Commentary on 2019 Roepke Lecture “War, Capitalism, and the Making and Unmaking of Economic Geographies”

Erica Schoenberger has done yeoman work over the years digging into European history to reflect on the origins of markets and money. Her Roepke lecture builds on this earlier work to the question of the origins of towns and burghers in the Middle Ages, roughly 800–1400. Schoenberger’s work has not received the attention it should have among economic geographers, for three reasons. One is that most economics is based on modeling, not history. Another is that translating the lessons of history to today is difficult. A third is that economics and economic geography are rooted in a view of the world that naturalizes markets and money (Schoenberger and Walker 2017).Schoenberger’s story of markets and money grows out of the work of Karl Polanyi and others who have debunked the view that markets are the normal form of economic interaction in premodern societies, when they are the exception. Market exchange does not grow up organically from simple barter, as posited by Adam Smith. Nor do modern markets scale up from village squares, as in the just-so story of Leon Walras, one of the fathers of neoclassical economics. Extensive markets and commercial societies are modern inventions (Schoenberger 2008, 2010).