Keynote – Professor Sven Beckert (Harvard Univeristy)
We are pleased to inform you that Professor Sven Beckert will deliver the keynote lecture at the Posthumus Conference 2026.
Professor Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. His research and teaching center on the Professor Beckert is also co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University, co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH) and co-editor of a series of books at Princeton University Press on ‘America in the World’.
His keynote lecture will be based upon his recent Capitalism. A Global History, which has been hailed as a book “of generational importance” (Marcus Rediker), “magisterial in scope and ambition” (Peter Frankopan) and which Thomas Piketty welcomed as “monumental, a must read”. It was glowingly and widely reviewed, for example in the New York Times and the Guardian and the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and many others consider it one of the best books of the year. In his lecture, he will suggest ways of thinking about capitalism on the broadest possible canvas and argue for the value of a historical approach to understanding this revolutionary economic civilization.