This chapter examines how commercial firms like the Belgian grocer Delhaize did not initially respond to the Single Market Program in the mid-1980s, but they did mobilize swiftly in the late 1980s to prepare for the "threat" of the new business and regulatory environment of an integrated regional market governed by social and environmental protections. Together with other food retailers, Delhaize formed sectoral clubs and associations to defend its interests: Buying clubs collectivized price negotiating power against producer consolidation and protected profit margins, while interest associations brought distributors and retailers together to influence European policymaking. At the same time, Delhaize and other commercial firms saw in the opening of Eastern Europe a profitable business opportunity, and they expanded quickly into the markets of Poland, Hungary, and the new Czech Republic in the early 1990s. As a result, the case of Delhaize gives us purchase on the complexity of business responses to market integration and demonstrates the diverse paths to regionalization for and against the Single Market.

Although book historians have tended to date the beginnings of an established market for printed plays to the mid 1590s, the first year of play publication, 1584, saw four plays printed, two of them in multiple editions. More plays were printed in this year than the rest of the decade combined; it would be another sixteen years before a play went into multiple editions in a single year. This chapter asks what this strange year tells us about plays as printed, reprinted, and revived commodities. The four plays discussed are John Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, and George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris. All four plays have things to say about reviving stories and performance, and three went on to be reprinted. Attending to them as a kind of corpus, this chapter investigates their place in the histories of revival, reprinting, and dramaturgy.

This chapter turns back to the scope of national powers, and argues that the original meaning of the Commerce Clause limits Congress to regulating the exchange of goods across state lines, and critiques the Supreme Court’s modern, expansive interpretation of the clause. It demonstrates, however, that the national commerce power was understood to be exclusive, lending support to the modern dormant Commerce Clause doctrine that restricts states from interfering with interstate commerce and that many originalists have opposed. It argues that, as originally understood, States retain police powers to regulate the health, safety, morals, and welfare of their populations and can incidentally affect interstate commerce through police regulations, as long as they have a legitimate purpose and do not target interstate commerce. Congress, similarly, could incidentally affect the states’ police powers or private conduct beyond the enumeration of powers so long as it was genuinely exercising its power over interstate commerce, such as when it closed the channels of interstate commerce to goods produced with child labor. This formalist approach reveals a symmetry in the original distribution of power between Congress and the states.

This chapter examines the Supreme Court’s state-sovereignty cases, particularly those involving sovereign immunity and the anti-commandeering doctrine. It argues that the Necessary and Proper Clause provides a textual basis for limiting Congress’s power to abrogate these state attributes. It critiques the Supreme Court’s modern federalism cases, like Printz v. United States, for relying on nontextual grounds, asserting that sovereign immunity and anti-commandeering principles derive from the Constitution’s structure and history, which view these as significant sovereign attributes the power to abrogate which cannot be delegated by implication. The chapter examines National League of Cities and its reversal in Garcia, highlighting tensions in applying federal laws to state functions. It argues that forcing states to enforce federal law or submit to citizen suits risks recreating the Articles of Confederation’s enforcement problems, potentially requiring the use of force against noncompliant states – a power the Framers rejected. Drawing on historical practices and the law of nations, the chapter posits that such powers require explicit constitutional authorization, reinforcing federalism’s vertical separation of powers and preserving state autonomy within the Constitution’s original design.

The story of a trader introduces the historical actors who made and transformed Mexico City during the seventeenth century. A tour of the landscape situates their lives in an American metropolis – a capital and commercial city sustained by working people. A discussion of residents’ economies underlines the focus on individuals and their economic goals. An overview of the city’s governance explains how and where people acted politically. A demographic profile confirms that this history is about people from all over the world: Native Americans; free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia; colonists and migrants from Europe; and all their descendants. Their experiences, their urban history, affirm archival reconstruction as a way to chart change over time from the perspective of people who made a living doing essential work, selling food, transporting goods, providing care, and valuing silver, the city’s money.

