In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, industry and finance matured together, pushing people into motion around the world. The instruments of long-distance trade, like insurance, credit and debt, connected cities and continents in new and sometimes unsettling ways. The free movement of goods and cash was mirrored by restrictions on migration to some parts of the world and by forced or coerced migration to others. This course explores the history of the rise of global capitalism at a human scale, exploring how financialization, industrialization and imperialism overlapped and intertwined, and how the remaking of the world in the image of capital weighed on human lives.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, industry and finance matured together, pushing people into motion around the world. The instruments of long-distance trade, like insurance, credit and debt, connected cities and continents in new and sometimes unsettling ways. The free movement of goods and cash was mirrored by restrictions on migration to some parts of the world and by forced or coerced migration to others. This course explores the history of the rise of global capitalism at a human scale, exploring how financialization, industrialization and imperialism overlapped and intertwined, and how the remaking of the world in the image of capital weighed on human lives.
