2024

Saturday, February 24, 2024
“Empires and the Origins of Capitalism”

Tiraana Bains, Brown University
“Budgeting India: The Making of a British Imperial State in South Asia”

Alejandra Irigoin, London School of Economics
“Private Trade Finance and Religion in the Catholic Environment”

Kris Lane, Tulane University
“What was Patosí, Bolivia, worth in the mid-17th Century?”

Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago
“Money and the Origins of Capitalism”

Jared Lucky, Yale University
“The Imperial Origins of Consumer Protection Law: The Case of Massachusetts Bay, 1692-1771”

Ellen Nye, Harvard University
“The Entangled Origins of Capitalism: Making Money between the English and Ottoman Empires”

Asheesh Siddique, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Conceptualizing Difference Before Universal Economic Laws”

Abigail Swingen, Texas Tech University
Commentator

Junko Takeda, Syracuse University
“Failure as a Category of Study: Louis XIV and Entrepreneurial Imperialism in Persia and Siam”

Andre Wakefield, Pitzer College
“The Dutch Republic Comes to the Harz Mountains: Pieter Hartzing in Clausthal”

Carl Wennerlind, Barnard University
“The Epic Showdown between Two Political Economies that Shaped both Economics and Capitalism”

 

2023

Saturday, February 18, 2023
“Empires, Market-Building, and the Origins of Capitalism”

Pernille Røge, University of Pittsburgh
“A Gateway to Empire: Amsterdam Merchant Bankers and the Danish West Indies, 1760s–1790s”

Abigail Swingen, Texas Tech University
“Trade, Colonization, and Empire: Financing the Financial Revolution”

Manuel Covo, University of California, Santa Barbara
“The Economic Consequences of the Seven Years’ War in Continental Europe”

Regina Grafe, European University Institute
“Financialisation and Moral Capitalism in the Spanish Empire”

Béla Kapossy, University of Lausanne
“Corporatism and Free Trade: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Switzerland”

Koji Yamamoto, University of Tokyo
“Mercantilism and Imperial Markets Reconsidered: The Westminster Soap Company, c. 1631–1640”

Mark Hanna, University of California, San Diego
“Piratical Markets in the Early Modern World”

Ellen Nye, Harvard University
“Turning Global Coinage into Imperial Money: Reasserting Ottoman Monetary Sovereignty under Mustafa II”

 

2022

Saturday, February 19, 2022
“The Classical Tradition and the Making of Knowledge”

Frederic Nolan Clark, USC
“On the Presence of Absence: Fragments in the Early Modern Classical Tradition”

Maya Maskarinec, USC
“The Genealogies and Domestic Spaces of Early Christian Saints in Early Modern Rome”

Anna-Luna Post, University of Amsterdam / USC
“Memory and Infamy: The Case of Galileo”

Susanna Berger, USC
“Anamorphoses as Actualized Allegories”

Dan Stolzenberg, UC Davis
“The Age of Pious Erudition”

Kristine Haugen, Cal Tech
“Classical Anxiety and the Sounds of English Poetry”

Christian Flow, USC
“Instantaneity, Futurity, Immortality: Timing the Work of an Eighteenth-Century Professor”

Giovanna Ceserani, Stanford
“Learning to Scythe: the eighteenth-century classical traveler and the agricultural sketch”

Roundtable and General Discussion:
Daniela Bleichmar, USC
Jacob Soll, USC
Dan Edelstein, Stanford
Arthur Weststeijn, U of Amsterdam / USC
Summation: Anthony Grafton, Princeton University / Fellow, the Huntington Library
Closing Discussion: Paula Findlen, Stanford
Huntington Library/Online

2020

Canceled (COVID)
“French Economic Thought and the Enlightenment”

Paola Bertucci, Yale University
“The Fabric of Enlightenment: Improvement, Useful Knowledge, and Embodied Skill”

Guillaume Calafat, Institute for Advanced Study
“Perpetual Peace or Perpetual War?: French Trade with North Africa during the 18th century”

Dan Edelstein, Stanford University
“Societas, Sociétés, and Society: Corporations in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought”

Antoine Lilti, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
“The perils of discredit: Public credit and national confidence in Enlightenment debates”

Darrin M. McMahon, Dartmouth College
“Lighting the Enlightenment with a Quaker Colony in France: The Atlantic Whale Oil Crisis of the 1780s and and the Nantuckois of Dunkirk”

Arnaud Orain, University of Paris

Sophus Reinert, Harvard University
“Political Economy Against the Enlightenment”

Pernille Roege, University of Pittsburgh
“‘A Practical Science’: Creole Economic Thought and the French Chambers of Agriculture in the Americas, 1759-1787”

Emma Rothschild, Harvard University
“M. Enveloppe and Infinite History”

Anoush F. Terjanian, University of Ottawa
“The problem of the ‘gouleau étroit’: Mably’s critique of Physiocracy (and beyond)”

