Agrarian populists prefigured today’s speculative financial imagination in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Evidence

This is not an entirely new phenomenon. As I argued in chapter 2, US agrarian populists molded their distinct speculative imaginations through attempts to navigate the post–Civil War period’s radical uncertainties, which cast serious doubt on probabilistic models of forecasting. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 501

Categorization

• XREF: Ties back to an earlier chapter on agrarian populism; useful to the reader’s central claim that speculative imagination has a deep history prior to the trading floor. — connects to: Grassroots populist speculators understood modern financial fictions deeply — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 205; Insuring, hedging and reassuring constitute the shared speculative practice of finance and populism — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 270; Speculation now pervades economic, social, and political life as an imagined collective enactment — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 85 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Grassroots populist speculators understood modern financial fictions deeply — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 205; Insuring, hedging and reassuring constitute the shared speculative practice of finance and populism — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 270; Speculation now pervades economic, social, and political life as an imagined collective enactment — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 85 (+3 more)