ABSTRACT
The idea that there was, or at least ought to be, an ethical dimension to the economic exchanges between ruling elites and their subjects was clearly present from ancient times in the writings of political philosophers from civilizations as diverse as those in Greece, India, and China. In the West, this notion was a matter of particular concern for 17thcentury thinkers like Hobbes and Locke and for a number of the philosophes in the age of the Enlightenment. But the concept of the moral economy, as it has been understood and debated by social scientists in recent decades, derives largely from the writings of Karl Polanyi, particularly his early 1940s study of The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Drawing on his earlier fieldwork and writings on West African societies, Polanyi argued that the rise of capitalism in Europe and its concomitant valorization of the market nexus in societal exchanges led to a profound transformation in human perceptions and behavior. Profit maximization and personal advantage became the all-consuming drives of both the political elites and the rising mercantile classes which dominated the increasingly specialized societies of western Europe and later their overseas settlement colonies and tropical dependencies. The ethical grounding that had once undergirded human societies-and continued to do so to varying degrees in those areas of the globe where the market did not yet reign supreme-was undermined and discarded by the unbridled pursuit of competitive advantage in the market arena.
