Trevor W. Jackson

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in fall 2022, and his second book, a synthetic history of early modern capitalism entitled The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in spring 2026.  His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and overaccumulation since the seventeenth century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital.  He also has an ongoing research interest in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health.  He has a joint appointment with the Political Economy program, and he sometimes writes about money, banking, and economic crisis for the popular press, at places like Dissent, The Baffler, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books.