Environmental | Department of History

Environmental historians investigate the co-determining relation of humans to the natural world from the distant past to the present. Major topics of study include environmental degradation, energy use, ecological exchange, co-evolution, resource scarcity, and changing ideas of nature. Environmental historians also uncover neglected physical and ecological dimensions of historical processes such as industrialization, warfare, and imperialism. During the last twenty years, the geographic and methodological base of environmental history has expanded and fractured into a number of subfields. Transnational and non-Western subjects have made important inroads. Environmental historians have also started looking to the history of science and technology for new topics and methodologies. Anthropogenic climate change offers an all too pressing example of this kind of intertwining of human technology, political economy and the natural world.

At the University of Chicago environmental history is closely linked to the study of economic development and the history of empires. Our faculty and students are also taking a leading role in exploring the new conceptual framework of the Anthropocene and its implications for historical scholarship.

Elizabeth Chatterjee Areas of Study: Environmental Political Economy South Asia On Leave Winter 2025 Office: Social Science Research Building, room 514
Mailbox 80 Phone: (773) 702-8018 Email Interests:

Environmental history; energy; infrastructure; modern India; capitalism in the global South; climate change

Assistant Professor of Environmental History and the College

University of Oxford, DPhil '15

BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Chatterjee is a historian of energy and the environment, with a focus on India from 1900 to the present. Her research explores how non-Western energy histories disrupt conventional understandings of capitalist development and the social dynamics of climate change.

Chatterjee’s first book manuscript, Electric Democracy: An Energy History of India from Colonialism to Climate Change (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), traces the flows of electricity to provide an energy-centered history of India’s transforming political economy since the late colonial period. In so doing, it seeks to trace the very different dynamics underlying the later, Asian-centric phase of the Great Acceleration in human impacts on the planet. In place of the conventional emphasis on North Atlantic industrialists and private multinationals, it locates the postcolonial state and popular pressures for cheap energy at the heart of our contemporary environmental predicament.

Chatterjee’s second book-length project will provide a novel perspective on the worldwide environmental and energy crisis of the early 1970s as seen from the oil-importing global South, experimenting with how historians might deploy the multisystemic lens of Earth System Science as a methodological approach. She is exploring the links between this crisis and India’s turn to both authoritarianism and fossil fuels during this decade. At the same time, she continues to work on a wide variety of other topics in energy history, including the “infrastructural turn” in environmental history, dams that cause earthquakes, and the twentieth-century history of cow dung energy.

Chatterjee holds faculty appointments in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Committee on International Relations. She also serves on the board of the UChicago Center in Delhi.

Recent course offerings

Energy in World Civilization II
Infrastructure Histories
Environmental Histories of the Global South
How (Not) to Save the World: The History of International Development
The History of Indian Capitalism
Environmental History (graduate colloquium)

Podcast interviews

"Environmental Crisis and Recovery," History in Focus, season 2, episode 10 (June 2024).
"India and the 1970s Energy Crisis w/ Elizabeth Chatterjee," American Prestige (September 2024).

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Selected Publications

“Dams and the Deep Earth: The 1967 Koyna Earthquake and Human Agency in the Anthropocene” (with Sachaet Pandey-Geeta Mantraraj), Past & Present (accepted for publication).
“Late Acceleration: The Indian Emergency and the Early 1970s Energy Crisis,” American Historical Review 129, no. 2 (2024).
“Towards an Energetics of Class: Comparing Energy Protests in India and the United States,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 66, no. 3 (2024).
“The Poor Woman’s Energy: Low-Modernist Solar Technologies and International Development, 1878–1966,” Journal of Global History 18, no. 3 (2023).
“India’s Oligarchic State Capitalism,” Current History, April 2023.
“Fossil Fuels from Extraction to Emissions” (with Antoine Acker, Lukas Becker, Nathalia Capellini, and Matthew Shutzer), in Emily O’Gorman, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart, and William San Martín (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023.
“New Developmentalism and Its Discontents: State Activism in Modi’s Gujarat and India,” Development and Change 53, no. 1 (2022).
“State Capitalism in India” (with Rohit Chandra), in Mike Wright, Geoffrey Wood, Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Pei Sun, Ilya Okhmatovskiy, and Anna Grosman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on State Capitalism and the Firm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
“Numbers Without Experts: The Populist Politics of Quantification,” in Christopher Newfield, Anna Alexandrova, and Stephen John (eds.), The Limits of the Numerical: The Uses and Abuses of Quantification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
“The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism,” Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 1 (2020).
Editor, with Matthew McCartney, Class and Conflict: Revisiting Pranab Bardhan’s Political Economy of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020.
“A Climate of Scarcity: Electricity in India, 1899–2016,” in John Brewer, Neil Fromer, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability, 1800–2075. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
“The Politics of Electricity Reform: Evidence from West Bengal, India,” World Development 104 (2018).
“Reinventing State Capitalism in India: A View from the Energy Sector,” Contemporary South Asia 25, no. 1 (2017).
“Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia” (with Sneha Krishnan and Megan Eaton Robb), Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 27, no. 4 (2017).

