Informations du cours

- To discuss the possibilities and limits of the recent renewal of interest in the history of capitalism.
- To consider the merits and shortcomings of different concepts of capitalism.
- To reflect on the potential contributions of the history of enterprise to a better understanding of capitalism.
- To study a number of different types of enterprise that are considered to be emblematic of key periods in the history of capitalism.

 

If you open a newspaper today, you are likely to find an important number of articles that deal with the economic dynamics of 'capitalism'. For some, capitalism is a boon to innovation and the wellspring of the prosperity of nations; for others, it is an exploitative system, which generates pervasive inequalities of income, wealth and power. Indeed, if we pay attention to how capitalism is used, it is clear that we cannot even agree on what it is: capitalism is a concept that seems as capricious and elusive as the world it evokes.

The reasons for this ambiguity are various but an important obstacle to the understanding of capitalism is the difficulty in grasping the sense of capital, and its alter ego, profit. This course proposes to use history as a laboratory to reflect on what we evoke when we speak of capital and profit, in order to give more concrete meaning to what we call capitalism. In this regard, we will pay particular attention to the history of enterprises since they have played a central role in the dynamics of capital and profit for centuries. For us, therefore, as Fernand Braudel put it: 'Firms and companies are interesting not so much for themselves as for what they can tell us: through the evidence they offer, we can see beyond into the larger picture of economic life and capitalist practice' (F. Braudel, 1982 [1979], The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th to 18th Century, vol. 2, transl. Siân Reynolds, Harper & Row, 433).