Weatherhead Initiative on Global History

Please join us for our next Global History seminar on Monday, March 2nd: “Uprooted by Capital: Socialist Interpretations of Labor Migration in the Age of Empire (1870-1910)”.
Speaker: Lucas Poy, Assistant Professor in Global Economic and Social History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/global-history-seminar-uprooted-capital-socialist-interpretations-labor-migration-age-empire

TODAY 2/9/2026: Global History Seminar with Siân Davies on "Between Plantation and Penrhyn Quarry: The Transition to Wage Labour, in Stone, in North Wales, in Jamaica." Historians focused on the transition to wage labour in one geographic zone have infrequently considered its relationship to this transition elsewhere. The geographic separation of management and business records has contributed to a lack of attention to the connections and interactions between these endeavors. This presentation analyses efforts to establish wage dependency and ‘industriousness’ through managers’ letters from North Wales before turning attention to similar efforts in post-emancipation Jamaica. https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/global-history-seminar-sian-davies

1/26 Global History Seminar: “Fuel of Empires: Agronomy, Autarky, and Interwar Soybean Frontiers” -

1/26 Global History Seminar: “Fuel of Empires: Agronomy, Autarky, and Interwar Soybean Frontiers” For more information and to register, please visit  our website. Registered participants will receive the precirculated paper.

12/1 Global History Seminar: "Community, Corporation, and the Institutions of Britain’s Early Modern International Trade" -

12/1 Global History Seminar: "Community, Corporation, and the Institutions of Britain’s Early Modern International Trade" For more information and to register, please visit  our website. Registered participants will receive the precirculated paper.

https://mailchi.mp/a4854655c805/1117-global-history-seminar-insect-empires-and-cotton-frontiers-ecologies-of-global-capitalism-1900-1930s

11/17 Global History Seminar: “Insect Empires and Cotton Frontiers: Ecologies of Global Capitalism, 1900-1930s” For more information and to register, please visit  our website. Registered participants will receive the precirculated paper.

"For the first time in most people’s memory, our economic future seems uncertain for a new reason: The immediate past cannot tell us what comes next." WIGH Chair Sven Beckert has a guest essay in the New York Times "The Old Order is Dead. Do Not Resuscitate."

Opinion | Capitalism Is Constantly Reinventing Itself. That’s Why Things Feel So Volatile. We are in the middle of the capitalistic order reinventing itself.

Exciting news from our chair Sven Beckert!

Capitalism by Sven Beckert: 9780735220836 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books A landmark event years in the making, a brilliant global narrative that unravels the defining story of the past thousand years of human history No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively...

10/6 Global History Seminar: “Indigenous Roots for Rationality Conditions in Political Economy" -

10/6 Global History Seminar: “Indigenous Roots for Rationality Conditions in Political Economy" Indigenous Roots for Rationality Conditions in Political Economy: Ireland, Senegal and the Origins of Critique in the Eighteenth Century JAMES LIVESEY Professor of History, University of Galway Commentators: TBA

April 24-26, 2025: The Nature of Commodity Frontiers Conference.
The Nature of Commodity Frontiers conference aims to contribute analyses at the intersections of ecology, race, gender, Indigeneity, and more-than-human life in the historical analysis of commodity frontiers. Our focus is the transformation of the global countryside, in all its diversity and unevenness across time and space. In line with this bottom-up approach, we shift the perspective away from the urban and industrial core regions of the world towards the countryside and agrarian change, and give a central place to ecological limits, local initiatives, resilience, and conflicts as drivers of change. https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/conference-nature-commodity-frontiers

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A nice update from out Global Network Partners in Dakar, Sheikh Anta Diop University.

We closed out the semester with a presentation by seminar alum Swarnabh Ghosh (center) with commentators Moisés de Freitas Cunha and Anny Li. See you in the fall!