Speculative markets displaced providential belief with probabilistic forecasting among farmers.

Evidence

While the Civil War had brought great uncertainty in the city’s markets, the newly arrived options trading opened entirely new trading opportunities, which not only sought to deliberately expand existing uncertainties but also to create new ones. CBOT speculators with “large purses” were now responsible for new waves of volatility reverberating throughout the city’s hinterlands, making crop prices so unpredictable that they shook up even age-old trust in the crop’s redeeming promise. In the face of unprecedented volatility, farmers increasingly lost faith in long-held providential beliefs about divine intervention and “God’s will.” With this move away from providential explanations, they turned to methods of “market forecasting” (Levy 2012, 181), crop production estimates, and weather forecasting. It was a time when meteorology became the new common sense for navigating uncertainty in farming communities, and actuarial science the trusted model for hedging unknown futures. More farmers now chased after an elusive “probabilistic certainty” in the hope of regaining some control over their futures. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 118

Categorization

• XREF: This tracks the historical migration of uncertainty-handling from religion to probability that the reader must trace to the trading-floor-to-politics migration central to the book. — connects to: Grain elevator storage physically disentangled grain from its grower for futures trading — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 71