ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN THE STOCK EXCHANGE by Marc Flandreau ( 9780226360447 )

Item Details

Title:

ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN THE STOCK EXCHANGE
A FINANCIAL HISTORY OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE

By:

Marc Flandreau

Format:

Paperback

List price:

£31.00

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£27.90

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£3.10

ISBN 10:

022636044X

ISBN 13:

9780226360447

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Publisher:

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Pub. date:

19 September, 2016

Pages:

416

Description:

Beginning with the discovery of a curious plot wherein science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, "Anthropology and the Stock Exchange "by economic historian Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned societies. It explores how the commodification of scientific truth became every bit as integral as financial engineering to the profitability of foreign investment and speculation in foreign government debt. Flandreau underscores the crucial role of finance (what he calls the Stock Exchange Modality ) in shaping the contours of human knowledge and vice versa in an age of mercantile expansion. He further argues that a new brand of imperialism, born under Benjamin Disraeli s first term as British Premier, built on the multiple covert links between the birth of social sciences and novel mechanisms of financial revenue creation and extraction. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican Rebellion or Abyssinian Expedition, for example, they responded and catered to the impulses of the Stock Exchange. The marriage between anthropological science and finance, Flandreau asserts, formed the foundational structures of late 19th century British Imperialism, which in turn produced essential technologies of globalization."

Synopsis:

Uncovering strange plots by early British anthropologists to use scientific status to manipulate the stock market, Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange tells a provocative story that marries the birth of the social sciences with the exploits of global finance. Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentleman-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned society, showing that anthropological studies were integral to investment and speculation in foreign government debt, and, inversely, that finance played a crucial role in shaping the contours of human knowledge. Flandreau argues that finance and science were at the heart of a new brand of imperialism born during Benjamin Disraeli's first term as Britain's prime minister in the 1860s. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican rebellion, they were in fact catering to the impulses of the stock exchange--for their own benefit. In this way the very development of the field of anthropology was deeply tied to issues relevant to the financial market--from trust to corruption. Moreover, this book shows how the interplay between anthropology and finance formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth-century British imperialism and helped produce essential technologies of globalization as we know it today.

Publication:

Imprint:

University of Chicago Press

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