Recent events
Histories of Migration: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives
18–21 October 2021
Together with Sören Urbansky (German Historical Institute, D.C.), Franziska Exeler organised and convened a workshop on Histories of Migration: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives, Fifth Annual Bucerius Young Scholars Forum, which was funded by the Zeit Foundation. The workshop was hosted (online) on 18–21 October 2021 at the German Historical Institute’s Pacific Regional Office at the University of California, Berkeley.
Empire and Histories of Criminal Law
15 June 2021
Catherine Evans (University of Toronto)
Joseph McQuade (University of Toronto)
Moderators: Franziska Exeler (Cambridge/FU Berlin), Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard)
Economic Law & Histories of Economic Life
18 May 2021
Fei-Hsien Wang (Indiana University)
Lionel Bently (University of Cambridge)
Moderators: Surabhi Ranganathan (Cambridge), Franziska Exeler (Cambridge/FU Berlin)
Writing Legal Lives - Histories of International Law
28-30 April 2021
This 3-day workshop investigated the possibilities of writing legal lives into histories of international law, building on the successful workshop on Writing Legal Lives held at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University in September 2019. The workshop explored how international legal cases and materials can be woven into intellectual and social histories of international law. The aim was to discuss how these narratives can usefully highlight the political economy within which these cases, disputes, and negotiations emerged, and map out the unexpected legal geographies traversed by the historical actors that we encounter in them. Participants included most core members of the Exchanges programme.
Empire & Maritime Legal History
20 April 2021
Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia)
Laurie Wood (Florida State University)
Moderators: Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard), Iza Hussin (Cambridge)
Writing International Legal History From and Through the Margins
23 March 2021
Mira Siegelberg (University of Cambridge)
Cait Storr (University of Technology Sydney)
Moderators: Surabhi Ranganathan (Cambridge), Franziska Exeler (Cambridge/FU Berlin)
Colonial Governance & Law
23 February 23 2021
Diana Kim (Georgetown University)
Nurfadzilah Yahaya (University of Singapore)
Moderators: Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard), Iza Hussin (Cambridge)
What is a Legal Archive?
20 November 2019
A workshop organized by Kalyani Ramnath in collaboration with the American Society for Legal History and held at the Center for History and Economics, Harvard University. This workshop brought together historians of South Asia and Latin America working on projects about law, paperwork, bureaucracy, and procedure who were interested in examining questions such as 'What are the archives of law?' and 'What definitions and notions of law do we work with as we assemble, read and interpret archive sources?' Scholars drew upon their engagement with legal sources and records, as well as their own approach to 'reading' legal materials. They also looked at the promise and perils of working with fragmented archives, with sources in multiple languages, and in multiple geographical locations. In the course of discussions, questions were raised about knowledge production, indigenous agency, and governance. By looking at different frameworks that are constructed around 'archive stories' and considering the legal encounter alongside the archival encounter, the hope was to arrive at creative and critical rethinking of what constitutes a legal archive and how it is constructed and read.
Writing Legal Lives
21 September 2019
A one-day workshop at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University organized by Catherine Evans, Kalyani Ramnath and Fei-Hsien Wang on 21 September 2019. Participants explored different approaches to writing legal lives, writing legal histories of individuals and communities, and the limits to legal life writing. The conversations centered on the nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of people, places and things that they initially encountered through legal records. They also focused on substantive, methodological and ethical dilemmas that they had faced as historians, researchers and interlocutors.
Spaces of Law
4 October 2018
A one day workshop at the Harvard Center for History and Economic organised by Franziska Exeler and Kalyani Ramnath. Nöelle Herrenschmidt and US District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock discussed Nöelle's illustrated book documenting the everyday life of the Boston Courthouse. Guests included Sunil Amrith, Shane Bobrycki, Niko Bowie, Ruth Coffey, Ian Kumekawa, Ken Mack, Ben Sacks and Jon Spack.
War, Law and Crime. Legal histories of the second world war and its aftermath
25-26 May 2018
This two-day workshop, organised by Franziska Exeler and Lily Chang (UCL) took place in Magdalene College, Cambridge. It brought together historians who are interested in new approaches to legal histories of war. The focus was on the Second World War and its aftermath, examining the intersection of law and war and its post-war consequences.