Aaron Jakes Areas of Study: Empires/Imperialism Environmental Intellectual International Islam and the Middle East Political Economy On Leave Autumn 2024 Office: William Rainey Harper Memorial Library, East Tower, room 689 Mailbox 13 Phone: (773) 834-6771 Email Interests:

Middle East history; capitalism; economic history; British Empire; environmental history; global and comparative history; political and social movements; political-economic thought

Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and the College

New York University, PhD '15

BIOGRAPHY

I am a scholar of the modern Middle East specializing in the historical geography of global capitalism, comparative studies of colonialism and empire, and environmental history.

Over the past decade of research and teaching, my overarching concern has been to address, simultaneously, two related challenges. First, as a historian of the postcolonial world, I am to pursue and develop new approaches to the critical study of global capitalism that demonstrate the continued relevance of insights and concerns that have animated the long and varied tradition of political economy. But second, drawing directly on the critiques of Eurocentrism and economic determinism that have been so central to the project of postcolonial studies, I seed to produce and teach historical narratives that unsettle the longstanding tendency to treat the “rest of the world” as mere passive recipients of ideas and processes that originate elsewhere.

My first book project, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2020) explores both the political economy of the Egyptian state and the role of political-economic thought in the struggle over British rule in Egypt following the occupation of 1882. For decades, Egypt has stood as a paradigmatic case of peripheral development in the capitalist world economy. From this perspective, the advent of Britain’s “veiled protectorate” after 1882 simply reinforced Egypt’s prior status as a vast plantation for the production of raw cotton and a market for industrial goods from Europe. All but obscured in such accounts is Egypt’s emergence as a key site for investment and experimentation in the worldwide financial expansion that characterized global capitalism at the close of the nineteenth century. Egypt’s Occupation tells the story of that financial boom and the crisis that followed. And the book goes on to demonstrate that this long-neglected process of financialization was of central importance to the politics of British rule. Across the four decades from the invasion of 1882 to Britain’s unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922, Egypt’s Occupation traces the complex career of the discourse I refer to as “colonial economism.” From the outset, British officials held that Egyptians, as racially distinctive human subjects, were capable of no more and no less than a bare recognition of their immediate material interests; the legitimacy of imperial rule would, accordingly, vary as a direct function of the “economic development” that British reform could deliver. In grappling with a discourse of colonial improvement that appeared to be succeeding on its own terms, Egypt’s early nationalist thinkers elaborated their own alternative accounts of the ephemeral and uneven qualities of financialization. They thereby articulated a range of rigorous, if fragmentary, critiques of the political and economic theories upon which the British had built their project of rule. In time, these efforts to find grounds for national sovereignty beyond the mere calculus of economic gain and lost shaped both the conceptual apparatus and the political strategies through which a growing nationalist movement sought to bring the occupation to an end.

Over the past few years, I have begun work on a new project, tentatively entitled Tilted Waters: The World the Suez Canal Made. Spanning more than two centuries, from the earliest European proposals to excavate a channel through the Isthmus of Suez to the Egyptian military regime’s current efforts to remake the waterway and its environs into a major processing hub and free trade zone, the book will explore the many and shifting roles that the Suez Canal has played in the production of global inequalities.

