Recent Centre-supported Events
Before capitalist hegemony
9-10 December 2022
Alison Richards Building
This Centre supported workshop was organised by Lorenzo Bondioli (Cambridge), Michele Campopiano (York) and Paolo Tedesco (Tübingen) and sought to re-launch the concept of Mode of Production as a heuristic tool assisting us in addressing a central epistemological problem of the historical discipline: how are we to approach past societies in their immensely varied historical specificity, and how are we to address the relations they entertained with each other?
Workshop website »
Round table: Intellectual History and the History of Economic Thought
Thursday 1st September 2022, 17:45 – 19:00 (UK time) – via Zoom WebinarThe Joint Centre for History & Economics organised a round-table as part of the History of Economic Thought Society’s Annual Conference. This event brought together leading scholars in intellectual history and the history of economic thought to reflect on the interaction and roads ahead for both schools of history.
Béatrice Cherrier (CNRS & CREST & Ecole Polytechnique, France)
Verena Halsmayer (University of Lucerne, Switzerland)
Ben Jackson (University of Oxford, UK)
Emma Rothschild (Harvard University, USA)Chairs: Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche (University of Cambridge, UK) & Pedro Ramos Pinto (University of Cambridge, UK)
The G.L.S. Shackle Biennial Memorial Lecture
28 November 2019, Law Faculty
Professor Steven G. Medema (Duke University/Shackle Visiting Fellow, St. Edmund's College)
Why do Economists use Imaginary Worlds? What the Coase Theorem tells us about the Pollution, Pollination, and Parliament
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Laws of Nature: Defining and Bounding in Environmental Governance
3-4 June 2019
Lauterpacht Centre for International LawThis Centre supported workshop was organised by Surabhi Ranganathan and Paul Warde in collaboration with the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. It examined the co-production of law and the natural world, with a focus on the histories and processes of definition of the objects and scales of environmental governance. This reflective inquiry was a timely and important accompaniment to the numerous ongoing legal and policy initiatives at domestic and international forums that have an ecological thrust, yet rarely discuss the construction of the frames within which they do their work. Discussions took place over three sessions, on expertise, animals, and oceans. Other participants were Annabel Brett, Megan Donaldson, Sabine Höhler, Susanna Lidström, Nayanika Mathur, Renaud Morieux, Vanessa Ogle, Harriet Ritvo, Sujit Sivasundaram and Sverker Sörlin.
Pembroke Environment Seminar / Centre for History and Economics
15 May 2019
Nihon Room, Pembroke College(How) should we 'teach' the Anthropocene?
An open discussion, chaired by Paul Warde, reflected on questions and explored some practical suggestions and insights from people who have already brought, or who are seeking to bring, the Anthropocene into their teaching. Panel members were Mike Hulme, Professor Human Geography, Cambridge, Harriet Ritvo, Professor, MIT School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Duncan Bell, Reader, Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Cambridge.
Supply Chains in Early Modern Europe
1 March 2019
Cripps Building, Magdalene College, CambridgeThis workshop brought to together a range of historians from economic, social and cultural history who have been developing an understanding of the interdependency of workers, materials, markets and infrastructure in early modern Europe to discuss, and how these links and complementarities built ‘supply chains’ that shaped economic and social development. Debate on the macroeconomic trends of the preindustrial world has been dominated by analysis of real wages and GDP, and their divergence across Europe after 1500. There has been more limited synthesis of work on the supply chains, and their collective impact in terms of material flows, development of forms of institutions, sociability, human capital, and infrastructure. The workshop aimed to gain insight into the path dependency of how institutions, organisations and natural resource exploitation grew up around strategically important production, intermediation and supply. It also built upon the opportunities offered by new approaches and methods: the availability of large digitised and geo-located datasets on trade, occupations, and transport systems allows linkage of data on a hitherto impossible scale. Furthermore, the workshop asked how disparate results can be brought together; what kind of chains and relationships now appear significant and might have been missed within narrow methodological frameworks; how might such work be progressed?
