Rethinking the Market » Activities and Outputs (tag [paper presentation])

University of Bristol Book Talk

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:29:20 GMT

On March 5th 2026, I delivered a talk on my book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism, to a selection of Danielle Guizzo's history of economic thought students at the University of Bristol. The presentation was called, 'Mathematical Proof-Making and the Nature of Economics Imperialism'.

King's College London Department Seminar

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 22:18:21 GMT

On October 29th 2025, I delivered a presentation on some of my new work on Harriet Martineau to the PPE Research Group of the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. The talk was entitled, 'Harriet Martineau's Demerara: Economic Theory, Realist Fiction and Moral Urgency in the British Slave Emancipation Debates of the 1830s'.

Abstract: Little remembered today, Harriet Martineau was a publishing phenomenon throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Novelist, travelogue writer, social commentator, she was also the author of numerous reports into the state of modern Britain and its colonies, thousands of op-eds on the most pressing contemporary policy dilemmas, and a daily supply of letters to a whole army of famous and influential correspondents across the Atlantic world. She came to public prominence with her Illustrations of Political Economy, twenty-four novellas published monthly for two years to educate the aspiring middle classes to her favoured laissez-faire solutions, which proved to be so popular with the reading public of the time that they outsold Dickens by a factor of five. They were written between 1832 and 1834, during the period of Whig ascendancy, the first Great Reform Act and the high point of the British debate about slave emancipation. The story on which my talk will concentrate, Demerara, was the fourth in the series, the second to be set in a British colony, and the only one to focus on what position the British state should take in the post-abolition debate about the West Indian planters’ insistence that they should continue to hold property in enslaved people.

How, though, should Demerara be read? Martineau makes a partial appearance in the text, with the lead character, Alfred, freshly returned to his childhood Guyanese home following time in England at boarding school, always on hand to give voice to her contention that the science of political economy offers the most respectable guide available as to how the middle classes should form their political views. However, this was also a time at which she was undergoing an epistemological break with her own religious upbringing. Even though the hesitant path to becoming a former Unitarian plays no obviously generative part in her narrative, its imprints are still visible only marginally below the surface of the text, and they mix with the strict contemporary secular religion of political economy in often unstable ways. Martineau’s purely moral condemnation of slave-based systems of production from as recently as eighteen months previously seems at first reading to have given way to a more personally detached account of how the laws of political economy will succeed in ending slavery whereas her prayers on the subject have failed. But closer textual study suggests that it does not do so completely, and various literary critics have consequently described the Illustrations not as an economic principles book at all, but as the combination of myth, fable and cosmology more widely seen in religious conduct books. I wish to explore the interstitial position of what it means to try to deliver lessons in political economy as an exercise in spiritual autobiography, one where the penitent individual necessarily invoked in such a tradition is scaled up to the level of the nation as a whole. Much in the manner of the realist fiction of the time, Martineau is still asking her readers to feel guilt about the fact that they have not yet done enough to ensure that full slave emancipation is passed into statute. In the context of mass public abstention from the consumption of slave-grown sugar, this could have been the guilt of individuals who continue to prop up the demand on which the West Indian plantocracy relied. Instead, it is guilt at the collective failure of society as a whole to use the available principles of political economy to force the government to end sugar subsidies and hence require the planters to submit to the brute economic logic that systems of free labour are always the most productive. The combination of moral and economic argumentation is the common thread that runs through the whole of Demerara, but the economic often overpowers the moral in a way which prevents the messengers who carry Martineau’s opinions within the story from ever becoming the relatable characters of realist fiction.

Copenhagen Business School Department Seminar Presentation

Thu, 15 May 2025 04:40:49 GMT

On May 14th 2025, I delivered a presentation on my new book to the Markets Research Group in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. The talk was entitled, 'Complexities and Controversies on the Road to Social Scientific Unification: Exploring the Pre-History of Contemporary Economics Imperialism', and it was based on some of the key analytical insights from my recent book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism.

