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.
 

Program:

Thursday, 27 August 2026

09:00–09:15

Welcome and workshop opening

Moritz von Brescius and Christof Dejung
 

09:15–10:00

Framing the Volume

Moritz von Brescius and Christof Dejung:

“Rethinking the Temporalities of Capitalism: An Introduction”
 

10:00–10:30

Coffee break
 

10:30–11:15

David Arnold, University of Warwick:

“Bovine Temporalities and Capitalist Commodification in British India”
 

11:25–12:10

Moritz von Brescius, University of Basel:

“Frozen Time: The Nineteenth-Century American Ice Trade and the Global Commodification of Cold”
 

12:10–13:30

Lunch
 

13:30–14:15

Julie Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara:

“Babies in the Right Time: Imagining the Prorace Cap”
 

14:25–15:10

Monika Dommann, University of Zurich:

“Just-in-Time Capitalism: Warehousing, Inventory, and the Temporal Infrastructure of Global Trade”
 

15:10–15:40

Coffee break
 

15:40–16:25

Carolyn Biltoft, Geneva Graduate Institute:

“The Short Run and la longue durée: Economics, History, and the Politics of Time”
 

16:35–17:20

Hatib Abdul Kadir, KITLV–Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden; Bustamin Wahid, Universitas Muhammadiyah Sorong; and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz / Aarhus University:

“The Temporalities of Ruination”
 

17:20–18:10

Mid-workshop commentary and discussion

Ann Laura Stoler, The New School for Social Research &

Corey Ross, University of Basel
 

19:15

Workshop dinner

***

Friday, 28 August 2026

09:00–09:45

Andy Bruno, Indiana University Bloomington:

“Soviet Phosphorus: Spatial Temporalities of Labor, Planning, Trade, and Ecology”
 

09:55–10:40

James Nealy, University of Texas at San Antonio:

“From Fordism to Flexibility: Production Regimes and the Politics of Time in Soviet Russia”
 

10:40–11:10

Coffee break
 

11:10–11:55

Mary O’Sullivan, University of Geneva:

“Fantasy Islands: Politics and Profits on the British Empire’s Wool Frontier, 1801–1834”
 

12:05–12:50

Jonathan Robins, Michigan Technological University:

“Capital, Environments, and Technology Across Three Waves of oil Palm Expansion”
 

12:50–14:00

Lunch
 

14:00–14:45

Ritam Sengupta, O.P. Jindal Global University:

“The Monsoon’s Compulsion: Colonial Government of Seasonality and North Indian Agriculture in the Nineteenth Century”
 

14:55–15:40

Juri Auderset, University of Bern:

“Time, Agriculture, and Industrial Capitalism”
 

15:40–16:10

Coffee break
 

16:10–16:55

Nicholas Mulder, Cornell University:

“The Consolation of Capital: Compensated Expropriation in Modern Economic History”
 

17:05–17:50

Workshop commentary and general discussion

Tehila Sasson, University of Oxford

Andrew Sartori, New York University
 

19:30

Conference dinner

*** 

Saturday, 29 August 2026

09:00–09:45

Javier Francisco, University of Basel:

“Reassessing the Commodity Frontier: How Temporal Regimes Shaped Capitalist Expansion in the Eastern Woodlands”
 

09:55–10:40

Alexander Engel, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München:

“Bandits, Prophets, or Burros? Conceptualizing Speculators in Futures Markets”
 

10:40–11:10

Coffee break
 

11:10–12:00

Concluding roundtable

Group discussion, next steps, and debrief 
 

12:00

Informal lunch
 

13:30

City walk and Rhine swim, weather permitting