As the subtitle of this volume suggests, it is not concerned with the empirical or historical operation of markets per se—none of the contributors are economists, and most are political scientists or historians—but is instead concerned with how ideas about the market have informed political thought and debate over the last quarter of the millennium. Thus, at the heart of much of the debate is how the balance between state and market has been perceived, conceived, and evolved. The contributions are arranged, more or less, chronologically, taking us from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, from the Great Transformation to the electronic global capital markets that now dominate so much of our economic life. Although there is acknowledgment of life beyond the Western world, particularly by the inclusion of an essay on India by Rob Jenkins, spatially the volume has a Western European focus.

The main aims of the volume are neatly summarized by Axel Schäfer: “to recover intellectual traditions critical of the free market and to show the functioning of markets was prescribed by distinct cultural and institutional contexts” (164). The editors Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, in their opening essay, say that their starting point is the acceptance of the embeddedness of markets but that rather than focusing on questions about institutional preconditions and trust they want to approach this from a much broader perspective. They want “to re-embed markets as ideas and practices of social co-ordination within their political, social and cultural contexts” (5). This allows them to break free from traditional debates about promarket versus antimarket and to reexamine, or recover, more ambivalent understandings of the market by thinkers from the right as well as the left. Indeed, one of the strengths of the volume is the way that many of the contributions (e.g., Richard Whatmore on liberal political economy during and after the French Revolution or David Eastwood on Tory economic thinking in the first half of the nineteenth century) successfully undermine simple views that equate liberal thinkers with rather crude and static views of the market. Trentmann and Bevir also argue that confronting such issues in turn raises questions about the role of agency in markets, about economic governance, and about their interrelationship. This encompasses everything from, as in the essay by James Livesey, the role of the peasantry in the emergence of modern capitalism in the eighteenth century to, as in the paper by Patricia Maclachlan and Trentmann, the emergence of the consumer as a force in the twentieth century. Reading these essays makes one feel that there is nothing new under the sun as many of the authors cleverly reveal how the debates of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century find strong echoes of debates in the twenty-first century—from environmental concerns (the focus of the essay by Donald Winc, which is concerned with Ruskin and Mill) to issues of civil society and community (discussed by Jose Harris in the context of Tönnies) to the role of the market as a social, political, and economic force.

The essay on India by Jenkins and the discussion of Japan in the contribution by Winch suggest that the notion of markets, or at least the debates about their political, social, and economic functions, differed significantly between Western Europe and Asia. Of course, this is consistent with one of the central claims of this volume, the notion that markets are embedded in distinctive and contingent traditions and practices. However, given both the current historical debates about the Great Divergence and the prediction of many commentators that India and China will emerge as economic superpowers in the twenty-first century, more could possibly have been made of this particular divide. Furthermore, given that the first question posed on the back cover of the volume is “how should we approach markets after the collapse of Marxism?” some discussion of markets, or the perceived role of markets, in the transition economies of the Eastern Europe would have been informative. Also, to an economic historian like myself it does seem strange that a volume that is concerned with markets does not contain a contribution from the group of social scientists for whom the notion of the market is intrinsic. While there are many references to the work of several dead economists, the perspective of modern economics on some aspects of the debates discussed and issues raised by this volume might have given it greater breadth, and possibly depth. Undergraduate textbook economics may treat markets as an ahistorical space that is culturally, socially, and politically neutral, but many of the advances in economic theory in the past thirty years have been made while trying to address the embedded and messy nature of markets, including the two concerns of agency and economic governance that Bevir and Trentmann emphasize in their introduction. Such criticism should not, however, detract from the overall quality of the volume: it is ambitious in its aims, which in part is to engage in a serious debate about what markets have been perceived to be, what they represent or have represented in the past, and what implications that has for how we think about what they should be in the twenty-first century, especially perhaps in terms of the debates about globalization. This is a provocative and often insightful collection of essays that should appeal to many social scientists and historians and would enliven many a university reading list.