This study examines the role of art as a crucible of capital and property during the First World War and constructs a large-scale historical narrative of European auctions held between 1910 and 1925. By combining sources such as auction reports, newspaper articles, caricatures, individual memoirs, and financial and legal documents with an analysis of art prices, this study allows for making new observations about the evolution of European art markets, their disruption by the events of the First World War, and their transnational entanglements. Far from focusing solely on reconstructing the collecting patterns of prominent individuals or shedding light on specific histories of appropriation and looting, this book explores broader cultural and social developments across the British, French, and German art markets and their milieus and also touches upon trade spheres such as Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Russia. While the First World War has often been neglected in scholarly studies as a phase of stagnation and stasis, this study shows that it had a disruptive impact on the art trade in the twentieth century and introduces a new transnational methodology for historical inquiries into cultural and artistic markets.

This chapter analyses the auction milieu’s cultural responses to war-induced developments. Within societies deeply entrenched in the mentality of mobilisation and sacrifice, the commercialisation of art stirred moral apprehensions, feelings of possession, and envy, both among the general public and within the art industry. Debates on nouveaux riches and profiteers underscored the construction of antagonist figures during the war, highlighting threats to the market from both external and internal forces. The widespread destruction of heritage also catalysed nationalist feelings, deepening the cultural fragmentation of a formerly integrated trade sphere. By scrutinising the biographies of dealers, examining art’s vulnerability in wartime upheaval, and exploring the interplay between art and finance, this chapter also outlines how the war acted on the tensions characteristic of each market and brought them to a conflagration.

Public spaces, as places of consumption, are windows onto unequal economic structures. In this chapter, I discuss different aspects of real and perceived inequalities in Tehran. I demonstrate that massive structural changes, such as the expansion of infrastructure and public transportation, have facilitated access to different parts of Tehran and a more equal experience of the city, yet different forms of inequality persist and are reproduced. Many public spaces offer a variety of opportunities for using space, ranging from walking in a public park to eating in high-end restaurants, all in very close proximity. Depending on what can be consumed and where it happens, public spaces bring inequalities to the fore as different groups often segregate within the same public space, following patterns that usually correlate with their ability to pay for products and services. Thus, in Tehran, as much as urban development may appear to work as an equalizer – bringing different socioeconomic groups together in newly shared public spaces – it highlights economic and social inequalities and makes disparities even more visible.

The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.

Although France and Germany would acquire modern industrial economies after 1850, neither was in a position to do so even a few decades earlier. Only the coming of railroads would give either country the kind of national market that was so important in Britain. The same was true for science in France, but not in Germany, for reasons that had to do with the same fragmentation that kept its economy traditional. The impact of railroad construction made up for that absence in making economic transformation possible, so that organizing spheres in accord with principles derived from the activities carried on within them would come as a concomitant of industrial transformation rather than a precondition for it. Its most striking expression would be the organization of national professional organizations, dedicated to giving doctors, engineers, chemists, and academic researchers control over their own domains, and providing essential services for modern industrial societies.

Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.

I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.

This chapter covers basic concepts in power system operations and electricity markets. Basic concepts of power generation include variable cost, marginal cost, fixed cost, investment cost, the weighted average cost of capital, and the definition of a natural monopoly. Basic concepts of transmission and distribution include a discussion of Ohm’s law, Kirchhoff’s laws, the power flow equations, and the direct current power flow. Basic concepts of consumption include the notion of valuation/marginal benefit, demand functions, demand elasticity, and the value of lost load. The actors of electricity markets are introduced, including transmission/independent system operators, distribution system operators, utilities, load serving entities, retailers, power exchanges, and transmission companies. Reserves and ancillary services are then introduced, and details about the forward-looking and rolling nature of power system operations are discussed. Exchanges and pools are informally defined, and the debate between uniform and pay-as-bid pricing is detailed. A blueprint of a typical electricity markets, with the participating actors and traded products and services, is introduced. The California and Central Western European markets are compared in order to introduce the debate between zonal and nodal pricing, as well as different approaches in pricing.

The nature of modern economies, and their ideological dimensions. The cultural challenges of capitalist economies and their “socialist” alternatives.