2026 A B Emden Lecture - Depending on Strangers: Love, Fear, and the Making of the Modern World
A B Emden Lecture 2026
Depending on Strangers: Love, Fear, and the Making of the Modern World
Professor Jeremy Adelman (Cambridge)
What does it mean for distant peoples to need each other without knowing each other, for “us” to need “them,” and vice versa? Since Adam Smith, interdependence between strangers has been the source of opportunism, utopianism, and unspeakable atrocity. This lecture, looking especially at controversies since the 1970s, puts the fevered debates about globalisation of our times into historical perspective — and asks what we can learn from disputes past to create better arguments for the future.
Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University and the Director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge, which is based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities (CRASSH).
His works cover Latin American and global history, including Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of Humankind from Origins to the Present (W W Norton, 8th edition 2026) and the forthcoming The Capitalist Age: Making and Unmaking of the Global Mind (Princeton University Press, late spring 2026).
Contact: andrea.diss@seh.ox.ac.uk
