Tanja Skambraks – författare

This book examines the concept of moral economy originally established by E.P. Thompson, focusing on the impact of religious norms on economic practice. With each chapter discussing a different empirical case study, the interrelations of the economy and religion are explored from antiquity through to the 20th century. The long-term trajectory and comparative perspective allows for moral economy to be seen in relation to ancient Greek commerce, medieval pawn-broking, Christian and Jewish economic ethics, urban social politics during the Plague, the Jesuit mission in Paraguay, the Ottoman Empire, religion in modern American capitalism, and Catholic attitudes toward taxation.

This book aims to provide insight into how moral thinking about the economy and economic practicehas evolved from a long historic perspective. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in economic history and cultural economics.

Markets feature prominently in recent research of premodern historians as well as economists. Discussions cover the questions, for example, how a market can be grasp as a place, an event or a mechanism of exchange, or whether premodern economies have just hosted markets or if some of them can even be regarded as market economies.

The proposed volume will now turn to the agents who forged and connected markets. Exchange was done between persons and with the help of persons: Artisans, retailers and poor people tried to better their living conditions by engaging on the market, merchants interconnected different markets, urban personnel (such as brokers, men working at the public scales, or the town council as a whole) regulated and facilitated exchange.

By focusing on economic practices and the agents who performed them, the volume aims at analyzing the specific characteristics of premodern markets, the reasons why people became active on the market and the institutions which formed exchange processes and were in turn shaped by them.