Before joining the Department of History, I was assistant professor of historical studies at The New School in New York City. I have also held fellowships at Yale University’s Program in Agrarian Studies and George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Selected Publications

“Peaceful Wars and Unlikely Unions: The Azhar Strike of 1909 and the Political of Comparison in Egypt,” Comparative Studies of Society and History (2022): 1-26.
Coauthored with Ahmad Shokr, “Capitalism in Egypt, Not Egyptian Capitalism,” in Joel Beinin, Bassam Haddad, and Sherene Seikaly, eds., A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020): pp. 123-142.
Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).
Coauthored with Ahmad Shokr, "Finding Value in Empire of Cotton," Critical Historical Studies Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 2017): 107-136.
"Review: John Chalcraft, Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)," Middle East Journal Volume 70, No. 4 (Autumn 2016): 688-691.
“Boom, Bugs, Bust: Egypt's Ecology of Interest, 1882-1914,” Antipode (February 2016).
“Review Essay: A New Materialism? Globalization and Technology in the Age of Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies Vol. 47, No. 2 (April 2015): 369-381.
“The Scales of Public Utility: Agricultural Roads and State Space in the Era of the British Occupation,” in Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman, eds., The Long 1890s in Egypt (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2014): 57-86.
“Review: Raouf Abbas & Assem El-Dessouky, The Large Landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt, 1837-1952, Amer Mohsen with Mona Zirki trans., (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012)," Economic History Review, 66, 2 (2013): 676-8.
“Review Essay: The Invisible State,” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX, No. 1(Spring 2012): 236-245
“Review: Michael Ezekiel Gasper, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt (2009),” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (Spring 2010): 374-8.

Professor Emeritus of the College, the New Collegiate Division, and International History

Prof. Hevia has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.

University of Chicago, PhD '86

BIOGRAPHY

James Hevia's research has focused on empire and imperialism in eastern and central Asia. Primarily dealing with the British Empire in India and southeast Asia and the Qing empire in China, the specific concerns have been with the causes and justifications for conflict; how empire in Asia became normalized within Europe through markets, exhibitions, and various forms of public media; and how the events of the nineteenth century are remembered in contemporary China. Both Cherishing Men from Afar (1995) and English Lessons (2003) focus on these issues. Subsequent research has centered on how the British in India developed and became dependent upon the production of useful knowledge about populations, geography, and pack animals to maintain their Asian empire. The first part of this project deals with military intelligence and appears in The Imperial Security State (2012). The second part of the project addresses military logistics, the uses of pack animals in warfare, the emergence of tropical veterinary medicine, and the physical transformation of the Punjab as a resource for supporting a security regime in northwest India. These subjects are taken up in Animal Labor & Colonial Warfare (2018). The third part of the project, now underway, considers the impact on India of new agricultural sciences that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. Imperial Pests will focus attention on applied or economic botany and entomology and demonstrate how “constructive colonialism” in India situated imperial development projects in a global scientific network. It will specifically address the war on insect and weed “pests” and the long-term ecological impact on post-colonial nations-states in South Asia.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

Animal Labor & Colonial Warfare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-building in Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Yingguode Keye: Shijiu Shiji Zhongguo de Diguo Zhuyi Jiaocheng (English Lessons). Translated by Liu Tianlu. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2007.

English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2003.

Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Chinese translation: Huairou yuanren. Beijing: Social Sciences Publishing House, 2002.

Winner of the 1997 Joseph R. Levenson Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies.

"Tribute, Asymmetry, and Imperial Formations: Rethinking Relations of Power
in East Asia." In Past and Present in China's Foreign Policy, edited by John E. Wills. Portland, MN: Merwin Asia, 2011.

"Small Wars and Counterinsurgency." In Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, edited by John D. Kelly et al., 169–177. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

"Tribute, Asymmetry, and Imperial Formations: Rethinking Relations of Power
in East Asia." Journal of American-East Asian Relations, special edition, From "Tribute System" to "Peaceful Rise": American Historians, Political Scientists, and Policy Analysts Discuss China's Foreign Relations 16, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2009): 69–83.

"'The ultimate gesture of deference and debasement': Kowtowing in China." The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives 203 (2009): 212–234.

"The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer China, Making Civilization (1900–1901)." In Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, edited by Rosalind Morris, 79–119. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

"Plunder, Markets, and Museums: The Biographies of Chinese Imperial
Objects in Europe and North America." In What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context, edited by Morgan Pitlka, 29–141. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.

"Rulership and Tibetan Buddhism in Eighteenth-Century China: Qing Emperors, Lamas and Audience Rituals." In Medieval and Early Modern Rituals: Formalized Behavior in the East and West, edited by Joelle Rollo-Koster, 279–302 Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002.

