Marketplace Exchange across History: Transcending Theoretical Divides

Recent findings in history and archaeology from regions across the globe now point to the long and diverse empirical records for marketplace exchange, greatly extending in time and space the importance of markets well before the Rise of the West or the supposed advent of modernity. These findings challenge the anti-market mentality that has been so rife in substantivism, while the temporal and spatial diversity of this mechanism of exchange also call into question economic perspectives that see modes and institutions of barter and trade as simply reflecting or extending inherent human tendencies, or are only expressions of what development economists refer to as an "informal" economy. In actuality, to function, markets and marketplace transactions require rules and practices.

Furthermore, the growth of large-scale market exchange networks necessitates synchronization and scheduling. Weights, measures, coinage, and calendars all often are integral elements. These customs, behaviors, innovations, as well as the sociohistorical contexts in which they take place, are widely diverse, not natural, and generally require planning, cooperation, and collective action that may be imposed from governing institutions but also may develop autochthonously from the base of society. Here, we offer a platform to explore and discuss from a cross-disciplinary, cross-temporal vantage the historical evidence for marketplace exchanges and their institutional frames, how and why such transfer systems varied and changed. We also encourage and highlight the conceptual role of new theoretical perspectives, such as collective action theory and notions of common-pool resource management, not previously applied to market systems, as foundations to explore diverse networks of economic transaction and transfer and how these webs of exchange varied over time and space. Through these foci, we aim to break down existing conceptual silos that cloud how we vision the past and the present, the modern and the premodern, and the West and the Rest. By eclipsing these great divides and how we theorize them, our goal is to better understand how our present world came to be.

This Research Topic welcomes themes including the following:

• Synthetic discussions and comparisons of marketplace exchange across history with an emphasis on premodern contexts
• Analytical factors behind the foundation of market institutions
• The governance of market institutions; change and variability in marketplace rules and practices over time and geographically
• How new evidence of marketplace exchange alters perspectives on premodern economies
• Evidence for the expansion of marketplace exchanges, and relations with systems of weights, measures, calendrics, synchronization, transport technologies
• Historical variability in the nature and role of currencies, money
• Definition of market spaces and the access to them
• Market revenues and their distributions, including the funding of political institutions
• How marketplace exchange spheres interrelated with other networks and modes of transfer in premodern contexts.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: marketplace exchange, markets, archaeology, governance, market institution

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.