Francesca Trivellato, Institute for Advanced Study
“Maritime and Commercial Law before Colbert”

Respondents
Lynn Hunt, UCLA
Margaret Jacob, UCLA
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, USC

2019

Friday, November 30, 2018
Sophus Reinert, Harvard University
“The Medici Grand Dukes and the Development of Political Economy 1500-1700”
Huntington Library

Saturday, March 9, 2019
“Natural Law and Economic Thought”

Dan Edelstein, Stanford University
“Free-Market Metaphysics: Augustine, Jansenism, Physiocracy, and the Origins of Laissez-Faire Capitalism”

Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Newtonian Universe and the Pursuit of Self-Interest”

David Grewal, Yale University
“Pufendorf on the Commercial Oeconomy”

Elizabeth Cross, Georgetown University
“Unnatural Exchanges: Commerce and Conquest in Eighteenth-Century French Visions of India”

Philip Stern, Duke University
“The Corporation and Early Modern International Thought”

Rebecca Spang, Indiana University
“The Nature of Money”

Nomi Stolzenberg, University of Southern California
“Invisible Hands and Dirty Hands: Accommodating Complicity in Early Modern Economic Thought”

Vanessa Ogle, University of California, Berkeley
“Friedrich Hayek, Natural Law, and Neoliberalism”

2018

Friday, February 9, 2018
“Political Economy in Britain’s Atlantic Empire, c. 1500-1800: Geography, Practices, and Politics”

Philip Stern, Duke University
“Circles of Commerce: Spatial Thought and the Political Economies of Seventeenth-Century English Expansion”

Hannah Farber, Columbia University
“Where Do You Get Your Insurance?: Oceans, Nation, and the Political Problem of Marine Underwriting”

Asheesh Siddique, University of Southern California
“George Chalmers and the Archives of Imperial Political Economy”

Fidel J. Tavárez, University of Chicago
“The Spanish Monarchy as an Imperial Machine, c. 1740-1796”

Jonathan Eacott, University of California, Riverside
“Leveraging Outside the Lines: India and the Economy of the English Atlantic”

Elizabeth Cross, Florida State University
“The Geopolitics of Monopoly: The French East India Company and the Political Economy of the Eighteenth-Century French Empire”

Concluding roundtable:
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin
Vanessa Ogle, University of California, Berkeley
Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California
Jacob Soll, University of Southern California
Huntington Library

2017

Friday, March 24, 2017
“The First Modern Economy: Golden Age Holland and the Work of Jan de Vries”

Maarten Prak, Utrecht University, Netherlands
“The Artisan Revolution and the Industrious Revolution, or, How the Quality of Labour Started to Improve in the Middle Ages”

Jane Humphries, Oxford University
“More Work on ‘Industriousness’”

Trevor Jackson, University of California, Berkeley
“Neither Malthus nor Keynes: The Modernity of Dutch Decline”

Philip T. Hoffman, Caltech
“Local Credit and the Industrious Revolution”

Jan de Vries, University of California, Berkeley
“My search for useful organizing concepts in historical studies: transitions, revolutions, crises, and divergences”

Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles
Comment and general discussion
University of Southern California

2016

Friday, April 29 & 30, 2016
Global Leadership Summit

Ed Balls, Harvard University
Jörg Asmussen, former European Central Bank board member and member of the German Ministry of Finance
David Walker, senior strategic advisor for PricewaterhouseCoopers and former head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office
Wolker Wieland, German Council of Economic Experts
Evangelos Venizelos, former deputy prime minister and minister of finance of Hellenic Republic
Thomas Miller, former U.S. Ambassador to Greece
William W. Holder, Dean of the USC Leventhal School of Accounting
Jacob Soll, University of Southern California
University of Southern California

2015

Thursday, February 12, 2015
“State Finance & Political Accountability in 18th-c. Britain”
Forum Director: Jacob Soll, USC

Presenters:

Paul Seaward, The Parliament, UK
“Building the parliamentary state: government finance and the routine of accountability, 1689–1800”

Larry Neal, University of Illinois
“Accounting for the transition from personal to impersonal exchange in Britain’s financial revolution”

William Deringer, MIT
“‘Intrinsick Values’: The South Sea Bubble and the Early-Modern Politics of Modern Financial Analysis”

2014

Thursday, February 12, 2014
State Finance and Political Accountability in 18th Century Britain

Paul Seaward, Director of Historical Research, the Parliament, United Kingdom
“Building the parliamentary state: government finance and the routine of accountability, 1689-1800”

Larry Neal, Professor of Economics, University of Illinois
“Accounting for the transition from personal to impersonal exchange in Britain’s financial revolution”

William Deringer, Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
” ‘Intrinsick Values’: The South Sea Bubble and the Early Modern Politics of Modern Financial Analysis”

Tim Harris, Professor of European History, Brown University

Closing Comments
Steve Hindle, W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, Huntington Library
Roundtable Discussion
USC