Session Abstract

The histories of capitalism have returned to the center of historical attention in recent years, after their relative marginalization in the period of cultural history's ascendancy. Historians of North America and the Atlantic World have attempted to return to the history of capitalism armed with the insights of new scholarship and new theoretical frameworks, while taking seriously the centrality of capitalism to modern social and political formations. The aim of this roundtable is to host a discussion of these new developments, and specifically to open up those developments, which thus far have been firmly centered on the North Atlantic, to conversation and comparison with the histories of commerce and capitalism  in the Indian Ocean World. What does the Indian Ocean World look like from the standpoint of the new histories of capitalism in the Atlantic World/North America? What do the new histories of capitalism that are being written look like from the vantage of the Indian Ocean world? What might the history of capitalism look like as global history?