There is much to be gained by considering how the market-in-general—the abstraction of value, mobility of labor, and regional integration necessary for economic development on a national scale—has shaped U.S. society, transforming modes of sociality and fostering ideals of self-regulation and economic rationality. But there is also much to be gained by attending to the historical specificity of markets and the processes by which they are transformed into what is typically imagined today to be a single economic system, synonymous with capitalism. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the understanding of the singular noun “market” as “the operation of supply and demand in the competitive free market,” and the understanding of “market forces” as independent economic factors, as extremely recent coinages—1970 for the former and 1942 for the latter. As we strive to understand the changing relations between economic conditions and U.S. culture, we should be careful not to project backwards a vision of the saturation and global reach of a market economy that many take to be characteristic of the twenty-first century.

This is an excerpt from Meredith L. McGill’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 152).