Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds

Capitalism's Hidden Worlds examines economic activities that occur in the concealed corners of the formal economy. Challenging common conceptions of capitalism as a system of transparent, open markets, essays reveal how capitalism depends upon, adapts to, and gains legitimacy from activities that occur outside the measured and the seen.

A dynamic social history of shadow capitalism spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Observers see free markets, the relentless pursuit of profit, and the unremitting drive to commodify everything as capitalism's defining characteristics. These most visible economic features, however, obscure a range of other less evident, often unmeasured activities that occur on the margins and in the concealed corners of the formal economy. The range of practices in this large and diverse hidden realm encompasses traders in recycled materials and the architects of junk bonds and shadow banking. It includes the black and semi-licit markets that allow wealthy elites to avoid taxes and the unmeasured domestic and emotional labor of homemakers and home care workers. By some estimates, the unmeasured economic activity that occurs within the household, informal market, and underground economy amounts to a substantial portion of all economic activity in the world, as much as 30 percent in some countries.

Capitalism's Hidden Worlds sheds new light on this shadowy economic landscape by reexamining how we think about the market. In particular, it scrutinizes the missed connections between the official, visible realm of exchange and the uncounted and invisible sectors that border it. While some hidden markets emerged in opposition to the formal economy, much of the obscured economy described in this volume operates as the other side of the legitimate, state-sanctioned marketplace. A variety of historical actors—from fortune tellers and forgers to tax lawyers and black market consumers—have constructed this unseen world in tandem with the observable public world of transactions. Others, such as feminist development economists and government regulators, have worked to bring the darkened corners of the economy to light. The essays in Capitalism's Hidden Worlds explore how the capitalist marketplace sustains itself, how it acquires legitimacy and even prestige, and how the marginalized and the dispossessed find ways to make ends meet.

Contributors: Bruce Baker, Eileen Boris, Eli Cook, Hannah Frydman, James Hollis, Owen Hyman, Anna Kushkova, Christopher McKenna, Kenneth Mouré, Philip Scranton, Bryan Turo.

Preface
Roger Horowitz

Introduction: Mapping the Shadowlands of Capitalism
Kenneth Lipartito and Lisa Jacobson

Part I. Measuring and Unveiling Markets

Chapter 1.
Lifting the Veil of Money: What Economic Indicators Hide
Eli Cook

Chapter 2. Accounting for Reproductive Labor: Feminist Economists and the Construction of Social Knowledge on Rural Women in the Global South
Eileen Boris

Part II. Working the Margins

Chapter 3. The Loose Cotton Economy of the New Orleans Waterfront in the Late Nineteenth Century
Bruce E. Baker

Chapter 4. Jim Crow's Cut: White Supremacy and the Destruction of Black Capital in the Forests of the Deep South
Owen James Hyman

Chapter 5. In the Shadow of Incorporation: Hidden Economies of the Hispano Borderlands, 1890-1930
Bryan W. Turo

Part III. The Licit and the Illicit

Chapter 6. Capitalism's Back Pages: "Immoral" Advertising and Invisible Markets in Paris's Mass Press, 1880-1940
Hannah Frydman

Chapter 7. Capitalism's Black Heart in Wartime France
Kenneth Mouré

Chapter 8. The Emergence of the Offshore Economy, 1914-1939
James Hollis and Christopher McKenna

Part IV. Hidden Market Spaces in Planned Economies

Chapter 9. Comrades In-Between: Transforming Commercial Practice in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1962
Philip Scranton

Chapter 10. Hidden Realms of Private Entrepreneurship: Soviet Jews and Post-World War II Artels in the USSR
Anna Kushkova

Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments