The Laws of the Markets: Historical Perspectives on Political-Economic Regulation

For decades, the focus of modern political history was restricted to the realm of politics, emphasizing issues such as parties, elections or the role of the press, for example. Economic history, on the other hand, was primarily interested in working with quantitative data over the longue durée or monographs of precise sectors or businesses. Moreover, economists have had a specific relationship to history since the market has generally been interpreted as an institution that can only be understood in the very longue durée. The historiographical shifts of the last twenty years have slowly changed this situation as the history of the state and economic policy has been reintegrated into the field of political history (Baruch and Duclert, 2000). Thanks to the influence of early modernists, modern historians have begun to consider economic policy and state intervention. Issues such as consumption, that had been left aside, have been placed back on the historiographical agenda revealing the links between consumption practices and public debate (Chatriot et al., 2006). While this work has been influenced by cultural history it does not fall fully into that sub-field. Th e juridical regulation of fraud, especially in the realm of food and drugs (Stanziani, 2005), the management of shortages in times of war, or the measures that determine access to credit are some of the various forms of state intervention that take place in this area. Some markets have generated studies by different social sciences on areas like the French wine market, whose construction and regulation is now well-known (Laferté, 2006; Chauvin, 2010) or more recently the fruits market (Bernard de Raymond, 2013). [Article's first paragraph]