Since the fall of the Soviet Bloc regimes, it has become accepted wisdom that the market system has triumphed—that relying on the free, independent exchange between economic actors is a far superior way of allocating resources than attempting to “plan” from above. At a general level, this accepted wisdom is hard to dispute. Yet, like all such propositions, its heuristic usefulness cuts two ways: Embracing it wholesale makes for an easy bet; it also, however, encourages one to overlook a more complex and ambiguous reality that lurks beneath the surface. We might agree, for example, that markets confer myriad economic and political advantages. What we might less readily agree on, however, is what, precisely, we mean by “markets.” As the essays in Markets in Historical Contexts make clear, if we mean institutions that are “not encumbered by geography, weight, unequal access to information, government regulation, or particularistic agendas” (p. 226) (not to mention cultural context), then we will quickly find ourselves running afoul of social science's ultimate limit: reality.

The goal of this interdisciplinary effort (with contributions coming from political scientists, historians, and sociologists) is to “retrieve” markets from the simplistic dichotomies of the twentieth century, that is, to demonstrate that in juxtaposing them to the state or to culture, we forget the degree to which they are the state and they are the culture (and the state and culture are them). Rather than overturn accepted wisdom, then, this volume seeks to better understand it.

Contributions follow two complementary lines of thinking: analyses of the actual place and role of markets in the development of modern societies, and analyses of how thinkers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries have understood that role and place. In the former vein, Rob Jenkin's essay on political legitimation and economic reform in India offers perhaps the clearest illustration of the book's central tenet that market activity needs to be seen from within the confines of culture, tradition, and ongoing social forces. While market ideology has reemerged in the India of the 1990s, its continued growth, Jenkins argues, rests less on institutional than ideological adaptability. To be more specific, market success will be determined by how well it competes with class-based issues, Hindu nationalism, and issue-based social activism. In such competition, all these ideological tendencies must interact with India's swadeshi (roughly, its economic nationalism), and it is this interaction that will not only determine which are successful, but on what terms. In establishing its swadeshi credentials, then, the market does in India what it no doubt must do in all social milieus: reflect the particularity of its time and place.

Patricia Maclachlan and Frank Trentmann's essay reinforces this point by suggesting that the recent spate of consumer protests might be better understood if we look less to the globalizing pressures of capitalism and more to the ways these protests “reflect and contribute to the longevity of domestic political cultures and local markets” (p. 201). In examining Japan, Britain, and the United States, the authors demonstrate that national definitions of citizenship and the public good play a strong role in determining whether consumer movements will flourish. Moreover, it is not just market activity in particular that is linked to the local. Maclachlan and Trentmann extend their conclusion to all social movements, suggesting that their “political ‘success’ … rests on the ability of movements to frame their objectives in ways that complement or contribute to broader cultural norms and prevailing ideas about democracy and political economy” (p. 201).

The final empirical assaults are on our understanding of how markets developed historically and where they are headed now. James Livesey's fascinating look back at eighteenth-century peasant agricultural societies adroitly demonstrates that much of what Karl Polanyi referred to as our “market mentality” came to markets from outside cultural sources, rather than emanating from them. And lest we believe that twenty-first-century global capital markets have finally thrown off all cultural shackles, Saskia Sassen reveals the “non-market and non-digital dynamics, agendas, contents [and] powers” (p. 225) that still remain.

If these essays complicate the real world of markets, the remaining essays complicate the ways we have historically viewed that world. David Eastwood's analysis of “High Tory” (e.g., Coleridge, Southey, and Sadler) opposition to the political economy of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo serves to remind modern conservatives that the progressive Left was hardly alone in its condemnation of market austerity and its commitment to an active state. Markets have historically presented societies with features offensive to both sides of the political spectrum. Moreover, as Heinz-Gerhard Haupt argues, we often fail to see just how complex was the opposition from quarters traditionally thought precapitalist in orientation. In his essay on guild theory and organization, Haupt argues that in the hands of Gierke, Durkheim, and others, guilds provided the necessary buffer between the state and the individual, a buffer that, far from “annulling the mechanisms of the market,” improved its chances of survival by “diminishing and moralizing its effects” (p. 104). The implication to consider here is that if the opposition to markets did not have the retarding effect on their growth that we have commonly presumed, then perhaps the dynamics of the markets that emerged in the wake of that opposition has also not been entirely as we have presumed.

None of these essays suffers from a lack of scholarly insight, and for that reason alone, this book is well worth the effort of those with intrinsic interests in the history of political economy and political economic thought. If there is a criticism to be found, it is one that stems from the (perhaps unfair) vantage point of readers in need of a more instrumental incentive. For those prone to asking the dreaded “so what?” when confronted with history, these essays are for the most part missing the hook required to draw them in. This is not to say that the hook is not there; it is. In fact, the message beneath this historical scholarship is of great importance to readers with contemporary concerns. The problem is that, for the most part, these essays fall far short of explaining why that might be.

Essays by Donald Winch, Jose Harris, and Richard Whatmore provide the most obvious examples here. In Winch's case, a rigorous look at the proto-environmentalism of Mill, Ruskin, and, to a lesser degree, Marshall leaves readers to sort out for themselves whatever parallels may exist with contemporary eco-strategies (e.g., the tension between its Luddite-romantic and its progressive socialistic elements). By contrast, Harris's concern with analytic imprecision looks initially to be more promising. As a correction to our slippery use of language, she offers a look back at Tönnies's famous Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction, arguing that it illuminates the “clashes of interest and principle in many major areas of public life” in ways that the “now largely exhausted dichotomies of socialism versus capitalism [and] states versus markets” (p. 144) can only partially accomplish. The problem here is that while the focus is in a helpful direction, the argument is less than convincing, as it is difficult to see how Tönnies's distinction could really help us better weigh the costs and benefits associated with the advance of modern bureaucratic societies.

Finally, Whatmore's historically astute treatment of Rousseau, Constant, and Say convincingly “complicates the historical record for those who continue to espouse a ‘black and white’ approach to the intellectual history of markets” (p. 69). But, a reader might ask, “to what end?” While we might rightly agree with his closing statement—“Say's belief that modern republics actually deprive the people of political and economic agency is a recurring theme in contemporary political culture” (p. 69)—we might just as rightly wonder what exactly to do with that insight.

In contrast to such academic caution, Axel Schäfer's examination of the German antecedents to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American progressivism will appear downright (and refreshingly) shrill. After concluding that “while progressive thought helped shape the consumer economy, welfare policies remained tied to the normative code of nineteenth-century producer capitalism,” Schäfer uses this observation to shed light on an odd and easily overlooked aspect of our current state: “[W]hile the poor are chided for becoming ‘dependent' on welfare, equivalent behavior patterns among the middle classes are defined as conducive to the workings of the consumer economy” (p. 167). This refreshing appraisal of the duplicity with which America's consumerist public ethos condemns with one hand what it praises with another reminds us of a simple yet—in this volume—sometimes overlooked truth: History matters.