Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange

Book excerpt: Beginning with the discovery of a curious plot wherein science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, "Anthropology and the Stock Exchange "by economic historian Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned societies. It explores how the commodification of scientific truth became every bit as integral as financial engineering to the profitability of foreign investment and speculation in foreign government debt. Flandreau underscores the crucial role of finance (what he calls the Stock Exchange Modality ) in shaping the contours of human knowledge and vice versa in an age of mercantile expansion. He further argues that a new brand of imperialism, born under Benjamin Disraeli s first term as British Premier, built on the multiple covert links between the birth of social sciences and novel mechanisms of financial revenue creation and extraction. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican Rebellion or Abyssinian Expedition, for example, they responded and catered to the impulses of the Stock Exchange. The marriage between anthropological science and finance, Flandreau asserts, formed the foundational structures of late 19th century British Imperialism, which in turn produced essential technologies of globalization."