Finance as Practice: Matter, Mentalité, and the Ordinary Investor
This paper will discuss the way that finance and lottery interpellated discursively and materially in nineteenth-century France, not only to police the boundaries of licit finance but to provide anchors and contexts that normalized and routinized novel financial practices. In the process, we construct a more diverse history of the kinds of market actors constituted by modern finance, and broach how we might begin to think of these ordinary actors – their wants and desires – as playing a part in reformatting the financial market in the first age of global capital.
