Title of the Book: 

Knowledge and Global Inequality Since 1800: Interrogating the Present as History

Summary of the Book:

The Element highlights the monopolization and exclusion from high-value knowledge in analysing divergent and, recently, partially convergent income trends across 200-odd years of the global capitalist economy. A Southern lens interrogates this history, in the process showing how developing command over knowledge creation sheds light on the middle-income trap. Overall, it shows a new way of looking at global capitalist economic history, highlighting the creation of, command over and exclusion from knowledge. This forces us to analyse the role of the subjective or agential element in making history; a subjective element that, however, always works from within and transforms existing structures and processes.

Speaker Bio:

Dev Nathan, an economist, is a Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research, New York; a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi; and the Research Director at the GenDev Centre for Research and Innovation. His main research interests are global production, development issues of indigenous peoples and gender relations. He is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series on Global Value Chains. His recent co-authored books include Reverse Subsidies in Global Monopsony Capitalism, 2022; and Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation, 2020. He is currently working on the manner in which the organization of the knowledge economy interacts with inequality in the global economy and between genders.