Suchergebnisse

Published online: 25 June 2020 ; The new history of capitalism (NHC) places a great deal of emphasis on slavery as a crucial world institution. Slavery, it is alleged, arose out of, and underpinned, capitalist development. This article starts by showing the intellectual and scholarly foundations of some of the broad conclusions of the NHC. It proceeds by arguing that capitalist transformation must rely on a global framework of analysis. The article considers three critiques in relation to the NHC. First, the NHC overemphasizes the importance of coercion to economic growth in the eighteenth century. We argue that what has been called 'war capitalism' might be better served by an analysis in which the political economy of European states and empires, rather than coercion, is a key factor in the transformation of capitalism at a global scale. Second, in linking slavery to industrialization, the NHC proposes a misleading chronology. Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South. During early industrialization, sugar, not cotton, was the main plantation crop in the Americas. Third, the NHC is overly concentrated on production and especially on slave plantation economies. It underplays the 'power of consumption', where consumers came to purchase increasing amounts of plantation goods, including sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. To see slavery's role in fostering the preconditions of industrialization and the Great Divergence, we must tell a story about slavery's place in supporting the expansion of consumption, as well as a story about production. ; This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2020-2022)

National studies have demonstrated their inability to correctly understand global phenomena, and the way in which they affect societies. This chronologically ambitious book investigates methodological and theoretical issues from Roman times to the present, in terms of globalization. In this context, one of the most relevant parameters of change emerges: the itinerancy of culture and knowledge. Therefore, this volume argues that itinerant agents carry with them cultural baggage, transporting and transmitting it to other spaces. In this way, interconnection begins, producing active changes in global history and visual culture. Contributions to this book focus on comparative studies, the evolution of global phenomena, historical processes in their diachrony, regional studies, changing economies, cultural continuities, and methodological questions on globalization, among others. In addition, the book opens with a contribution from Professor Peter Burke.

When a new wave of women's history burst onto the Australian national scene in the 1970s, its angry tone, revolutionary critique, and national political focus reflected its close connections with the women's liberation movement. Subsequent research into the history of working women expressed the strength of labor history in Australia. The new concept of "gender relations" enabled feminist history to claim all historical processes and relationships, not just women's experience, as its proper subject. More recently feminist history has been at the forefront of the transnational turn in Australian history that has reinvigorated research into biography, empire, colonialism, migration, and the women's movement itself. Seemingly now far removed from its grassroots, the new transnational feminist history would yet seem to be appropriate in the face of one of the most urgent of contemporary political challenges: the need to address the inter-connectedness of the world, evident in the terrible plight of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who risk and lose their lives in crossing national borders.