Making the Market

Paul Johnson is Vice-Chancellor and President of La Trobe University, Melbourne. His previous publications include the three-volume Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (edited with Roderick Floud, 2004), Old Age: From Antiquity to Postmodernity (edited with Pat Thane, 1998) and Twentieth-Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change (1994).

• 1. Mammon's cradle; Part I. Individuals: 2. Contracts, debts and debtors; 3. Coercion, custom and contract at work; Part II. Institutions: 4. The incorporation of business; 5. The limitation of liability; 6. Corporate performance; Part III. Information: 7. Shareholders, directors and promoters; 8. Mammon's conceit; Bibliography.

'Paul Johnson brings a novelist's eye for character and incident in the tradition of Dickens and Trollope to Victorian commercial life. His acute observations of human foible is complemented by the analytical precision of a social scientist to produce a major study of the market in Victorian Britain. Far from the abstraction or neutrality of neo-classical economics, he shows how the market was permeated with differences of status between rich and poor, between capital and labour. It involved social choices about the desirability or acceptability of various modes of economic conduct, which are as relevant now in the age of Bernie Madoff as of Melmotte.' Martin Daunton, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and author of Trusting Leviathan