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Indicative Reading List

Theory and current debates

Anderson, Victor. Debating Nature's Value: the Concept of 'Natural Capital.’ Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Antal, Ariane Berthoin, Michael Hutter, and David Stark, eds. Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press, 1984.

Clune, Michael W. A Defense of Judgement. Chicago University Press, 2021.

Graeber, David. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Helm, Dieter. Natural Capital: Valuing Our Planet. Yale University Press, 2015.

Martínez Alier, Juan. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Northhampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar, 2002.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1867.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. UK: Allen Lane, 2018.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.

Vanderbilt, Tom. You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice. Simon and Schuster, 2016.

Secondary works

Alder, Ken. Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815. Chicago University Press, 1997.

Ashworth, William J. Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640-1845. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Dyer, Serena. Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century. Bloomsbury, 2021.

Schaffer, Simon. “Golden Means: Assay Instruments and the Geography of Precision in the Guinea Trade.” In Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. H. Otto Sibum, Marie Noelle Bourguet, and Christian Licoppe. London: Routledge, 2003.

Spary, Emma. Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Salmond, Anne. Experiments Across Worlds. Auckland University Press, 2017.

Walls, Laura Dassow. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. University of Chicago Press, 2009.