Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science

Description

Uncovering strange plots by early British anthropologists to use scientific status to manipulate the stock market, Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange tells a provocative story that marries the birth of the social sciences with the exploits of global finance. Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentleman-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned society, showing that anthropological studies were integral to investment and speculation in foreign government debt, and, inversely, that finance played a crucial role in shaping the contours of human knowledge. Flandreau argues that finance and science were at the heart of a new brand of imperialism born during Benjamin Disraeli’s first term as Britain’s prime minister in the 1860s. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican rebellion, they were in fact catering to the impulses of the stock exchange—for their own benefit. In this way the very development of the field of anthropology was deeply tied to issues relevant to the financial market—from trust to corruption. Moreover, this book shows how the interplay between anthropology and finance formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth-century British imperialism and helped produce essential technologies of globalization as we know it today. Dedication Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: The Stock Exchange Modality 1. Writing about the Margin 2. Rise of the Cannibals 3. Anthropologists without Qualities 4. The Ogre of Foreign Loans 5. The Learned Society in the Foreign Debt Food Chain 6. Acts of Speculation 7. Wanderlust: A Victorian Racist 8. Salt-WaterAnthropology 9. The Violence of Science 10. The Man Who Ate the Cannibals 11. Subject Races Conclusion: Catharsis Supplement 1: Principles of Social Editing Supplement 2: Pim’s Travels Supplement 3: The Demographics of Cannibals Supplement 4: How to Prick an Anthropological Bubble Notes Sources Works Cited Index