Photo of Emily Lynn Osborn
Emily Lynn Osborn Areas of Study:
Africa Empires/Imperialism Environmental Gender and Sexuality Social History
Office: Social Science Research Building, room 516 Mailbox 99 Phone: (773) 834-9019 Email Interests:

African history; Francophone Africa; gender in Africa; colonialism; technology transfer and diffusion
Associate Professor of African History, African Studies, and the College

Stanford University, PhD '00

Emily Lynn Osborn is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the College. 
Affiliated Faculty, Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
Faculty Board, Center for International Social Science Research
Faculty Board, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights

BIOGRAPHY

Osborn is a historian of Africa, with a particular interest in precolonial and colonial West Africa. She is currently the Faculty Director of the Senegal study abroad program, and she has also served as co-director of the Committee on African Studies, chair of the College’s British fellowships committee, and on the Faculty Boards of the Center for International Social Science Research and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. She is also the Faculty Director of the Social Sciences Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows program and an editor of The Journal of African History.

Her first book, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule, uses gender analysis to investigate the intertwined history of household making and statecraft in Kankan, Upper Guinée (located in Guinea). Other topics on which Osborn has published include the history of technology transfer and diffusion in West Africa; the role of intermediaries in colonial rule, the Anthropocene in Africa; the history and cultural significance of the color red in the Atlantic world; and the relationship in West Africa of containers and mobility. She has also researched the effort by the United States government in the 1950s and 1960s to export the model of the land grant university to Africa.

Osborn earned her A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE and Fulbright-Hays fellowships and by the American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research council. Before coming to the University of Chicago, Osborn served as the Carl E. Koch Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

TEACHING INTERESTS

At the University of Chicago, Prof. Osborn teaches courses on precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial African history; graduate and undergraduate seminars on African historiography; oral sources of history; gender and state-craft; as well as histories on enslavement, the transatlantic commerce in enslaved peoples, and the making of the Atlantic world.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications
  • “Containers and Mobility in West Africa.” In "On Containers," edited by Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Lord Smail. Special issue, History and Anthropology 29, no. 1 (2018): forthcoming.
  • Editor, The Journal of African History.
  • "Containers, Energy, and the Anthropocene in West Africa." In Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa, edited by Gareth Austin. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
  • "From Bauxite to Cooking Pots: Aluminum, Chemistry, and West African Artisanal Production." In "Exploring Global History through the Lens of History of Chemistry," edited by Lissa Roberts. Special issue, History of Science 54, no. 4 (Dec. 2016): 425–42.
  • "Red Echoes of Enslavement: Cochineal Red, West Africa, and the Slave Trade." In A Red Like No Other: How Cochineal Colored the World, edited by Carmella Padilla and Barbara Anderson. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2015.
  • "Work and Migration." In The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, edited by Richard Reid and John Parker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule. Athens: Ohio University Press, New African Histories, 2011.
  • "Casting Aluminium Cooking Pots: Labour, Migration and Artisan Production in West Africa’s Informal Sector, 1945–2005." African Identities 7, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 373–86.
  • "Loyalty, Perfidy, and Scandal in Guinée Française: The Noirot-Penda Affair." In Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa, edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
  • Coauthor with Richard Roberts and Benjamin Lawrance. "Introduction: Intermediaries and the Making of Colonial Africa." In Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa, edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
  • "'Rubber Fever,' Commerce and French Colonial Rule in Upper Guinée, 1890–1913." Journal of African History 45 (2004): 445–65.
  • "'Circle of Iron': African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa, 1890–1910." Journal of African History 44 (2003): 27–48. Reprinted in The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires: Social Organisation, vol. I, edited by Owen White. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013.
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Photo of Mary Hicks
Mary Hicks Areas of Study:
Africa Caribbean-Atlantic History Cultural Empires/Imperialism Gender and Sexuality Latin America Political Economy Race
Office: Social Science Research Building, room 503 Mailbox 51 Phone: (773) 702-7858 Email Interests:

Slavery and Emancipation, the Atlantic world, Brazil, early modern capitalism, colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality
Associate Professor of History and the College

University of Virginia, PhD '15

BIOGRAPHY

Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

More broadly, she seeks to interrogate the multiplicity of connections between West Africa and Brazil through the lens of mutual cultural, technological, commercial, intellectual and environmental influences and redefine how historians understand experiences of enslavement and the middle passage. In addition to investigating the lives of African sailors, she also explores the cultural and religious sensibilities of enslaved and freed African women in living in 19th century Salvador da Bahia. Along these lines, her second book will detail the emergence and elaboration of new gendered and racialized subjectivities in the wake of Portugal’s initiation of trade with West Africa in the fifteenth century.

