Gareth Austin

Last chance to register: landmark conference to mark 250 years since publication of The Wealth of Nations. ‘Modern Enquiries into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ 5-6 March 2026 Keynes Hall, King’s College, Cambridge: Thursday, 9.15am – 5pm, and Friday, 9.00 – 12.45. Free, registration required. Arthur Goodhart Lecture Theatre (LG19), Law Faculty, Sidgwick Site: concluding public forum, Friday, 2-4 pm. No booking required, arrive early to secure a seat. All free and open to the public, students especially welcome.

Last chance to register: major conference celebrating 250 years of 'The Wealth of Nations': the most famous text in the history of political economy and economics.

Leading historians and economists will assess its legacy & ask what it means for the next century.

Free, open to public, link below ⬇️⬇️

*Conference announcement*
Modern Enquiries into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations: International Prosperity and Development 250 Years After Adam Smith. King's College, Cambridge. 5-6 MARCH 2026. Further information & to register via Eventbrite: www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/docs/Camb_WO...

@gareth-austin.bsky.social
@cwpeconhist.bsky.social
@pramospinto.bsky.social
@kingscollege.bsky.social

Conference announcement (details to follow in mid-Jan):

Modern Enquiries into the Nature and Causes
of the Wealth of Nations: International Prosperity and Development 250 Years After Adam Smith

King's College Cambridge, 5-6 MARCH 2026
Convenors: Gareth Austin (Cambridge) and Alex Trew (Glasgow)

"La contrainte et les marchés : concilier les explications
économiques et sociales de l’esclavage en Afrique de
l’Ouest précoloniale, vers 1450-vers 1900"
Gareth Austin (Cambridge)
(tr. Darla Gervais)
Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 2025/3 n° 72-3, pages 101-131
DOI 10.3917/rhmc.723.0101

Why had it taken *nine years* for Labour to face up to what has been glaringly obvious since 2016? And even now #Starmer equivocates with the phrase “the Brexit deal”. No - it is #Brexit itself which is the colossal act of self-sabotage.

Mali Under Siege: Tracking the Fuel Blockade Crippling Bamako - bellingcatMali Under Siege: Tracking the Fuel Blockade Crippling Bamako - bellingcat Attacks by a jihadist group on fuel convoys bound for Bamako, the capital of Mali, have destroyed more than 130 tankers since September, a Bellingcat investigation has found.  The systematic attacks by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) have brought Bamako and other regions of the West African nation to a standstill as the Al Qaeda-affiliated […]

Watch! This is so fucking good. @bellingcat.com, you are the best

BBC apologises after Robert Jenrick accused of xenophobia A contributor to Radio 4's Thought for the Day slot made the remark about the shadow justice secretary.

'Honest Bob' Jenrick, a politician obviously & deliberately embracing xenophobia, does some weapons grade xenophobia & the BBC *apologises* for a Thought For The Day contributor calling it xenophobic. Licence fee payers need to know who makes these decisions & why. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Just attended an excellent writers' conference exploring the paths to/causes of the Great Acceleration (of human-made environmental change, starting c. 1950), at the University of Basel, organised by Moritz von Brescius (UB) and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (U of Chicago). Exciting stuff.

muse.jhu.edu/pub/19/artic...

Professor Peter Mandler, Deputy Chair of the History Faculty, Professor of Modern Cultural History, Bailey Lecturer in History, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

Prof Peter Mandler’s (@petermandler.bsky.social) insatiable curiosity has fuelled an extraordinary career over more than two decades at Cambridge.

As he steps back from formal teaching, the acclaimed historian reflects on a life of intellectual breadth, public advocacy—and no plans to slow down ⬇️⬇️

Cambridge Global Economic History Seminar, Monday 9 June, 17:15 BST in the Audit Room, King's College:

John Tang (Utrecht University), "Superstition, fertility, and modernization: evidence from Japan, 1880-1980"

This talk is hybrid: for zoom link see www.hist.cam.ac.uk/event-series...

