Intimacy and Economic Life

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What does it mean to write “intimate” histories of economic life? This episode of the History Workshop podcast brings together a group of scholars drawn together by precisely those questions. They began meeting in May 2021, each bringing their own research topic and working together to explore the virtues and limits of making the economy intimate. For some, intimacy itself was their subject matter – the emotional dimensions of economic transactions; for others, intimacy was a kind of methodology, denoting a small-scale, close-up, grassroots approach to a subject. Their aim as a group was to ask what a focus on ‘intimate histories’ could offer to historical writing and historical perception – how it might transform the way historians traditionally write and see.

In addition to the six scholars who came together to record this discussion, the larger group is comprised of researchers engaged in these questions from diverse perspectives and geographies, all with racialized and gendered inequalities of capitalism at the heart of their inquiries. Their concerns range from marriage as capital in the antebellum United States and the Indian Ocean to Black women and banking in the Caribbean, from caste and economic invisibility in modern Korea to sex trafficking in/as contemporary finance. For a full listing of contributors and paper abstracts, please visit the project blog.

Produced by Marybeth Hamilton

Julie Hardwick

Julie Hardwick is the John E. Green Regents Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research lies at the intersections of legal, economic, social and family/gender history in early modern France, and she has published many books and articles in relation to her varied interests. She explored many themes related to precarious courtship in her most recent book, Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789. She tweets @DrJulieHardwick.

Marybeth Hamilton

Marybeth Hamilton is an editor of History Workshop Journal and Coordinating Editor of History Workshop. She is the author of In Search of the Blues and When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment, and she has written and presented several features for BBC Radio. She is currently writing a cultural history of Valerie Solanas’s 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol.

Kate Gibson

Kate Gibson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Manchester. She has published on the history of the family in eighteenth-century England in Past and Present, Cultural and Social History and The Journal of Family History, and is working on her first monograph on illegitimacy in eighteenth-century England. She is currently part of the AHRC-funded project Faith in the Town: Lay Religion, Urbanisation and Industrialisation in England, 1740-1830, and tweets as @KateGibson22.

Sarah Roddy

Sarah Roddy is Lecturer in Irish Social History at Maynooth University and formerly Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish History at the University of Manchester. She is author of Population, Providence and Empire: The churches and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland (Manchester, 2014) and co-author of The Charity market and humanitarianism in Britain (London, 2018). She is currently writing a monograph entitled Visible Divinity: An Intimate History of Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850-1921, whose introduction she workshopped for this network.

Orsi Husz

Orsi Husz is a professor at the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden; she held a professorship of Economic History at the same university until 2021. Her research spans a number of areas of the culture of economic life in the 20th century, such as consumption, credit, household budgets, playing the lottery, investing in the stock market, use of banking services, e.g. current accounts, checks and credit cards. In her paper “Making finance familiar. Commercial intimacies from child allowance accounts to the IKEA-Family Card,” she identifies, using Sweden as a case, a process of intimization of finance in the second half of the twentieth century.

Andrew Popp

Andrew Popp is a professor of history at Copenhagen Business School and Editor-in-Chief at Enterprise and Society. A business historian, he is increasingly interested in how business interacts with and shapes the emotions of everyday life. For the latest meeting of this group, he workshopped a paper on Ray and Florence, a young couple from early twentieth-century Ohio, mapping their fantasies and dreams onto capitalism’s projects and projections.

Alexia Yates

Alexia Yates is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Manchester, where she co-directs the Centre for Economic Cultures and researches and teaches the history of economic life and urban history. She is currently researching the history of everyday life and finance in nineteenth-century France, part of her AHRC Research Leadership Fellowship “Rise of the Rentier: France and the Making of Financial Modernity.”

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