Urban History: Space, Place and Connections
9-10 June 2017
The workshop was organised by Franziska Exeler in collaboration with the Free University of Berlin and brought together historians who are pursuing new directions and questions in urban history. ‘City’ is understood here as a place where the local and the global converge. By viewing the city as a lens into a variety of political, social, economic and cultural issues, the workshop explored ruptures and continuities between colonial and post-colonial cities, migration, memory and the legacies of empire, and transfers of knowledge and experts.
The New Economic History of India
11-12 May 2017
The History Project hosted its fifth conference on 11-12 May 2017 at the University of Cambridge. The conference was concerned with the economic history of India, particularly in relation to exchanges across frontiers, the history of the law, and the history of economic thought.
The French Empire: Comparisons, Exchanges and Collaborations
27 June 2016
University of Cambridge
The workshop brought together PhD candidates working on France and its empire from a comparative and connective perspective especially with Britain and its empire. These included students from France (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Britain (Cambridge, Oxford, London) and the United States (Harvard). A major theme was the dynamics of emulation and collaboration between the French and British empires since the eighteenth century, from exchanges of ideas to institutional cooperation in the form of condominia in the late nineteenth century. Other themes included slavery in the French Empire, exchanges between France and India, and French colonial law. Workshop Programme » Participant List »
Law in Modern History: Social and Political Explorations
23 January 2016
University of Cambridge
This one-day workshop, organized by Catherine Evans and Franziska Exeler, brought together historians and lawyers who are particularly interested in the social and political dimensions of law. The focus was on the modern period, from the eighteenth century to the present day. Covering a variety of different regions and societies, the participants analyzed the functions and meanings that law can have beyond specific legal or political systems. They also discussed how in the past and in the present, international, national and local actors received, appropriated, utilized or even created law, and how these processes in turn affected the relationship between state and society. Participants » Programme »
Legal History in Global Perspective
12 December 2015
Harvard University
‘Legal History in Global Perspective’ was a one-day workshop organized by Catherine Evans and Kirsty Walker for scholars developing new projects in the field of global legal history. Participants expressed a strong commitment to narrative, densely archival studies, and to the effort to consider the legal lives of relatively non-elite actors, from middling administrators, legal authorities and civil servants to sailors, labourers, and villagers. Several papers explored the ways in which legal categories and discourses were understood and mobilized in everyday life, revealing legal cultures embedded in social and economic practices. Many centered on histories rooted in both the local and the global, using individual cases to engage with and challenge key debates of imperial histories, migration and diaspora, and the practices of international law.
France and Its Empire in the Global Economy
10 June 2015
University of Cambridge
A one-day workshop organized by David Todd, Renaud Morieux, Emma Rothschild and Pierre Singaravélou took place on 10 June 2015 at Trinity Hall, as part of the program on Cordial Exchanges: Britain and France in the World since 1700. The workshop explored the new global economic history of France and its empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in a comparative and connective perspective with the economic history of Britain and its empire. The participants examined new quantitative, political and cultural approaches to France's formal empire, the financial aspects of France's global power and the impact of global economic expansion on the modern French state and society. Such perspectives facilitated a reappraisal of the French dimension of nineteenth-century globalization and brought to light the ways in which it complemented as well as competed with the better known British – or Anglo-American – dimension.
Petitions and Political Culture in South Asia
4 - 5 June 2014
A two-day workshop took place in Magdalene College as part of the Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas programme. It brought together scholars from different periods of South Asian history (early modern, colonial, and contemporary) who are often not in conversation with one another. It brought into focus the question of changing state structures and relationships with individuals and communities, as well as considering the methodological and theoretical challenges raised by petitions. We hoped that focusing on changing genres of petitioning across time would illuminate some of the critical issues in current South Asian historiography, including (but not limited to) questions of historical memory, the formation of publics, ideas of law and subject hood, and changing understandings of the role of the state.
