Prof. Dr. Sven Beckert – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Sven Beckert

Harvard University
History

External Senior Fellow
Marie S. Curie FCFP Fellow
January 2019 – July 2019
FRIAS School of History
September 2008 – July 2009

Website

E-Mail: beckert@fas.harvard.edu

Last Update: 31.08.2019

Curriculum Vitae

Laird Bell Professor of History Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. He just published Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity. The book won the Bancroft Award, The Philip Taft Award, the Cundill Recognition for Excellence and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times named it one of the ten most important books of 2015. His other publications have focused on the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, on labor, on democracy, on global history and on the connections between slavery and capitalism. Currently he is at work on a history of capitalism. Beckert teaches courses on the political economy of modern capitalism, the history of American capitalism, Gilded Age America, labor history, global capitalism and the history of European capitalism. Together with a group of students he has also worked on the historical connections between Harvard and slavery and published Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History.

Beckert is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University , and co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Beyond Harvard, he co-chairs an international study group on global history, is co-editor of a series of books at Princeton University Press on “America in the World,” and has co-organized a series of conferences on the history of capitalism. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. He also directs the Harvard College Europe Program.

1989 M.A. in History at Columbia University, New York; 1995 PhD in History at Columbia University, New York; 1996–2000 Assistant Professor, Harvard University; 2000–2003 Dunwalk Associate Professor at Harvard University; since 2003 Liard Bell Professor at Harvard University.

Selected Publications

Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2016)
Empire of Cotton: A Global History. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie. Cambridge University Press (2001; paperback 2003)
Democracy and its Discontents. Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York. Past and Present 2002; 174: 114-155.
Emancipation and Empire. Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of American Civil War. American Historical Review, 2004; 109 (5): 1405-1438.
The American Bourgeoisie. Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Julia B. Rosenbaum, New York 2010.
Labor Regimes after Emancipation. The Case of Cotton. In: Marcel van der Linden (eds.): Grenzenüberschreitende Arbeitergeschichte. Konzepte und Erkundungen, Leipzig 2010; 139-155.

FRIAS Project

Capitalism (2019)

A Global History analyzes the social and spatial spread of capitalism over the past 500 years. Charting one of the most impactful developments of the modern era, the book argues for a non-eurocentric and post Cold War history that makes the global South an integral story of the full sweep of capitalism’s history, and leaves some of the ideological binaries of the nineteenth century behind. Combining very local with very global analysis, I will embed my narrative of economic change in accounts of politics, culture, and social structures, and will show how very dispersed actors–from merchants in India to enslaved workers in the United States, from Bochum industrialists to African peasants structured the revolution of capitalism and brought about our contemporary world.

The Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2008-09)

The book “The Empire of Cotton” is going to explore the history of this most important commodity of the nineteenth century, and in doing so trace the history of the first great wave of capitalist globalization. In many ways, cotton is the key to unlocking the history of nineteenth-century capitalism and the global networks in which it was embedded. By inventing the factory as the most efficient way of producing textiles, cotton manufacturers recast the way humans worked. By demanding ever more cotton to feed their hungry factories in Lancashire and elsewhere, manufacturers encouraged a vast expansion of cotton lands and along with it the forced migration of millions of slaves as well as the colonialization of new territories. By producing ever more cotton textiles ever more efficiently, and selling them to markets throughout the world, cotton traders destroyed less efficient indigenous ways of producing textiles. In the process, they decisively moved the center of the industry from India to Western Europe and the United States, for example by turning India from a region of cotton exporters to a colony that consumed vast quantities of British yarn and cloth. Cotton, in short, was so central in nineteenth-century capitalism that most of its history could be told from the vantage-point of this agricultural commodity. From the perspective of the century as a whole, cotton’s importance can only be compared to oil’s centrality a hundred years later.