Market relations are commonplace in the English-speaking world, yet their cultural dimension remains oddly inaccessible to the historian. The different meanings that Britons and Americans have attached to their experience of the market over time have yet to be explored in any depth. An abundance of documentary material exists to throw light on the surface of commodity exchange, to be sure, but it is a light that, more often than not, obscures by its brightness the interior of the market transaction. Statistics and equations dispose us to see the history of the market as a calculable rather than an interpretable phenomenon; they thereby deflect our vision away from that ambiguous, subjective terrain where material necessity, social constraint, and cultural imperative meet as the fusable and fissionable constituents of all human exchange. Rarely, if ever, do market relations appear in our cultural chronicle as they do in our cultural life: as a constant, mediate, and immediate presence.

Why should this be so? Given the extraordinary array of commodities in the contemporary world, how is it that such items and the culture underwriting their exchange should remain so consistently opaque? Why do we lack anything approximating a phenomenology of market experience? What is it that debars us from describing in a systematic fashion the fundamental structures of meaning and feeling that have accompanied the different forms of commodity exchange over time? And, in this connection, why do we encounter such difficulty in our efforts to form an adequate historical conception of the cultural conditions and consequences associated with the movement toward fully developed market economies?