency.
4. Commodities and the Idea of a Global Market (Harvard, September 2011)
What are the advantages and pitfalls of the turn to “commodity biographies” (e.g. of coffee, cotton, madeira, silk, seeds, cocaine) in business history? This symposium will focus on the role that commodities played in enabling or hindering the imagination of a global marketplace, and how a global economy in turn shaped a sense of national identity.
See the project website for full details.
Here is a statement of the project`s aims:
Although “financial literacy” has recently become a strategic priority for many governments, there has been little systematic research into the history of popular financial knowledge, or the role of cultural and emotional dimensions of market behaviour in times of economic crisis. The Culture of the Market Network will bring together an international group of intellectual and cultural historians on the one hand and business and economic historians on the other to investigate the particular forms of epistemology, subjectivity and social relations that were created by and that in turn help reconfigure financial capitalism in the long nineteenth century in the United States. A series of four symposia (Oxford, Manchester, UC Irvine and Harvard, including videoconferencing) will focus on the intersections between culture and economics in nineteenth-century America, a period that offers many insightful parallels to the current moment of crisis in global financial capitalism. The Network is interdisciplinary and comparative in outlook, promoting interaction between the core group of researchers and invited experts from related fields such as Victorian Britain and present-day Wall Street.
The Network aims to investigate how non-experts learned to make sense of financial information in general and the operations of the stock market in particular in the period. It will do so by focussing on the forms of financial knowledge that they acquired, and the ideological assumptions behind the turn to statistics and forecasting as ways of representing the market. The Network will consider the institutional, rhetorical and psychological mechanisms that helped persuade ordinary people to participate in the stock market, and the role of seemingly non-economic factors such as trust and confidence in shaping market behaviour in the period. It will also showcase research on how global commodity chains helped forge a popular understanding – and distrust – of a globalised market. Finally the Network will explore how popular scepticism about the market and money played out in the political struggles of the era.
The head of the Network is Dr Peter Knight, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, University of Manchester. His publications include:
Knight, P. The Kennedy Assassination. Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Knight, P. Conspiracy Conspiracy Culture – American Paranoia from the Kennedy Assassination to The X-Files. Routledge, 2000.
The Past Speaks 
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