Rules of Exchange

The control of competition is designed, at best, to reconcile socioeconomic stability with innovation, and at worst, to keep competitors out of the market. In this respect, the nineteenth century was no more liberal than the eighteenth century. Even during the presumed liberal nineteenth century, legal regulation played a major role in the economy, and the industrial revolution was based on market institutions and organisations formed during the second half of the seventeenth century. If indeed there is a break in the history of capitalism, it should be situated at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the irruption of mass production, consumption and the welfare state, which introduced new forms of regulation. This book provides a new intellectual, economic and legal history of capitalism from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. It analyzes the interaction between economic practices and legal constructions in France and compares the French case with other Western countries during this period, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Italy.

Alessandro Stanziani is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales (EHESS) and Senior Researcher at the Center National des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS) in Paris. He earned a PHD in economics from the University of Naples and a PhD in history from the EHESS, Paris. He has received numerous grants for his research, including one from the CNRS for a project on bonded labour in the Indian Ocean and one from the British Academy and French Ministry of Research program on food policies in France and British in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries (with Peter Atkins). Stanziani has written approximately eighty articles and book chapters in English, French, German and Russian. He is the author of Lconomie en rvolution. Le cas russe, 1870-1930 and Histoire de la qualit alimentaire, 18e-20e sicles. He is the editor of La travail contraint en Asie et en Europe, XVIIe-XXe sicles and La qualit des produits en France XVIIIe-XXe sicles and co-editor of Nomenclatures et classifications. Enjeux conomiques et dynamiques historiques (with Martin Bruegel and Jrme Bourdieu).