Harold James

Professor of History, LAPA Faculty Associate, Law and Public Affairs, Princeton University, USA

Breaking the Wall of Finance. Why This Current Crisis Will Be Transformational

The current economic crisis is a deadlock: experts agree how dire the situation of our economies has become and yet they can’t define what may change it. For Harold James (1956), professor of economic history, the crisis is a call to study the past: we need to examine the economic forces disrupted by the Second World War and the Cold War in order to understand and successfully respond to the challenge we are facing at the moment. Before joining Princeton university’s faculty, James worked at Cambridge University, where he focused on German financial history in the interwar era and the reappraisal of the peculiar nature of German national identity as an economic identity. In his most recent work “The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalisation Cycle” (2009) he urges to rethink globalisation: Is globalisation reversible? Do currencies rise and fall like empires? How does culture influence economic development and performance? Assessing only the present won’t help us go into an economically bright future.

www.princeton.edu/history/people/display_person.xml?netid=hjames