Cambridge Global Economic History Seminar, 19 May:
Lisbeth Rodrigues (Porto), ‘Beyond almsgiving: The financial role of charitable institutions in early modern Portugal and its empire’. 17:15 UK time in Audit Room, King's College, Cambridge. Or online: subscribe at www.hist.cam.ac.uk/event-series...

<em>The Economic History Review</em> | EHS Journal | Wiley Online Library The Sokoto Caliphate of northern Nigeria was the workshop of West Africa in the pre-colonial nineteenth century, producing famous blue-black cloth that reached many markets south of the Sahara as wel...

Travieso & Westland, "Resilience and decline of handicraft textiles in colonial northern Nigeria, 1911–52", Economic History Review (2024), examines the issue of deindustrialisation in what had been the leading centre of textile production in precolonial Africa. Read at doi.org/10.1111/ehr....

<em>The Economic History Review</em> | EHS Journal | Wiley Online Library The Sokoto Caliphate of northern Nigeria was the workshop of West Africa in the pre-colonial nineteenth century, producing famous blue-black cloth that reached many markets south of the Sahara as wel...

Congrats to Emiliano Travieso & Tom Westland for winning the Economic History Society's prize for best article in the Economic History Review (2024) by authors within 5 years of PhD. "What happened to the workshop of West Africa?"

🎙️ PODCAST | Listen to @camhistory.bsky.social’s Hank Gonzalez talk to David Runciman on the History of Ideas Podcast.

🎧 Find out more about the Haitian Revolution: the first time in history a slave revolt resulted in an independent free state ⬇️

The Zoom link for Tinashe Nyamunda's presentation on Monday 17:15 GMT will be sent to subscribers to the Global Economic History Seminar e-list 48 hours in advance. For the link to subscribe, go to www.hist.cam.ac.uk/event-series...

The excellent Zimbabwean financial historian Tinashe Nyamunda (now U of Glasgow) is presenting to the Global Economic History Seminar on Monday 17th, 17:15 GMT, in the Audit Room, King's College, Cambridge, on the financial origins of the Anglo-Boer War. Also on Zoom

The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century by Richard Reid

Richard Reid's The African Revolution is a panoramic global history of Africa in the age of imperialism.

Out now. Learn more about this monumental work of history: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Lots of discussions about mining and metals in Africa exaggerate their importance and this is a particularly obvious example. 10% of something is not enough to corner a market!

My chapter in Capitalism: Histories, edited by Robert G. Ingram and James M. Vaughn (Boydell Press, 2025) is titled
"Capitalism in Africa: Two Histories, 1650s-1940s". Compares the partly similar, partly contrasting cases of South Africa and British West Africa (esp. Nigeria & Ghana).

Capitalism: Histories, edited by Robert G. Ingram & James M. Vaughan. Just published by Boydell Press. Contributors G. Austin, R. Austen, P. Coclanis, T. Dennison, A. Evans, E. Griffin, R.G. Ingram, A. Karak, J. Majewski, M. Metzler, K. Pomeranz, M. Ramseyer, T. Roy, Horus T'an

Resounding rebuttal of Trump's energy policy from a piece of work at the Daily Telegraph.

Honoured to be talking to Kaoru Sugihara's Seminar on Global Economic and Environmental History on Wednesday (15 Jan) in Kyoto: "Tropical Africa and the 'Long Acceleration'". RINH, 13:30-15:30 Japan time (venue: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature).

My own paper-in-progress compares Ghana and Kenya, challenging accepted generalisations about both causes and consequences of SAPs in Africa.

More advanced versions of the papers will be given at the World Economic History Congress in Lund in July (wehc2025.com). This project follows Akita’s edited "Oil Crises of the 1970s and the Transformation of International Order: Economy, Development, & Aid in Asia & Africa" (Bloomsbury 2023).

so, the takeoff of micro-electronics and personal computers, the “Third World” debt crisis, the IMF-WB sponsored economic liberalization (“Structural Adjustment” programmes) in Africa & Latin America, and a rising Asian share of the world economy.

The changing international economic order of the 1980s
Just completed a fascinating workshop (10-11 Jan 2025), organised by the tireless Prof Shigeru Akita on the beautiful Japanese island of Awaji. The subject is the international economic order of the 1980s.