The chapter reconstructs the previously untold history of the rise of the central market food complex over the course of the seventeenth century, a space that straddled the Main Square and Volador Square. Nahua market women defended their privilege to sell what they called fruits of the earth. Recent migrants paid rent at city hall to secure a stall at the food court. African-descended poultry vendors obtained trading licenses at the Viceroyal Palace. They all convinced officials to support their businesses because they provisioned the city.

The chapter opens with comments on autobiographical writings by Petrarch, Augustine, Uriel da Costa, Franciscus Junius, Ludvig Freiherr von Holberg, Jan Amos Komenský, and Leibniz. There are seen as attempts to make sense of one’s own life circumstances, while aware that absolute knowledge of one’s own life is not possible. This is particularly salient when it comes to understanding one’s sufferings. Following this, there is a discussion of the concepts of public and fatherland, comparing contemporary times to olden times, primarily Greek and Roman antiquity. The public is understood as a kind of collective moral and legal arbiter, and language plays an important role in its existence. This is seen to be particularly important for what is called a public of the Hebrews. The contemporary public is that of Christianity, but also of commerce, schools, and universities. A fatherland is explained in terms of familial bond to a community and a link in the chain of humanity. This is followed by a discussion of Machiavelli, Hugo Grotius, and Leibniz.

The Introduction tackles biases and lacunae in recent discussions about the effects of economic globalization on the world-literary circulation of texts. I highlight three arguments (Ph. Cheah, A. Mufti, E. Apter) that dismiss world literature as a procedure of exchange for surrendering to “neoliberal global capitalism” and confront them with the observation that even the critique of this systemic correlation loses sight of spaces other than that of the Euro-Atlantic world system (D. Ganguly, F. Orsini). Against this background, the Introduction claims that the political economy of world literature offers a more complex picture even within the confines of European capitalist modernity if we recognize the diversity of economic discourses surrounding its early theories. First, I attempt to historicize and diversify the notion of “the economy” by addressing semantic oscillations in the notions of ecology, circulation, and commerce. Then I outline the five “designs of circulation” the individual chapters will address and make preliminary suggestions about their pre-, non-, or anti-capitalist elements.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

This chapter considers the environmental consequences of the United States’ victory in the American Revolution during the approximately three decades following the war. Domestically, US settlers carried the agroeconomy developed during the colonial era into new lands through the violent dispossession of Indigenous nations. This expanded the geographic scope of pre-existing ecological trends such as deforestation, wildlife depletion, and soil exhaustion. Urbanization and industrialization introduced new pollutants into local ecologies while facilitating the spread of epidemic disease. Commercial networks also tied American environments to foreign markets. Market demands for fur and heating oil led to the decimation of marine mammal populations. The final decades of the US transatlantic slave trade provided enslaved labor for the expansion of the ecologically destructive system of plantation capitalism. In the north and northwest, foreign demand for US-grown goods contributed to the simplification of local ecologies through their transformation into cropland and livestock grazing lands.

This chapter introduces the merchants who are the principal focus of this study and the sources on which the study is based. It also forecasts the argument that will be made about the class identity these merchants fashioned.

This chapter takes up a theme that has underlain all previous chapters: were these men capitalists or how are they positioned in the history of capitalism? It also explores the question of whether these merchants formed a class and, if so, in what sense. I argue that they did form a class based on their role in the economy, but that their identity was fashioned by drawing on other ideological registers as well. The complex “class identity” they constructed allowed them entry into their period’s moral economy. It also provided later merchants with a model that would enable a narrative about their own self-worth.

This chapter discusses the centuries-old discourses that condemned merchants as greedy, duplicitous, and usurious predators and damned commerce as a threat to the common good. It also, however, introduces the arguments that emerged during the Middle Ages (mostly from Scholastics) in defense of commerce and merchants themselves, and it traces the signs of a lightening of the attacks on merchants as we enter the period of study in this book.

Chapter 8 considers commerce and money management, the largest category of work in the work-task database. This provides a detailed view of petty commerce, the typically small transactions that took place every day across the country, with women and men almost equally involved. Markets remained the most common locations of commerce, but transactions took place everywhere including the home, the street, and occasionally, the specialist retail shop. Evidence of administering debts and pawning goods demonstrates the significant role played by married women in these activities.