Elise Dermineur Reuterswärd, Ph.D.

Arbeitsvorhaben

The Moral Economy: History and Explorations of a Critical Concept

My book project is tentatively titled The Moral Economy: History and Explorations of a Critical Concept. This book explores the relationship between markets and society. Specifically, it retraces the history of the moral economy and analyzes the transformations and evolutions it has undergone over time. By “moral economy,” I mean the non-economic norms affecting commercial interactions, such as fairness, cooperation, flexibility, and other-regarding norms. The book illustrates how, in premodern communities, exchanges were governed by the norms of the moral economy in the context of a lack of efficient institutional structures for contract enforcement and coercion. These norms not only guided transactions, but also strengthened community cohesion. They established a strong mutual insurance system, offering support and security to members long before the emergence of modern welfare states.
However, at the turn of the nineteenth century, industrialization, urbanization, and demographic explosion coalesced to form the tenets of modernity, causing the norms of the moral economy to wane. The welfare state replaced community support, cities stretched and disrupted previously enmeshed ties between people, and changes in work, especially wage labor, altered the meaning of communality. Yet, the norms of the moral economy have not disappeared altogether. They have evolved, adapted, and even persisted in modern societies. This book explains how and why.

Recommended Reading

Dermineur, Elise M. Gender and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Sweden: Queen Louisa Ulrika (1720–1782). Routledge, 2017.
—. “Rethinking Debt: The Evolution of Private Credit Markets in Preindustrial France.” Social Science History 42, no. 2 (2018): 317–342.
—. Before Banks: The Making of Credit and Debt in Preindustrial France. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Kolloquium, 10.02.2026

The Moral Economy: A Horribly Open-Textured Concept

This talk presents part of my research project, which revisits the concept of the moral economy as an analytical tool for understanding the relationship between markets and social norms. Taking the 2008 financial crisis as an entry point, it argues that contemporary capitalism is marked by increasing disembeddedness, producing not only economic instability but also moral contestation and collective resistance. The talk traces the genealogy of the moral economy from E. P. Thompson and James C. Scott to Karl Polanyi, highlighting both the strengths and the limitations of their accounts—particularly the concept’s theoretical looseness and its tendency to idealize premodern exchange. Building on Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness and the “double movement,” the presentation proposes rethinking the moral economy in terms of degrees of embeddedness rather than as a historically bounded system. It argues that moral economy norms—such as fairness, reciprocity, legitimacy, and subsistence security—continue to shape economic behavior and political responses within modern market societies. The talk concludes by outlining the conditions under which moral economy claims emerge, persist, or are reactivated.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Dermineur Reuterswärd, Elise (Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2025)

Before banks : the making of credit and debt in preindustrial France Cambridge studies in economic history

Dermineur Reuterswärd, Elise (Cambridge, 2018)

Rethinking debt : the evolution of private credit markets in preindustrial France