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Richard Drayton: European empires and the origins of modern inequality

September 17, 2015 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Inequality between nations and inequality within societies are almost always examined as two distinct problems. To the extent that we have addressed the global history of inequality, as in the work of Acemoglu, Atkinson, Milanovic or Piketty, we have drawn on comparative methods, defined, and limited by, the logic of national accounting. The focus has been securely on the relative impact of contemporary institutional arrangements. In addition, while status inequality, experienced as gender, race, and class, has certainly been measured in its economic consequences, it is rarely examined as an enduring generator of domestic and international inequality. It is the aim of this paper to apply the connective methods of global history to examining the relationship between the long run histories of all these kinds of inequality. It asks, first, whether we can identify a culture of inequality generation and reproduction which comes out of the neolithic transition, a lineage of social and economic forms based on intersecting orders of domination and exploitation? It examines, second, how the global extension of this western Eurasian social regime by the European empires connected, since 1500, the internal organisation of ‘opportunity hoarding’ and exploitation – the two key mechanisms which Tilly identified as reproducing inequality through time — experienced as gender, class, and race, to unequal participation in the global organisation of production and exchange? It seeks, last, the contemporary implications of such a long run historical perspective on inequality.

Drayton Photo

Richard Drayton
King’s College London

Richard Drayton is Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London. Born in the Caribbean, he was educated at Harvard, Yale and Oxford, taught at the universities of Virginia and Cambridge, and has visited at Harvard, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His earliest work was on the relationship of science and technology to European expansion. His book Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (2000, 2005) won the Forkosch Prize of the American Historial Association. In 2002, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. He brings to CUNY his current work on how western european empires operated as part of a collaborative system which organised regimes of inequality both within and between different regions and societies. Slavery and the plantation economies of the Americas, he suggests, organised a historical geography of inequality, unequal schedules of rights, and cognitive regimes of status difference which persist at several scales of contemporary experience.

Details

Date:
September 17, 2015
Time:
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Event Category:
Website:
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/Calendar/Detail?id=32435

Venue

ARC Conference Room 5318
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016 United States

Organizer

Advanced Research Collaborative
View Organizer Website