Culture and Commerce: Cultural Policy and Economic Value in the Creative Industries

Culture and Commerce tracks the often contested, if unavoidable, relationship between culture and commerce throughout the modern and post-modern periods. Although culture as commerce (and vice versa) is not, as the book will demonstrate, an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, it has been given an increased significance in recent decades by the emphasis on ‘creative industries’, in government policy, economic discourse and academic teaching and research. Locating the principal roots of the culture and commerce debate in European Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution, it poses the question of whether culture and commerce are mutually exclusive or mutually dependent, exploring the issue in a wide range of contexts, from high art to popular culture, private enterprise to public policy, the local to the global.