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International History and Politics
17 October 2019

Pierre Du Bois 2019 Conference Tackles Global Capitalism

On 3-4 October, the 2019 Pierre du Bois Annual Conference was held at the Graduate Institute.

The 2019 Pierre du Bois Annual Conference was held in Geneva on 3-4 October 2019 under the auspices of the Pierre du Bois Foundation and the International History Department at the Graduate Institute. The conference was organised by Professor Carolyn Biltoft and Professor Amalia Ribi-Forclaz.

Entitled Microcosms of Global Capitalism, the conference aimed to contribute to the flourishing field of the history of capitalism by using the framework of microcosm. Historically, the term microcosm has connoted a space or an object wherein the ‘whole’ of a broader phenomenon appears within a smaller scale or significant part.  In the ancient context, scholars considered human beings to be microcosms of the universe at large, thus to study and to know a single person, was to grasp the workings of the cosmos.

In this frame, this conference sought to illuminate the “macrocosm” of modern global capitalism, through a number of microscopic lenses. Rather than describing the evolution and transformation of capitalism as a historical process, the conference instead sought to genuinely rethink the nature of the system itself by challenging some of its historical and conceptual tenets.

The conference brought together historians from a wide range of academic institutions, including the universities of Oslo, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Oxford, New Hampshire, Southern California, Zurich, Geneva, Manchester, Pennsylvania, Sidney, Hawaii, Aston and Rice. Discussions focused on themes that included the “microcosmic” lenses of seeds, spruce cones, single texts, small states and human bodies. Julia Ott of the New School in New York delivered the keynote address on “From the Jim Crow South to Global Neoliberalism”. This can be viewed below.

Julia Ott: From the Jim Crow South to Global Neoliberalism