A History for the Future: Radical Markets and the Work of History

This essay will consider how Radical Markets both impels new avenues for historical research and how historical research might advance the insights of this book. Firstly, I show how the book’s emphasis on the combination of corporate monopoly power, often supported by the state, in distorting markets might lead us to rethink certain commonplaces in economic history. Secondly, I consider how the history by which women’s work came to be recognized as labor might enrich our view of the book’s suggestion for treating data as labor. Finally, I end with some concrete proposals for how Radical Markets might nourish a new knowledge cluster across disciplinary boundaries within the academy.