*Message sent from a system outside of UConn.* Hi everyone,
Please see the CFP for a set of sessions that Swarnabh Ghosh and I are organizing for the 2025 AAG. Apologies for any cross-posting. Best regards, Mikael Omstedt CFP: Historical Geographies of Capitalism - Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, March 24-28, 2025 Organizers: Mikael Omstedt (UBC) & Swarnabh Ghosh (Harvard) Recent years have seen a set of parallel re-engagements with the uneven historical geographies of capitalism within and beyond critical geography. On the one hand, the much-noted “return” of capitalism to popular and scholarly discourse in the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis has left its most prominent mark in the discipline of history, where the history of capitalism has become increasingly institutionalized as a historical specialization. This is emblematized by the emergence of the so-called “new history of capitalism” (NHOC) in North American universities. Eschewing the entrenched positions of previous rounds of debate, the NHOC presents itself as more global, more relational, and more heterodox than what came before it. It is less interested in rigid definitions than in tracing a multiplicity of capitalist forms across a much wider historical canvas. Although deeply geographical in an implicit sense, the NHOC has (with a few exceptions) so far eschewed serious engagement with critical geographical and spatial theory. And, yet, it is precisely the uneven development of capitalism—so aptly theorized in the tradition of geographical political economy—which has emerged as its primary terrain of inquiry. On the other hand, with capitalism never quite having escaped their gaze, critical geographers are increasingly turning to history to rethink its trajectories, patterns, and constitutive relations. Indeed, some of the most dynamic concepts that have been engaged by critical geographers in recent years are deeply historical: from racial capitalism to settler colonialism to uneven and combined development, each of which hinge upon arguments about continuity and change over the longue durée of capitalism. These concepts have opened the door for historical thinking in geography well beyond the confines of traditional historical geography, and they have revitalized new geographies of the historical processes, structures, and events that mediate the present. Nevertheless, critical geography is relatively ill-equipped, in turn, to contribute to the broader conversations in the historical social sciences and humanities from which these concepts emanate because it suffers from the discipline’s long-standing neglect of historical methods and modes of reasoning. “Capitalism,” Jason W Moore remarked some years ago, “is theoretically rather than historically constructed by geographers.” The abstraction from concrete history in David Harvey’s “historical-geographical materialism” is an obvious example. Another is the selective incorporations of Cedric Robinson’s theoretical account of racial capitalism which have either ignored, or unproblematically accepted, his particular historical interpretation of the origins of feudal racialism and European capitalism. History is increasingly gestured towards but not always interrogated in depth. To these sessions we invite contributions formulated at the intersection of critical geographical theory and the history of capitalism. We welcome empirical, conceptual, and methodological papers that engage critically with the uneven geographies of capitalism from the vantage point of any historical period and world region, with the conviction that reading across sites and conjunctures is likely to yield the most fruitful conversations. Methodologically agnostic, we hold a space for primary archival investigations, synthesizing accounts based on secondary sources, and theoretical reflections and interventions. In bringing together approaches that demonstrate a geographical sensibility toward the history of capitalism, these sessions seek to examine the methodological challenges and opportunities associated with the constitution of a critical historical geography of capitalism. We plan to have a number of paper sessions followed by an invited roundtable reflecting on theoretical and methodological questions pertaining to the historical-geographical study of capitalism. This concluding roundtable will tentatively include Vinay Gidwani (Minnesota), Manu Goswami (NYU), Aaron Jakes (Chicago), Don Mitchell (Uppsala), and Shaina Potts (UCLA). Please send an abstract of 300 words to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> and [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> by October 10. Accepted papers will be notified shortly after to give participants time to meet the October 31 abstract deadline.
