Inspired by a panel at the 2025 American Historical Association annual conference, this JHI Blog Forum will collect and publish short reflections on the relationship between new work in intellectual history and political economy, broadly conceived, concerning Europe and beyond.... Continue Reading →
by Sam Chian Immanuel Wallerstein, a towering figure in twentieth-century social science, is best known for his groundbreaking analysis of the history of capitalism in The Modern World-System series (1974, 1980, 1989, 2011). However, before his engagement with African studies... Continue Reading →
by Truman Cunningham From the early sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, emblem books displayed moral, political, and religious lessons with small woodcut images and a few lines of poetry. They were extremely popular in both Catholic and Protestant Europe,... Continue Reading →
by Disha Karnad Jani In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, Oxford about her new book Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War (Basic Books, 2025), also available in German... Continue Reading →
by Christoffer Basse Eriksen As Charles Darwin was vacationing in the Bournemouth area in the autumn of 1862, he noticed an unfamiliar phenomenon. During his leisurely strolls around the clover fields that surrounded the cottage in which he and his... Continue Reading →
by Parker Cotton This think-piece is motivated by an early modern thought experiment found in philosopher Pierre Bayle's (1647–1706) Pensées diverses sur la comète. In it, Bayle asks how visitors from another world would hypothetically interpret Christian behavior. He writes:... Continue Reading →
In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Marc-William Palen, Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024). Palen begins his story in the 1840s, and shows... Continue Reading →