Description:
Throughout its history, the U.S. military has worked in close connection to market-based institutions and structures. It has run systems of free and unfree labor, taken over private sector firms, and both spurred and snuffed out economic development. It has created new markets--for consumer products, for sex work, and for new technologies. It has operated as a regulator of industries and firms and an arbitrator of labor practices. And in recent decades it has gone so far as to refashion itself from the inside, so as to become more similar to a for-profit corporation.
The Military and the Market covers two centuries of history of the U.S. military's vast and varied economic operations, including its often tense relationships with capitalist markets. Collecting new scholarship at the intersection of the fields of military history, business history, policy history, and the history of capitalism, the nine chapters feature important new research on subjects ranging from Civil War soldier-entrepreneurs, to the business of the construction of housing and overseas bases for the Cold War, to the U.S. military's troubled relationships with markets for sex. The volume enriches scholars' understandings of the depth and complexity of military-market relations in U.S. history and offers today's military policymakers novel insights about the origins of current arrangements and how they might be reimagined. Contributors: Jessica L. Adler, Timothy Barker, Patrick Chung, Gretchen Heefner, Jennifer Mittelstadt, A. Junn Murphy, Kara Dixon Vuic, Sarah Jones Weicksel, Mark R. Wilson, Daniel Wirls.Review Quotes: "The Military and the Market is an excellent analysis of how the United Stated defense establishment shapes, and is shaped by, external economic trends and business marketplaces. The raison d'etre of this anthologized, multi-author volume rests on an expansive definition of the word 'marketplace, ' moving beyond the defense industry hardware which often assumes analytical primacy in studies of defense markets. Through offering this wide intellectual umbrella, the editors bring into the work a varied and often surprising array of case studies - ranging from topics such as Cold War housing construction to modern national security contracting - and along the way shed light on some lesser-known episodes of American military history."-- "The Strategy Bridge"