23.08.24
Professor Francesca Trivellato
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ
“The Birth of the Modern World”: Old and New Grand Narratives
5–7pm, Friday 24 November 2023
The McGrath Centre, St Catharine’s College
As part of the College's 550th anniversary celebrations, St Catharine's will be hosting several lectures open to students, staff, Fellows, alumni and the public. Recordings for each lecture will be published online so that anyone who was not able to attend has the opportunity to watch back at their leisure.
The talk is titled after one of the many influential works by late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (1970; Honorary Fellow 2014) and gestures toward historians’ never-ending search for the causes, manifestations, and timing of what goes under the name of modernity, if not also its presumed Western exceptional character. While Marx’s influence on these debates is well-known and has recently received new attention, Weber’s has receded in the background and many of his views have been caricatured. This talk will offer some insights into Weber’s legacy among scholars of Europe’s past economic life and development. In so doing, it will ask whether and how canonical narratives are still worth wrestling with at the onset of the twenty-first century.
Professor Trivellato's latest monograph is The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019). Since 2020, she has been one of the founding editors of Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics.
Please complete the booking form below so that the organisers at St Catharine's can track numbers for this event.
