An archaeology of European financial market integration - Troels Krarup, The Knowledge Problems of European Financial Market Integration: Paradoxes of the Market, Routledge, 2023.

Financial infrastructures are crucial, but often neglected, technical systems that are intended to facilitate the transactions of money and financial assets and accelerate spatial integration.In light of the growing digitalisation of financial transactions and the increasing politicisation of payment systems such as Swift in the context of geopolitical struggles, financial infrastructures have received increased attention in social science research (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn, 2019;Brandl et al., 2024;de Goede and Westermeier, 2022;Petry, 2021).The present book by Krarup contributes to this ongoing discussion.However, Krarup is less interested in the question of the increasing politicisation of financial infrastructures than in developing a sociology of the controversies surrounding the construction and integration of these technical systems.To achieve this, the book draws on a variety of disciplinary perspectives to study markets and market integration processes.Krarup highlights the contributions of economic sociologists to an understanding of markets as being institutionally embedded and political economists' emphasis on the ideational politics of market integration (p.8).Furthermore, Krarup discusses a wide variety of approaches in Science and Technology Studies (STS) that have untangled the relationship between economic knowledge and market technologies such as stock exchanges (p.13).Although the author praises these literatures for opening up a variety of trajectories for studying market integration and financial infrastructures, Krarup's own conceptual approach comes out of a critique of this scholarship.Recent scholarship on market integration has overtly focused on explaining and tracing how market integration processes have unfolded, often framed as a question of power politics (p.3).Krarup posits that there exists a more fundamental problem that market integration faces and that scholarly work has to excavate: the undetermined and vaguely specified character of markets and market integration.Krarup posits that there is a lack of understanding of the origins and practical implications of this indeterminacy for market integration processes.The primary thesis of the book is that the development of and the controversies surrounding practical projects of market integration are shaped by the underlying problem of delineating the content and meaning of market integration (p.20).Market integration is conceived of as an epistemic problem that actors face in their attempt to integrate financial markets, which in turn shapes their particular responses.Thus, the book can be understood and read as an archaeological journey into this underlying problem and the paradoxical manifestations that structure processes and projects of financial market integration.