"World Heritage, National Culture, and the Restoration of Chengde." Positions 9, no. 1 (2001): 219–244.

"Looting Beijing, 1860, 1900." In Tokens of Exchange, edited by Lydia Liu, 192–213. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

"The Archive State and the Fear of Pollution: From the Opium Wars to Fu-Manchu." Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 234–264.

"Leaving a Brand on China." In Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, edited by Tani E. Barlow, 113–140. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

"Imperial Guest Ritual: A Translation and Introductory Comments." In Religions of China, edited by Donald Lopez, 471–487. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

"An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game: Thomas Francis Wade in China." Late Imperial China 16, no. 2 (1995): 1–22.

News

Named a 2015–16 National Humanities Center Fellow
Discusses "The Afterlives of Ruins: The Yuanmingyuan in China and the West" at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing [video, 66 minutes]

Dipesh Chakrabarty Areas of Study: Empires/Imperialism Environmental International Legal South Asia Affiliated Faculty, Department of English
Resource Faculty, Department of Comparative Literature
Resource Faculty, Department of Cinema and Media Studies
Courtesy Appointment, Law School
Faculty Fellow, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory
Resource Faculty, Cinema and Media Studies and Comparative Literature
Visiting Distinguished Professor, School of Culture, History, and Language, The Australian National University, Canberra Office: Foster Hall, room 208 Phone: (773) 702-8642 Email Interests:

Modern South Asian history and historiography; postcolonial studies; theory and history; globalization; climate change and human history

Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College

Affiliated Faculty, Department of English
Courtesy Appointment, Law School
Faculty Fellow, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory
Visiting Distinguished Professor, School of Culture, History, and Language, The Australian National University, Canberra

Australian National University, PhD ' 84

BIOGRAPHY

Dipesh Chakrabarty holds a BSc (physics honors) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate Diploma in management (considered equivalent to MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD (history) from the Australian National University. He is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College. He is a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and, by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School.

He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. He has also served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture.

Honors and Awards (Selected)

Awarded the Prix Européen de l’Essai or the European Essay Prize for Après le changement climatique: penser l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2023), the French translation of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021)
DLitt. (Honoris Causa), University of London (conferred at Goldsmiths), 2010
Honorary doctorate, University of Antwerp, Belgium, 2011
Honorary doctorate, École Normale Supérieure, 2021
Toynbee Foundation Prize, for contributions to global history, 2014
Tagore Memorial Prize, Government of West Bengal, 2019, for The Crises of Civilization (2018)
Jadunath Sarkar Memorial Gold Medal, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata, 2021 for contribution to History
Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Honorary Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities
Fellow, British Academy

Fellowships and Visiting Professorships (Selected)

Visiting Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Historical Sciences, 2005
American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Fellowship, 2005–6
Honorary Professorial Fellow, School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne, 2007–2011
Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, 2008–9
Fellow, Institute of Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, 2010
Hallsworth Visiting Professor, University of Manchester, 2010
Dean’s Distinguished Visitor, College of Asia and Pacific, Australian National University, 2015–2027
Visiting Professor, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 2019
Visiting Professor, The University of Technology, Sydney, Australia (to present)

Research Supervision

Chakrabarty’s current students in History and SALC work on a variety of topics: 20th-century Kerala, prostitution in British India, India-China relations in the 1950s, modern Islam in Bangladeshi history, youth culture in colonial Bengal, the history of modern Bengali music, state-making and representations of royalty in Nepal, the labor history of Bombay, and the energy history of Maharashtra.

Recently completed theses include work on epidemics in the British Empire, the history of the Sino-Indian boundary, the history of the idea of “popular sovereignty” in colonial India, Yunani medicine, the politics of water in Pakistan, India reform societies in nineteenth-century Britain, slavery in south India, environmental consciousness in Hindi literature, the East India Company in the eighteenth century, the Vaishnava movement in nineteenth-century Bengal, the history of the film industry in Bengal, the history of housing in Bombay in the early part of the twentieth century, comparative indigenous histories of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the culture-concept in Bengali history, visual aspects of the rebellion of 1857, the making of the Indian constitution, the sixties in Pakistan, low-caste politics in Bengal during the Partition, Assam tea-plantations, missionaries in Orissa, religious thought among Bengali Muslims in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass politics in Bangladesh, labor in Delhi, the history of the Anglo-Indian communities in India, the history of photo-journalism in Bengal, the evolution of the qazi and mufti in British India, and the intellectual history of Mughal India.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books in English

Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton, 1989; 2000)
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000; second edition, 2008) – translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Polish, Turkish, Korean, and Russian
Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002) – translated into Arabic (Kalima, 2011)
The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth, c. 1900–1950 (Chicago, 2015)
The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (Delhi: Oxford, 2018) with Ranajit Dasgupta, Some Aspects of Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century: Two Views (Delhi: Oxford, 2019) – translated into Bengali
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021; New Delhi: Primus, 2021) – Translated into German, Spanish, and French with Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese translations forthcoming
One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (Brandeis, 2023) – Korean translation forthcoming

Invited Lectures (Recent, Selected)

Lectures in the Human Sciences, Institute for the Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, 2014
Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Souls’ College, Oxford, 2014
Tanner Lectures in Human Values, Yale, 2015
Mandel lectures in the Humanities, Brandeis, 2017
History and Theory annual lecture, Harvard, 2017
inaugural Halle Lectures in the Humanities, Halle, 2018
William James Lecture, Harvard Divinity School, 2019
Sixth Annual Ikeda Lecture on Peace and Harmony, Singapore Management University, Singapore, 2020
inaugural Contributions to Indian Sociology Lecture, Indian Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, 2021
Golden Jubilee lecture, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, 2023
What We Have in Common in this Fragmented World,” General Conference, UNESCO, 2023
keynote, European Congress of Theology, Heidelberg, 2024
Smuts Memorial Lectures, University of Cambridge, March 2025

Edited Books and Journals

with Shahid Amin, Subaltern Studies IX (Delhi: Oxford, 1996)
with Carol Breckenridge, Homi Bhabha, and Sheldon Pollock, Cosmopolitanism (Duke, 2000)
with Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori, From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Delhi: Oxford, 2007)
with Bain Attwood and Claudio Lomnitz, “The Public Life of History,” a special issue of Public Culture (2008)
with Henning Trueper and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2015)

Books in Bengali

Itihasher janajibon o anyanyo probondho [The Public Life of History and Other Essays] (Kolkata: Ananda, 2011)
Monorather Thikana [Where the Mind Travels], ed. Sanjib Mukhopadhyay (Kolkata: Anustup, 2018) – Shortlisted for the Ananda literary prize in Calcutta in 2019
Bondhur chithi Bondhuke [Letters Between Friends] (Kolkata: Anustup, 2019) – correspondence between Dipesh Chakrabarty and the deceased Bengali writer Raghab Bandyopadhyay, 2003–2016
Smriti, Satta, Songlap [Memories, Identities, and Conversations] (Calcutta: Nirjhor Publications, 2023)

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

"On the Mexican Ejido." Humanity 11.2.
“Chico Franco y Nicolás Zapata.” Revista NEXOS (August 2019).
“El alma perdida del Plan de Ayala.” Revista NEXOS (July 2019).
"La caja de hojalata." Revista NEXOS (June 2019).
"El ejido de Anenecuilco." Revista NEXOS (May 2019).
"La historia al revés." Revista NEXOS (Apr. 2019).
"Sobre la propiedad comunal de los pueblos: De la Reforma a la Revolución." Historia Mexicana (264) 66, no. 4 (Apr.–June 2017): 1,923–60.
"La promesa agraria del artículo 27.” Revista NEXOS (Feb. 2017).
"La invención del ejido." Revista NEXOS (Jan. 2015).
"Claroscuros de la reforma agraria mexicana." Revista NEXOS (Dec. 2010).
Revolución y exilio en la historia de México: Homenaje a Friedrich Katz. Coedited with Javier Garciadiego. Mexico: Ediciones Era, coedition with the Colegio de México and the Katz Center for Mexican Studies, 2010.
Editor. En busca de Molina Enríquez: cien años de Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales. Mexico: coedition with the Colegio de México and the Katz Center for Mexican Studies, 2009.
"Manuel Gamio y el Indigenismo de la Revolución Mexicana." In Historia de los intelectuales en América Latina, vol 2, edited by Carlos Altamirano. Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2010
"John Womack: sobre historia e historiadores." Revista Temas (2008). Interview.
"Aspectos económicos de la desamortización de las tierras de los pueblos." In España y México, ¿Historias económicas paralelas?, edited by Rafael Dobado, Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, and Graciela Márquez. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007.
A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
"Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfirian Mexico: The Unexamined Legacies of Andrés Molina Enríquez." The Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1 (Feb. 2002).
"El comercio de exportación en Tuxpan, 1870–1900." In El siglo XIX en las Huastecas, México, edited by Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Luz Carregha Lamadrid. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Esudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2002.
"Economía y comunidad en Papantla: reflexiones sobre 'la cuestión de la tierra' en el siglo XIX." In Estructuras y formas agrarias en México: del pasado al presente, edited by Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Teresa Rojas Rabiela, 197–214. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Esudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2001.
"La vainilla de Papantla: Agricultura, comercio y sociedad rural en el siglo XIX." Signos Históricos 3 (2000).
"Lo agrario y lo agrícola: reflexiones sobre el estudio de la historia rural posrevolucionaria." Boletín del Archivo General Agrario 3 (July 1998).

