The Fulton Fish Market stands out as an iconic New York institution. At first a neighborhood retail market for many different kinds of food, it became the nation’s largest fish and seafood wholesaling center by the late nineteenth century. Waves of immigrants worked at the Fulton Fish Market and then introduced the rest of the city to their seafood traditions. In popular culture, the market—celebrated by Joseph Mitchell in The New Yorker—conjures up images of the bustling East River waterfront, late-night fishmongering, organized crime, and a vanished working-class New York. This book is a lively and comprehensive history of the Fulton Fish Market, from its founding in 1822 through its move to the Bronx in 2005. Jonathan H. Rees explores the market’s workings and significance, tracing the transportation, retailing, and consumption of fish. He tells the stories of the people and institutions that depended on the Fulton Fish Market—including fishermen, retail stores, restaurants, and chefs—and shows how the market affected what customers in New York and around the country ate. Rees examines transformations in food provisioning systems through the lens of a vital distribution point, arguing that the market’s wholesale dealers were innovative businessmen who adapted to technological change in a dynamic industry. He also explains how changes in the urban landscape and economy affected the history of the market and the surrounding neighborhood. Bringing together economic, technological, urban, culinary, and environmental history, this book demonstrates how the Fulton Fish Market shaped American cuisine, commerce, and culture.

The untold story of America's wholesale food business. In nineteenth-century America, municipal deregulation of the butcher trade and state-incorporated market companies gave rise to a flourishing wholesale trade. In Movable Markets, Helen Tangires describes the evolution of the American wholesale marketplace for fresh food, from its development as a bustling produce district in the heart of the city to its current indiscernible place in food industrial parks on the urban periphery. Tangires follows the middlemen, those intermediaries who became functional necessities as the railroads accelerated the process of delivering perishable food to the city. Tracing their rise and decline in the wake of a deregulated food economy, she asks: How did these people, who occupied such key roles as food distributors and suppliers to the retail trade, end up exiled to urban outskirts? Moving into the early twentieth century, she explains how progressive city planners and agricultural economists responded to anxieties about the high cost of living, traffic congestion, and disruptions in the food supply by questioning the centrality, aging infrastructure, and organizational structure of wholesale markets. Tangires combines economic and cultural history by analyzing popular literature, innovative scholarship, and USDA publications. Detailing the legal, physical, and organizational means behind the complex exodus of food wholesaling from the urban core, Tangires also reveals how the trade adjusted to life beyond the city limits as it created new channels of distribution, product lines, and markets. Readers interested in US history, city and regional planning history, food history, and public policy, as well as anyone curious about the disappearance of the central produce district as a major component of the city, will find Movable Markets a fascinating read.

The Foundations of Complex Evolving Economies seeks to offer an integrated analysis of the anatomy and physiology of the capitalist engine of generation and exploitation of technological organizational and institutional innovations - from the drivers of knowledge accumulation, to the modes in which such knowledge is incorporated into business firms, all the way to the processes of innovation-driven “Schumpeterian competition” and macroeconomic growth. In that, it advances the interpretation of such patterns, in terms of economies seen as complex evolving systems. The basic objects of analysis are the history of the emergence and development of modern capitalist economies and their current functionings. Indeed , the tall ambition of the book is to address two basic questions at the core of the whole economic discipline since its inception. They regard, first, the drivers and patterns of change of the capitalistic machine of production and innovation and, second, the mechanisms of coordination among a multitude of self-seeking economic agents often characterized by conflicting interests. In order to do that, this Manual, in addition to the nature of technology and innovation, considers from a profoundly alternative perspective, all domains of analysis typically addressed (or not) by microeconomic texts, including micro behaviours, the theory of the firm, the theory of production, consumption patterns, market dynamics, and industrial evolution.