Cotton pickers, 1800s.The New York University Department of History and the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School are inviting abstracts for a one-day workshop Global Histories of Capital: New Perspectives on the Global South. We are seeking paper proposals from advanced graduate students 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 on October 7th, 2017

Applicants should submit a 250 – 300 word abstract to globalcapitalconference@gmail.com by April 15, 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 history; histories of economic thought; science, technology and the economy; culture and translation; decolonization; markets and market governance

Workshop Objectives:

The 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.

The 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 mis-recognized. 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.

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