CfP: Global Histories of Capital

CALL FOR PAPERS – EXTENDED DEADLINE MAY 1ST

Global Histories of Capital: New Perspectives on the Global South

Department of History, New York University and the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies

The New York University Department of History and the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School are inviting abstracts for a workshop entitled Global Histories of Capital: New Perspectives on the Global South. We are seeking paper proposals from advanced graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty working broadly on themes related to the history of capitalism, historical political economy, the history of economic life and new materialism. The workshop aims to connect scholars working on topics or countries considered part of the global south, international history and those engaged in comparative historical research.

The conference will take place the weekend of October 7th, 2017 in New York.

Applicants should submit a 250 – 300 word abstract to globalcapitalconference@gmail.com by May 1st, 2017. Suggested themes include but are not limited to:

Built-environments; slavery; labor; internationalisms; gender, gendered labor and unpaid work; concept histories; financialization; agrarian change; radical traditions; state structures; sovereignty; law; commodity histories; environmental historyhistories of economic thought; science, technology and the economy; culture and translation; decolonization; markets and market governance

Workshop Objectives

Our aim is to bring together graduate students working on areas of the non-west, broadly conceived, whose work approaches questions of the economic from political, environmental, intellectual and cultural perspectives. In light of growing interest in the status of the economic to social scientific inquiry — spurred by research programs from the history of capitalism to new materialism — our objective is to foster a critical conversation about how we write such histories from world-regions outside Western Europe and North America. By bringing together scholars of varied regional expertise, we hope we might more precisely reframe the relevance of categories such as the ‘global south’ and ‘non-west’ within their specific relationship to historical processes of globalization and imperialism.

Our emphasis on the ‘global’ nature of this history is not simply to fill-in a preexisting cartography that has been relatively neglected by new histories of capitalism. Rather, we intend to explore how the global emerged as a category under modern capitalism and the different moments in which it has been imagined and redefined, and perhaps misrecognized. Understanding the global spaces of capitalism requires close attention to methodological questions of comparability, scale, historical structure and unevenness. Therefore this workshop intends to group scholars thematically, rather than by region or periodization, in order to develop comparative vocabularies for doing this type of historical work.

CfP: Histories of Capitalism 2.0

Conference: Histories of Capitalism, v2.0

CALL FOR PAPERS

Histories of Capitalism, 2.0

Cornell University

September 29 to October 1, 2016

In 2014, Cornell’s History of Capitalism Initiative hosted a conference on the “Histories of American Capitalism” to showcase the deep connection between traditional subfields of social history (race, gender, sexuality and class) and the new history of capitalism. Building on the success of that conference and on developments in this rapidly-growing field, we invite proposals for panels that continue to illustrate the diversity of the histories of capitalism(s) through a variety of perspectives, including intellectual, legal, gender, environmental history, as well as the history of science and technology.

We hope that the previous conference’s focus, which sought to bring social and cultural history categories into dialogue with capitalism, will continue to infuse the conversation this year. We would also especially like to see panels and papers that incorporate non-U.S., regional, transnational, or global histories.

For the 2016 conference we are open to all proposals and particularly encourage submissions on:

  • Science and Technology
  • Migration
  • Unfree Labor
  • Family and Home
  • Environment and Built Environment
  • Criticizing, Defending and Defining Capitalism
  • Regulation and the State

Plenary Speakers include:

  • Jedidiah Purdy (Duke)
  • Marcus Rediker (Pittsburgh)
  • Emma Rothschild (Harvard University)
  • Juliet Walker (University of Texas-Austin)

 

Submission:

  • Our invitation is open to scholars at any stage of their careers. We will accept both panels and individual papers.
    • For each panel, please include a 500 word description of the panel, a 250 word description of each paper in the panel and a short c.v. for each paper giver.
    • For each paper, please submit a 250 word description of the paper and a short c.v.
  • To submit the paper proposals please go to http://hoc.ilr.cornell.edu/fall-2016-conference
  • Submissions are due by March 1, 2016

Call for Papers

We are currently accepting proposals for the 2016 conference.

Register for the Conference

Registration to attend the conference has not yet begun.

Please contact Rhonda Clouse with any questions or concerns.

Debating the history of capitalism & slavery

History of Capitalism has been an influential take on  analyzing the history of business and society in the USA in recent years. However, it has also been criticized as an approach for its failure to clearly define its key concept, capitalism. Recently, the issue of slavery and capitalism has been discussed again as an important issue in order to understand the nature of capitalism (and management, an argument made by Prof Bill Cooke of the University of York).

The following blog by Tom Cutterham picks up these debates in this blog post:

It’s been two and a half years since the new history of capitalism marked its arrival with the full red carpet treatment in the New York Times. So it’s about time we saw some serious and constructive critiques of the project. Robin Blackburn’s lengthy review of Empire of Cotton goes some way to bringing that Bancroft-winner back down to earth, particularly by scrutinising the concept of “war capitalism.” But what I particularly want to share with Junto readers today is an article by the NYU sociologist John Clegg recently published in the Chicago-based journal, Critical Historical Studies.

Anyone who has read Beckert, Baptist, and Johnson, or is eagerly awaiting the forthcoming volume on Slavery’s Capitalism, ought to read what Clegg has to say. In earlier posts at The Junto, I’ve pointed out the way new historians of capitalism have made a feature out of their resistance to defining the primary term. Clegg puts that resistance at the centre of his critique. “None of them,” he writes, “seem interested in asking what capitalism is” (281). As a result, he argues, “these authors fail to explain how the various features of the antebellum economy that they identify form part of a coherent capitalist system” (284). That makes it very difficult for them to “engage scholars in other fields and contribute to contemporary political and economic debates” (282).

To read the full blog, follow this link: https://earlyamericanists.com/2015/10/27/continuing-the-debate-on-slavery-and-capitalism/