"Agricultural issues in the 'New History of Capitalism'"

After a quarter of a century of propagating the almost universally proclaimed lack of alternatives to capitalism, historians have rediscovered capitalism as a controversial subject of research, at the latest since the financial crisis of 2008. There is talk of the "re-emergence of a historical concept" (Jürgen Kocka/Marcel van der Linden), a "new history of capitalism" is being called for (Sven Beckert) and the historians' guild is being urged to "think" "global capitalism" historically (Friedrich Lenger). As commendable as this recent awakening in historical capitalism research is, there is one particularly astonishing omission: the almost complete silence on the role of agriculture in the process of industrial capitalist transformation in the 19th and 20th centuries. This lecture begins at this neglected point and outlines some perspectives on the relevance of agricultural issues in recent historical research on capitalism.

Lecture by Dr. Juri Auderset (Bern)