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About Me

I am a historian of Europe from the 18th century to the present. While my particular interests lie in Western Europe (Britain, France, Germany, mostly), I conceive of Europe broadly and seek to place European history in the context of its interactions with the wider world. Europe’s imperial and colonial past beyond the geographic boundaries of the continent is an important part of that history. Similarly, the sprawling nature of capitalism and the world economy require an engagement with non-European history. In my now completed first book (The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950) I traced changing political, legal, and cultural regimes of time during an area of intensified global interactions between Europe and other world regions. The book follows time in its different manifestations as clock time, calendar time, and social and cultural time from Germany, France, and Britain, to British India, the colonial world broadly, the late Ottoman Levant and Egypt, and the League of Nations. I consider this book an attempt and proposal to conceptualize European history as global and international. I published an article related to the book in The American Historical Review in 2013.

My current book project is titled Archipelago Capitalism: A History of the Offshore World, 1920s-1980s. It reopens the history of twentieth-century political economy and capitialism (in its free-market, neoliberal variety in particular) in Europe and beyond, by pointing to an economic,  legal, and political regime of smaller, often enclave-like territories and spaces that thrived on the sidelines of a world otherwise increasingly dominated by nation-states: tax havens, offshore finance, flags of convenience, and free trade zones. At the same time, the book provides the first archivally-based account of how ‘offshore’ came into existence as a sophisticated, far-flung system often beyond the reach of national regulators and governments. The book thus seeks to shed light on the origins of tax avoidance and evasion on a global scale, one of the most pressing current problems with profound implications for the rise of inequality throughout the twentieth century. The project uses a multi-archival approach that combines documents from national archives, central banks, multilateral institutions, private banks, and oral history interviews in locations such as Australia, Bahamas, Britain, Canada, Cayman Islands, France, Germany, Guernsey, Ireland, Jersey, Luxembourg, Panama, Singapore, Switzerland, and the US. A pilot article based off this work is forthcoming in The American Historical Review in December 2017.

Since graduate school, I have maintained an interest in the histories and languages of the (Arab) Middle East, and relations between Europe and the Middle East are an additional area of expertise.

Recent Publications

Book:

The Global Transformation of Time: 1870 – 1950 (Harvard University Press, October 2015).

Articles:

“Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s-1970s,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5 (December 2017): 1431-1458.

“State Rights against Private Capital: The “New International Economic Order” and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962-1980,” Humanity 5 no. 2 (2014): 211-234.

“Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s-1940s,” American Historical Review 120, no. 5 (December 2013): 1376-1402.

Media Coverage

Social Media

@vanessahistory

Country Focus

Britain, US, Germany, France

Expertise by Geography

France, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

18th century, 19th century, Modern, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Capitalism, Colonialism, Diplomacy, Economic History