Looks at the shift from the marketplace as an actual place to a theoretical idea and how this shaped the early American economy. When we talk about the economy, -the market- is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain-s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market-s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart-s book-takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America-places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less-fettered brand o