An Intellectual History of Universal Basic Income
14 January 2019The last ten years have witnessed a major revival of interest in the Universal Basic Income proposal. A conference, organised by Peter Sloman, Daniel Zamora and Pedro Ramos Pinto, and supported by the Trevelyan Fund, POLIS, the Wiener-Aspach Foundation and the Centre for History and Economics took place in Cambridge on 14 January. It explored the contemporary history of basic income from the 1960s to the present. A range of papers explored the emergence of different basic income and related ideas in the 20th century, and the contexts in which it was debated, the role of global networks and institutions in its dissemination, and its relationship to broader discussions around social justice. The conference brought together historians, sociologists and economists with global expertise. It also heard from leading UBI campaigners and policy-makers who have been involved in setting up basic income-type schemes, and concluded with a round table discussion with Phillipe van Parijs, philosopher and founder of the Basic Income Earth Network; Eduardo Suplicy, Brazilian politician and author of the country’s minimum income legislation; Louise Haag, development expert and co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network; Malcolm Torry, Director of the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust; and Guy Standing, author of Precariat: the New Dangerous Class (2011) and co-chair of BIEN.
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Programme »
Modern France and a New History of Capitalism
17 December 2018This Centre-supported one-day workshop, organised by Alexia Yates (University of Manchester) and funded by Manchester, took place in Magdalene College, Cambridge. It tested the hypothesis that the history of modern France has a vital contribution to make to the history and historiography of modern capitalism, and asked what we can learn about the evolution of modern economic life by focusing on the French experience. To date, renewed interests in economic history and the history of capitalism in the French and Francophone contexts have tended to focus on the early modern and revolutionary periods, often with an eye to revising understandings of the origin, course, and nature of the Revolution. The post-revolutionary and contemporary eras, however, in which the economic, social, and cultural relations of capitalism acquired their modern form, have not received similar recent attention. Contributors presented original work offering new perspectives on the 'Frenchness' (or not) of capitalism, and explored ways of reorienting existing historiography thanks to the topics and methodological approaches prominent in the study of modern France. Amongst participants were Erika Vause (St. John's University), Elizabeth Heath (CUNY-Baruch), Tyson Leuchter (University of Chicago), Thomas Dodman (Columbia), David Todd (KCL), and Nicolas Delalande (Sciences-Po).
Sovereignty, Economy and the Global Histories of Natural Resources
18-19 December 2017
A two-day Centre supported international symposium on the global history of natural resources, held in Magdalene College, aimed to open a conversation between junior and senior scholars working on the economy, law and the environment. The workshop asked how natural resources like carbon, aid and water became the subject of legal, economic and international politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. The event was coordinated by Centre associate Tehila Sasson (Emory University/IHR) in collaboration with the University of Basel, the University of Heidelberg and the University of Sydney. The three universities provided the funding through the International Research Award in Global History with additional contribution from the journal Past & Present. Conference keynote speaker was Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law at Duke University.
Shari’a in Motion II
14-16 July 2017, CRASSH, University of Cambridge
This Centre supported workshop, organised by Fahad Bishara (University of Virginia), Iza Hussin and Julia Stephens (Rutgers), brought together a diverse group of scholars working on varied aspects of Islam, law and authority, for discussions on method, mobility and meaning in the study of shari’a.
Measuring Matters: Histories of Assessing Inequality
5-7 July 2017, Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge
The conference, organised by Pedro Ramos Pinto and Poornima Paidipaty, combined intensive workshops with two public events on the topic. One was a keynote address by a leading scholar in the field: Professor Alice O’Connor, author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History (Princeton 2001). The second public event was a roundtable aimed at engaging with current practice and policy, engaging with a wider academic and non-academic public.
Virtù, Stato, Sovranità. Political Thought in Italy c. 1300-c. 1800
20 June 2017, Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
A Centre supported one-day workshop on early modern Italian political thought, organised by Felix Waldmann. Participants included Melissa Calaresu, Serena Ferente, James Hankins, Jill Kraye, Giorgio Lizzul, John Robertson, Quentin Skinner, Peter Stacey, Nicolas Stone Villani, and Filippo de Vivo.
Domesticating Energy. Energy environments inside and outside the home
25-26 May 2017, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge
This Centre supported workshop, organised by Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck) and Paul Warde, reflected upon the home as a space in which energy is domesticated and brought together a wide range of expertise around historical and current uses of energy. Disciplines covered included history, economics, engineering and anthropology.