Prof. Hicks received her B.A. from the University of Iowa and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where she was a recipient of the Jefferson Fellowship. She has also received the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the Mamolen Fellowship at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She is the winner of the Southern Historical Association’s Latin American & Caribbean Section Dissertation Prize and been a finalist for the CGS/Proquest Distinguished Dissertation Award for the Humanities and Fine Arts.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books

  • Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835 (under contract with Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture for The University of North Carolina Press), forthcoming

Articles

  • “Transatlantic Threads of meaning: West African Textile entrepreneurship in Salvador da Bahia, 1770- 1870,” Slavery & Abolition 41:4 (December 2020), 695-722

  • “Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade: Collective Investment Practices from Portugal to Brazil, 1500-1840,” Journal of Global Slavery 2:3 (2017), 273-309

Book Chapters

  • “João de Oliveira’s Atlantic World: Mobility and Dislocation in Eighteenth-Century Brazil and the Bight of Benin,” in The Many Faces of Slavery: New Perspectives on Slave Ownership and Experiences in the Americas Eds. Lawrence Aje and Catherine Armstrong, (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2019)

  • “Middle Passage,” in 400 Souls, Eds. Keisha N. Blain and Ibram X. Kendi (New York: Basic Books, 2021)

Book Reviews

  • Review of Sharla Fett’s Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade in Black Perspectives (November 16, 2018)

  • Review of Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands in Black Perspectives (February 5, 2021)

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Photo of Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson Areas of Study:
Britain Early Modern Europe Empires/Imperialism Environmental Intellectual Political Economy Science and Medicine
Office: Social Science Research Building, room 217
Mailbox 92

 Phone: (773) 702-0638 Email Interests:

British history; the British Empire; the Enlightenment; science and environmental history; political economy; cornucopianism and the anthropocene
Associate Professor of British History, Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College

University of Chicago, PhD '05

BIOGRAPHY

My first book, Enlightenment's Frontier: the Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (Yale, 2013) investigates the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? This perspective recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.

My second book, Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin's Lake District (Chicago, 2016), coauthored with Vicky Albritton, considers the problem of the Anthropocene from the perspective of a late Victorian utopian movement. Green Victorians tells the story of the first "post-carbon" society in Britain, a community in the English Lake District dedicated to Arts and Crafts industry and simple living. This experiment was galvanized by precocious anxieties about anthropogenic climate change, voiced by the eccentric polymath John Ruskin. He convinced his supporters to reject coal and steam in favor of renewable energy and labor-intensive handicraft production. By creating a new culture of sufficiency, Ruskin and his followers sought to demonstrate that a simple material life was still compatible with a great measure of cultural creativity and intellectual freedom. Green Victorians explores the radical and material experience of Ruskin's community without shying away from the darker side of the movement, including its technophobia and paternalism.

My current research deals with a set of closely related themes in environmental history, history of science, and political economy. The British Industrial Revolution saw the birth of the first fossil fuel economy. At the same time, geologists transformed the public understanding of the earth's interior and deep past. My new project sets out to show that these developments—fossil growth and fossil science—converged to produce a fundamental reorientation of politics and culture towards cheap energy and cornucopian growth.

