"Materiality, subjectivities, and business history"

In 2017, I published an article that explored the long – “irrational” – adherence of Liverpool’s nineteenth-century cotton broker to outdoor trading. In Liverpool, the city’s very streets, the flagstones of the Exchange building’s courtyard, became vital components of the material infrastructure of finance and commerce. But this was also a terrain across which played subjectivities, emotions, and meaning. Moreover, it was also through this play that the subjectivities of the brokers were constituted and reconstituted. My contribution, which emerges from correspondence with Ken Lipartito, will consider, first, the relationship between the material and the constitution of subjectivities, and, secondly, the implications for the practice of business history of centering subjectivities rather than rationally constituted market subjects.