Hey Ian, do you think the original black market might have been the capitalist slave trade in Africans ? etymologically :>)
Charles
>
>
> Ian Murray asks:
>
> "Oooh oooh oooh what's the etymology of black markets?"
>
> My dictionary defines a "black market" as
>
> "1. The illegal business of buying or selling goods or currency in violation
> of restrictions such as price controls or rationing. 2. A place where these
> illegal operations are carried on."
>
> It defines the "black economy" to be
>
> "A sizeable hidden segment of a country's economy that operates on numerous
> unreported cash transactions"
>
> So what we're really talking about, I guess, is the black economy rather
> than the "black market" as such. What the etymology is, I don't care.
>
> Comrade Ian writes:
>
> "And who gets to define what a criminal is?"
>
> Well, I guess the people who make the laws, enforce the laws, are made
> citizens or subjects by the laws, agree to be bound by the laws - people
> like that do. Is there a point you're getting at?
=====================
Not much, just the utter racism of the term and the need to look at the construct of legality from the perspectives afforded by Charles Tilly and Morton Horwitz, among others....
Main Entry: et·y·mol·o·gy Pronunciation: -jE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -gies Etymology: Middle English ethimologie, from Latin etymologia, from Greek, from etymon + -logia -logy Date: 14th century 1 : the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language 2 : a branch of linguistics concerned with etymologies
Ian