O'Connell Initiative Events
2025
Tuesday, April 15 at 1:00pm
Rose Hill Campus, Hughes Hall, room 212
441 E. Fordham Road
"Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World"
"Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World"
Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Dr. Marc-William Palen (University of Exeter), shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea, Palen explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age. By the early twentieth century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. Of course, this vision was at odds with the era’s strong predilections for nationalism, protectionism, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion. Palen reveals how, for some of its most radical left-wing adherents, free trade represented a hard-nosed critique of imperialism, militarism, and war. Palen shows that the anti-imperial component of free trade was a phenomenon that came to encompass the political left wing within the British, American, Spanish, German, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Russian, French, and Japanese empires. The left-wing vision of a “pax economica” evolved to include supranational regulation to maintain a peaceful free-trading system―which paved the way for a more liberal economic order after World War II and such institutions as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. Rediscovering the left-wing history of globalism offers timely lessons for our own era of economic nationalism and geopolitical conflict.
Wednesday, 26 March | 5:00PM
Lincoln Center Campus, McNally Amphitheater
140 W. 62nd Street
Revisiting the Birth of the Atomic Age: The History and Memory of the Manhattan Project
Join speakers Dr. Alex Wellerstein (Stevens Institute of Technology), author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Myrriah Gómez (University of New Mexico), author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos (University of Arizona Press, 2022), and Patrick H. Willems (Filmmaker), director of The Dinner Plan (2025), Night of the Coconut (2022), as they discuss the memory of the Manhattan Project among both historians and the public, the social and environmental effects of nuclear testing in the American southwest, and the depiction of atomic weapons in Hollywood and global cinema.
Thursday, February 13 | 5:00pm
Lincoln Center Campus, South Lounge
113 W. 60 Street
Monetary Pluralism and East India Company Rule in Eighteenth-Century Eastern India
Andrew Sartori, New York University
Eighteenth-century India was characterized by a highly monetized constellation of commercial relations that Keynes would surely have considered a "monetary economy... an economy in which money plays a part of its own and affects motives and decisions” rather than functioning as a neutral mediator of real exchanges of goods and services. But like many other places in this period, albeit to an extreme degree, the "monetariness" of this economy to a great degree presented itself in the experiential form of a plurality of monies -- that is, plural monetary circuits functioning on the basis of highly conditional and limited cross-currency convertibility that interacted through the mediation of a complex exchange market operating at the limits of state power. Given these factors, Dr. Sartori will discuss the specific monetary features of extractive strategies in the borderlands of British India, and how we might better incorporate money as a feature of colonial extractive economies.
Andrew Sartori is a historian of South Asia and imperial Britain. His work focuses on the relationship between concept-formation and the social practices associated with modern capitalism.