This volume serves up a combination of broad questions, theoretical approaches, and manifold case studies to explore how people have sought to understand markets and thereby reduce risk, whether they have approached this challenge with a practical view based on their own business acumen or used the tools of scholarship.

Autorentext
HARTMUT BERGHOFF is the Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, USA, and Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Previously he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and a Chandler International Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School. His fields of expertise are the history of consumption, business history, immigration history, and the history of modern Germany.
PHILIP SCRANTON is Board of Governors Professor, History of Industry and Technology, Rutgers University, USA, and Director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society, Hagley Museum and Library. He has authored or edited 13 books, the most recent of which is Reimagining Business History (Johns Hopkins, 2013, with Patrick Fridenson). He currently is at work on an overview of aircraft gas turbine engine development, Making Jet Engines Work, 1940s1960s.
UWE SPIEKERMANN is the Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. He has held teaching and research positions in Göttingen, Bremen, Münster, London, Exeter, and Vienna, and he has served as managing director of a Heidelberg-based foundation for nutrition. His work focuses on consumption history, business history, and modern German and American social and economic history.

Inhalt
The Origins of Marketing and Market Research: Information, Institutions, and Markets; H.Berghoff , P.Scranton  & U.Spiekermann Selling Indian Indigo in Traditional and Modern European Markets, 17801910; A.Engel 'Cotton Guessers': Crop Forecasters and the Rationalizing of Uncertainty in American Cotton Markets, 18901905; J.L.Pietruska Mail-Order Doctors and Market Research, 18901930; D.J.Robinson Making Metropolitan Markets: Information, Intermediaries, and Real Estate in Modern Paris; A.M.Yates Introducing Small Firms to International Markets: The Debates over the Commercial Museums in France and Germany, 18801910; S.A.Marin Making the Ledgers Talk: Customer Control and the Origins of Retail Data Mining, 19201940; J.Lauer Markets, Consumers, and the State: The Uses of Market Research in Government and the Public Sector in Britain, 19251955; S.Schwarzkopf Mrs. Housewife and the Ad Men: Advertising, Market Research, and Mass Consumption in Postwar Britain; S.Nixon Subliminal Seduction: The Politics of Consumer Research in PostWorld War II America; K.Lipartito Gender Realignment: The Design and Marketing of Gas Stations for Women; G.Donofrio The Bad Science and the Black Arts: The Reception of Marketing in Socialist Europe; P.H.Patterson