From the back street to the high street: commercial gambling and the commodication of chance

Introduction Over the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-rst centuries, commercial gambling has been transformed from a semi-deviant, largely underground pastime to a globalized, multi-billion-dollar leisure industry. This dramatic shift can be located within the broader context of changes in post-Second World War patterns of leisure and consumption, as well as the intersection of political, economic and technological forces that saw the interests of governments and big business converge around the expansion of gambling prots.