Cultural Life of Risk and Innovation

<p>How did innovation become something to strive for an end in itself? And how did the market come to be thought of as the space of innovation? This edited volume provides the first historical examination of how innovations are conceived marketed navigated and legitimated from a global perspective that highlights contrasting experiences. These experiences include: colonial projecting in the Dutch New Netherlands trust networks in the early US securities market female investors during the Financial Revolution life insurance in nineteenth-century France bubbles and trusts in 1920s Shanghai government regulation of the pre-Revolutionary stock market and the checkered success of today’s bit-coin technology. By discussing these diverse contexts together this volume provides a pathbreaking reconsideration of market and business activities in light of <i>both </i>the techniques and the emotional vectors that infuse them.</p>