Slobodian Co-Directs Major Conference on Global Economic History

The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University hosted “Neoliberalism’s Citadels and Chokepoints,” the History and Political Economy Project’s 2024 Summer Research Grantee Conference, on December 13-14, 2024. The conference showcased work from eleven summer research grant recipients whose projects span the globe from Southeast Asia to Latin America.

Professor Quinn Slobodian, Professor of International History at the Pardee School and co-director of the History and Political Economy (HPE) Project, helped organize the event. Named one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers by Prospect UK and author of “Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy,” Slobodian brought together a diverse group of emerging scholars for the conference.

The 2024 grantees presented wide-ranging research across five panels. José Antonio Galindo Domínguez (El Colegio de México) explored how Mexican business groups shaped North American economic integration through their governance programs from 1945-1994. Julián Gómez-Delgado (The New School) examined the technopolitics of privatization and the dismantling of public banking infrastructure in Colombia. Jeremy Goodwin (Cornell University) traced the evolution of entrepreneurship and small business development in the United States from the 1950s through the 1990s.

Roxanne S. Houman (Columbia University) analyzed pan-European consumer-activist networks between 1957 and 1992, particularly in fair trade and anti-sweatshop movements. Eve O’Connor (Harvard University) presented an intellectual history of the twentieth-century cooperative movement in the United States. Asensio Robles (Comillas Pontifical University) investigated how the IMF and the 1978 Stand-By Arrangement influenced Spain’s transition from the Franco regime.

Eylem Taylan (UC Berkeley) studied labor militancy and trans-imperial rivalry at Greek ports following Chinese state capital acquisition. Aila Trasi (Johns Hopkins University) explored how the IMF and World Bank reshape state-economy relationships in Southeast Asia through Thailand’s Sufficiency Economy policy. Peter Vale (UC Berkeley) examined how Central African citizens navigated relationships between natural resources, foreign capital, and political sovereignty. Joel van de Sande (Columbia University) presented research on Djibouti’s independence, while Stefan Yong (UC Santa Cruz) analyzed crises of overproduction in global shipping and the political economy of megaships.

The two-day conference was structured around five themed panels: IMF’s relationship with democracy, grassroots economic movements, banking and business systems, postcolonial sovereignty in Africa, and global logistics. Each panel featured responses from scholars in the wider HPE network.

Keynote speakers included Dylan Gottlieb of Bentley University, presenting “Yuppies: A Social History of Financialization,” and Charmaine Chua of the University of California, Santa Barbara, discussing “The Logistics Counter-revolution: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence, and the Transpacific Empire of Circulation.”

The HPE Project, which supports scholarship examining how economic policies affect inequality, economic stability, and political participation, will open applications for its 2025 summer research grants in February. Under the leadership of Slobodian, whose work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, the Project aims to produce historical scholarship that can address contemporary challenges of social-political transformation and counter rising inequality, economic dislocation, and political alienation.

HPE’s 2025 summer research grant application will open on the HPE website in February.