Abstract: Economics imperialism is a phenomenon with which many social scientists today are readily familiar. It occurs when an explanatory framework designed for teaching undergraduates the underlying principles of economic theory reappears in other social science literatures as a potential competitor for subtler forms of context-specific empirical findings. Such explanations clearly exist within very different epistemic domains, but they are often now presented by economics imperialists as if they are epistemologically interchangeable. My new book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism, seeks to understand more about the intellectual foundations of these instances of what philosophers call scientific unification. This requires not only a history of economists’ development of their mathematical market models, but also further histories of prior developments in the fields of both physics and mathematics. Most discussions of economics imperialism today revolve mainly around normative questions: is it justifiable, yes or no? However, much more interesting insights can be revealed by thinking analytically about the complex path from the history of mathematics to the history of physics to the history of economics, all of which provide the pre-history for economics imperialism as it is practised today. The links are nothing other than extremely complicated between Lagrange’s introduction of the variational calculus, Maxwell’s equations that form the basis of quantum physics, Hilbert’s famous Paris lecture on the future of mathematics and Stigler and Becker recommending the development of a unified social science on the basis of economists’ price theory. But they reveal a series of epistemic self-doubts amongst the economists most responsible for taking forward the programme of mathematising the market model, self-doubts that usually remain hidden in plain sight. They also provide an important contrast to the bullishness of those who have promoted the agenda of economics imperialism for the social sciences as a whole.

SOAS Political Economy Seminar Series paper presentation

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 19:39:00 GMT

On January 9th 2025 I delivered a paper to the Political Economy Seminar Series in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The paper was called, 'Intellectual Border Transgressions in a World of Economics Imperialism: The Epistemic Limits of Mathematical Market Models as Social Science Explanations'. More generally, I spoke about my new book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism, concentrating in particular on the epistemic trespassing that is involved in treating non-market social relations as if they map neatly onto the terrain of mathematical market models.

Paper presented to the Political Economy Research Group, University of Cambridge

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 20:36:31 GMT

On January 26th 2022 I presented a paper called 'Seeking Refuge in Mathematised Free Market Models? The Febrile Political Backdrop to Ricardo's Principles' to the Political Economy Research Group of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Abstract: 'Out of all possible institutional arrangements for organising economic life, how did orthodox economic theory come to reflect in its models only free market institutions to the exclusion of all others? Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy usually takes centre stage in historical scholarship that seeks to answer this question. However, almost no attention has thus far been paid to the broader background conditions that shaped the way in which he presented his text. Further exploration of these conditions makes it possible to ask whether orthodox economic theory’s continued conflation of ‘the economy’ and ‘the market’ results from treating as if they were universal what were actually only the specific features of a strictly limited period of early nineteenth-century British political history. Ricardo wrote the Principles during a time of severe curtailment of civil liberties in the realm of free speech. This culminated in the introduction of the so-called Six Acts, legislative instruments that made criticism of the King and his ministers into an offence with serious consequences. They were backed by suspensions of habeas corpus that allowed religious dissenters and political radicals to be imprisoned without trial. Ricardo was shielded by parliamentary privilege when speaking out in the House of Commons against the broader political climate that had produced this legislation, but not when committing his economic theory to the page. I ask whether he sought refuge from such pressures in abstract models that were at one stage removed from an expressly articulated opinion, models that imposed a rigid separation between ‘state’ and ‘market’. He thus might be seen to have circumvented what proved to be time-limited sedition laws through escape into a free-floating realm called ‘the market’, but that realm has persisted in orthodox economic theory long after the original need for it was exhausted.'

Paper delivered to the Glasgow Competition Talks Seminar Series, School of Law, University of Glasgow

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 18:02:00 GMT

On October 14th 2021 I delivered a paper to the Glasgow Competition Talks Seminar Series at the University of Glasgow, for those with a research specialism in competition law. The paper was entitled ''The Market: The Economics and Politics of a Key Domain of Legal Thinking'.

Abstract: Competition law requires an engagement with lots of other disciplines, perhaps most notably with economics. Non-economists already talk about the economy all of the time, but the very familiarity of core economic ideas as they have taken hold in everyday life might be more of a hindrance than a help in understanding how competition law and economics interact. The obviously economic concept of ‘the market’ is, interestingly, one that is left largely implicit and undefined in modern economic theory. In many ways competition law acts to protect the integrity of the market, and it is a short step from that premise to making the directly political statement that it exists to allow the market to do what the market does best. In most models used by economists, this will mean ensuring that there are no distortions in the allocation of available economic resources, so that the economy in that purely hypothetical model world can work as efficiently as possible. This can very easily be translated into the political assumption that in the real world too markets should be left to their own devices to decide for us how the economy should be organised. However frequently we hear such claims, though, we should be sceptical of them, for they suggest that ‘the market’ is capable of identifying its interest in allocative efficiency and of having the will to enforce that interest. Yet ‘the market’ is clearly not a sentient being able to act in the same manner as a conscious human agent. How might we therefore make sense of the translation from economics to politics of the concept of allocative efficiency in a purely hypothetical model world to the assertion that ‘the market’ always knows best in the real world? My book, The Market, tackles this question by showing the very different ways in which the concept of ‘the market’ has entered economic theory, emphasising how recently it has been that the allocative efficiency definition of market dynamics has risen to prominence. Different economic definitions of ‘the market’ have different implications for competition law, and I demonstrate the varied ways in which that relationship might impact upon the thinking of competition lawyers.

