Sven Beckert

Sven Beckert is a German-American historian who is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, and global history. With Christine A. Desan, he is the co-director of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University.

He was an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow in 2008. He was a Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Fellow. He was a New York Public Library Fellow. He is a Guggenheim Fellow.

Early and personal life He studied history, economics and political science at the University of Hamburg, Germany and then graduated from Columbia University with a PhD in History.

Beckert is married to Lisa McGirr, a fellow history professor at Harvard. They have two children.

Career In 2003, Beckert worked at the University of Konstanz as a Humboldt Research Fellow.

In 2020, an honoree of the Great Immigrants Award named by Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Works Beckert's first book was The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (2001). Beckert would go on to author the Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), which won the 2015 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History. The New York Times called it "one of the ten best books of 2015." Economic historian Peer Vries wrote that it was "a must read for every historian interested in global history, but in my view it is better as a story on cotton than as an analysis of capitalism." Other economic historians have criticized the book.

Beckert published his third book, Capitalism: A Global History in 2025.

Comaroff petition

In February 2022, Beckert was one of 38 Harvard faculty to sign an open letter published in The Harvard Crimson defending Professor John Comaroff after a university investigation found that he had violated the Harvard's sexual and professional conduct policies. The letter stated, in part, that "We the undersigned know John Comaroff to be an excellent colleague, advisor, and committed university citizen.” Four days later, after three graduate students filed a lawsuit with detailed allegations of Comaroff's actions and the university's failure to respond, Beckert was one of several signatories to say that they wished to retract their signatures.

Publications Books

online online ---- "History of American capitalism" (American Historical Association, 2012). 44pp historiography; on;line

Journal articles

Edited volumes Sven Beckert, and Seth Rockman, eds. (2006) Slavery's Capitalism - A New History Of American Economic Development (2006) online