ABSTRACT

The ascension of finance in recent decades was accompanied with intermittent episodes of crisis, a dazzling complexity of novel financial instruments and the spread of investment practices into the fabric of everyday life. All this has turned finance into a fresh object of research. For some disciplines, finance has become the new ‘exotic’ (Maurer 2006: 18): anthropologists, literary scholars, cultural historians and political theorists among others have discovered that their tools of the trade are applicable to this domain (Shell 1999; Ho 2009; Wennerlind 2011). For other disciplines, such as international political economy and sociology of money, finance is already an established topic whose developments can be discussed within canonical bounds (Strange 1986; Helleiner 1994; Ingham 2004).