Posthumus Conference 2026 about Global Capitalism
The Posthumus Conference takes place on 21 and 22 May 2026 and is hosted by IISH-researcher Ulbe Bosma and his team. Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, will deliver the keynote lecture at the conference.
‘Capitalism’ is a word some people don’t even dare to use out of fear that they might be regarded Marxist leftist. Historians have been less shy, fortunately, and consider ‘capitalism’ as a powerful lens, through which we can understand how our current globalized world has come into existence. Every trained historian has been taught about the classics authored by Marx, Weber, Sombart, Schumpeter and Braudel. We know therefore that these giants had different ideas about what capitalism is.
Capitalists have been identified well before Marx wrote his famous Das Kapital. In the eighteenth century it was people earning their income through accumulating money. Marx himself sparingly used the word capitalism but wrote about the capitalist mode of production as an incredibly adaptive and even progressive force. Weber and Sombart made capitalism and modernity almost twins in terms of mentality. And since Braudel and Wallerstein capitalism in all its different appearances, capitalism became global even before it was national.
The banking crisis of 2008 has revived scholarly and public interest in the phenomenon of capitalism. With an undertone of frustration, indeed, as we see how profits accumulate among those who do not need it, leaving the costs and ecological damage for the other 99 percent. For some this anomaly signifies that capitalism has run its malignant course. As historians we know, however, that it was not the first time that the end of capitalism was predicted.
Is there an end to capitalism? Can it be reshaped into a more ecologically sound and humane system, a ‘green capitalism’? Or another one: when did capitalism start? We might not be able in the two days allotted to the Posthumus conference to solve all these questions, or even one of them, but we may enjoy the intellectual challenge to think about capitalism as historical phenomenon.
Practical
Date: 21-22 May 2026
Place: IISG, Cruquiusweg 31, Amsterdam
Registration, programme and more information: This website posthumusconference.org is temporally not available at the moment. Please send an email to posthumus@uu.nl for more information.
Language: English
Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University, co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH) and co-editor of a series of books at Princeton University Press on ‘America in the World’
His keynote lecture will be based upon his recent publication Capitalism. A Global History, which has been hailed as a book “of generational importance” (Marcus Rediker), “magisterial in scope and ambition” (Peter Frankopan) and which Thomas Piketty welcomed as “monumental, a must read”. It was glowingly and widely reviewed, for example in the New York Times and the Guardian and the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and many others consider it one of the best books of the year. In his lecture, he will suggest ways of thinking about capitalism on the broadest possible canvas and argue for the value of a historical approach to understanding this revolutionary economic civilization.
