“The Birth of the Modern World”: Old and New Grand Narratives

Fri 24 November 2023

McGrath Centre

A talk by Professor Francesca Trivellato, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

The talk is titled after one of the many influential works by late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (1970; Honorary Fellow 2014) and gestures toward historians’ never-ending search for the causes, manifestations, and timing of what goes under the name of modernity, if not also its presumed Western exceptional character. While Marx’s influence on these debates is well-known and has recently received new attention, Weber’s has receded in the background and many of his views have been caricatured. This talk will offer some insights into Weber’s legacy among scholars of Europe’s past economic life and development. In so doing, it will ask whether and how canonical narratives are still worth wrestling with at the onset of the twenty-first century.

Professor Trivellato's latest monograph is The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019). Since 2020, she has been one of the founding editors of Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics.

Cost: Free