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The M Yarn: Price and Social Imagination in Early Industrial Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2015

Paul Anthony Custer
Paul Anthony Custer*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Lenoir-Rhyne University, 625 7th Avenue NE, Box 7219, Hickory, NC 28603, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

This essay explores market talk in early nineteenth-century Britain through a close reading of the correspondence of the cotton-spinning firm McConnel & Kennedy of Manchester between 1798 and 1813. I argue that two distinct “narratives” of price and value emerge from these letters, and that the cleave between them pointed both to a deep anxiety about the market, and to a clear and clever bargaining strategy. McConnel & Kennedy clung stubbornly to a definition of “value” that they understood to be fictive, in order to avoid frank surrender to what they saw as cannibalistic price-competition. Rhetoric was, then, no small thing to them. They conceived supply and value as being inversely related, and this idea, I argue, was implicit also in wider contemporary anxieties about the relationship between proliferation and meaning.

Type
Manuscript
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 417 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I am extremely grateful to the staff at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester for their patience, helpfulness, and courtesy to me during my various stints with them.

References

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