Histories of Capitalism

Catalog description

This is a graduate seminar that focuses on narratives of the origins, development, and politics of capitalism. If capitalism denotes a particular arrangement of social relations and implies a certain relationship between states, markets, and civil society, it also can be located in time and space, as part of what characterizes the emergence of globalized modernity. But what is to be gained from (re)telling the history of capitalism? Why have so many attempts been made to do so? Should we think of capitalism as having a history or histories? What horizons of political judgment open up for today by tracing these long historical processes, if any? We will attend to these questions by examining key debates such as: the question of Eurocentrism in development of capitalism; race, gender, and labor in the transition from feudalism to capitalism; the relationship between “core” and “periphery”; and the overlapping processes of deindustrialization, neoliberalization, and mass incarceration. We will read works by Silvia Federici, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Nancy Fraser, Karl Marx, Cedric Robinson, and Ellen M. Wood, among others.