"Historical Imaginaries: Cultural Myths and Constructed Comparative Advantages in Quality Markets"

This article links contemporary political economic structures and market outcomes with the historical construction of national identities, “historical imaginaries”. I define historical imaginaries as historically constructed, shared social myths, building upon the contributions of historians such as Eric Hobsbawm (“Invented Tradition”) and Benedict Anderson (“Imagined Communities”). The notion that “history matters” is not new to the field of political economy. Indeed, the historical institutionalist approach focuses on the historical dynamics between competing groups and the present-day social and market consequence of their institutionalized solutions. Recently, economic sociology has inverted this historical-facing perspective by introducing the idea of “imagined futures” to the study of market dynamics (Beckert 2016). According to this perspective, people form contingent, imaginary future expectations about the market based on collective, socially-constructed beliefs. These future imaginaries critically shape behavior in the present moment towards money and credit, investment, innovation and consumption. My article integrates these two approaches, considering how imagined histories shape institutions and thus production incentives. Using the example of the French wine market and the French notion of terroir, I hypothesize that national and cultural myths shape both political mobilization and political power dynamics when market institutions are constructed. These myths are institutionalized in market rules, regulations and structures, often leading then to the reification of the myth. In this case, the myth functions as it is true, not because it is true, but because it shapes the rules of production.