Joint Center for History and Economics Online Seminar

Vanessa Ogle - Histories of Capitalism: the View from Offshore

This talk will offer some thoughts on how to think about capitalism and political economy as viewed from ‘offshore’ - a place that isn’t necessarily always a physical locality, a part of the economy that is often deliberately beyond the grasp of national accounts, a mode of profit-seeking seemingly detached from underlying value chains, generating (unearned) income from capital rather than from labor and production. I will use the history of twentieth-century tax havens and the offshore economy broadly to think about how - if? - we can write histories of capitalism that combine a focus on labor and circulating capital, that are sensitive to the peculiarities of place as well as legal forms, and that can account for the temporally and geographically uneven and patchy spread of capitalism around the world.