Playing the Market: Retail Investment and Speculation in Twentieth-Century Britain. By Kieran Heinemann

Abstract

During my undergraduate studies a few years ago, friends encouraged me to use some of my limited disposable income to invest in a popular cryptocurrency. I have since watched with mild amusement as the potential return oscillated violently between over 500 per cent to about the same as if I had put it into a current account, and smirked at online adverts from the UK Financial Conduct Authority warning that ‘Investing can seem like a game, but the risks involved are very real’. It is this sort of mass participation in financial markets as entertainment which Kieran Heinemann takes as his subject in his timely and insightful Playing the Market. Heinemann shows that popular participation in the stock market, since the late nineteenth century up to the recent proliferation of small investors in cryptocurrencies (p. 221), was meaningfully driven by the exciting appeal of games, risk, and gambling rather than any calculating rationality, with the British possessing a peculiar appetite for risk contrasting to that of Europe. Playing the Market looks beyond existing accounts of the City of London to investigate moral discourses ‘from below’ (p. 2) of the financial press and betting shops. There, Heinemann identifies a much longer legacy of popular stock market culture across the interwar period and ascendent by the post-war age of affluence. This culture underlay but also acted in tension with Thatcher’s agenda of economic individualism and market populism, and repeatedly raised anxieties around the moral health of the nation. Playing the Market aligns strongly with a historiographical trend questioning predominant narratives of the postwar period which has recently found a centre of gravity around Aled Davies, Ben Jackson, and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s edited volume The Neoliberal Age? (2021). By illuminating the hitherto unexamined popular discourses of stock market participation, Heinemann convincingly disrupts the idea that the Thatcherite moment was regenerative of Victorian values otherwise subdued by the mid-century corporatist social democratic welfare state.