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Buying time: futures trading and telegraphy in nineteenth-century global commodity markets*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2015

Alexander Engel
Alexander Engel*
Affiliation:
Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 5, 37073 Göttingen, Germany E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Adapting the dictum that ‘time is money’, Western merchants have long promoted and welcomed technologies to accelerate commerce. Thanks to revolutionary changes in communication in the nineteenth century, including the telegraph, information could for the first time travel much faster around the globe than goods. This asymmetric time–space compression created new problems for agents of global trade, as transactions could occur faster than the handling of the goods. Yet this problem also presented an opportunity to establish new forms of trading and ways of thinking about time. In the case of world markets for primary products such as grain or cotton, the new technique of futures trading at commodity exchanges became a tool to redress the time differential between the movement of goods and information. It pushed the commercial community to think in a ‘double time’ of a dematerialized present and a material future with physical goods, and centred global commodity markets on a few marketplaces. The article thus argues that historians need to examine economic understandings of the future alongside political, cultural, and social understandings.

Keywords

commoditiesfutures tradingmarketstime–space compressiontelegraph
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 284 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I owe a debt of gratitude to Heidi Tworek and Simone Müller for the sheer amount of patience and constructive advice they provided in the different stages of developing this contribution. The text further profited from a number of remarks by two anonymous reviewers, whom I would also like to thank.

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