We are delighted to welcome four Oxford doctoral students to the Global History of Capitalism project’s research community this academic year, Yung Au, Victoria Gierok, Andrés Guiot-Isaac and Aftab Mallick, all of whom have been awarded 4th year studentships within the project.
Yung Au is based at the Oxford Internet Institute and is writing her thesis on the mass surveillance industry, focusing on the public-private ventures of surveillance projects in Asia. Her research looks at the long and uneven histories of the surveillance industry, how it shapes the modern day surveillance marketplace and what implications this has for our surveillant futures.
Victoria Gierok is an economic historian whose research looks at economic inequality in pre-industrial Germany, spanning the period from 1300 to 1850 and covering circa 40 cities, towns and parishes. Her research aims is to establish and understand large changes in wealth inequality over time and the impact of events such as the Black Death or the Thirty Years’ War, and to compare this with recent research on England, Italy, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire and Japan.
Andrés Guiot-Isaac comes to us from the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies(OSGA). His doctoral research is on the history of developmentalist economic interventions in post-war Latin America and the complex institutional arrangements involved. By approaching post-war Colombia as a laboratory for rationalising tools of economic management, his research aims to decentre the history of capitalism by locating some of the institutional innovations that underpin the functioning of capitalist systems in the modern era beyond the North-Atlantic world.
Aftab Mallick’s thesis is on the social history of the Iranian cohort of the nobility of the Mughal Empire in the 17th century, through which he hopes to contribute to understandings of social, political and economic change in Early Modern India, particularly the incipient capitalistic potential within a theoretically “feudal” or patrimonial society.
We are particularly excited to be working with such a diverse and interdisciplinary group of researchers, and look forward to working with them to develop historical case studies around their research for the project’s case study series. The Global History of Capitalism project would like to thank our sponsors for their generous support for the doctoral studentship programme.