Defining the Economy in Political Crisis: Revolution, Rupture and the Law
October 4 2013
Harvard University
Historians and social scientists have turned to examine the relationship between economics and its object. Scholars increasingly argue that the 'economy' itself is a recent product of socio-political practice. With the integration of markets and the rise of global economic institutions, there is a tendency to see this as a universal process playing out similarly in different jurisdictions. The aim of this meeting was to examine how contingency, violence and ideologies were involved in redefining the economy. How was the economy constructed after revolutionary change or decolonization? What tools and technologies did new political orders adopt? Given that drastic political change was accompanied by both chaos and violence, we are interested in examining the ways in which the contingencies of the everyday shaped conceptions of property, wealth, exchange and commodities. The workshop also examined the ways in which the the 'economy' is a creature of laws and regulations. In the workshop we hoped to bring into focus not just the processes of law making, but also the everyday life of the law and the role it plays in constructing the economy.
Workshop Program »
Commerce, Corporations and the Law
27-28 September 2013
Princeton
The History Project, in cooperation with The History Department at Princeton University and the Joint Center for History and Economics, held its second conference on 27 - 28 September 2013 at Princeton University. The conference was concerned with cross-cultural trade, firms, and legal systems around the world. The History Project is supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, with the object of encouraging a new generation of historians of the economy and economic life.
Exchanges of legal ideas and practices: Britain, France and their empires since 1700
8 July 2013
The workshop, organised by Renaud Morieux, Emma Rothschild, Pierre Singaravélou and David Todd and held in Cambridge, considered law as a field of practical as well as intellectual exchanges across national borders. Programme »
Civil Rights Lawyers in American Legal Historiography
8 July 2013 5.30pm
Old Combination Room, Trinity College
Professor Kenneth Mack Lawrence Biele Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and author of Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Harvard Univesity Press, 2012) Comments by Professor Catherine Barnard and Professor Emma Rothschild Talk co-hosted by the Centre for History and Economics and the Centre for European Legal Studies
History of Copyright and Intellectual Property
Forum on Open Access
1 July 2013
A discussion took place in The Parlour and Cripps Auditorium, Magdalene College on 1 July 2013 about the history of copyright and open access. Participants included Peter Baldwin (UCLA), Anne Jarvis (University Librarian, Cambridge), Ira Katznelson (Columbia/SSRC), Rachel Leow (Harvard), Peter Phillips (Chief Executive, Cambridge University Press), Emma Rothschild (Harvard/Cambridge) and Fei-Hsien Wang (Magdalene College, Cambridge).
Event Poster »
Programme »
Participants »
Recovering Law in Asia
16 March 2013
A one-day workshop, organised by Rohit De and Fei-Hsien Wang in connection with the project on Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas, took place in Trinity Hall, Cambridge, on 16 March 2013. The aim of the workshop was to explore the processes through which seemingly alien legal systems were adapted by Asian societies, and the new institutions and practices that emerged as its result. By focusing on a number of Asian societies, the meeting hoped to bring together disciplines and histories that are rarely in conversation with one another, to identify similar phenomena that happen in different regions and also uncover legal connections between Asian societies.Schedule »
Participants »
Justice Stephen Breyer in Conversation
9 July & 11 July 2012
Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, visited the Centre in July. Two events were hosted to mark the occasion, the first on 9 July, with history Phd and JD students. The second event, co-hosted by the Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS), took place on 11 July in Trinity College. In conversation with Catherine Barnard and Emma Rothschild, Justice Breyer talked about the function of comparative law, originalism in the Supreme Court, and the role of public opinion in shaping the judges' views.
Southeast Asia: India connections
8 June 2012
An informal rountable meeting took place in Magdalene College, Cambridge as part of the project on the Sites of Asian Interactions. The aim of the meeting was to discuss Indian and British archival materials, including collaboration with West Bengal state archives. Amongst the participants were Tansen Sen and Geoffrey Wade from the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. Agenda » Participants list »
Federal Credit in Historical Perspective May 7, 2012 The purpose of this workshop was to explore the extension of federal credit in a historical perspective and consider today's realities within the context of longstanding debates over public sector risk management, including, for example, federal loan insurance and credit.
