Co-hosted with: Journal of Agrarian Change (JoAC)

Speakers: Swarnabh Ghosh (University of Chicago), Mikael Omstedt (University of British Columbia), and Teddy Paikin (Institut Catholique de Paris)

What is capitalism, and how should historians and social scientists narrate and theorise its emergence and global spread? Defined too narrowly, it is confined to one corner of Europe, to industrial revolutions and the wage nexus, leaving empire and much of the world at its margins; defined too loosely, it dissolves into the ever-existing pursuit of profit through trade. Recent revivals of the transition debate have reopened these questions, spurred by critiques of Eurocentrism and the rise of the New History of Capitalism. Much of this literature, however, remains shaped by the polarities of older debates: production versus circulation, internal versus external pressures, European origins versus global entanglements, class formation versus empire. Rather than belabouring old positions, this CLaSP-JoAC seminar treats the debate’s own history, its polemics and missed encounters, as a resource for contemporary and future inquiries into the historical geography of capitalism, and the stakes of defining its uneven and variegated history today.

Authors’ bios:
Swarnabh Ghosh is a geographer and historian. He recently completed his PhD at Harvard University and is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago, jointly in the Department of Sociology, the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), and the Urban Theory Lab. His work broadly deals with urbanization, infrastructure, and the historical geography of global capitalism, with a regional emphasis on South Asia and the Indian Ocean world. 

Mikael Omstedt is a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography and Planning, University of British Columbia. He works on the historical geographies of U.S. capitalism, currently writing on a book manuscript provisionally titled Grounding the Fed: Agrarian Capitalism and Central Banking in the U.S. South. His previous work has been published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Environment & Planning A: Economy & Space, and Geoforum, among other outlets.

Teddy Paikin teaches history and international political economy at the Institut Catholique de Paris. His research focuses on the state, industrial policy, and the political economy of Bonapartism in 19th century France. His dissertation studied the life and political economy of Michel Chevalier, the chief economist and a key economic advisor to Emperor Napoleon III during the Second Empire, focusing on his contributions to trade policy, infrastructure development, banking and French imperialism. His work has been published in the History of European Ideas and the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism.

This is an hybrid event. For online attendance, please follow the MS Teams link below.