The Foreign Wealth of Nations
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Huntington Library
1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA
Stewart R. Smith Board Room
9:30 am – 5:30 pm (PT)
See the forum program.
Lunch will be provided by EMSI to those who RSVP by January 31.
This conference will examine the intersection of the rise of modern European capitalism with non-European actors and institutions. The goal is to understand not only the deep interrelatedness of international trade. Rather than looking at the rise of European empire and wealth as a great divergence, we are looking to understand the odd convergences which led to the period of European economic domination and how it grew from competition and plunder, as well as from emulation and cooperation with foreign empires, in particular in China, India, and the Middle East.
Forum Leader
Co-Organizers
“Commercial Divergences in Canton on the Eve of the Great Divergence, 1750-1800”
“Levant Company Merchants between the English and Ottoman Empires, c. 1700”
“The Powers that Be: Dutch and British Merchant Bankers and the Danish Colonial Empire”
Participants
Discussant
“Bubble Colony: Saint-Domingue and the Debt of France”
“The Japanese Emulation of the Founding of the Bank of England”
“Bureaucracy and the Origins of Modernity: Revisiting Joseph Needham’s Question in the Context of British Socialism”
“The Rise and Demise of Paper Money in China (1000-1500)”
“Capitalism and the Market Economy: Connections, Differences, and Implications for the Early Modern World”
Guest Speaker: Mark Blyth
Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers
Mark Blyth, Professor of International Economics, Professor of International and Public Affairs, and Acting Director of Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University
Moderated by Saori N. Katada, Professor of International Relations, USC
Thursday, February 20, 2025
USC University Park Campus
Social Sciences Building B40 & Zoom
12:30 noon – 2:00 pm (PT)
Co-sponsored by USC Dornsife Center for International Studies, USC School of Philosophy, and USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
Photos from the Martens Economic History Forum, 2023 & 2024
Image: Framed Pith Painting depicting Foreign Merchants buying Tea from Chinese dealers, c. 1840, pith paper and ink. Courtesy of the USC Pacific Asia Museum.
