Our second talk this term! Alex Anievas gives an international historical account of the origins of capitalism!

RETHINKING THE ORIGINS OF CAPITALISM AND THE "RISE OF THE WEST": BEYOND THE EUROCENTRIC CAGE

with Alex Anievas

Room 4, Mill Lane Lecture Theatre, Cambridge
Tuesday, 3 November, 2015 @ 5-6:30PM

Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a fundamentally European process - a system born in the mills and factories of England or under the guillotines of the French Revolution. Drawing on his groundbreaking book with Kerem Nisancioglu, 'How the West Came to Rule', Alexander Anievas tell a very different story, offering a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. Anievas argues that contrary to dominant wisdom, capitalism’s origins should not be understood as confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but as the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role. Through an outline of the histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the Asian colonies and bourgeois revolutions, Anievas will give an account of how these events and processes came together to produce capitalism.

The book: Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu 2015: Capitalism: A History of Violence. Pluto Press.

Alexander Anievas is a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) In Cambridge. His research focuses on the development of non-Eurocentric approaches to international historical sociology and political economy, with a particular emphasis on the study of epochs of macro-historical change and conjunctures of interstate conflict, war and revolution. He is the author of 'Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945', and co-author of 'How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism.
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Welcome to the second of this term's Critical Theory and Practice seminars. The aim of these talks is to integrate radical theory with political practice and activism. Each talk consists of a presentation followed by a Q&A session (and trip to the Anchor pub round the corner). We record each session, so if you can't make it, like our pages so you get updated once the video is uploaded. Organised by Cambridge Defend Education (CDE) and Cambridgeshire Left.

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