University of Chicago, PhD '08

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of the economy, the United States, and capitalism. In addition to being a member of the Department of History and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought I am the current Faculty Director of the Law, Letters, and Society program.

My most recent book is Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2021), which is a history of American economic life from British colonial settlement through the Great Recession. The book is also a single-volume history of the United States.

My next book, The Real Economy: History and Theory (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025) argues for a novel theory of the economy, its history, and its politics. It draws inspiration from the economics of Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes, and seeks to offer a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical and theoretical study from across the social sciences and humanities.

My future research projects include The Midas Touch, a global history of the demand for money from ancient times through the present, as well a planetary history of the city of Houston. I wrote a series of essays on Houston for the Visualizing Climate and Loss Project at Harvard’s Center for History and Economics.

My book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard, 2012), won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award and the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.

Recent Courses Offered

Undergraduate

• Property and the Public Interest
• The United States, 2000-2008
• History of Populism in the United States

Graduate

• The Global History of Money
• Topics in US History: The New Deal
• Emergence of Capitalism

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, traces the flows of electricity to provide an energy-centered history of India’s transforming political economy since independence in 1947. It analyzes the critical role of cheap energy in undergirding both economic development and democratization, and how political actors have sought to navigate between these competing processes. The book thus locates struggles for energy justice at the heart of climate history and the Anthropocene. In this and other published works, Chatterjee also examines India’s distinctive mode of state capitalism, showing that its basic structures have remained remarkably resilient even as the country has nominally liberalized since the 1980s.

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 early history of solar energy, the history of so-called fuel riots, and the “infrastructural turn” in environmental history.

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 is a non-resident Fellow of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a regular public commentator on South Asian affairs.

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

• History of Indian Capitalism

• Environmental History (graduate colloquium)

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.

Yale University, PhD '90

BIOGRAPHY

Amy Dru Stanley is a historian of the United States, with particular interest in law, capitalism, freedom and unfreedom, human rights, the relationship between the household and economic life, and the historical experience of moral problems. Her work has appeared in scholarly books and journals, as well as in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, Slate, and Jacobin. She has received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring. In 2018, she was the jury chair for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Harvard University, PhD '96

BIOGRAPHY

Emilio Kourí's main scholarly interest is in the history of rural Mexico since Independence, including society, economy, politics, culture, and the law. He is the author of A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico. It tells the story of the strife-ridden transformation of rural social relations in the Totonac region of Papantla during the course of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to how the progressive development of a campesino-based international vanilla economy changed and ultimately undermined local forms of communal landholding. A Pueblo Divided received the 2005 Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) and the 2005 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize (Honorable Mention) from the American Society for Ethnohistory. He is also the editor of En busca de Molina Enríquez: cien años de Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales and co-editor of Revolución y exilio en la historia de México: Homenaje a Friedrich Katz.

He is at work on a three-volume history of communal landholding in Mexico. Volume One examines the evolving meaning and practice of communal land tenure in Mexican villages during the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on changes brought about by agricultural commerce and commodification, population growth and mobility, socio-economic differentiation within and beyond villages, and the haphazard implementation of a multiplicity of liberal disentailment laws. Volume Two focuses on the Zapatista movement of the Mexican Revolution, offering a revisionist interpretation of its agrarian and political goals and practices and of its place in the land reform that would follow its demise. Volume Three explains the legal, political, and ideological origins of the collective land-grant community (ejido) created by the Mexican Revolution between 1915 and 1934. By 1992, when a constitutional amendment ended the redistribution program, more than two thirds of Mexico’s arable lands and forests were at least nominally in the hands of these land-grant communities—the most extensive state-managed land tenure transformation in the history of modern Latin America. Historians have long regarded the communal character given to ejido property as a return to forms of social organization rooted in Mexico’s indigenous past, and have considered it to be the fulfillment, at least in principle, of what villagers like Emiliano Zapata had long demanded and fought for. Against prevailing interpretations, Volume Three argues that the new ejido of the Revolution was not what country people (and especially the Zapatistas) had battled for. Rather, it was the piecemeal product of idealized notions of indigenous communal organization and historical practice hastily contrived by the "progressive" elites who won the Revolution and who were then compelled in fits and starts to make expedient agrarian reforms in order to build sorely needed popular political allegiances.

He teaches classes and seminars on land reforms, rural ecologies and social movements, indigenous societies, and the history of agrarian thought, as well as general courses on Latin American and Latino/a history, and is director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies.

Recent Course Offerings

• Tropical Commodities in Latin America

• Latin American History Seminar

• Zapatista Social Movements, Old and New

• Agrarian Reform in Twentieth-Century Mexico

• The History of Mexico, 1876 to the Present

• Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial Latin America

• US Latinos: Origins and Histories

• Latin American Civilizations

Harvard University, PhD '99

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of inequality and its persistence. I specialize in the study of Brazil and Latin America, and focus particularly on informality, cities, citizenship, law, migration, race, slavery and its afterlives.