Workshop Programme »
Annales, past and future
25 January 2017
This event celebrated a new partnership of Éditions EHESS and Cambridge University Press to co-publish the journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales from 2017. Coordinated jointly by Cambridge University Press and the Centre for History and Economics, the event took place in the Lecture Theatre in Trinity Hall. It was followed by a reception at the Cambridge University Press Bookshop. The Annales is the most widely distributed Francophone history journal in the world, shaped by a unique spirit of intellectual enquiry that has made it one of the most influential and recognizable journals across the social sciences. This forum reflected on its past and on future directions of research. Speakers were Etienne Anheim, Editor, Annales, Romain Bertrand, Editorial Committee Member of Annales and Senior Research Fellow, Sciences Po, Stephen Sawyer, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History, American University of Paris, Editor in Chief, Annales English version, Iza Hussin, Lecturer in Asian Politics, POLIS, University of Cambridge, and Gareth Stedman Jones, Co-Director, Centre for History and Economics, Professor of the History of Ideas, Queen Mary London. It was chaired by Tim Harper, Associate Director of the History of History and Economics.
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Podcast »
Global Muslim Encounters: Homogenisation and Diversity across Time and Space
Cambridge, 9-10 December 2016
This Centre supported conference brought together historians, art historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars of comparative literature and Islamic studies, with the aim to analyse how Muslim travellers, scholars, state officials and migrant workers made sense of radically different forms of practical piety and religious thought they encountered while being on the move. The event was organised through CRASSH by Amira Bennison, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs and Helen Pfeifer.
The Global Politics of Public Debts, from the Late 18th Century
11-12 June 2015
This Centre supported workshop, organised by Nicolas Barreyre (EHESS-CENA), Nicolas Delalande (Science Po), and Alexia Yates (CRASSH), took place in Magdalene College. It was part of a series of events aiming to write a political history of public debt. While there has been a major endeavour of historical research on public debts for the 17th and 18th centuries in the past thirty years, there has been very little written on what could be called the "liberal age" of the 19th and 20th centuries. As contemporary events continue to push sovereign debt to the forefront of international relations and domestic politics, it is clear that a historical account of the evolution of public debt as a political and social artefact is necessary. Based on a series of workshops, the project aims to look at public debts not as a narrow technical matter (although this aspect is important), but as the locus of political stakes about the relation between citizens and states, including matters such as national sovereignty, the construction of the (financial) market, the redistribution of income through public borrowing, and the financing of war. It seeks to expand the geographic and temporal scales of inquiry into the topic of public debt, as well as to generate a more integrated social and political history that can capture and fully explicate public debt as a complex economic, cultural, and political phenomenon.
Programme »
Figuring disparity: Historicising the measurement of inequality
8 May 2015
This Centre supported one-day workshop, convened by Pedro Ramos Pinto and Poornima Paidipaty, took place in Magdalene College as part of the Philomathia-funded project 'The measure of inequality: social knowledge in historical perspective'. The workshop brought together a range of innovative historical and social science perspectives looking to chart the state of the art in relation to the theme, identifying key areas for exploration, collaboration and for wider impact in the public sphere and policy domain. Project webpages are available at http://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/measurement and http://www.ssrp.cshss.cam.ac.uk/projects/inequality
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Constituting India
12 December 2014
This meeting took place in Magdalene College and was organised by Ornit Shani. The scholars involved work in the area of law, citizenship and democracy in India. Participants included William Gould (Leeds), Stephen Legg (Nottingham), Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS) and Ornit Shani (Haifa and St John's College, Cambridge).
India in the World
2 May 2014
This one-day Centre supported conference took place on Friday 2 May in the Winstanley Theatre, Trinity College. The conference was organised by Joya Chatterji and Prasannan Parthasarathi on the eve of David Washbrook's impending retirement. Amongst speakers were many of David's students and collaborators. The event was of interest to anyone with a broad and comparative interest in social and economic history, and world history, and David Washbrook's contribution to these fields.
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Institutions and their Discontents: Rethinking Economic Development in South Asia
17-18 March 2014
Keynote speakers: Prof. Sugata Bose (Harvard) and Dr Ha-joon Chang (University of Cambridge)
Public lecture by Prof. Pranab Bardhan (Berkeley) on 17 March 2014
This two-day conference on institutions and institutional change in South Asia brought together historians, economic historians, economists, sociologists and political scientists to critically discuss and debate institutional development in the region. With panels ranging from the origins of institutions in the region to contemporary attempts at policy reform to the informal economy and innovation, the conference included contributions from eminent scholars, emerging researchers and graduate students. The conference received generous funding from CRASSH and the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund at the University of Cambridge, the Economic History Society, the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Graduate Workshop - Bringing the law back into history
16 Dec 2013
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
The workshop, organised by William O'Reilly (Cambridge) and Tom Tölle (Princeton), provided a forum for young historians with an interest in legal categories in historical analysis to critically engage with the role of law in recent historiography and to discuss different approaches to legal categories in their own research.
