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Introduction: markets in modernization: transformations in urban market space and practice, c. 1800 – c. 1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2015

JON STOBART  and
ILJA VAN DAMME
JON STOBART
Affiliation:
Department of History, Manchester Metropolitan University, All Saints Building, All Saints, Manchester, M15 6BH, UK
ILJA VAN DAMME
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Antwerp, Stadscampus, Grote Kauwenberg 18, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium
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Extract

This special issue addresses the changing role and later history of physical, face-to-face markets for goods, which in modern cities all over the world are mainly or wholly used by individuals and families for consumption purposes. Our focus is on the urban market as a specific urban place and its shifting relationship with important alterations in the governance, society and economy of modern, industrial cities (until c. 1970). The main intention of this collection is to move beyond traditional (western) views of the so-called ‘decline’ of these urban marketplaces. In the history and theorization of the type of cities that came into being all over the world in the wake of economic and political transformations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘markets’ are usually thought of in terms of their institutional meaning. They are referred to as abstract notions of commerce and exchange, be it in commodities, labour, cash or shares. Seldom are they studied as real, physical marketplaces within cities; as entities that take up space; function in changing production and distribution chains and evolve as a result of changes in wholesaling, retailing, consumption and the political regulation of urban space, society and economy. Indeed, it is often argued that ‘marketplaces’ in this spatially delimited and concrete sense ceased to be of importance once modernization took hold of urban landscapes all over the world. That this is not the case is amply demonstrated by the articles gathered here: markets continued to be vibrant parts of a wide variety of towns and cities across the globe.

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Introduction
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Urban History , Volume 43 , Special Issue 3: Markets in modernization: transformations in urban market space and practice, c. 1800 - c. 1970 , August 2016 , pp. 358 - 371
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 For classic overviews, see Pirenne, H., Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, 1952Google Scholar; orig. edn 1925); Pirenne, H., The Economy of Cities (Harmondsworth, 1972Google Scholar; orig. edn 1969); Braudel, F., Civilisation matérielle, economie et capitalisme, vol. II: Les jeux de l’échange (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar; Bairoch, P., Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

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7 First published as Weber, M., ‘Die Stadt: eine soziologische Untersuchung’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47 (1920–21), 621–772Google Scholar. We make references to the English translation published in Weber, M., Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Roth, G. and Wittich, C. (Berkeley, 1978), 1212–372Google Scholar.

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9 Ibid., 1214. Weber does not go so far as to claim that the marketplace is the only element of urbanity, giving, for instance, attention to the ‘fort’ as political centre, being equally crucial to medieval urban development. In many ways, the regulations enforced by the ‘fort’ were ways of countering urban market failures from food shortages to health issues. See, for instance, Beresford, M.W., New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in England, Wales and Gascony (London, 1967)Google Scholar, and, more recently, Blockmans, W., Metropolen aan de Noordzee. Geschiedenis van Nederland, 1100–1555 (Amsterdam, 2010)Google Scholar, on strategies of urban promotion by feudal superiors in order to create marketplaces, almost invariably as sources of income.

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18 Simmel's essay was first published in 1903; our references are drawn from the English translation in Bridge, G. and Watson, S. (eds.), The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford and Malden, 2002), 11–19Google Scholar, quote from 12. On the centrality of the Berlin experience in the thinking of Simmel, see Jazbinsek, D., ‘The metropolis and the mental life of George Simmel: on the history of an antipathy’, Journal of Urban History, 30 (2003), 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar–25.

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20 Bridge and Watson (eds.), Blackwell City Reader, 12.

21 Ibid., 11 and 14.

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23 Park, R.E., Burgess, E.W. and McKenzie, R.D., The City (Chicago, 1925)Google ScholarPubMed. A nice analysis of their urban framework is provided by Savage, M. and Warde, A., Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity (Basingstoke, 1993), 9–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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28 These associations frequently pop up in remarks on the persistence of second-hand markets in the modernizing townscape. See Charpy, M., ‘The scope and structure of the nineteenth-century second-hand trade in the Parisian clothes market, in Fontaine, L. (ed.), Alternative Exchange. Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York, 2008), 127Google Scholar–51; and Stobart, J. and Van Damme, I., ‘Modernity and the second-hand trade: themes, topics and debates’, in idem (eds.), Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade. European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900 (London, 2010), 1–15Google Scholar.

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30 This is our own translation. See Sitte, C., L'art de batir les villes. Notes et reflexions d'un architecte. Traduites et completees par Camille Matin (Geneva and Paris, 1902Google Scholar; orig. edn 1889), 7 (see also 16, and 135–7).

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36 This is apparent in the works of such diverse thinkers as Walter Benjamin (Passagenwerk/The Arcades Project, 1927–940), Jürgen Habermas (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit/The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1962), Michel Foucault (Surveiller et Punier/Discipline and Punish, 1972) and, most recently, Richard Sennett (The Fall of Public Man, 1977).

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