Sometimes the most fruitful advances in scholarship occur when different intellectual trajectories and influences are brought into dialogue with one another, when concepts and methodologies developed and perhaps commonplace in one can reinvigorate debates around old questions in another area or, indeed, pose new and perhaps better questions. That is the spirit which animates our roundtable, which brings ideas and approaches from cultural history and the history of technology, from the sociology of finance, to spark new ways of talking about the history of finance. Together we take topics long familiar to economists, well-developed in theories and expressed in formulae, but find opportunities to introduce contingency, agency, disruption, and the material world into our understandings.
We take as our starting point a series of essays by Kenneth J. Lipartito: “Connecting the Cultural and Material in Business History” (Enterprise & Society, 2013), “Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism” (American Historical Review, 2016), and “The Ontology of Economic Things” (Enterprise & Society, 2020). We have organized our discussion around the concept of infrastructure, the underpinnings—often very material but also arising out of particular, contingent social configurations—that enabled the historical development of finance between the eighteenth century and the recent past.