My research has been funded by fellowships from the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Monographs
Edited Volumes
  • Editor with John Brewer, Neil Fromer, and Frank Trentmann, Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability 1800-2075, Bloomsbury Press: 2019
Articles and Essays
  • “Ruskin in the Year of COVID 19,” Ruskin Birthday Reflections, Reilly Center, Notre Dame, February 8, 2021
  • Contributor to Roundtable on Duncan Kelly, Politics and the Anthropocene for H-Diplo.
  • “Natural History” in Old Ways New Roads, ed. Nigel Leask et al (Edinburgh: Birlinn 2021), museum catalogue for 2020 exhibition about Highland tour at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow
  • "The Coal Question Before Jevons." Historical Journal 62, no. 2 (June 2019).
  • "Growth in the Anthropocene." In Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society, and Sustainability, 1800–2075, edited by John Brewer, Neil Fromer, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, and Frank Trentmann. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2019.
  • “Roundtable: The Anthropocene in British History [with Chris Otter, Alison Bashford, John Brooke, and Jason Kelly]." Journal of British Studies 57, no. 3 (July 2018): 568–96.
  • "Abundance and Scarcity in Geological Time 1784–1844." In Nature, Action, and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment, edited by Katrina Forester and Sophie Smith, 70–93. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2018.
  • "Political Economy." In Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain, edited by Mark Bevir, 154–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  • "Scottish Tobacco and Rhubarb: The Natural Order of Civil Cameralism in the Scottish Enlightenment." Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 2 (Win. 2016): 129–47
  • "Adam Smith and Enlightenment Studies." In Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, edited by Ryan Patrick Hanley, 443–60. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
  • "Island, Nation, Planet: Malthus and the Enlightenment." In New Perspectives on Malthus, edited by Robert J. Mayhew, 128–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • "Climate Change and the Retreat of the Atlantic: The Cameralist Context of Pehr Kalm's Voyage to North America 1748–51" William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 1 (Jan. 2015).
  • "The Origins of Cornucopianism: A Preliminary Genealogy." Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1 (Spr. 2014).
  • "Adam Smith in the Forest." In The Social Lives of the Forests, edited by Susanna B. Hecht, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Christine Padoch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
  • "Natural History and Improvement: The Case of Tobacco." In Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, edited by Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • "A History of the Species?" Review essay of Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, edited by Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Lord Smail, History and Theory 52, no. 3 (Oct. 2013).
  • "The Industrial Revolution in the Anthropocene." Journal of Modern History 83, no. 3 (Sept. 2012).
  • "Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians." American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (Dec. 2010).
  • "Prudence and Magnanimity: Roundtable on Ryan Hanley's Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue." The Art of Theory: Conversations in Political Philosophy (Nov. 2010).
  • "Enlightened Hands: Managing Dexterity in British Medicine and Manufactures 1760–1800." In Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, edited by Christopher Forth and Ivan Crozier. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.
  • "The Physiology of Hypochondria in Eighteenth-Century Britain." In Cultures of the Abdomen: Dietetics, Digestion, and Fat in the Modern World, edited by Christopher E. Forth and Ana Cardin-Coyne. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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Photo of Steven Pincus
Steven Pincus Areas of Study:
Britain Caribbean-Atlantic History Early Modern Europe Empires/Imperialism International Legal Political Economy South Asia United States
Office: Social Science Research Building, room 505 Mailbox 28 Phone: (773) 702-9653 Email Interests:

Atlantic history; history of Britain; British Empire; history of Ireland; global history; early American history; history of the Netherlands; worldwide colonial rivalries of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; history of political economy; British Empire in South Asia; comparative revolutions; state formation; Industrial Revolution
Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History and the College

Harvard University, PhD' 90

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Britain and its Empire, of comparative revolutions, comparative empires, and of northern Europe more broadly. I am both a deeply committed archival historian and a scholar who believes profoundly that historians should engage with the social sciences. My first book, Protestantism and Patriotism, was an entangled and comparative study of English and Dutch politics, culture, and society in the mid-seventeenth century. I traced the decline of apocalyptic thinking and the rise of notions of political economy in England and the Dutch Republic. My second major monograph, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, offered both a major revisionist account of England's Glorious Revolution and a reappraisal of the literature on revolutions more broadly. I showed that far from being an unrevolutionary revolution, the Revolution of 1688 radically transformed English state and society. The revolution, I suggest, can only be understood by placing it in a European and global context. Since 1688 was a radical revolution, I suggest, it is imperative to rethink the nature of revolutions since so much of that literature assumed that the later eighteenth-century French Revolution was the first modern revolution. My third monograph, The Heart of the Declaration, argued that by placing the American Revolution and its seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, in an imperial rather than proto-national context it becomes clear that Americans broke away from Britain not because they resented the imperial state but because they wanted a different kind of state—one that would actively promote social and economic prosperity and equality.

