The Promise of Markets. New Perspectives on Early Modern Cultural-economic History

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Tina Asmussen, since 12/2020
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322918491

The DFG network "The Promise of Markets" explores the potential for an integrated economic cultural history of early modern times. It sheds new light on early modern market cultures and practices which have not been shaped by supply and demand alone but also by social relations, affects, emotions and materialities. Turning to new methodological approaches it becomes possible to integrate aspects which have been studied for a long time separately by economic and cultural historians into a broader conceptual framework. This approach is innovative in two respects: First, the network devises methodological approaches which allow analyzing early modern markets as sociocultural phenomena in their own right ¿ as phenomena constituted by the entanglement of the actors¿ economic practices and techniques with meaning-making affects and emotions like trust, desire, uncertainty and fortune. Second, it adapts concepts developed by modern economic history and influenced by practice theory, New Institutional Economics and the history of knowledge applying them to economic contexts before the 19th century. In doing so, the network meets the current demand to overcome economic history¿s obsession with and narrow perspective on capitalism. To achieve its goal of an interdisciplinary analysis of early modern markets and their sociocultural effects the network brings together sociologists, literary scholars, cultural and economic historians.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Tim Neu, until 11/2020