Date/Time:

1 March 2018 (Thursday), 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Lectures Outline / Synopses:

Capitalist industry since Industrial Revolution has resulted in enormous productivity increases, wealth creation and sustenance of huge population growth. Yet the same business system and firms that were so successful in wealth creation wreaked ever-greater havoc on the natural environment, resulting (by today) in global warming, rising sea levels, water shortages, and mass extinction. From the nineteenth century a niche set of entrepreneurs sought to create for-profit businesses which could make the world more sustainable. This lecture uncovers their history, explores their motivations, and explains why it has proved a huge challenge to make capitalism sustainable.

Date/Time:

2 March 2018 (Friday), 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Lectures Outline / Synopses:

Globalization is a cyclical phenomenon. This lecture explores the globalization cycles we have seen from the nineteenth century until the present day. There was a first wave of massive economic, social and political globalization between the1850s and the1920s. This was sharply reversed for much of the twentieth century, before resuming from the 1980s. Today globalization is once more facing turbulent times. This lecture uses the broad lens of business history to explore what drives globalization, what ends it, and what we can learn from history about the future.