 I am currently engaged in a number of research projects. For the past decade I have been working on a Global History of the British Empire, ca. 1650–1784. This book, based on research in a wide range of European, North American, and West Indian archives, insists that the British imperial state was just as institutional strong if structurally distinct, from its rivals. Throughout the empire Britons debated and fought over the kind of imperial state they wanted. Some wanted to focus on a political economy that privileged colonial production over one that emphasized colonial consumption; some wanted an empire that favored England, while others thought the empire should be organized as a confederation; some thought chattel slavery was essential to the prosperity of the empire while others decried cattle slavery as economically and morally deleterious; some thought the empire should protect and promote the development of indigenous peoples, while others thought indigenous peoples were a barrier to imperial development. I insist that accounts of the colonies that focus on the binary relationship between a particular colony or set of colonies and Britain will necessarily misunderstand that relationship. The British Empire can only be understood as a global phenomenon. It is essential to think the empire whole. I am working on a second monograph, Partners in Revolution, that compares the Irish Revolution of 1782 and the American Revolution. I highlight the social, cultural, and ideological similarities between the Irish and American situations. The book explains why Americans severed ties with the British Empire and the Irish did not. I suggest that one of the consequences of the abortive Irish Revolution was that the re-emergence of confessional divisions in Ireland. Finally, I am working on a set of essays (maybe a book) with James Robinson of Harris Public Policy, trying to explain British divergence: why was it that Britain, and not China, India, France, or the Dutch Republic, became the first industrial nation? Why did the British state take the distinctive form that it did?

My research has been supported over the years with fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. I have been a visitor at All Souls College (Oxford), EHESS (Paris), IMT (Lucca) and the University of Warwick.

I am deeply committed to both undergraduate and graduate education. I am happy to supervise senior theses and doctoral dissertations on any topic in British history, the history of the British Empire, Atlantic history, Dutch history, political economy, revolutions, comparative empires, history of European ideas, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious history, and the cultural history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.

I have supervised over twenty doctoral dissertations covering a wide range of topics. Some topics have included the origins of humanitarianism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the rise of the Patriot party in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the emergence of associational life in the British Empire, the East India Company and the emergence of British India, politics of the navy and the British Empire, the transformation of British India in the late eighteenth century, the Anglo-French-Indian struggle for the Ohio Valley, British imperial indigenous policy in Scotland, North America, and Bengal, the high church reaction to the Revolution of 1688, the remaking of the Church of England after the Act of Toleration, the Scottish Kirk in the early eighteenth century, the rise of opera in Britain, the making of the English Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, British monetary policy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of slave labor in the British Empire, Leisler's Rebellion and its consequences, British party politics in the early eighteenth century, the persistence of Catholicism in the British Empire, and many more.

I am a co-convenor of the History and Social Sciences and the Empires and the Atlantics forums.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications (Selected)

The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for Activist Government. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,, 2016.

co-edited with Peter Lake. The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: Public Persons and Popular Spirits. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012

1688:The First Modern Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

  • Morris D. Forkosch Prize,  American Historical Association
  • Gustav Ranis International Book Prize, Yale MacMillan Center
  • Bronze Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards

England’s Glorious Revolution 1688–1689: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006

co-edited with Alan Houston. A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Photo of Kenneth Pomeranz
Kenneth Pomeranz Areas of Study:
East Asia Empires/Imperialism Environmental International Political Economy Social History
Office: Social Science Research Building, room 218 Mailbox 111 Office hours: Spring Quarter 2025 Monday, 1:30-3:00pm and Wednesday, 10:30am-12:00pm, and by appointment Phone: (773) 834-4247 Email Interests:

Reciprocal influences of state, society, and economy in late Imperial and twentieth-century China; the origins of a world economy as the outcome of mutual influences among various regions; environmental history in China; comparative studies of labor, family organization, and economic change in Europe and East Asia; expansion of China to its present frontiers
University Professor of Modern Chinese History and the College

