Contingency and Mysticism from Economics to Finance: Knight, Ayache, DeLillo

The recent history of finance has been widely portrayed, by both critics and practitioners, as a story about risk. As pointed out by Mary Poovey, focusing on risk entails forgetting uncertainty. In this paper, I argue forgetting uncertainty leads to an inability to distinguish between rational and mystical modes of financial thinking. Using literary-theoretical analysis, I read three exemplary texts across each other: Frank Knight’s seminal 1921 treatise, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, which helped justify the modern corporate financial form; Elie Ayache’s 2010 The Blank Swan, a philosophical account of derivatives trading that exemplifies more recent developments in finance; and Don DeLillo’s 2013 Cosmopolis, a novel that remediates the structures of thought implied by the other texts’ philosophical commitments. This textual nexus allows me to explicate the characteristic form of financial mysticism, rendering it visible against claims that derivatives and financial theory have fully rationalized finance.

“Unable to Dismiss Them”: Re-assessing the Jewish “Court Bankers” of Abbasid Baghdad, 908–932

Economic historians describe the emergence of Jewish court bankers presiding over a central state bank in Abbasid Baghdad as significant for the global history of finance. This paper, however, re-evaluates these figures in light of new insights about court cultures and institutions in the medieval Islamicate world. It argues that they should be understood primarily as middlemen in tax collection. They performed favors for individual viziers, but likely never held official titles or appointments at al-Muqtadir’s court. Rather, it was precisely their outsider status relative to elite Abbasid social networks that accounts for the longevity of their careers.

Comedy and Crisis

Comedy and Crisis features the first ever scholarly English translation of two plays by the eighteenth-century Dutch playwright Pieter Langendijk: Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders [Quincampoix of de Windhandelaars], and Harlequin Stock-Jobber [Arlequin Actionist]. Both plays were occasioned by the financial speculation in England, France, and the Netherlands in 1719-20. In the Netherlands the speculative activity was referred to as a windhandel or wind trade. The first play is a full-length satirical comedy, and the second is a short, comic harlequinade; both were performed in Amsterdam in the fall of 1720, as the speculative bubble in the Netherlands was bursting. Comedy and Crisis also contains a translation of the extensive apparatus (introduction and notes) prepared by the scholar C.H.P. Meijer for his 1892 edition of these plays. The current editors have updated the footnotes and added six new critical essays by contemporary literary and historical scholars that contextualize the two plays historically and culturally. The book includes an extensive bibliography and index. The materials assembled in Comedy and Crisis are a rich resource for cultural, historical, and literary students of the history of finance and of eighteenth-century studies.

Rogue Bankers, Black Radicalism, and the Caribbean History of Racial Capitalism

This essay offers a response to two critical commentaries—from diplomatic historian Brenda Gayle Plummer and political theorist Clarisse Burden-Stelly—on the author’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. While locating both commentaries under the epistemological and political purview of the radical wing of black studies, the essay focuses on four topics that appear in Plummer’s and Burden-Stelly’s comments: (1) the question of class, and in particular the role of the Caribbean middle classes, in the history of finance, banking, imperial expansion, and Caribbean sovereignty; (2) the particular status and nature of the Caribbean region within the history of capitalism; (3) the nature and the meaning of the well-worn term racial capitalism; and (4) the idea of “war” as a fundamental aspect of the modes of regulation and accumulation of said racial capitalism.

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment

In The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock shows how Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentine political thinkers adapted Aristotelian and Polybian insights to create a paradigm of republican political thought that was sensitive to the problem of stabilizing civic virtue against inevitable political decay in time. This republican paradigm, he famously insists, traveled to eighteenth-century Anglo-American contexts via the work of James Harrington and helped political thinkers make sense of two seemingly disparate events—the rise of finance in Britain and the American Revolution—in civic republican terms. Pocock’s insistence that The Machiavellian Moment is a work of history does not negate its contributions to political theory. First, it is a significant text for political theorists who attend to the role of language and discourse in political thinking, although the Pocockian approach bears limitations worth acknowledging. Second, Pocock’s work is critical to the republican revival in contemporary political theory, because he centers and defends Florentine and Anglo-American republicanisms as political discourses worthy of scholarly attention. Lastly, The Machiavellian Moment appears, in hindsight, as a foundational text for scholarship in the history of political economy, particularly the pre-history of finance and credit.