Location: Amsterdam
Submission deadline: May 15, 2020
This conference seeks to make sense of the cultural and social understanding and impact of finance in the long eighteenth century. It takes 1720 as a watershed moment, but also welcomes challenges to a historiographical trend that treats the Bubbles as a rupture in the development of early modern finance while overlooking continuities and longer-term trends.
This conference challenges scholars of the long-eighteenth century to step forward and make fresh engagement with financial history and related public debates. We invite scholars from backgrounds such as cultural history, art history, literary studies and the history of knowledge and science to investigate the different ways in which the world of finance was entwined with different systems of knowledge, and how financial practices shaped, and were shaped by, society and culture as a whole. As explained below, this conference will be followed by a one-day conference with policy makers and banking professionals. Therefore we specifically encourage papers that explore broader implications of their findings both for the more traditional financial history and for our understanding of finance today.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
Cultural responses to finance and speculation in the long 18thcentury.
The global and colonial dimension of European financialisation.
Understanding the material culture and physical heritage of finance
Representations of finance and financiers and their practices.
Critical analyses or historicization of concepts used in finance, such as bubbles, investment, speculation and interest.
How the ‘science’ of finance was embedded in and shaped by other knowledge domains.
We welcome submissions for individual papers (20 minutes). Paper proposals should include a title, a 300-word summary, and a 50-word biographical blurb. Proposals may only be submitted in English. The final deadline for all submissions is March 31, 2020. Speakers will be informed about their participation by April 14.
Please send your proposal to: historyoffinance@gmail.com
The conference will be preceded by a performance of stock-jobbing play of 1720, and followed by a one-day public event in which historians discuss the current urgency of making sense of finance with the financial sector, policy makers and other experts. More information about these events will be posted on: https://history-of-finance.org.