Yale University, PhD' 88

BIOGRAPHY

Kenneth Pomeranz is a University Professor of History and in the College; he previously taught at the University of California, Irvine. His work focuses mostly on China, though he is also very interested in comparative and world history. Most of his research is in social, economic, and environmental history, though he has also worked on state formation, imperialism, religion, gender, and other topics. His publications include The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), which won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the AHA, and shared the World History Association book prize; The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (1993), which also won the Fairbank Prize; The World that Trade Created (with Steven Topik, first edition 1999, 3rd edition 2012), and a collection of his essays, recently published in France. He has also edited or co-edited five books, and was one of the founding editors of the Journal of Global History. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other sources. His current projects include a history of Chinese political economy from the seventeenth century to the present, and a book called Why Is China So Big? which tries to explain, from various perspectives, how and why contemporary China's huge land mass and population have wound up forming a single political unit.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books

Coeditor with J. R. McNeill. Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present. Part 1: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making, The Cambridge World History, vol. VII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Coeditor with J. R. McNeill. Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present. Part 2: Shared Transformations? The Cambridge World History, vol. VII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Coeditor with Laura J. Mitchell and James B. Given. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A Companion Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. 

La Force de L’Empire: Révolution industrielle et écologie, ou pourquoi l’angleterre a fait mieux que la Chine. Edited, with an introduction, by Philippe Minard. Alfortville: Éditions ère, 2009.

The book collects various pieces of my work previously published in English, with some previously unpublished material added in Chapter II.

Editor, The Pacific in the Age of Early Industrialization. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009.

Coeditor with Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeffrey Wasserstrom. China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.

"Introduction: the Environment and World History" and "The Transformation of China's Environment, 1500–2000." In The Environment and World History, 1500–2000. Coedited with Edmund T. Burke III, 3–32, 118–164. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Coeditor with John McCusker, Stanley Engerman, David Hancock, and Lewis Cain. Encyclopedia of the History of World Trade. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale 2005. 

The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Coauthor with Steven Topik. The World that Trade Created: Society, Politics and an Emerging World Economy, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999; fourth edition, 2017.

