Lessons from History

This series of six events has run since the autumn of 2019, initially at the offices of our co-hosts Sarasin and Partners in London, and latterly online. It has tackled a series of contemporary issues and problems from a historical perspective, featuring a range of lecturers from the Faculty and experts from the team at Sarasin and Partners. 

Our themes have moved from the 2008 crash to the ‘levelling-up’ agenda (due to air on 7 June 2021), and taken in the rise of China, the social challenge of technological development, the environment and the economic implications of gender inequality.  Our aim has been to show that historical knowledge and historical insight provide ways of thinking about today’s questions and how they should be tackled. 

The Faculty would like to express its gratitude to Sarasin and Partners for generously supporting the series and to Guy Monson, Senior Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Sarasin and Partners, for chairing the events. We are also grateful to the many alums, donors and new friends who have joined us for these evenings, and we thank them for their support.

Levelling up: how well have state interventions worked?

 

 

https://player.vimeo.com/video/568818394?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479

 

Monday 7 June 2021

Professor Jo Innes, Oxford – The ‘Bettering Society’ project: England 1783-1818

Professor Richard Reid, Oxford – From dual mandate to developmental state: the concept of levelling up in modern Africa

Dr Ben Jackson, Oxford – ‘I’ve heard that song before’: levelling up in twentieth century Britain

Dr Subitha Subramaniam, Sarasin & Partners – How will levelling up change the policy paradigm?

 

How has gender inequality affected economic productivity? 

https://player.vimeo.com/video/521555931?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479

Monday 22 February 2021

Professor Jane Humphries, Oxford – Does anybody gain from gender inequality? The historical answer 

Professor Maria Misra, Oxford – From Girl Power to Culture Wars: Gender and Globalization Since the 1970s 

Therese Kieve, Sarasin & Partners – Gender Equality: Better Boards and Better Work

 

 

Are environmental sustainability and economic growth compatible goals?

https://player.vimeo.com/video/480226138?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479

Monday 28 September 2020

Professor James Belich, Oxford – Depletion-driven expansion in global history

Dr Amanda Power, Oxford – Is ‘civilisation’ sustainable?

Professor Miles Larmer , Oxford – Polluting the past: an environmental approach to histories of central African mining

Natasha Landell-Mills, Sarasin & Partners – A contemporary perspective

 

Adapting to technology: from the industrial revolution and war to coronavirus and the digital age

https://www.youtube.com/embed/y-fUvoCcetg?controls=0

Monday 4 May 2020

Josh Sambrook-Smith, Sarasin & Partners – Investing in technology

Prof. Rob Iliffe, Oxford - Productive utopias: fantasies and realities of technological change in the British workplace, 1700-1820

Dr Erica Charters, Oxford - Information Technology in war: a long-term perspective

Dr Kathryn Eccles, Oxford - History in the digital age

 

China and the World: from the Ming Dynasty to Today

china and the world

Monday 24 February 2020
 

Niloofar Rafiei, Sarasin & Partners - China’s economic outlook

Prof. Rana Mitter, Oxford - China’s DNA: how authoritarianism, globalization, technology and consumerism draw on China’s past to shape its future

Prof. Craig Clunas, Oxford - Remembering and forgetting Imperial China

Prof. Catherine Schenk, Oxford - Hong Kong: a prism for China’s global economic links

 

2008 and All That: Policy Responses to Economic Crisis and their Results, from the Middle Ages to Today

2001 and all that

Monday 30 September 2019

Professor John Watts, Oxford - The Black Death, 1348-1350

Dr Christopher McKenna, Oxford - The South Sea Bubble, 1711 - 1720

Professor Patricia Clavin, Oxford - Britain and the Making of Global Order, 1919-1931

 

St Paul's Cathedral