News

Joins panel discuss on Mexico's presidential election, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Jan. 28, 2019
Delivers a talk on "Friedrich Katz Agraian Mexico," Freie Universität Berlin
Discusses Article 27 of the Constitution of Mexico, Revista NEXOS, Feb. 2017
Discusses agrarian reforms, "La invención del ejido," iRevista NEXOS, Jan. 2015
Hosts the XIV Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México as director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies, University of Chicago
Advised curators on the exhibit, "Researching Mexico: University of Chicago Field Explorations in Mexico, 1896–2014," Special Collections. Seonaid Valiant, PhD '14, cocurated the show.

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.

News

Delivered convocation address, Graham School [20 mins]
Participates in Q&A on how to teach the Anthropocene, EuropeNow, with syllabus
Received 2016 Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
Coorganized "Climate Change: Disciplinary Challenges to the Humanities and Social Sciences"
Organized "Global Midwest" conference
Discusses effective public speaking for AHA Today (blog)

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

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind, Scarcity: Economy and Nature in the Age of Capitalism, under contract with Harvard University Press, 2023.
Coauthor with Vicky Albritton. Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin's Lake District. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Ruskin Society Book Prize 2016 (runner up).
Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

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.

News

Co-authors "Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Academic Travel," Inside Higher Ed, Apr. 18, 2019
Launches planetary history research project with Dipesh Chakrabarty
Participates in Q&A on how to teach the Anthropocene, EuropeNow, with syllabus
Discusses Amitav Ghosh’s recent book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in an article in the Guardian.
Coauthors, with Vicky Albritton, Green Victorians: the Simple Life in John Ruskin's Lake District (Chicago, 2016). Ruskin Society Book Prize 2016 (runner up).
Coorganizes "Climate Change: Disciplinary Challenges to the Humanities and Social Sciences" at the Neubauer Collegium
Delivers the inaugural T. C. Smout Lecture in Scottish History on the "Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism" [audiocast, 55 minutes
Talks at the Social Life of Forests Conference on "Invisible Forests: Natural Knowledge in the Making of Classical Economics" [video, 27 minutes]

Outreach

Co-author with Rachael Osborn, Mark Fiege and Will Wright, Amicus brief of environmental historians, Juliana v. United States, February 22, 2019.

Kenneth Pomeranz Areas of Study: East Asia Empires/Imperialism Environmental International Political Economy Social History Office: Social Science Research Building, room 218 Mailbox 111 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).

News and Awards

Receives Dan David Prize, 2019.
Publishes 4th edition (with Steven Topik) of The World that Trade Created (2017)
Publishes Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present. Part 1: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making and Part 2: Shared Transformations?
Leads Mellon Foundation Pilot Project on Professional Careers for Historian
L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales selects The Great Divergence as one of the top 40 books of the last 40 years.
Delivers the Schouler Lectures on "Why Is China So Big?" at Johns Hopkins University (2014)
Speaks on "Property Rights and Community Membership in the Late Imperial and Twentieth-Century Yangzi Delta," Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago (2014) [video, 47 minutes]
Delivers the University of Chicago Harper Lecture on the "Unique Patterns of Chinese Economic Development" [video, 85 minutes]
Serves as president of the American Historical Association