LIAS Lecture: Capitalism and Empire: Europe’s Hinterlands and Its Oceanic Empires
10. Dec
Richard Drayton, LIAS Alumnus, Professor of Imperial and Global History, King's College London
Tuesday, December 10th, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: Leuphana Campus | Lecture Hall 3
Language: English
On 10 December, LIAS alumnus Richard Drayton, Professor of Imperial and Global History, King's College London, has been invited to give the second LIAS Lecture this semester. The London-based historian, born in Guyana, will talk about the early history of capitalism, especially in relation to Europe's (later) colonies.
How Capitalism emerged as the dominant economic system in the modern world is one of the most important problems in the social sciences. In this lecture, Drayton offers a global history solution which connects the consequences of Europe's geography and its 'Pre-Columbian' economy, with the impact of the rise of Oceanic empires. Overseas trade and colonisation after c. 1500 both catalysed 'modern' forms of state formation, and generated new kinds of interactions between West European port cities like Amsterdam or Bordeaux and the continent's central and eastern hinterlands. In these changes, there were losers as well as winners: Lüneburg, for example, an enormously significant industrial and trading city of late medieval Europe, ended up in the modern era as a satellite of Hamburg, while Italy, once the hotspot of early Capitalism, declined into a periphery. But both centres and peripheries participated in the extraordinary economic dynamism generated by European expansion in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and the wealth extracted in colonial spaces. The legacies of this entanglement of capitalism and empire persist in the unequal distribution of benefit from resources and labour in the Twenty-First century global economy.
This lecture is open to all interested persons.
