The Natural Origins of Economics

Talk of the economy is everywhere now, and almost every corner of life seems shaped by markets. Before the modern age, people had no shared notion of an economy at all, and writing on money and trade treated these matters as features of the natural world.

Margaret Schabas traces how that changed. The book follows the shift that came only in the early nineteenth century, when economists began to posit and identify the economy as a separate object that could be studied apart from physical nature.

It is published by University of Chicago Press, ISBN-13 9780226735702. It suits readers of economic history and the history of ideas.