Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets. By Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra,. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xvi + 357 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendix, bibliography, index. Cloth, $39.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-49642-1 .

Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets. By Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xvi + 357 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendix, bibliography, index. Cloth, $39.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-49642-1.

In his 1904 book, The Theory of Business Enterprise, economist Thorstein Veblen lays out a fundamental conflict at the heart of industrial capitalism, that between the engineer and the “business man.” The engineer seeks rationality, order, maintenance, and incremental efficiency. The business man, by contrast, seeks profit and will gladly organize or disrupt the engineers’ machines in its pursuit. At stake in Veblen's analysis is not just economic exchange but the very configuration of society. “The machine process pervades the modern life and dominates it,” Veblen wrote. Through it, “the course of things is given mechanically, impersonally” (Veblen, pp. 306, 310). The machine, once unleashed, is irresistible.

For today's readers, Veblen's “mechanical” could easily be replaced with “digital,” a term which likewise conjures the relentless advance of software engineers and, with them, the pervasive impersonality of online shopping and “I hope this finds you well” emails. To Veblen and critics of digitization who follow his arguments, Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra's Automating Finance offers a refreshing corrective. At the heart of Pardo-Guerra's book—a history of automation efforts in British and American securities markets from roughly the 1960s to the 2010s—is a conflict that would seem familiar to Veblen: between tradition-bound securities dealers and upstart digital technicians. Yet, as Pardo-Guerra emphasizes, the reconfiguration of finance around...