Changing economic experiences and understandings.

Polanyi, Mauss, and others describe reasons for the growing differentiation of economy from other spheres of life. This article proposes a further reason: the increasing invisibility of economic transactions in everyday life. It traces the declining visibility of economic transactions in England and North America from around 1700 to the present, as public marketplaces were displaced by growing longer‐distance trade and the growing role of intermediaries. It suggests that this declining visibility of the economic networks in which people were enmeshed encouraged the development of economic thought, ultimately including the idea of the economy as a distinct realm, which was intended to explain activities and processes that were no longer visible. That economic thought became increasingly complex and incomprehensible to ordinary people, who had to come to believe things that they did not understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]