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,
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. Louis-Philippe Rochon, Full Professor of Economics, Laurentian University
Monetary Policy During and After the Trump Era, Thursday, 5 March 2026, 9:00 AM EST
Louis-Philippe Rochon is Full Professor of Economics at Laurentian University, Canada, where he has been teaching since 2004. Before that, he taught at Kalamazoo College, in Michigan. He obtained his doctorate from the New School for Social Research, in 1998, earning him the ‘Frieda Wunderlich Award for Outstanding Dissertation’, for his dissertation on endogenous money and post-Keynesian economics.
In January 2019, he became the co-editor of the Review of Political Economy, and its Editor-in-Chief in 2021. Before that, he created the Review of Keynesian Economics, and was its editor from 2011 to 2018, and is now Founding Editor Emeritus. He is a Consulting Editor for the newly-created Advances in Economics Education, and the Associate Editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Studies. He is the co-director of the Monetary Policy Institute, and the editor of the @Monetaryblog.
He has been guest-editor for the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, the International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, the European Journal of Economic and Social Systems, the International Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Banking Finance and Sustainable Development. He has published on monetary theory and policy, post-Keynesian economics, and fiscal policy.
He is on the editorial board of Ola Financiera, International Journal of Political Economy, the European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention, Problemas del Desarrollo, Cuestiones Económicas (Central Bank of Ecuador), and Bank & Credit (Central Bank of Poland), Bulletin of Political Economy, Advances in Economics Education, Il Pensiero Economico Moderno, Journal of Banking, Finance and Sustainable Development, Research Papers in Economics and Finance, and the Associate Editor of Journal of Business and Economic Studies.
He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elgar Series of Central Banking and Monetary Policy, and co-editor of New Directions in Post-Keynesian Economics.
He has been a Visiting Professor or Visiting Scholar in Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, and the United States, and has further lectured in Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Morroco, Peru, Spain, South Africa, Switzerland, the United States, and the UK.
He is the author of some 180 articles in peer-reviewed journals and books, and has written or edited close to 60 books. His Encyclopaedia of Post-Keynesian Economics and A Brief History of Economic Thought, were just published. Both books are with Elgar. He is currently editing the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Central Banking.
He has received grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada (SSHRC), the Ford Foundation, and the Mott Foundation, among other places.
