Nov 8, 2026

The Capitalist Era

The Making—and Unmaking—of the Global Mind

Jeremy Adelman

Hosted by Elisa Prosperetti

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Summary

Jeremy Adelman’s The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of the Global Mind (Princeton University Press, 2026) puts the world’s current unwinding in much-needed historical perspective. Combining political, economic, intellectual, and environmental history, the book tells the epic story of the forces that, since the late eighteenth century, have transformed the world into a single but fractured survival unit that is integrated by exchange and flow, yet divided by suspicion and fear. It is a story of hopes for universal peace, panic over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people view one another across distances and borders.

The Capitalist Era chronicles how global integration compelled people from different parts of the world to reckon with what it means to need each other for resources or recognition without knowing one another, and it describes the confrontations and experiments that have shaped the world through periods of integration and disintegration over the past two centuries. Rejecting simplistic determinisms about inevitable peace or inescapable doom, this book illuminates the brittle unity of today’s world.

The author, Jeremy Adelman, is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University and the Director of the Global History Lab at Cambridge University.

The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

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Elisa Prosperetti

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor (History) at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. More here: More here: https://t.co/CZLsbzn6jF.

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