Markets and Trade on the Margins: An Introduction

The introduction contextualises the volume within historiographic discourses on the three key terms of the subtitle: markets, trade, and margins. First, we highlight the interpretations of the terms in the context of urban research and their changes over time. In doing so, we follow how attention to these phenomena grew out of legal history; next, we situate them in the main historiographic turns of the last decades, namely the social, spatial, cultural, and infrastructural turns. Second, we showcase some recently completed and ongoing research projects, initiatives, and related publications that can be considered the immediate settings for the work presented here. Finally, through short summaries, we point out some of the novelties the chapters in this volume offer. We argue that these studies allow the readers to refine their image of urban development and urbanisation “on the margins”, a position that we regard as a crucial constitutive factor of trade and a frequently chosen site for markets. We believe that marketplaces, trade connections, and the agency of the margins are themes that have global relevance and, therefore, expect that this collection of essays will appeal to scholars working on similar questions in other regions within and beyond Europe.