Lefteris Pitarakis/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.
‘Zones of turbulence’, was a term that the economic historian Fernand Braudel used to describe areas of market instability that were controlled and manipulated by an ‘exalted merchant class’.
A few wealthy merchants, Braudel says, in eighteenth-century Amsterdam or sixteenth-century Genoa could throw whole sectors of the European or even world economy into confusion, creating a ‘shadowy second zone which would represent the favoured domain of capitalism’. This constructed trade zone, where flows of capital could run unchecked and without caution, forms the basis of what we know now as dominant liberal and neoliberal models of economic governance.
