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With England’s Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi’s landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the...

Discipline of economics, who already assimilated the mathematical and technical tools as a base for the expression of theory is almost lost its identity as a social science. This process has become visible through some historical breakups. These breakups have scientific, social and economic faces. While the developments in natural sciences had led the economists to imitate physics - since it uses more certain methods as a science; the market society which established after the industrial...

In this article I discuss Polanyi's intellectual formation in early twentieth-century Budapest and in 1920s Vienna, focusing in particular upon his relationship to Guild Socialist and Marxist theory and to Austrian Social Democracy. It was a period in which Marxism was evolving rapidly, and Polanyi was too. In his twenties, he reacted forcefully against what he saw as the evolutionary and deterministic traits of Marxist philosophy. In his thirties, his relationship to Marxism underwent a...

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of many countries around the world where the relationship between customary land tenure and economic development has been hotly debated for a long time. A commonplace of the debate in PNG is that 97% of the nation's land is held under customary tenure, while only 3% has been alienated, and these proportions have not changed since the country became independent in 1975. This paper shows that the boundary between customary and alienated forms of land or immovable...

The concept of the ‘counter-movement’ has had a significant impact within studies in International Political Economy (IPE). In the light of the credit crisis and the growth of growing resentment to the notion of the free market, the idea of the counter-movement has been utilised to understand social reaction to neoliberalism. This article argues that whilst the counter-movement has been used in unique and innovated ways, Karl Polanyi himself used the term largely to refer to a specific...

This paper explores the dynamics of institutional change in periods of instability in the global capitalist system. Two recent bodies of literature—actor-centered institutionalism and the ‘policy mobilities’ approach—emphasize how contextual and historical specificities drive transformation as institutions move across space. However, scholars in both traditions give less attention to the systematic patterns of social conflict that influence how policies move and mutate. Drawing on the case...

In this article I revisit Karl Polanyi's writings on ancient Mesopotamia. I begin by situating them in the context of his general approach to trade, markets and money in the ancient world. Next, I reconstruct his major theses on Mesopotamia, drawing upon his published works as well as unpublished documents in the Karl Polanyi and Michael Polanyi archives. Finally, I provide a critical assessment of the merits and demerits of his contribution, with reference to Assyriological research...

This article examines the history of globalized capitalism from the perspective of the relations to the environment which it helped to construct. It proposes a definition of globalized capitalism as a form of relation to nature. If philosophy has frequently postulated that modernity is characterized by the dissociation between the natural and the social, the history of the economic take-off of the states of Western Europe throws a singular light on this hypothesis. Combining a reading of...

In this analysis of the first colonialisms in history, the eastern roots of the Phoenician colonial system in the first millennium BC are traced and the metropolis of Tyre is established as the final link in a long chain of colonial experiences in the ancient Near East. The author reviews some of the theories and debates about trade and the colonial phenomenon, scrutinises the colonial situations that arose in the East in a context of long-distance interregional trade, and analyses the...

A “port of trade” is a theoretical concept developed by Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) to describe the phenomenon of a particular kind of trading post.

Nature and Power is to be understood not only as human power against nature but also as power by nature in the sense of Michel Foucault's biopouvoir (biopower) or Francis Bacon's "Naturae non imperator nisiparendo" (Only by obeying nature may we dominate nature). The fragile human attempts to get power over nature and by nature have a long history, reaching back over millennia until prehistoric times, and much of world history may be explained in part by the unstable relationship between...

La nouvelle économie institutionnelle est devenue populaire dans la recherche de l’économie antique depuis une dizaine d’années. Pourtant la notion de « croyances culturelles », qui joue un rôle central dans l’œuvre de Douglass North et dans les analyses du changement institutionnel par Avner Greif, a été largement ignorée. J’affirme qu’une approche néo-institutionnelle qui utilise cette notion de « croyances culturelles » offre une meilleure voie pour comprendre l’influence des idéologies...

This essay identifies a contradiction between the flourishing interest in the environmental economics of the classical period and a lack of critical parsing of the works of its leading representatives. Its focus is the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It offers a critical analysis of their contribution to environmental thought and surveys the work of their contemporary devotees. It scrutinizes Smith's contribution to what Karl Polanyi termed the "economistic fallacy," as well as his...

This article proceeds from the field of tension between the synchronical approach of the economics of convention and the diachronical approach of economic anthropology (in the tradition of Karl Polanyi). It is argued that the economics of convention remain problematic to historians in that they fail to capture the long term transformations traditionally referred to as the emergence of modernity and the coming about of homo economicus. As a possible solution, the use of concepts and insights...

This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish émigrés to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The émigrés form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan...

This article provides foundations to K. Polanyi's famed argument that monopoly power in the global capital market served as an instrument of peace during the Pax Britannica (1815-1914). We focus on the role of intermediaries and certification. We show that when information and enforcement are imperfect, there is scope for the endogenous emergence of 'prestigious' intermediaries who enjoy a monopoly position and as a result, control government actions. They can implement conditional lending:...

A propos de : Karl Polanyi, La Subsistance de l'homme. La place de l'économie dans l'histoire et dans la société, Flammarion

The article reports on a conference on the economic history of the Latène period of the European Iron Age, held in Otzenhausen, Germany, from November 28-30, 2011. Topics discussed included theories of economy and society during this era, particularly that of Austrian economist Karl Polanyi, economic archaeology research, and the trade networks of traditional societies.

The essay examines from a historian's point of view the approaches to the analysis of market exchange in new economic sociology and explores in which way sociology and history can cooperate in embedding markets in temporal structures. In a first step the author sharply criticises the favourable reception given to Karl Polanyi's work "The Great Transformation" in the field of new economic sociology. In particular she discusses the narrowing of research perspectives and its negative side...

A fundamental principle of Karl Polanyi's institutional outlook is that any economic system has to be considered as a whole and as a historically specific social organization. This principle implies a comparative method and a critique of conventional economics. Besides, the problem of the interrelation between the economic system and other aspects of social life cannot be avoided. On this basis, Polanyi points out the peculiar "economic" nature of the market-capitalist society and explains...