Trevor Jackson

Areas of Expertise

• Britain
• Early Modern Europe
• Economic History
• Early Modern World

Trevor Jackson works on early modern European economic history, with an emphasis on inequality and financial crisis. His book manuscript, Capitalism and Impunity: Afterlives of European Financial Crisis, 1680-1830, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. It examines how changes in the scope for prosecutorial discretion, technical complexity, and the international mobility of capital diffused the capacity to act with impunity in the economy across the very long eighteenth century.  The project argues that impunity has shifted from the sole possession of a legally-immune sovereign to a functional characteristic of technically-skilled professional managers of capital, to an imagined quality of markets themselves, such that a constituent element of the modern economic sphere is that within it, great harm can and will happen to great many people, and nobody will be at fault. Dr. Jackson has taught courses on international economic history ranging from the early modern period to the twentieth century, as well as courses on capitalism and inequality, the history of economic crisis, and the history of human rights.  Prior to joining the faculty at the George Washington University, he lectured at the University of California, Berkeley.

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2017

Publications

"Between Independence and Impunity: The Theory of Proto-Central Banking After the Crisis of 1720." Eighteenth Century Studies 54, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 33-52. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/771830.

Classes Taught

HIST 1120: European Civilization in its World Context, 1700-Present

HIST 2001: Global Economic History, 1700-Present

HIST 3001: Capitalism and Anti-Capitalism

HIST 3001: History of Economic Crisis

HIST 3101: Capitalism and Inequality

HIST 3140: France to 1815

HIST 6031: International Economic Systems