‘Fence-ing lessons’: child junkers and the commodification of scrap in the long nineteenth century

Wendy A. Woloson

Business History, 2019, vol. 61, issue 1, 38-72

Abstract: This article considers the circulation of junk in nineteenth-century American markets, concentrating on its various stages of commodification – and the people responsible for that commodification – as scrap was transformed from worthless garbage found on the streets into lucrative materials suitable for industrial use. The study adds to historians’ understanding of the emergence of capitalism, whose formation happened as much from the bottom up as the top down. The often-overlooked populations who engaged in petty and often illegal entrepreneurship, including the children discussed here, had a very real impact on the emerging economy. Looking at scrap more clearly elucidates the processes of commodification and the logic of capitalism at work – the transformation of miscellaneous, valueless goods into aggregated abstractions with significant economic worth.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00076791.2017.1294161 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:bushst:v:61:y:2019:i:1:p:38-72

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FBSH20

DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2017.1294161

Access Statistics for this article

Business History is currently edited by Professor John Wilson and Professor Steven Toms

More articles in Business History from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().