Research Summary
Research Summary
Principal Research Interests
Description
My research is principally focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century subjects, with an emphasis on economic and especially financial history. I am interested in the role of banks and capital markets in the process of economic development as well as in the political economy of international relations. I have related interests in geopolitics and military conflict. I continue to be interested in the use of counterfactuals in historical explanation. Having begun my career as a historian of Europe, I am working towards a more global approach to historical problems.
“The 1970s and the Birth of the Modern World Economy”. It is often erroneously assumed that the 1980s were the decisive decade in the history of “globalization”. In reality the key changes in the international order that paved the way to what we now call globalization dated back more than a decade. It is only now that historians are beginning to reappraise the 1970s as the period when the post-war era of capital controls and regulated markets gave way to a new and more dynamic period of capital mobility and deregulation. This large, multi-year project is intended to explore the processes that gave rise to globalization in both the corporate and the political spheres. At its core are two biographical studies -- one of the banker Siegmund Warburg, the other of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: to key figures in the global 1970s. "The West and the Rest: Explaining the Predominance of Western Civilization, c. 1500-2000". Although traditional courses on Western Civilization tended to posit a long-run Western ascendancy dating back as far as ancient Athens, in reality it was only from the late fifteenth century that West European societies began to establish a clear lead over those in the rest of the world. I am writing a new textbook that will reassess the "triumph of the West" by comparing Western ideas and institutions with those in other continents.
Research in Progress