Steve Medema > I'm interested in the history of the idea of the market,
specifically how ideas of the market evolve in the UK from 1700 to 1830. 

Avner Offer > Try Lisa Herzog, *Inventing the Market* (OUP, 2016).

Apologies for the late reply.  Following from the above, I agree with
Herzog, that a study of the idea of markets should be informed by a study of
real markets.  Herzog does not give such – but that as hardly surprising –
since as far as I have discovered, no study of markets exists for that (or
hardly any other) period.  Here is my preliminary crude sketch of the situation.

Sales at traditionally rather egalitarian markets were in steep decline over
this “long” eighteenth century, losing the battle for sales with shops,
which tended to be limbs of vertically integrated somewhat monopolistic
chains of distribution.  The main reason is: shops sold largely cashlessly,
on credit, whereas markets need cash/change to be paid and quit, and
cash/change itself was disappearing (overseas) over this period.  The three
agencies stripping cash/change out of the economy seem to be: the king to
fund foreign wars, the East India company to fund foreign trade, and the
guilds of Grocers and Mercers, who controlled shops.  The legislation
underlying the export of cash was the abolition of seigniorage (1666) -
subsequent getting intellectual support from John Locke.  The end of this
period came in 1816 with the reversal of that policy - a move with the
intellectual support of Adam Smith.

It is perhaps of interests that two of the agencies mentioned, EIC and the
Grocer’s Guild, seem to have links, through their common root in the
medieval Pepperer’s Guild.  And, since the questioner mentions paper money,
that the Bank of England was apparently a key factor in this decay of
markets, taking deposits in needed silver coin, exporting it, and ‘replacing
it’ with high denomination paper, of little use to the market-going ordinary
citizen.  And the first governor of the Bank of England was, I believe, a
leading member of the Grocer’s Guild.

Anonymous Questioner > My work is on portraits and money (portraits as a
kind of money and money as a kind of portrait).  

I cannot make any sense of this, unless perhaps the questioner is thinking
of an old (anti-Keynsian) Goon Show joke by Spike Milligan?  However, coming
at it from a literary direction, I would suggest the questioner might visit
the work of Alexander Pope.  He was promoting invisible hand type ideas
decades before Smith.  And he does give us a portrait - of the age itself,
as one of stupidity – in his ‘Dunciad’.  It pointed a finger directly at the
London Lord Mayor’s Day, the parade of Guilds, led off by the Mercers, and
the Grocers.

Rob Tye

Some further facts and citations here:  

https://www.academia.edu/31132451/Maria_Graham_and_the_Politics_of_Small_Change