1848 as a Turning Point in the History of Political Thought
11-12 April 2012
A two-day conference took place in King's College as part of the programme on The Interaction between Political, Economic and Religious Ideas 1750-1950. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the new project strand which examines 1848 as a turning point in the history of political thought. This will be a major investigation reconsidering the significance of 1848 both in Europe and the wider world. The events of the Arab Spring remind us how uncertain patterns, developments and successes of revolutions might be. Not only will we examine the Revolutions of 1848 in a global setting, but we shall also be applying the new approaches to the history of political thought, which have been developed in Cambridge and elsewhere since the 1970s.
Programme »
Participant List »
Penang and the Indian Ocean
17-18 September 2011
Penang
This event was organised with collaborators in connection with the project on the Sites of the Asian Interactions. Among the themes explored were the early history, trade and exchange, the Indian diaspora, and law, authority and modernity. The keynote lecturers were Christopher Bayly and Om Prakash, with Sunil Amrith and Tim Harper as moderators.
Population, economy and welfare, c. 1200-2000
16-18 September 2011
A Centre-supported conference, organised by Chris Briggs, Peter Kitson and Stephen Thompson in honour of Professor Richard Smith, took place on 16-18 September in Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. The principle purpose was to recognise and celebrate the scholarly achievements of Professor Richard M Smith and to bring together an international group of historians, demographers and economists, ranging from current graduate students to senior academics, to discuss long-run interconnections between population change, economic development, and welfare provision in past time.
His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire
31 May 2011, Cambridge
A panel discussion of Sugata Bose's new book on Subhas Chandra Bose. Panelistsincluded Sugata Bose (Harvard), Sunil Amrith (Birkbeck, London) and Sumit Mandal(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and the discussion was chaired by Tim Harper (Magdalene College, Cambridge).
Utopia and Dystopia: Politics of Commitment
20-21 May 2011
A workshop organised by Nick Stargardt took place at Robinson College, Cambridge. The workshop was organised around the work of Gareth Stedman Jones with a panel of his former Cambridge students. It was an experiment to see whether it is possible to generate new insights about what political idealism and commitment have meant in the period since the French Revolution. The small group of intellectual and cultural historians who werel present would more often be kept apart by the fences separating their periods, places and sub-specialisms. Programme » Participants»
Energy and Environment: A Global History
22 April 2011, Harvard
Harvard University Center for the Environment The workshop considered energy history in a global perspective. It presented new research by graduate students from Harvard and MIT, and concluded with a roundtable session of faculty from both institutions. The workshop was the first in a series of events hosted by the Energy History Project, an initiative that explores the ways in which the historical study of energy use and its transformations can contribute to the understanding of economic, social, and environmental change. Participants included David Blackbourn, Alison Frank, Richard Hornbeck, Ian Miller, Harriet Ritvo and Emma Rothschild. The workshop website can be found here.
Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit
From December 2010, Harvard
An exhibition at Harvard Business School, curated by Caitlin Anderson, Visiting Fellow at the Center for History and Economics, drawing on materials in Baker Library's Historical Collections to show how previous generations devised creative ways of lending and borrowing long before credit cards.
Session at the Fitzwilliam: Europe's Asian Centuries
26 November 2010, Cambridge
A small workshop took place at the Fitzwilliam Museum. It brought together associates of the Centre and members of the project on 'Europe's Asian Centuries' at Warwick directed by Maxine Berg. There was a porcelain galleries and handling session with the curators Victoria Avery, James Lin and Nik Zolman. The potter Alan Bainbridge also discussed techniques for making blue and white porcelain. The workshop started in the seminar room and was followed by the galleries session. The focus of the workshop was on Asian export-ware porcelain and its impact on early European initiatives in porcelain production. More information about the project, 'Europe's Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830' is available here.
Income Maintenance Programs in America From 1920s to the Present Day: A Progress Report on New Evidence
10 November 2010,
Harvard
Price V. Fishback, Thomas R. Brown Professor of Economics, University of Arizona; Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research; Co-Editor, Journal of Economic History. The event was jointly sponsored by the Project on Justice, Welfare and Economics and the Joint Center for History and Economics.
