Firms use a variety of strategies to limit competition that would otherwise erode profits. Firms innovate, creating new technologies, new markets, and new firms. Innovations allow them to distinguish their products or lower their costs and thus maintain profits. Their ability to innovate depends on the existence of social institutions that allow them to amass the resources—labor, capital, and information—necessary to compete successfully. Firms also maintain profits by manipulating the political process to maintain preferred access to markets, technology and resources. Finally, firms take actions to limit competition directly. Waves of consolidation, justified by an assumption of the inevitability of increasing firm size, have limited competition and entrepreneurship. Cartels and other forms of collusion, sometimes thought to have disappeared from US markets after the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, are still active in a wide variety of national and international markets.

“Ensuring America's Health” demonstrates how public and private power intermingled to embed a specific organizational model—the insurance company model—into the health care system. The dissertation draws on government documents, trade association papers, company archives, and interviews with policymakers, insurance industry leaders, and physicians. In addition to exploring health care politics, it presents a detailed study of major trade associations and ground-level organizations, such as individual insurance companies and physician offices. This history reveals the degree to which policy debates and private sector organization have informed one another; exposes the factors driving US health care costs; and details the origins of the system's pseudo-corporate structure, which places insurance companies in a supervisory role over physicians and hospitals.

Accounting for Taste examines the history of the US Food and Drug Administration's regulation of markets through labels as a form of public–private infrastructure, built through the ceaseless work (and antagonisms) of public regulators, the food industry, and expert advisors. From public hearings on setting “standards of identity” for foods to rule making on informative labels like the Nutrition Facts panel, it links a narrow history of institutional change in food regulation to broader cultural anxieties of twentieth-century America, arguing that the recurrence to informative labels as a political solution reflects a transformation in not only scientific understandings of dietary risk but also cultural understandings about the responsibility of consumers. In describing this “informational turn” in food politics, the dissertation foregrounds the important role of intermediaries, specifically consumer and health experts, and intermediate spaces, such as labels, in the framing of political debates about the production and consumption of everyday goods.

The dissertation offers a new perspective on the transformation American capitalism in the late nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the urban and political dimensions of that momentous process. With Boston as a focal point, it examines the consolidation of a North American market by looking at the conflict between two groups of businessmen: the city's elite business class, led by merchants, bankers, and financiers, who sought to prioritize the imperatives of an interconnected continental economy, and a lower-middle-class coalition of shopkeepers, small manufacturers, and skilled workers, who espoused robust metropolitan development based on an expanded public sector and the proliferation of proprietary businesses. The dissertation explores the rival political economic visions of the two groups and their clashes in urban politics. It analyzes the battles they waged over fundamental policy questions such as municipal finance, tax reform, metropolitan integration, and the uses of urban space, interpreting them as competing political efforts to define the contours of the modern American economy.

“Selling Paris” explores the cultural, economic, and spatial parameters of private construction in the French capital at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to the state-centered accounts that currently characterize our understanding of Paris as a capital of modernity, this project looks to private property owners, real estate brokers, and speculative developers, as well as the moral economy in which their projects took place, in order to understand the elaboration of the built landscape of the modern metropolis. I argue that new classes of market intermediaries—namely estate agents, market-oriented architects, and small-scale joint-stock firms—emerged in this period to build and market residential spaces, establishing apartments and buildings as merchandise and tenants as clients. Focusing on the activities of these commercial actors reveals the existence of a French culture of commerce centered on speculation and risk-taking, a business culture that profoundly affected the production of residential space during of one of the city's greatest periods of expansion. Thus, in contradistinction to scholarly accounts of both French entrepreneurialism and Parisian urban development, this project reconstructs the activities of a dynamic capitalist class whose uncoordinated projects were the main authors of the capital city's urban fabric. Tracing the manner in which housing and property operated as a commercial object during a crucial period of urbanization, moving between and among the economic activities of investment, speculation, production, and consumption, this project seeks to present a research agenda for both the cultural history of markets and the economic history of cities.

“Wishful Thinking” discusses the origins of retail premium schemes in America. An entirely new marketing strategy that began appearing in the early 1850s, giving away free things with purchases helped fuel the consumer revolution of the 19th century by inducing people to buy things they did not necessarily want or need. The article focuses on the three most prevalent forms of premiums – gift distributions, prize packages, and gift book establishments – and draws on scholarship from various fields, including advertising and marketing history and economic anthropology. In addition to describing various premium schemes and linking them to nascent consumerism, the article posits why they might have been so successful, despite the fact that many were clearly fraudulent.

In Depression-era South Georgia, truck farmers experimenting with onion planting found that their crop emerged unusually sweet, due to the region's climate and particular soil content. But what gave Vidalia onions a unique flavor—their low sulfur and high water content—also rendered them nearly impossible to market, as the vegetable spoiled much quicker than regular onions. In their seventy-year quest to overcome the onion's natural limitations, Georgia growers would transform their formerly insular region into a hub of global supermarket capitalism. As onion acreage skyrocketed with the advent of controlled atmosphere storage, growers recruited thousands of Latin American workers. Then, when storage techniques proved imperfect, industry leaders contracted with growers across Central and South America to produce sweet onions for sale during Georgia's off-season. In striking contrast to the Vidalia onion's branding as a “down-home” southern crop, the vegetable's history reveals the contradictions in our modern food system.

Sociologist of science Sheila Jasanoff tells us that “A master narrative is a compelling and frequently repeated story about the way the world works that takes hold of our imaginations and shapes the ways in which we perceive reality, as well as our possibilities for collective action.” The asbestos litigation master narrative, versions of which are available on hundreds of plaintiff-firm websites, has been spectacularly successful in generating billions of dollars in revenue for plaintiffs, attorneys, and expert witnesses since 1973.2 As of December 31, 2009, the US District Court E.D. Pa. MDL 875 (Multi-District asbestos Litigation) docket included 42,076 cases “consisting of 2,337,692 individual claims (all diseases).”