How to Study a Global Market

WHat is a Global market? Market Threads addresses this question by empirically analyzing the world cotton market and bringing together insights from the social sciences and new directions in the study of markets. For more than a quarter of a century, a social experiment unprecedented in world history has been in progress: neoliberal market reform on a global scale. This experiment has revealed a remarkable fact: we do not know how markets work, let alone what the term “global market” means in practice. This book presents a study of the making and maintenance of a global commodity market, drawing on twenty-four months of fieldwork on four continents. The research was carried out in seven market places that cover the rural and urban sites of the world cotton market: three cotton-growing villages—Izbet Sabry and Kafr Gaffar (Lower egypt), and Pamukköy (Western Turkey)—and four merchant cities— Izmir (Turkey), Alexandria (egypt), Memphis (TN), and New york City.1 Markets are elusive. Disciplines have been established to study their nature; entire libraries are filled with accounts of how they work; and global institutions have been formed to facilitate their expansion. Nevertheless, a quick look at ambitious projects aiming to analyze markets reveals the striking and complete absence of an answer to the question “what is a market?”2 Douglass North, the 1993 Nobel laureate in economics, has stated this point better than anyone else: “It is a peculiar fact that the literature on economics [. . .] contains so little discussion of the central institution that underlies neoclassical economics—the market.”3 More arresting still, this curious silence about the market is shared by competing social research paradigms that ostensibly represent different political aspirations. Hayek is considered the ultimate ideologue of market expansion. His oeuvre does not offer concrete insights into how markets work, but rather a set of theoretical assumptions about how markets disseminate subjective information by converting knowledge into prices and serve as a mechanism of resource distribution.