Call for Papers on Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Financial Panics and Crises for the Journal of Cultural Economy (deadline: 1 January 2011)
Publicado el 01-09-2009.
Journal of Cultural Economy
Special Issue: Financial Panics and Crises: Cultural and Historical Perspectives Editor: Mary Poovey
Financial crises come in many varieties. Indeed, as Walter Bagehot insisted, if one emphasizes the panic phase of what can only retrospectively be identified as a crisis, instead of the mania that precedes or the contraction that follows, the economist can identify several kinds of unsettled economic behavior, any of which might eventually become a financial crisis. Thus, according to Bagehot, the 1866 collapse of Overend, Gurney, and Co. caused a credit panic; the scare of 1864 was a bullion panic; and the collapse of the railway bubble in 1848 sparked a capital panic. In Bagehot’s account, such periodic eruptions were undoubtedly disruptive, but, as episodes in a mature nation’s ordinary business cycle, they did not mean that the modern system of capital was fatally flawed. For Bagehot, a panic, like the mania that inaugurated it, was “a calculable, though unpleasant piece of business” and, as such, grist for the economist’s mill.
Only time will tell if the current global financial crisis reprises any of the panic forms that Bagehot identified; only economists of the future can decide whether the current recession heralds a second coming of the Great Depression or constitutes an altogether new kind of economic event. While we wait for the future to access our current situation, we can learn from past attempts to understand, manage, and survive financial manias, panics, and crises. This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy addresses the history of financial upheavals. Topics may include the shortages in coin, bullion, or other monetary forms, which caused governments to intervene in a nation’s money supply; debates about how to define or prevent financial crises; accounts of specific panics and their impact; varieties of fraud or other criminal behavior that accompanied speculative booms; the role of the banking industry in various crises; literary or cultural representations of panics; and the global repercussions of past crises.
Editorial Mission of the Journal of Cultural Economy
It is now clear that the three main organising concepts of the social and cultural sciences – culture, economy, and the social – are each undergoing a process of significant reinterpretation just as our understanding of the relations between them is changing equally rapidly. The Journal of Cultural Economy will serve as a major international vehicle for the intellectual clarification and empirical exploration of these developments. Its mission is to promote work that examines the varied and changing ways in which social, cultural, technical, and economic networks and practices interact with one another in complex ways whose analysis requires the abandonment of attempts to differentiate these as belonging to ontologically separate realms.
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