Economists are inclined to think of the market economy as always existing, just developing or "growing". Historians —and anthropologists— know very well that this is not the case; quite viable non-market societies have existed upon a base of "customary" institutions; others have embodied "revenue" economies, drawing upon agricultural surplus. An attempot is made in this book to bridge these differing approaches to economic history and teory. Its subject is the evolution of the market economy, and of its forms and institutions. While this evolution has produced many benefits, it has also its darker sides, such as slavery, usury, and the ignobler aspects of colonization. The author, an eminent British economist, dives considerable attention to these last.…
"John Hicks is another Nobel prize winner in economics. It’s a short book making sense of economic history . I love it when scholars can take a mass of information and then simplify it, to make a narrative of it, and give some shape to it, so that you have a way of understanding it. This is a book I read some years ago and I’m going to say the same thing about the final book I chose, by Marc Bloch. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter John Hicks was known as a theorist and not at all as a historian. Somehow, in talking to people and reading about it, he had a sense of how you could just make a kind of thought experiment about how things developed and how one thing led to another. It’s not so much that it’s right— because, you know, it was written a while ago and we’ve learned a lot more about how things develop now—but that it really provided a framework for people to think about this long view. I love it. I recommend it to everybody. It’s a short book and a very good read. I recommend it highly. It’s about starting out with being farmers. Then a few people get interested in commerce. Then there’s a long description of how you have an agrarian society with commercial activity stuck onto it as a little ornament. But then the commercial activity grows. It has increasing influence and eventually it begins to have some political influence. Then it becomes a larger and larger part of the economy and the political framework and that lasts for quite a long time. And then, when you begin to get industrialisation and what we call modernisation then, in fact, agriculture declines and you have commercial activity that really takes over the economy. It’s a way of putting that whole sweep of history together which I find very appealing. I like the way he did it. Nothing has really replaced Marx in that way. Piketty expects to do something along those lines. Hicks’s book also talks about the changes in the economy. “What’s replaced Marx’s theory of capital, you might say, is the modern theory of finance” I think, today, one might say that what has replaced Marx and his thought about industry dominating the economy is finance. People think that finance will be the new capital that will run the world, but it’s not a Marxian class notion. As part of this, I put the class back into it in my book on the dual economy. But what’s replaced Marx’s theory of capital, you might say, is the modern theory of finance. That would be the short answer to that question."
