Anthropologists in the stock exchange: a financial history of Victorian science - 57544

Uncovering strange plots by early British anthropologists to use scientific status to manipulate the stock market, 'Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange' tells a provocative story that marries the birth of the social sciences with the exploits of global finance.

Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentleman-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned society, showing that anthropological studies were integral to investment and speculation in foreign government debt, and, inversely, that finance played a crucial role in shaping the contours of human knowledge.