Sven Beckert

Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard  University. Professor Beckert's research and teaching focus on the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. His publications have focused on the nineteenth-century American bourgeoisie, on labor, on democracy and, in recent years, on the global history of capitalism. Beckert teaches courses on the history of American capitalism, Gilded Age America, the political economy of modern capitalism, labor history and global capitalism. Beckert is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University. Beyond Harvard, he co-chairs an international study group on global history,  is co-editor of a series of books at Princeton University Press on “America in the World,” and has co-organized a series of conferences on the history of capitalism.

Selected Publications

• The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie Cambridge University Press (2001 (paperback, 2003))
• The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Itentity in the Nineteenth Century. co-edited with Julia Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan 2010)
• "From Tuskegee to Togo" in Journal of American History (September) (2005)
• "Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War" in American Historical Review Issue 109 (Dec 2004), pp. 1405-1438. (2004)
• "Democracy and its Discontents: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York" in Past and Present (February 2002), pp. 114-155 (2002)

Contact information: Sven Beckert, History Department