On the history of modern cemeteries

"I want to reverse the causal arrow: changing burial practices, themselves imbricated in larger cultural developments, produce, or at least invite new meanings of death. "Concepts of death" might be regarded less as the coalescence of attitudes and beliefs and more as practices which take on meaning as strands in a larger web of cultural transformation. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution are not among the causes of cemeteries, if anything the converse is true: cemeteries produce a cultural world fit for the new economic order.
Cemeteries, in this account, are to death what Lombard Street was to Bills of Exchange or the stock market to equities: no mere venue but a sign that the underlying cultural assumptions of capitalism had taken root, that what might have seemed outrageous in an earlier age - the ready circulation of commercial paper or limited liability companies or freehold in grave sites, divorced from the Church - could be taken as part of the landscape of everyday life". (T. W. Laqueur, Cemeteries, Religion and the Culture of Capitalism, in Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in honor of R. M. Hartwell,  edited by John A. James and Mark Thomas, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p 139-140).