Trading Spaces

Looks at the shift from the marketplace as an actual place to a theoretical idea and how this shaped the early American economy. When we talk about the economy, ¿the market¿ is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain¿s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market¿s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart¿s book¿takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America¿places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less-fettered brand o