Formal futures markets in the late nineteenth century upended the industrial social contract.

Evidence

However, as I will now argue, the rise of speculative communities must be located in a longer arc of historical changes originating in the dawn of modern finance capitalism and, specifically, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the first formal futures markets were established in North America and Western Europe. It was the time when speculative markets were hurled to the fore of capitalist life and the fictitious trading of options, futures, and derivatives grew intemperately, upending industrial economies’ social contract. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 110

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to reader’s prior knowledge of financialization narratives that locate rupture in the post-Bretton Woods 1970s; this pushes the origin back a century.

Related

• Modern speculative communities trace to the 1860s-70s founding of formal futures markets. (similarity 0.94)
• Speculative communities originated in late-nineteenth-century futures markets, not the post-Bretton Woods era. (similarity 0.92)
• Chicago futures trading diverged from material reality from its very beginnings (similarity 0.82)
• Financiers’ imagined communities remain nationally bound despite global market rhetoric. (similarity 0.82)
• Futures trading achieved unprecedented scale in nineteenth-century Chicago. (similarity 0.81)
• Speculative communities arise from the tension between financial imagination and neoliberal reason (similarity 0.80)
• Speculation was nationalized as patriotic while excluding most of the population. (similarity 0.80)
• Speculation trades on imaginary goods severed from material production (similarity 0.80)
• Homo speculans originated in Chicago’s futures exchanges and populist movements (similarity 0.80)
• Futures speculation was initially more exclusive than earlier land speculation (similarity 0.80)
• Social and political forces drive the speculative imagination’s history and swings. (similarity 0.79)
• Speculative imagination is a generative social force integrated into everyday capitalist life (similarity 0.79)
• Modern derivatives increase exposure to volatility to profit from it. (similarity 0.79)
• Twentieth-century America rehabilitated speculation as patriotic duty for national strength (similarity 0.78)
• Fighting financialization requires wielding speculation on shifting ground (similarity 0.78)