Chicago’s first futures markets catalyzed global shifts in risk and credit distribution

Evidence

The second chapter historicizes these important transformations by trailing the evolution of the historical forerunner of homo speculans. I provide an in-depth genealogy of the distinct speculative imagination that emerged in (and around) the first formal futures markets of global capitalism’s new hegemon, the US economy of the fin de siècle. This is not a history of finance or of speculation, both of which predate the events that I review here by hundreds of years. My historical focus is the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, a period that augurs unprecedented political conflicts around speculative finance, leading to a widespread moral legitimation of speculation in modern societies. During that period, debates around the morality of speculation were also rife in many other countries, most notably in Europe’s financial epicenters and in colonial South Asia’s market capitals. However, I argue that the depth and breadth of political conflict (involving governments and courts, traders and farmers, populists and urban workers) around history’s first standardized futures markets in Chicago were a catalyst for tectonic global shifts in the distribution of risk, credit, and social insurance and therefore a salient precursor of finance’s more recent transformations. My particular emphasis on that time’s surging populist movement, and specifically on the ambivalent position of that movement toward finance’s most speculative constituents, offers a more historically complete and accurate representation of the original homo speculans, which goes well beyond the suave figure of the financier or the working-class urban gambler. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 32

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to the reader’s project on how uncertainty-training migrates speculation into politics and self-presentation, providing the historical origin point.
• XREF: connects to: Chicago futures trading diverged from material reality from its very beginnings — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 86; Chicago’s options-market culture aided the Anglo-American capital-market model’s global ascent — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 178; Futures trading achieved unprecedented scale in nineteenth-century Chicago. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 68 (+6 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Chicago futures trading diverged from material reality from its very beginnings — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 86; Chicago’s options-market culture aided the Anglo-American capital-market model’s global ascent — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 178; Futures trading achieved unprecedented scale in nineteenth-century Chicago. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 68 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Chicago futures trading diverged from material reality from its very beginnings #complicates (0.75) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 86
• Financialization shifts markets from calculation to speculation, destroying predictability #complicates (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 742