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Please join us on Tuesday, April 7th from 12:00pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, by Trevor Jackson, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.
Professor Jackson will be joined in conversation by Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, will moderate.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics and Sociology.
About the Book
Today, virtually the entire world lives under the economic system called capitalism, and most people alive have never known another. But as the economic historian Trevor Jackson argues in this powerful book, it wasn’t always capitalism, it didn’t have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn’t have to be this way. How did it happen?
With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains the rise of capitalism from the discovery of the New World to the First World War. A fast-paced work of global history that explores the role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch tulips, and whale blubber — along with Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers — The Insatiable Machine traces capitalism’s development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossil–fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.
Panelists
Trevor Jackson is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in Fall 2022. His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and over-accumulation since the 17th century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital. He also has an ongoing research interest in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health. His second book, a synthetic history of early modern capitalism entitled The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, will be published by W.W. Norton in March 2026. He sometimes writes about money, banking, and economic crisis for the popular press, at places like Dissent, The Baffler, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books.
Chenzi Xu is Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, with research at the intersection of finance, international economics, and economic history. Her work focuses on the relationship between financial institutions and the flow of capital and goods, with a particular interest on understanding how historical events shape and impact modern outcomes. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She holds a BA from Harvard in economics and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in economic history, where she was the William Shirley Scholar at Pembroke College and a Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholar.
Dylan John Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical perspective. His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil societies in the pre-fascist period. Reviewers have called this book “the most original and provocative new analysis of the preconditions of Fascism that has appeared in years,” and “brilliant and courageous.” A second book, How Societies and States Count: A Comparative Genealogy of Censuses (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed in preparation for Palgrave), argues, against state centered accounts of official information, that censuses work best where there is intense interaction between state and society. In addition, Riley has started a new project investigating the connection between the meaning and substance of democracy in interwar and post-war Europe. He has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Sociology, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review, and the New Left Review. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review.
Abhishek Kaicker (moderator) is an historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900), with focus on the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial South Asia. His first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2020), shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) over the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. He is now engaged in two new major research projects: one, a prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 from the perspective of the Mughal empire; and another on the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern modes of communalism in North India under colonial rule in the 18th and 19th centuries. More immediately, he is writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an eighteenth-century courtier, scribe, essayist, diarist, poet, connoisseur, gourmand, and inveterate aficionado of all things Delhi. Together with Professors Asad Ahmed (Berkeley) and Lawrence McCrea (Cornell), Kaicker is an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, a new peer-reviewed venue for emerging conversations on the intellectual history and culture of premodern South Asia.
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