Thursday, February 5, 2015 at 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Dorothy Hirshon Suite, Arnhold Hall, Room i205, 55 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011
Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University, will present his new book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Professor Beckert will relate the epic story of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Audience Q&A to follow. Professor Sven Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. His books include Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity. His other publications have focused on the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, on labor, on democracy, on global history and on the connections between slavery and capitalism.
Beckert is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University, and co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Beyond Harvard, he co-chairs an international study group on global history, is co-editor of a series of books at Princeton University Press on “America in the World,” and has co-organized a series of conferences on the history of capitalism. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. He also directs the Harvard College Europe Program.
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