The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 

Articles (Selected)
  • "Repenser le changement économique de longue durée: La Chine, l’Europe, et l’historie comparée." In L'histoire économique en mouvement: entre héritages et renouvellements, edited by Jean Claude Daumas, 293–310. Villieneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2012.
  • "Contemporary Development and Economic History: How Do We Know What Matters?" Economic History of Developing Regions, special issue for World Economic History Congress 27, no. 1 (2012): 134–145.
  • "The Great Divergence debate at 10—and at 250." Historically Speaking 12, no. 4 (September/October, 2011). Response to a forum on the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Great Divergence.
  • "Areas, Networks, and the Search for 'Early Modern' East Asia." In Comparative Early Modernities, edited by David L. Porter. London: Palgrave, 2012.
  • "Labor-Intensive Industrialization in the Yangzi Delta: Late Imperial Patterns and their Modern Fates." In Labor-Intensive Industrialization in Global History, edited by Kaoru Sugihara and G.M. Austin. London: Routledge, 2012.
  • Coauthor with Daniel Segal. "World History: Departures and Variations." In A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrop. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
  • "Advanced Agriculture." In The Oxford Handbook of World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, 246–266. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • "Labeling and Analyzing Historical Phenomena: Some Preliminary Challenges." Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 2, no. 1 (March 2011): 3–27.
  • "Commerce."  In The Oxford Concise Companion to World History, edited by U.C. Rublack, 105–128. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • "Their Own Path to Crisis? Social Change, State-Building, and the Limits of Qing Expansion, ca. 1770–1840." In The Age of Revolutions in a Global Context, edited by David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 189–208. New York: Palgrave, 2010.
  • "Putting Modernity in Its Place(s): Reflections on Jack Goody's The Theft of History." Theory, Culture, and Society 26, no. 7/8 (December 2009): 32–51.
  • "Shang xia Taishan—Zhongguo minjian xinyang zhengzhi zhong de Bixia yuanjun (yue gongyuan 1500 nian zhi 1949 nian." (Up and Down Mt. Tai—Bixia Yuanjun in the Politics of Chinese Popular Religion, ca 1500–1949) Xin shixue 20, no. 4 (December, 2009): 169–215.
  • "Le machinisme induit-il une discontinuité historique? Industrialisation, modernité précoce et formes du changement économique dans l’histoire globale." In Histoire globale, mondialisations, capitalisme, edited by P. Beaujard, L. Berger, and P. Norel, 335–373. Paris: La Découverte, 2009.
  • "Calamities Without Collapse: Environment, Economy and Society in China, ca. 1800–1949." In Questioning Collapse, edited by Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  • "The Great Himalayan Watershed: Agrarian Crisis, Mega-Dams, and the Environment." New Left Review 58 (July/August 2009): 5–39 (short version). Longer version published in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (July 27, 2009). Abridged version published in Engineering World (August/September 2009): 32–42.
  • "World History and Environmental History: Introducing an Agenda," and "China's State, Economy and Environment in Global Perspective, 1400–2000." In Environmental History and World History, edited by both in Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 3–32, 118–164. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
  • "Introduction: Industrialization and the pacific world ca. 1800-1930 - and beyond" In The Pacific in the Age of Early Industrialization, edited by Kenneth Pomeranz, xiii–xlix. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
  • "Rekishi wa gurobaru kenkyu ni dono yō na kōken ga de suru ka?" (What Does History Have to Offer to Global Studies?). In Gurobaru Hisutori no Chōsen (Challenges of Global History), edited by Mizushima Tsukasa, 46–55. Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2008.
  • "Land Markets in Late Imperial and Republican China." Continuity and Change 23, no. 1 (April 2008): 101–150.
  • "Chinese Development in Long-run Perspective." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152, no. 1 (March 2008): 83–100.
  • "Social History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change." Journal of World History 18, no. 1 (March 2007). Chinese translation, 2009
  • "Orthopraxy, Orthodoxy, and the Goddess(es) of Taishan." Modern China 33, no. 1 (January 2007): 22–46.
  • "Limian jingji: Zhonghua diguo wanqi de nongcun shouru, feiwendingxing yu xigbie guifan" (The Economics of Respectability: Rural Incomes, Instability, and Gender Roles in Late Imperial China). Jindai Zhongguo funu shi yanjiu (Research on Modern Chinese Women’s History) 14 (December 2006): 205–241. A revised and translated version of "Women's Work and the Economics of Respectability." In Gender in Motion, edited by Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
  • "Without Coal? Colonies? Calculus? Europe, China, and the Industrial Revolution." In Unmaking the West: "What-If" scenarios that Rewrite World History, edited by Ned Lebow, Geoffrey Parker, and Philip Tetlock, 241–276. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
  • "Imperialism, Development, and 'Civilizing' Missions, Past and Present." Daedalus (April 2005).
  • "Standards of Living in Eighteenth-Century China: Regional Differences, Temporal Trends, and Incomplete Evidence." In Standards of Living and Mortality in Pre-Industrial Times, edited by Robert Allen, Tommy Bengtsson, and Martin Dribe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • "Zhuanbian de diguo: Zhonghua diguo moqi de falu, shehui, shangyehua he guojia xingcheng" (An Empire in Transition: Law, Society, Commercialization, and State Formation in Late Imperial China). Zhongguo Xueshu 15 (Winter 2004).
  • "Shijie jingji shi zhong de jinshi Jiangnan: bijiao yu zonghe guancha" (Early Modern Jiangnan in Global Economic History: Comparative and Integrative Perspectives). Lishi yanjiu 284 (August 2003): 3–48.
  • "Women's Work, Family, and Economic Development in Europe and East Asia: Long-term Trajectories and Contemporary Comparisons." In The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150, and 50 Year Perspectives, edited by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden, 124–172. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
  • "Beyond the East-West Binary: Resituating Development Paths in the Eighteenth Century World." Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (May 2002): 539–590.
  • "Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture." American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (April 2002): 425–446. Translated and reprinted in Globalgeschichte: Theoriean, Ansätze, Themen, vol. 1, edited by Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert and Ulrike Freitag. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2007. Also translated and reprinted in La Rivoluzione industriale tra l’Europa e il mondo, edited by Tommaso Detti  and Giovanni Gozzinni. Milan: Pearson Paravia Bruno Mondadori, 2009.
  • "Is there an East Asian Development Path? Long-Term Comparisons, Constraints, and Continuities." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 44, no. 3 (2001): 322–362. Abridged and translated versions published in Japanese and German, 2003.
  • "Development, Disaggregation and Decline: Re-thinking the Chinese Economy, ca. 1730–1930." Itinerario (Winter 2001): 29–74. Translated version published in Chinese, 2010.
  • "Ritual Imitation and Political Identity in North China: The Late Imperial Legacy and the Chinese National State Revisited." Twentieth-Century China (formerly Republican China) 23, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 1–30.
  • "'Gentry Merchants' and Partnership Revisited: Family, Firm, and Financing in the History of the Yutang Enterprises of Jining, 1779–1956." Late Imperial China 18, no. 2 (June 1997): 1–38.
  • "Power, Gender, and Pluralism in the Cult of the Goddess of Taishan." In  Culture and State in Chinese History, edited by R. Bin Wong, Theodore Huters, and Pauline Yu. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
  • "Local Interest Story: State‑Making and Capital Markets in Shandong Province, 1900–1937." In Chinese History in Economic Perspective, edited by Thomas Rawski and Lillian Li, 295–318. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
  • "Water to Iron, Widows to Warlords: The Handan Rain Shrine in Modern Chinese History." Late Imperial China 12, no. 1 (June 1991).
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James T. Sparrow Areas of Study:
Empires/Imperialism Human Rights Intellectual International Political Economy United States South Asia
Office: Social Science Research Building, room 225D Mailbox 67 Office hours: Spring Quarter 2025 Wednesday, 3:00-5:00pm & by appointment https://calendly.com/jtsparrow/office-hours Phone: (773) 834-1271 Email Interests:

