GLOBAL HISTORY OF CAPITALISM

Course Objective: This course intends to introduce students to the wide variety of approaches to the history of global capitalism. Throughout the course, we will engage with approaches including Marxist examinations of capital in relationship to labor, approaches that study capital in relation to ecology, mobility, and ideas, as well as from feminist critiques of capitalism and anti- and post-colonial readings of history of capitalism. Through readings, including academic articles, primary sources, excerpts from fictional narratives and life writings, and viewings of films, videos, and documentaries, we will trace the arc of history of capital across the planet. From early networks of merchant capital in the Indian Ocean World to early sugar plantations and finance in the Mediterranean, from silver mines and slave plantations in the Americas to join-stock companies and merchant vessels plying the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, from the factories and mills of industrial Europe to the peasant farms in Asia, Middle East, and Africa, from the nineteenth century era of British imperialist dominance to the twenty-first century neoliberalism, students will leave the course well-versed in the history of the social, economic, and ecological crises that mark the world we live in.

Course Content: This course examines the history of capitalism, focusing on how capital has operated in different geographic and ecological contexts from the 14th century to the present. In the course, we will explore questions raised in the historical examination of capital “in motion”, tracing how investable wealth moves across the planet, transforming places into property, things into commodities, people into labor, natures into productive spaces. The course also relates the global economy to the everyday lives and labor of a variety of economic communities across the globe: including traders, bankers, creditors, plantation owners, industrialists, peasants, workers, enslaved people, pirates, and smugglers. It analyzes the fundamental processes and contingencies that the global expansion of capitalism relied upon and reinforced, including—but not limited to—debt and indebtedness, colonial hierarchies, dispossession, ecological crisis, and gendered social reproduction and care.