Karl Polanyi's position in economic anthropology is odd. His essay “The Economy as Instituted Process” (Polanyi 1957b), and the collection in which it appeared (Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957), were central to the main intellectual dispute in the sub-discipline, the formalist–substantivist debate in the 1960s (see Isaac 2005; Wilk 1996: 3–13). At the same time, The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944) has had little influence. There are good reasons for this imbalance. The essay speaks of orders and processes of the sort that anthropologists commonly see in their field research, while the book describes something rather different, changes in Britain and Europe over almost two centuries. The scope of these changes is alien to the more circumscribed focus of conventional anthropology, which makes the book less accessible than the essay.

Though perhaps less accessible, the book should be useful. The changes it describes revolve around a growing stress on the self-regulating market free from interference by the state, on the expansion of the market to areas of life hitherto outside of it, and on the medium of the market, money, as the measure of value and the motive for market actors. These are very much the neoliberalism that, for the past decade or two, has increasingly been the political-economic milieu of the people and situations that anthropologists study.