Rethinking Capitalism and Economic Order IV – YSI Webinar Series

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.

Rethinking Intellectual Property and Data Through Economic and Social Lenses, Thursday, 18 December 2025, 8:00 am EST

Rohinton P. Medhora is Professor of Practice at the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and a former president of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Canada where he remains a Distinguished Fellow. During Spring 2026 he will be Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Previously, he was vice president of programs at Canada’s International Development Research Centre. His fields of expertise are international economic relations, innovation policy, and development economics.

Rohinton sits on the board of several non-profit organizations.  He was a member of the Commission on Global Economic Transformation and The Lancet and Financial Times Commission on Governing Health Futures 2030, and is a founding member of its successor the Digital Transformations for Health Lab at the University of Geneva.  In 2021-22 he chaired the Ontario Workplace Recovery Advisory Committee.

Rohinton received his doctorate in economics in 1988 from the University of Toronto, where he subsequently taught. He has published extensively in professional and non-technical journals and has produced several books including co-editing International Development: Ideas, Experience, and Prospects (Oxford University Press). In May 2025 he produced a three-part video series on the governance of new technologies with the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York.