On Monday, March 15th, Professor Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Department of History, University of Massachusetts-Amherst joined us for the third and final Labour and Humanities Seminar of the semester. You can watch the video below or on the CIRHR YouTube channel.
This talk explores the origins, uses—and demise—of an overlooked technique of producing political economic knowledge in the early modern world: arguing from the authority of official paperwork and administrative archives.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, archival records were powerful sources of policy arguments about government and political economy. Focusing on the early modern British empire, the talk traces the origins of these archival methods; of work in the archives themselves; of their application to governing empire and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and how they empowered a specific form of bureaucratic expert. By the early nineteenth century, however, emerging conceptual divisions between ‘political economy’ and ‘history' removed archives from the remit of bureaucratic labor, and centered new forms of technical expertise.
Hosted jointly with the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies (CDTS) with the support of the Faculty of Arts & Science, the Labour and Humanities Seminar brings distinguished scholars in the humanities working on themes related to labour, globalization and employment relations to the University of Toronto to present and discuss their work. The seminars reflect an eclectic approach to the study of work across human history and culture and are intended to help build and reinforce interdisciplinary connections, both within CIRHR and in the wider University community.
You can watch video from the first two Labour and Humanities Seminars of the year:
The Economic Life of Untouchability with Diana Kim (School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University)
"But he was no sissy": Ernest Fitzgerald and the Gendering of Whistleblowing, 1968-1978 with Sarah Milov (Department of History, University of Virginia)