Paper delivered to Political Economy Lockdown Seminar Series

Tue, 12 May 2020 08:52:18 GMT

On May 11th 2020 I presented a version of the paper that I will be delivering 'in' Newcastle the following week to the online Political Economy Lockdown Seminar Series. The paper was entitled, 'A Failure of System or a Failure of Nerve? Adam Smith's Conspicuous Soft-Pedalling on the Imperial Adventures of Glasgow's Eighteenth-Century Tobacco Merchants'. In it, I focused on the apparent bifurcation in Smith's critique of Empire, in which the activities of the East India Company were subjected to a withering attack, but the activities of the merchants trading within the Atlantic economy were criticised much more gently, despite being different only in degree rather than in type. Smith's obvious contempt for the East India Company resulted from what he had learnt about the way in which it was intertwined with London's commercial interests to disrupt good governance norms, but the Glasgow tobacco merchants he counted amongst his friends and acquaintances were let off lightly by comparison.

London Mini-Tour of Presentations

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 23:49:00 GMT

On February 13th and 14th 2019 I went on a mini-tour of London universities delivering papers related to my project. I presented one paper called 'David Hilbert and the Mathematisation of the Market Model' to the Political Economy Research Centre's General Seminar Series at Goldsmiths College, University of London. I presented another paper called 'Crusoe, Friday and the Homo Economicus of Econ 101 Courses' to the Department of Politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. And I delivered a third paper called 'The Postcolonial Writing Back to the Robinson Crusoe Economy' to a Masterclass Lecture and Question and Answer Session delivered to the Department of European and International Studies at King's College London. The abstracts for the talks are to be found below.

'David Hilbert and the Mathematisation of the Market Model': "In general, there is a unified – albeit still deep contested – political language of ‘the market’. This revolves around the process of buying and selling under conditions of free exchange backed, if necessary, by contract. But when we turn from the political language to economic images of ‘the market’, the sense of unity rapidly dissipates. Those economic images are themselves, at heart, mathematical images, and it would be fair to say that ‘the market’ has been thoroughly mathematised in economic theory. It is the assumption that mathematics provides a universal means of exploring all scientific problems – Leibniz’s so-called mathesis universalis – that also underpins the encroachment of economists’ market model into all sorts of realms of social experience. The ‘imperialism’ of the economics imperialism phenomenon is keenly felt and often resisted by social scientists. However, some excellent work by Fine and Milonakis aside, the ‘economics’ of economics imperialism currently remains largely unexplored. My research-in-progress paper will try to shed light on the relationship between economics imperialism and the mathematisation of economists’ basic market model. Yet it will be shown that this is no straightforward matter. Ask many non-economists what is wrong with economics and they will say that it has allowed a mathematical logic to crowd out concerns for real-world experiences; push them further and they will say that it has simply become too mathematical. Looking at the history of economic thought, however, reveals that there have been over time many articulations of the market model, each of which has a mathematical essence, but that it is to mischaracterise what is important about them to think of older variants being less mathematical and newer variants being more mathematical. They are more usefully thought of as being differently mathematical, where the key difference is that they manifest entirely opposed images of the economic relations that they are designed to represent. The two most important attempts to strike out in new directions in mathematical economics – one I associate with the work of Jevons, the other with Arrow and Debreu – were enacted to solve problems that enable the political language of ‘the market’ to continue to resonate but which are largely superfluous to the way in which economists construct their market models today. Jevons used the mathematics of number to overcome the nineteenth-century free will problem, and thus to defend the notion of free exchange. Arrow and Debreu used the mathematics of signs to overcome the twentieth-century coordination problem, and thus to defend the notion that buying and selling at given prices represents coherent economic activity. However, a deeper look at the mathematics of the market models developed both by Jevons and by Arrow and Debreu implies limitations to how far ‘the market’ should be embedded in practice, the very opposite of the general political orientation of studies cast in the economics imperialism mould. Emphasising the colonisation of the market model by mathematics therefore provides an invitation to rethink the putative success of economists in colonising the other social sciences."

