News, thoughts and perspectives

from Fate of Nations Research Group

Thanks to El Niño, Papua New Guinea was experiencing an intense heatwave and prolonged drought when I arrived in the capital early December 2018. Coming from a longer research stay in Australia, I was visiting Port Moresby in order to gather archive material for my PhD project about the country's mining history.

The new Fate of Nations anthology "The Political Economy of Resource Regulation: An international and comparative history, 1850-2015" was published on UBC Press April 1. To celebrate this little milestone, the group organized a book launch through the "Stay on Campus" lecture series on April 10, with presentations by editors Andreas R.D. Sanders,...

The prestigious Business History Conference took place on 14-16th of March, in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cartagena de Indias. This was not just the first time the conference was held in Latin America, but was also among the best ever attended BHC conferences. The theme of the conference was "Globalization and De-Globalization: Shifts of...

Hans Otto Frøland and Robrecht Declercq have just anounced a Call for contributions to their planned edited volume, provisionally titled "A global history of copper" (see below)

The forthcoming edited volume titled The Political Economy of Resource Regulation: An International and Comparative History, 1850-2015 is now available for pre-order at UBC Press. The volume is edited by Andreas R.D. Sanders, Pål T. Sandvik and Espen Storli, and contains case studies spanning seven continents and both advanced and developing...

The Fate of Nations project is currently looking for two prospective postdoctoral reseachers and one PhD researcher.

One of the Fate of Nations pillar leaders Espen Storli has been promoted to full professor, effective from September 15. In accordance with long established academic traditions, the Fate of Nations group has presented the new professor with a cake worthy of a man of his stature and position.

Congratulations!

EBHA's annual congress was held in Ancona in early September, and this year's topic was The Firm and the Sea: Chains, Flows and Connections. The organizers invited papers on the maritime links of firms, clusters, networks and global value chains. Challenging the ocean, Fate of nations participated with two presentations and a chair in a land-locked...

Several Fate of Nations associates attended the reunion of the Oslo Contemporary International History Network at Jesus College, Oxford. The two-day conference on September 10th-11th, financed by Jesus College, Aarhus University and NTNU, was set to reappraise the themes, theories, methods and perspectives currently shaping research in and teaching...

Jonas Scherner's latest article on the "metal mobilization" in Nazi-Germany, published in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, has gained the attention of the press in the German speaking world. Scherner's findings has formed the basis for a long article in the online version of Focus, one of Germany's three largest weekly news magazines, as...