Authors’ Workshop, Basel, 27–29 August 2026
Capitalism has always been shaped by competing temporal pressures. Entrepreneurial competition, dependence on credit, uncertain futures, and volatile markets required economic and state actors to anticipate change and manage risk. At the same time, capitalist expansion depended on attempts to reconcile the accelerated rhythms of production, trade, and finance with the divergent temporalities of labour, agriculture, climate, animal life, and natural resources.
The international authors’ workshop The Temporalities of Capitalism: Empire and the Commodification of Nature since 1600 will bring together scholars from Europe, North America, Africa and Asia to examine these relationships from global economic and environmental history perspectives. To be held at the University of Basel from 27 to 29 August 2026, the workshop forms part of a collaborative book project on the role of time in the history of capitalism.
The contributions investigate how expectations of possible futures shaped investment, production, labor regimes, and imperial governance. Particular attention is devoted to extractive and agricultural “commodity frontiers,” where land, labor, animals, and natural resources were incorporated into expanding markets. The case studies address, among other subjects, cattle in British India, the nineteenth-century American ice trade, the work of social reproduction, colonial agriculture and monsoon seasonality, wool and oil-palm frontiers, Soviet industrial planning, global warehousing, futures markets, compensated expropriation, and the temporalities of ecological ruination.
Moving beyond established studies of clock time and industrial work discipline, the workshop asks how ideas of regularity, seasonality, acceleration, delay, exhaustion, and rupture influenced historical decision-making. It also explores the techniques through which uncertainty was increasingly transformed into calculable risk, as well as the conflicts that arose when capitalist expectations encountered ecological limits and alternative understandings of time. By connecting global, imperial, economic, labor, and environmental history, the project seeks to establish temporality as a central category for understanding the development and expansion of capitalism since the early modern period.