Emma Hart

A Senior Lecturer of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Emma Hart has written extensively on the early history of the United States of America. She joins us to celebrate her latest monograph, Trading Spaces.

Today, “the market” is an abstract system, made even more intangible by the rise of online commerce. Throughout most of history, however, the market was a place where people went to buy and sell their wares. Trading Spaces explains how Britain’s colonisation of America helped to create the type of market we know today. Following traders into the shops, auction rooms, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth and eighteenth century America, Emma tells a transnational and transitional tale about the development of capitalism as we know it.