My first book, A Poverty of Rights (Stanford, 2008), examines how weak citizenship rights and residential informality came to define urban poverty, popular social struggles, and the political dynamics of inequality in modern Brazil. It received book awards from the Social Science History Association, the Urban History Association, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Brazilian Studies Association.

A volume I coedited with Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero, Cities from Scratch (Duke, 2014), explores the many ways in which poverty and informality have shaped the Latin American urban experience. My essay, "A Century in the Present Tense," explores the intellectual history of the informal city, arguing that slums and shantytowns are dynamic historical phenomena in their own right rather than perpetual symptoms of current crises. In various other essays and ongoing research, I have focused on informality's relationship to developmentalism and political liberalism, slavery, racial inequality in law and urban space, criminal law, internal migrations, and the relationship between the urban poor and Brazil’s political left.

Along with Brazilian historian Keila Grinberg, I have edited a volume entitled The Boundaries of Freedom, which brings together essays by leading Brazilian and Brazilianist scholars of slavery and its afterlives. My own essay, “Slavery, Freedom and the Relational City,” focuses on how unfreedoms born of slavery continued to bind urban free and freedpeople during Brazil’s age of abolition.

My current book, Intimate Inequalities: Urbanism, Slavery, and Bounded Freedom in a Brazilian City, explores the historical co-evolution of urbanism and informality. The book is based in Recife, Brazil, a northeastern city that came to be seen as both the capital of Brazilian underdevelopment and the incubator of some of the country's most innovative social and cultural movements. Recife originated as a slave city, and the social and power relations that had sustained slavery continued to structure it long after abolition in 1888. Like many other cities across the globe, Recife evolved as a place where modern technologies, economies, and liberal institutions coexisted with and depended upon urban informality. Formal institutions and economies were embedded in an essentially relational city, in which personal connections mediated economic and political life and deep inequality structured vital (and often violent) intimate interdependencies. In the twentieth century, relational power proved remarkably adaptable, inhabiting liberal institutions and radical social movements, structuring "political society," and doing much to explain both social mobility and inequality's resilience. In exposing the microhistory of this phenomenon in Recife, I explore the emergence of urban informality as part and parcel of modern governance and bring into a focus a paradigm of urban modernity that shapes city life across the globe.

Other ongoing projects focus on the "Rights to the City" movement in law, political philosophy, and practice; and the global history of urban informality through a collaborative project entitled "La Ville informelle au XXe siècle: politiques urbaines et administration des populations."

At Chicago, I am part of the Faculty Advisory Committees for the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, the Art and Architecture Committee and the Latin America Faculty Working Group; and I am a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Outside of the University, I serve on the editorial boards of Past & Present and the Journal of Latin American Studies, as well as the international Advisory Committee for the Centro de Estudos da Metrópole in São Paulo and the board of the Urban History Association. My teaching focuses both on my core research interests and on the larger histories of Brazil, Latin America, cities, and social inequality. Before coming to Chicago, I taught at Amherst College and Northwestern University.

Columbia University, PhD '02

BIOGRAPHY

Paul Cheney is an historian of Europe with a specialization in old regime France and its colonial empire. Before beginning his PhD training in history at Columbia University, he studied political economy at the New School for Social Research. He has taught at Columbia University, the European College of Liberal Arts (Berlin), and the Queen's University of Belfast.

The unifying element of Professor Cheney’s work is an interest in early modern capitalism, and in particular the problem of how modern social and political forms gestated within traditional society. Old regime France serves as an excellent case study in this problem because of the way in which it combined real economic dynamism with deep-seated political and social impediments to growth. He addresses France’s integration into a globalized early modern economy in a methodology diverse way, drawing on intellectual, economic, and social history. His first book, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization in the French Monarchy (Harvard University Press, 2010), examined how French philosophes, merchants, and administrators understood the adaptability of the French monarchy to the modernizing forces of primitive globalization. Currently, he is working on a second book entitled, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (University of Chicago Press, 2017), a micro-history of one plantation in France’s richest colony. He has published in such journals as The William and Mary Quarterly, Past & Present, Dix-Huitième siècle, and Les Annales historiques de la révolution française.

Recent Graduate Courses

• The French Revolution

• Old Regime France

• Atlantic Worlds, c. 1700–1800

• Political Economy and the Invention of Society, c. 1680–1830

• Montesquieu and the Enlightenment, with Robert Morrissey, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

• Revolutionary Culture in Eighteenth-Century France and America, with Eric Slauter, Department of English

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.

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.