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Unconventional Histories of Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2019

Abstract

The financial crisis of 2008 brought with it a renewed interest in the study of capitalism across disciplines. While historians have since led the way with writings on commodities, labor, finance, and institutions, these have been largely conveyed from the Euro-American perspective without necessarily probing other values, parameters, and conditions beyond western political economy that have shaped business over time. This article suggests that to assess the benefits and limits of the global capitalist experience, we must prioritize unconventional subjects, sources, and styles in how we frame research questions, analyze evidence, and cast narratives. Such an endeavor is especially timely given the growing influence of regional markets around the world and the increasing prominence of computational tools to generate and analyze novel datasets.

Type
Research Note
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2019 

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References

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10 Examples of capturing devices include computers, mobile phones, cameras, microphones, scanners, trackers, and even the Internet. In the field of data storage, technological leaps have made hard drives, servers, flash cards, USB sticks, and cloud space increasingly inexpensive. On average, the cost of storing data per gigabyte has halved every fourteen months since 1980. See “A History of Storage Cost (Update),” mkomo.com, 9 Mar. 2014, http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update.

11 In business, examples include supply-chain management, reducing operational costs, capturing new markets, and testing a product. In the sphere of predictive modeling, prominent examples include elections, sporting events, weather, crime, housing markets, and stock prices.

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