Conference Programme »
Histories of Material Life in South Asia, 1500-1900
15-16 April 2013
This Centre-supported event took place in the Alison Richards Building, Seminar Room 1. The interdisciplinary, two-day conference explored the relationships between economy and culture in early modern and modern South Asia. Speakers included art, cultural, economic, social and intellectual historians of India, Burma, Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean world.
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Theory and Practice
18-19 March 2013
The Centre-supported sixth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History was held in Trinity College on 18 March and St John's College on 19 March 2013. The theme of the conference this year was 'Theory and Practice' and the focus was on political realism and 'moralism' in politics, the writing of constitutions, and the theorizing of political action. The aim of the conference was to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. The conference keynote speaker was Dr Joel Isaac, Christ's College, and nine graduate papers were be presented across four panels.
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Conference Report »
Political Economy and the State in Historical Perspective
11 July 2012
An interdisciplinary workshop bringing together senior academics and early career researchers in an open forum was held at the Alison Richard Building, Sidgwick Site, West Road. Plenary talks were given by Prof. David Harvey (City University of New York), Prof. Martin Daunton (University of Cambridge) and Dr. Ha-Joon Chang (University of Cambridge). The workshop was sponsored by the Centre for History and Economics (Cambridge); Trevelyan Fund, Faculty of History (Cambridge); BISA - International Political Economy Group; Trinity Hall (Cambridge). The conveners were Alex Campbell, Raphael Heffron, Jared Holley and David Pretel (Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge).
Workshop Programme »
Workshop Report »
The Philomathia Conference on Political Thought and the Environment
25-26 May 2012
Trinity Hall Lecture Theatre
This Centre supported interdisciplinary conference brought major scholars to Cambridge to discuss the historical relationship of politics and the environment. The ways in which political actors manage the natural world, and are shaped by it, have always mattered, and now appear to matter more than ever. In history, economics and political theory, the environment has become a subject of great scholarly significance. The conference examined what the history of ideas can contribute to contemporary debates about the relationship of politics to the environment. Amongst participants were Annabel Brett, David Runciman, Melissa Lane, Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck and Paul Warde.
Oikonomia, Economy and War
19-20 March 2012
The Centre-supported fifth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History was held at King's College on 19-20 March 2012. The theme was 'Oikonomia, Economy and War'. The aim of the conference was to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. The conference keynote speaker was Professor Andrew Gamble (POLIS, University of Cambridge) and eight graduate papers were presented across three panels.
See here for the programme »
Population, economy and welfare, c. 1200-2000
16-18 September 2011
A Centre-supported conference, organised by Chris Briggs, Peter Kitson and Stephen Thompson in honour of Professor Richard Smith, took place on 16-18 September in Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. The principle purpose was to recognise and celebrate the scholarly achievements of Professor Richard M Smith and to bring together an international group of historians, demographers and economists, ranging from current graduate students to senior academics, to discuss long-run interconnections between population change, economic development, and welfare provision in past time.
Utopia and Dystopia: Politics of Commitment
20-21 May 2011
A workshop organised by Nick Stargardt took place at Robinson College, Cambridge. The workshop was organised around the work of Gareth Stedman Jones with a panel of his former Cambridge students. It was an experiment to see whether it is possible to generate new insights about what political idealism and commitment have meant in the period since the French Revolution. The small group of intellectual and cultural historians who were present would more often be kept apart by the fences separating their periods, places and sub-specialisms.
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Politics, Order, Law
21-22 March 2011
The Centre supported Fourth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History took place in King's College, Cambridge on 21-22 March 2011. This year's theme was Politics, Order, Law and a keynote address was delivered by Dr Annabel Brett. Eight research papers were presented across three panels, followed by discussant comments and audience responses. The aim of the graduate conferences is to provide an opportunity for graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere.
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Structures and Transformations in Modern British History
24 February 2011
An event to mark the publication of Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, a collection of essays in honour of Gareth Stedman Jones, edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, took place at Trinity Hall on 24 February. Martin Daunton chaired a roundtable discussion with Mark Goldie, Catherine Hall, Frank Mort and Gareth Stedman Jones.