Europe and the Universe: British Economic Sentiments in Historical Perspective

The idyll of British independence is based on historical precedent: that the British have a particular relationship to the world beyond Europe, to democracy, and to economic institutions. The lecture will be concerned with ideas of distinctively British economic sentiments – that Britain was “a society of grown-up competitive commerce,” in which “Political Economy is exactly true” -- and with the circumstances of British economic life over the long nineteenth century.

A talk by Emma Rothschild
Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History
Director, Center for History and Economics

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Emma Rothschild BIO:  18th century and 19th century history, especially the history of economic thought and economic history. I am Director of the Joint Center for History and Economics, and am involved in collaborative research projects, at the University of Cambridge and at Harvard, on Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas and on Visualizing Historical Networks. I am also an Affiliated Faculty member at Harvard Law School. Recent publications include "Isolation and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century France" (American Historical Review, October 2014), "The Archives of Universal History" (Journal of World History, September 2008), “A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic” (Past and Present, August 2006), Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) and The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)