Global Intellectual History and the History of Capital: Toward a Social History of Concepts

We’re thrilled to announce a new issue in our journal, Critical Historical Studies! Devoted to research on the implications of socio-economic transformations for cultural, political, and social change, the latest issue of Critical Historical Studies draws attention to how forms of economic practice help illuminate social imaginaries and asks to what extent writing the history of ideas is also a task of economic and social history or a task of critical theory.

In conjunction with this latest issue, CHS editor and author Andrew Sartori will discuss intellectual history as mode of critical history, one that is presently in pursuit of global scale. If intellectual history is to “go global,” what should this new turn look like? One approach has been to emphasize the circulation of texts, people and ideas, focusing on the connectedness of intellectual fields dispersed across conventional national and civilizational boundaries. Andrew’s talk will instead sketch a conception of global intellectual history that roots the global dissemination of concepts in local and regional histories of capital.

Andrew Sartori is professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Liberalism in Empire (University of California Press, 2014) and Bengal in Global Concept History (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and he coedited Global Intellectual History (Columbia UP 2013) with Samuel Moyn. He is also coeditor of the journal Critical Historical Studies.