Program Home

This engraving, after a painting by R. C. Woodville, depicts the public reading of news from the Mexican War (1846-48) at the door of a hotel in a town in the American West [click for larger picture]

From 2005 to 2010 the Department of History at Harvard University will be collaborating with the Centre for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge in the Program on Exchanges of Economic and Political Ideas Since 1760. The program has been made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The program has as its point of departure two promising developments in recent historical scholarship. The first is the investigation of large scale political, economic, and cultural systems, and in particular of Atlantic history and South East Asian and Indian Ocean history. The second is the history of political and economic thought in a large scale context of economic, religious, and legal history, including the history of the states of mind of individuals in their economic lives.

Projects

The program will have two initial projects, one concerned with ideas of global connectedness in the late 18th century, and the second with the uses of 19th- century political ideas in distant and disparate settings. A subsequent project will be about the intellectual history of late 19th- and 20th-century international identities and institutions. The objective, in each project, will be to explore the long-distance movement of economic and political ideas, and the ways in which ideas are used and transformed in different cultures and societies.

There is a program of small research grants for graduate students; details are available on this website. There will in addition be workshops and conferences over the period of the program both at Cambridge and at Harvard, details of which will also be made available here.