Market threads : how cotton farmers and traders create a global commodity / Koray Calskan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Calskan, Koray, 1972-

Series:

The Princeton economic history of the Western world Understanding the process of economic change

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cotton trade.

Markets.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (249 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What is a global market? How does it work? At a time when new crises in world markets cannot be satisfactorily resolved through old ideas, Market Threads presents a detailed analysis of the international cotton trade and argues for a novel and groundbreaking understanding of global markets. The book examines the arrangements, institutions, and power relations on which cotton trading and production depend, and provides an alternative approach to the analysis of pricing mechanisms. Drawing upon research from such diverse places as the New York Board of Trade and the Turkish and Egyptian countrysides, the book explores how market agents from peasants to global merchants negotiate, accept, reject, resist, reproduce, understand, and misunderstand a global market. The book demonstrates that policymakers and researchers must focus on the specific practices of market maintenance in order to know how they operate. Markets do not simply emerge as a relationship among self-interested buyers and sellers, governed by appropriate economic institutions. Nor are they just social networks embedded in wider economic social structures. Rather, global markets are maintained through daily interventions, the production of prosthetic prices, and the waging of struggles among those who produce and exchange commodities. The book illustrates the crucial consequences that these ideas have on economic reform projects and market studies. Spanning a variety of disciplines, Market Threads offers an original look at the world commodity trade and revises prevailing explanations for how markets work.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: How to Study a Global Market

Chapter 1. What Is a World Price? The Prosthetic and Actual Worth of Cotton

Chapter 2. Market Maintenance in the Worlds of Commodity Circulation

Chapter 3. Markets' Multiple Boundaries in Izmir, Turkey

Chapter 4. A Market without Exchange: Cotton Trade in Egypt

Chapter 5. Growing Cotton and Its Global Market in a Turkish Village

Chapter 6. Cotton Fields of Power in Rural Egypt

Conclusion: What Is a Global Market?

Glossary

References

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612692147

9781400833924

1400833922

9781282692145

1282692143

OCLC:

814518096