Penang and the Indian Ocean: Mapping Exchanges and Interaction
1 - 2 July 2010
Cambridge
Organised by the Centre for History and Economics and held in Trinity Hall, Cambridge, this conference sought to explore how ideas travelled across Asia, and how they changed in the process, focusing on networks of people, texts, objects and symbols that circulated throughout Asia in the age of global empires. Papers included Regions and Boundaries: Exploring the Spatial Reach of Straits Chinese Merchants of Penang in the Bay of Bengal (Loh Wei Leng, Universiti Malaya); The Hajj and the Indian Ocean, 1860-1940 (John Slight, University of Cambridge); Eurasian family histories: Penang and beyond (Kirsty Walker, University of Cambridge); and Picturesque Penang: tropicality, landscape and land appropriation the early 19th century (Christina Skott, University of Cambridge). Participants included Sunil Amrith (Birkbeck, University of London), Christopher Bayly (University of Cambridge), Mark Ravinder Frost (Hong Kong University), Tim Harper (University of Cambridge), Andrew Jarvis (University of Cambridge), Rachel Leow (University of Cambridge), Su Lin Lewis (University of Cambridge), Loh Wei Leng, Sumit Mandal (Humboldt University), Emma Rothschild, Christina Skott, John Slight and Kirsty Walker.
Programme »
The Internationalization of the History of France and the French Empire
14 June 2010, Cambridge
This workshop, held in King’s College, Cambridge, examined the implications of recent trends in global, imperial and transnational history for the history of early modern France and her empire. Participants included Renaud Morieux, Frédéric Régent, François-Joseph Ruggiu, David Todd, Richard Drayton, Emma Rothschild and Robert Tombs. For further information, please see the event website.
Morality and markets: thinking about Albert Hirschman in the 1970s
Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University)
19 May 2010
Cambridge
Haiti in History
May 3 2010
Harvard
The workshop, organized by the Center for History and Economics and the Program on Justice, Welfare and Economics, explored recent work on Haiti/Saint-Domingue in the long history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Speakers included Julia Gaffield (Duke University), Malick Ghachem (University of Maine), Walter Johnson (Harvard University), Martha Jones (University of Michigan), Emma Rothschild (Harvard University), Edward Rugemer (Yale University), Rebecca Scott (University of Michigan), David Todd (University of Cambridge), and Edward Widmer (Brown University).
Event Poster »
Writing World History
26 March 2010
This Centre-supported event took place in St John's College, Cambridge and was a debate between the authors of The Transformation of the World and the Birth of the Modern World, Professor Jürgen Osterhammel and Professor Sir Christopher Bayly respectively, about their approaches to writing world history. The debate was followed by a roundtable discussion with the following participants: Andrew Arsan, Chris Clark, Richard Evans, Leigh Denault, Rosalind O' Hanlon (University of Oxford), and William O' Reilly. The event was organised by Ulinka Rublac. Podcast »
Réinterpréter l’Ancien Régime
1 July 2009
A meeting organised by David Todd and Pierre Singaravelou took place at the Collège de France on 1 July 2009. Participants included Christophe Charle, Jacques Revel, Daniel Roche, Emma Rothschild and Gareth Stedman Jones. For further information, visit the meeting web site.
Instruments of Empire: Science, Information, and French Colonization in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
9 June 2008
This workshop discussed the various means that were used to foster French colonial/imperial expansion and to maintain colonial possessions in the 17th and 18th centuries. It investigated “instruments of empire” in the broadest sense; this could include instruments such as forms of bureaucracy, government information networks, the sciences associated with navigation, cartographic practices, trade policies, or even human beings. Click here for the programme and the list of participants.
L’internationalisation de l’histoire de France / The Internationalization of the history of France, 1750-2000
3 June 2008
A workshop, co-organised by the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po and the Centre for History and Economics, was held in Paris at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques on 3 June 2008. The workshop examined the implications of recent trends in global, imperial and transnational history on the history of France. It highlighted the international dimension of three aspects of modern French history: the end of the Old Regime in the late 18th century; the ideological origins of the Second French Colonial Empire in the 19th century; and intellectual exchanges within the French postcolonial world since 1950. Participants included Robert Aldrich (Sydney), Christophe Charle (Paris I), Marcel Dorigny (Paris VIII), Emma Rothschild (Harvard) and Robert Tombs (Cambridge). Click here for the programme and the list of participants.