This article contributes to a socio-technical analysis of derivatives by offering an infrastructural explanation of divergent outcomes on two early American futures markets. It takes as the starting point of analysis the classification systems by which these futures markets were constitutively linked to underlying markets in agricultural commodities. Despite the formal similarity of these systems, their contrasting implementation-i.e., how grading was accomplished and integrated into practice-produced classifications with dissimilar semiotic qualities. This semiotic distinction is shown to have promoted divergent economic behaviors and outcomes on the two markets: high-risk speculation and volatility on the Chicago Board of Trade, low-risk hedging and stability on the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. The article thus argues that treating classifications in their semiotic capacity yields an analysis that can connect foundational infrastructures and market-level outcomes in meaningful, non-deterministic ways. Keywords: derivatives; infrastructure; classification; semiotics; social studies of finance; Chicago Board of Trade; New Orleans Cotton Exchange grading process, which took place in an antagonistic negotiation between buyer and seller at the point of exchange, and produced classifications that were only temporary appellations. 2 These differences led classifications on each exchange to differ along two semiotic dimensions: grades on CBOT failed to index the physical qualities of the commodity to the degree of those on NOCE; grades on CBOT established a permanent relation between their indexical and symbolic functions, while on NOCE this relation was continually negotiated. I then draw a theoretical connection between this semiotic divergence and three distinct types of derivative market trades-speculation, hedging, and cornering-arguing that the semiotic qualities of classifications on CBOT promoted high-risk speculation and corners, while those on NOCE fostered low-risk hedging. In sum, I trace a line of influence from the classifying practices at the root of these derivative markets through to the contrasting levels of volatility seen on each. The article thus outlines a general theory of how infrastructure, through its semiotic characteristics, can non-deterministically influence system-level dynamics and outcomes. Classification and communication Thisarticle conceptualizes classification systems as market infrastructures (Pardo-Guerra 2013). Infrastructures are socio-technical devices that support action locally while enabling coordination globally (Bowker 1994; Star & Lampland 2009; Star & Ruhleder 1996). They undergird large-scale technical systems (Hughes 1987) by harmonizing multiple, independent technologies and communities of practice around a single, common standard (Barry 2001; Bijker, Hughes & Pinch 1987; Edwards, Bowker, Jackson & Williams 2009). When infrastructures work as intended they transparently support everyday action, becoming visible 4 and contested only upon breakdown. Shared classificatio...

This article analyses how a pair of nineteenth century commodity exchanges-in Chicago and New Orleans-shaped the sociotechnical infrastructures underlying two key types of market information-price quotations and crop statistics. Specifically, the paper investigates why these exchanges saw divergent outcomes, each successfully developing one information infrastructure but not the other. Prior scholarship has understood infrastructural development as the result of idiosyncratic, social structural alignments in actors' resources and desires. This paper, by contrast, examines how such structural elements interacted with practical resources available to exchanges based on their roles within infrastructures. Findings demonstrate that the exchanges gained influence in proportion to their discretion over an infrastructure's everyday operations and the market routines these enabled. This 'infrastructural power', or lack thereof, interacted with social structural resources in two distinct forms-'feedback' in New Orleans and 'sacrifice' in Chicago-providing or denying each exchange the ability to shape infrastructures to its advantage. These findings suggest that analysts should pay closer attention to market dynamics as they relate to 'infrastructure in action'.

In contrast to work showing exogenous social influences on the production of economic ideas, this article asks how a market’s own infrastructure can endogenously shape practitioners’ economic perspectives. It investigates this question by comparing the evolution of opposed views on speculation across two 19th-century American futures markets. The analysis locates the origins of this divergence in features of the grading, receipting and contracting processes that linked these new derivative markets to underlying agricultural markets. This connective infrastructure both made possible new speculative practices and established market ontologies from which traders theorized the economic significance of those practices. These ontologies served as distinct cores around which incompatible constellations of ideas – including beliefs about price relations between spot and futures markets, the character of the global market and the motives and capabilities of speculators – were elaborated.

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