The History of Economic Thought Working Group and East Asia Working Group of the Young Scholars Initiative is launching a webinar series that brings critical attention to the idea, practice, and evolution of capitalism. This project aims to reconnect the history of economic ideas with the world they sought to describe, reform, or transform. Capitalism is not just an economic system; it is a lived experience, a political project, and an ideological battleground.
We seek to open a conversation about capitalism as it has been theorised, imagined, and contested across historical periods and geographies. From early critiques of enclosures and slavery, to colonial accumulation and contemporary platform economies, capitalism’s forms have shifted, but its underlying logics—commodification, accumulation, exclusion—continue to shape our worlds.
This series will invite senior scholars who work across traditions—Marxist, classical, feminist, ecological, decolonial—to speak to these shifting realities. Our goal is not to arrive at a unified definition of capitalism, but to stay with its plurality. What is the nature of capitalism in our time? What kind of capitalism is being debated in different contexts? What kind of resistance does it provoke? How do economic theories shape their justification or critique?
Our approach to history foregrounds tension, silence, and the politics of knowledge. The HET WG places special emphasis on themes like decolonisation, pluralism, epistemic difference, and the often under-acknowledged intellectual contributions from the Global South. We invite our participants
The History of Economic Thought Working Group and East Asia Working Group of the Young Scholars Initiative is launching a webinar series that brings critical attention to the idea, practice, and evolution of capitalism. This project aims to reconnect the history of economic ideas with the world they sought to describe, reform, or transform. Capitalism is not just an economic system; it is a lived experience, a political project, and an ideological battleground.
We seek to open a conversation about capitalism as it has been theorised, imagined, and contested across historical periods and geographies. From early critiques of enclosures and slavery, to colonial accumulation and contemporary platform economies, capitalism’s forms have shifted, but its underlying logics—commodification, accumulation, exclusion—continue to shape our worlds.
This series will invite senior scholars who work across traditions—Marxist, classical, feminist, ecological, decolonial—to speak to these shifting realities. Our goal is not to arrive at a unified definition of capitalism, but to stay with its plurality. What is the nature of capitalism in our time? What kind of capitalism is being debated in different contexts? What kind of resistance does it provoke? How do economic theories shape their justification or critique?
Our approach to history foregrounds tension, silence, and the politics of knowledge. The HET WG places special emphasis on themes like decolonisation, pluralism, epistemic difference, and the often under-acknowledged intellectual contributions from the Global South. We invite our participants to think about histories of caste, race, gender, and land, alongside more familiar categories such as markets, property, and the state.
Key areas of focus include:
- Histories of capitalism across continents: not just as diffusion from Europe, but as co-productions and frictions and histories of capitalism have their centres spreading across the globe, not only in the WEST but in the EAST too, from Malacca, Hugli, Calicut, Macao, Nagasaki, Pegu to Batavia, to name a few.
- Capitalism’s relationship with colonialism, racialisation, and dispossession
- Property regimes, financial architectures, and state-market entanglements
- Trade, Tariffs and Wars
- Debates on crisis: inflation, debt, austerity, climate collapse
- Intellectual genealogies: from Marx and Gandhi to Du Bois, Luxemburg, Fanon, and Polanyi
- The metabolism of capital and planetary boundaries
- The role of economics as a discipline in naturalising or resisting capitalist logics
This series is not an attempt to replace critique with nostalgia or celebration. Instead, we want to create a space where histories of capitalism can inform strategies for its transformation or transcendence. Theories of capitalism are not just descriptions; they are interventions. We hope to create a space where critique and imagination work in tandem.
Prof. Katharina Pistor
The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It, Wednesday, 5 November 2025, 9.00 am EST
Capitalism seems unstoppable. Laws and regulation that are meant to contain its excesses can slow its expansion but are unable to contain it. How is it that a system that relies to extensively on the law to code assets as capital is so resistant to legal constraints is the question this book addresses. The answer lies in the fact that capitalist law is Janus-faced: Its private law side empowers actors to use law as a tool to build private wealth and power over others; the public law side seeks to rein in some actions, but it also protects private actors against state interreference. This is how private actors rule over others with impunity, shift the risk of their actions on society at large and the environment. I conclude that private law needs a reset to ground it in principles of mutual respect and support among private actors rather than exploitation and power.
Katharina Pistor is researcher and writer on capitalism and capitalist law, the law of money and finance, comparative law and law and development.
She is the (co-) author and editor of nine books. Her most recent book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton UP 2019), explains how, behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, capital is created—and why this little-known activity is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. The Code of Capital explores the various ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are selectively coded to protect and reproduce private wealth. The Code of Capital was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider.
Katharina Pistor has currently two books under contract: “Capitalist Law and How to Transform It” (Yale UP). This book explores how capitalism reconstitute itself through law and what it would take to transform it. She is also working with Co-Pierre Georg on “Coded Power” (Princeton UP), a book aims to show how control over the formal means by which societies organize themselves — the legal and digital codes – can empower a few at the expense of the many, lest control is firmly vested in the latter.
Pistor regularly publishes in legal and social science journals. In her paper “Rule by Data: The End of Markets” in The Journal of Law and Contemporary Problems (2020), she suggested that the harvesting of consumer data at scale creates new asymmetries of information and power that renders illusionary the idea of voluntary contracting in a free market. And in her essay “From Territorial to Monetary Sovereignty” in the Journal on Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2017), she argued that the rise of a global money system means a new definition of sovereignty — the control of money — which might eventually be de-coupled from territory. She is a regular contributor to Project Syndicate, has published opinion pieces, among others, in The Guardian, and The New York Times.
Katharina Pistor serves as the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School, which she joined in 2001. Previously she held teaching and research positions at Harvard Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Law in Hamburg. She has also been visiting professor at the University of Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law, Pennsylvania Carey Law School, the London School of Economics, Oxford, and Tel Aviv University. She is an elected member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2015), the European Academy of Sciences (2021), and The Club of Rome (2024). In 2012 she received (with Martin Hellwig) the Max Planck Research Award on international financial regulation. In addition, she has received research grants by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the US National Science Foundation. She is one of the three co-directors of Columbia University’s Center for Political Economy, funded by a major grant by the Hewlett Foundation.
Katharina Pistor loves the arts. She is an avid concert goer and visitor of galleries and museums. She also and enjoys playing the harpsichord alone and in chamber ensembles together with her husband Carsten Bonnemann on the viol.
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