'Crusoe, Friday and the Homo Economicus of Econ 101 Courses' and 'The Postcolonial Writing Back to the Robinson Crusoe Economy': "Why should a political economist like me be interested in the technical details of debates presented within literary theory? In particular, why might I have persuaded myself that it is a good use of my time to find out as much as I can about what literary critics think of Daniel Defoe? The answer is relatively straightforward. Much of the discussion of Defoe’s literary characterisations focuses on the extent to which he was able, in the early eighteenth century, to distil the essence of an abstract homo economicus with whom we are still familiar today. However, that same answer also reveals other puzzles. Defoe’s characters in Robinson Crusoe continue to find their way into many economics textbooks, and they are used as pedagogical tools to enable students on Econ 101 courses to begin to ‘think like an economist’. They might remain fundamental abstractions, but they retain a rhetorical power derived from their familiarity which unlocks for students the essential relationships which economic theory attempts to describe. In the absence of appeals to Crusoe and to Friday, the homo economicus of the economics textbooks would usually remain entirely unnamed. But the economics textbooks themselves are almost the last place in which Defoe’s original characterisations remain pretty much exactly as they were in his 1719 novel. Robinson Crusoe is almost certainly the most rewritten story in the English language, with each generation of novelists since the early twentieth century providing multiple rewritings of the basic plot. Postcolonial and feminist authors in particular have engaged in a conspicuous ‘writing back’ to the original novel, in an effort to expose Defoe’s racist and sexist story lines through a mixture of caricature, satire and carefully constructed plot reversals. The absence of any similar attention to rewriting Defoe’s original novel in economics should give us pause for thought about the typical content of Econ 101 courses. Are we happy with a pedagogical approach to economic theory which tells us that we are all approximations in our economic behaviour of either the active white colonial settler Crusoe, or the passive enslaved person of colour Friday?"

Presentation at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 17:49:26 GMT

On 9th November 2018 I delivered a talk at the Institut du Monde Anglophone at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. The talk was entitled, 'Brexit Threats and the Future of UK Financial Regulation'. The paper was designed to show in how many different directions the Conservative Party was pulling itself at that time over what to do about Brexit and how the City of London would fit into the post-Brexit global financial landscape. Global financial markets will inevitably be remade once Brexit frees the City from regulatory oversight from the European Commission, and the best bet at the time of delivering the presentation was that this would be in response to the City increasingly incorporating itself within the type of minimalist regulation usually associated with offshore financial centres. The paper was delivered one week before Theresa May presented her withdrawal agreement to a fractious Cabinet and an even more fractious Parliament, and at that time two potential models of the new regulatory future were still being discussed. One was the so-called Jersey Model, in which the UK would continue to follow EU rules for the trade in goods but not for the trade in services. The other was the so-called Singapore-on-Thames Model, in which a free-wheeling 'Global Britain' would seek to gain competitive advantage through regulatory undercutting. Both models seemed to me to point in the same direction when it comes to the question of how the City would in future be inserted into global financial markets. Both appeared to point to the British financial services industry being compensated for the loss of passporting rights within the EU financial space by being allowed pretty much to write its own regulatory system.

Seminar on Race, Class and Nation in Modern Britain, Queen Mary University of London

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 08:08:01 GMT

On June 19th 2018 I gave a short presentation entitled 'Buccaneering Britain' to a seminar held at Queen Mary University of London on Race, Class and Nation in Modern Britain. The event was organised as part of Robbie Shilliam's leaving celebrations. My paper looked at the politics of memory in relation to the image presented by the most gung-ho of Conservative Brexiteers of a 'buccaneering' Britain that will approach free trade deals with gusto in the post-Brexit world. This construction invokes the active recall of particular aspects of British history in the form of constant repetition of a limited number of stylised tropes. Pride of place in this regard goes to 'You must remember that Britain has always been a great trading nation' and 'You must remember that Britain has always been a great maritime nation'. Yet this simultaneously entails a commitment to passively forget other histories which would focus on how the British Empire was constructed through violence and how British control of the seas meant control of all the trade that was conducted by sea, including that in people. The contemporary politics of race, class and nation in Britain is trapped, I concluded, in a telling of history that has been hijacked by Brexiteer opinion. This makes a more restorative politics - a reparative politics even - seem further away than ever.