Modern US political history; political economy; war and society; human rights; America in the world; history of social science
Associate Professor in History and the College

Brown University, Ph'D 02

Office Hours:
Spring Quarter 2025
https://calendly.com/jtsparrow/office-hours

BIOGRAPHY

I am an historian of modern US politics broadly construed, with special interests in the mutual constitution of social categories, democratic publics, and state formation.

My first book, Warfare State, is a history of the social politics of the national state as its foundations shifted from welfare to warfare during World War II. Its central concern is to examine the ways in which different groups of citizens encountered the burgeoning warfare state and in the process accepted, rejected, or otherwise contested the legitimacy of expanding federal authority in everyday life, thereby shaping the horizons of political possibility for decades.

I am currently completing a sequel to Warfare State tentatively titled Sovereign Discipline: The American Extraterritorial State in the Atomic Age. This book examines the mass politics of extraterritorial sovereignty, and the crisis of legitimacy it engendered, from V-E Day to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My third book project is also nearing completion. It is an intellectual history titled New Leviathan: Rethinking Sovereignty and Political Agency after Total War.

Much of this recent work is informed by a long-term collaborative research project on the problem of the democratic state, which has benefitted from two Neubauer Collegium project grants for which I am codirector ("The State as History and Theory" and "The Problem of the Democratic State in US History"), and resulted in the edited collection Boundaries of the State in US History as well as two special issues of the Tocqueville Review.

My teaching interests include both graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of US politics, diplomacy, and war; social engineering; social movements; citizenship; America in the world; the American state; and a set of undergraduate research seminars on the history of the New Deal, the early Cold War, and digital history. I am also committed to teaching in Chicago's distinctive Core Curriculum. It is one of the oldest general education curricula in the United States, engaging foundational works and questions in the humanistic social sciences for decades since the 1930s.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books

Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

  • Honorable mention, 2012 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians.
  • Review by Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2012).
Special Issues and Edited Volumes
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  • Awarded 2023 Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching

  • Named an OAH Distinguished Lecturer

  • Co-organizes Major Project on "State as History and Theory" at the Neubauer Collegium

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