THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Abstract: Human life is structured by institutions – the rules that create patterns of incentives and expectations which condition how we behave and coordinate with others. Institutions can create the conditions for prosperity and human flourishing, providing individual freedoms, economic opportunity and the capacity for innovation. As history has long shown, they are not guaranteed to do so, but why?
October 8, 2025
4:30 - 7:00pm CT
Location: Social Sciences Division Tea Room, SSRB 201, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
The Cost of State Building: Evidence from Germany
Speaker: Leander Heldring, Northwestern University
Leander Heldring joined Kellogg in 2020 after receiving his PhD in economics from the University of Oxford. His research interests are in economic development, political economy and economic history, with a particular focus on the role of government in facilitating or stifling innovation, entrepreneurship and growth.
Register here: https://uchicagosocialsciencesdivision.wufoo.com/forms/p745b211ru0mgf/
Paper Link: https://uchicago.box.com/s/j08cg7l0fv927npv3lznlczuzn41jjtp (please do not circulate beyond workshop)
Event Listing: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/251683-institutions-workshop-and-kickoff-reception
Please note - Francesco Guala is no longer speaking on October 8 - his talk is being reschedule for a later date.
October 22, 2025
4:30 - 6:30pm CT
Location: Neubauer Collegium, 5701 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
Constructing a colonial state: The land rights debate in 18th-century Bengal
Speaker: Tirthankar Roy, Professor of Economic History, at the London School of Economics
Abstract
“The principle on which [Akbar, Mughal Emperor] secured his conquest was [to show regard] to the right of the Zemindars, the ancient proprietors of the soil,” said Philip Francis in 1777. Disagreeing radically, his rival Warren Hastings said, “much the greatest part of the Zemindars .. are incapable of judging or acting for themselves, being either minors, or men of weak understandings, or absolute idiots.”
Two colonial administrators in charge of building a European-ruled state in India made these comments about a magnate in the countryside. Their debate reveals the (possibly) universal dilemma of a colonial state project: limited trust in indigenous institutions and limited power to supersede these. How was the problem solved so that a strong empire could grow?
Speaker Biography
I teach South Asia and Global History at the LSE and am the author of Monsoon Economies: India’s History in a Changing Climate, besides other books and articles. My work on economic history tries to answer these questions. Is there a long-term pattern in Indian capitalism? Does history help us understand how capitalism in India works today? How do climatic conditions shape economic change in the long run?
My recent publications include Law and the Economy in Colonial India (with Anand V. Swamy, University of Chicago Press, 2016). The book discusses the diverse influences that shaped British Indian law and shows why it delivered rather poor value to the users. A sequel, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy (with Anand V. Swamy, University of Chicago Press, 2022) studies the historical roots of modern Indian laws and the persistence of a colonial legacy. Currently in press, Water and Development: The Troubled Economic History of the Arid Tropics (Oxford University Press) explores the idea that the economic emergence of societies in arid and semi-arid tropical regions depended on their ability to extract and recycle water and, in turn, on manipulating the environment in certain ways. The process has been politically tense and has tested federal democracies.
Register here: bit.ly/4nFknAF
Paper Link: https://uchicago.box.com/s/luiucnqcmfoytmbq8idy6pyo6pr0rgad (please do not circulate beyond workshop)
Event Listing: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/251684-institutions-workshop-with-tirthankar-roy
November 12, 2025
4:30 - 6:30pm CT
Location: SSD Tea Room, SSRB 201, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
Explaining Democratic Erosion
Speaker: Sue Stokes, Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago
Speaker Biography
Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory and how democracy functions in developing societies, distributive politics, and comparative political behavior. Her single and co-authored books include Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (2001), Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (2013), and Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests (2019). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Register here: bit.ly/4gFbQeU
Paper Link: https://uchicago.app.box.com/s/yz92c6trsu67ids3wv2bssklez3b173o
Event Listing: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/251685-institutions-workshop-with-susan-stokes
November 19, 2025
4:30 - 6:30pm CT
Location: SSD Tea Room, SSRB 201, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
Speaker: Steve Pincus
Title: South Asian origins of American Independence: Political Economy and Imperial Civil War.
I am a historian of Britain and its Empire, of comparative revolutions, comparative empires, and of northern Europe more broadly. I am both a deeply committed archival historian and a scholar who believes profoundly that historians should engage with the social sciences.
Register here: bit.ly/3W4Blg4
Paper Link: https://uchicago.app.box.com/s/n591b59p7ih72oh0j08pb57gwg5t3ck4
Event Listing: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/251686-institutions-workshop
February 11, 2026
4:30 - 6:30pm CT
Location: TBD
Speaker: Peter Bang
Title: TBD
My research is situated at the interface of ancient and world history. It is focused on exploring historical comparisons between the Roman and other pre-colonial land-empires, especially the Mughal Empire of India, to suggest new ways of conceptualising the anatomy of Roman power. Topics include taxation and tribute, patrimonial lordship and the notion of Universal Empire, cosmopolitan high-culture as well as trade and economy.
Register here: https://bit.ly/482qSZt
Paper Link: coming soon
Event Listing: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/251691-institutions-workshop
February 18, 2026
4:30 - 6:30pm CT
Location: TBD
Speaker: Hye Young You
Title: TBD
Hye Young You holds a joint appointment in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Her primary research focuses on how interest groups influence democratic representation in the United States. By focusing on the role of interest group lobbying in American politics, her research examines the specific mechanisms and strategies that interest groups use to lobby and sheds light on groups that play a crucial role, but have been understudied, in policymaking. She also studies how politicians are informed and how interest groups can control the provision of information to policymakers. In addition to her core research agenda on lobbying, she is interested in federalism and local political economy, focusing on how local government finances affect the provision of local public goods and intergovernmental relations. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and other outlets. Professor You’s work has been recognized by five discipline-wide Best Paper awards from the American Political Science Association. Hye Young You received her B.A. at Seoul National University in South Korea, her M.A. at The University of Chicago, and her PhD at Harvard University.
Register here: https://bit.ly/3LTu4OC
Paper Link: coming soon
Event Listing: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/251692-institutions-workshop
March 4, 2026
4:30 - 6:30pm CT
Location: TBD
Speaker: Elizabeth Chatterjee
Title: TBD
Elizabeth Chatterjee is a historian of energy and the environment, with a focus on India from 1900 to the present. Her research explores how non-Western energy histories disrupt conventional understandings of capitalist development and the social dynamics of climate change. Chatterjee’s first book manuscript, Electric Democracy: An Energy History of India from Colonialism to Climate Change (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), traces the flows of electricity to provide an energy-centered history of India’s transforming political economy since the late colonial period. In so doing, it seeks to trace the very different dynamics underlying the later, Asian-centric phase of the Great Acceleration in human impacts on the planet. In place of the conventional emphasis on North Atlantic industrialists and private multinationals, it locates the postcolonial state and popular pressures for cheap energy at the heart of our contemporary environmental predicament. Chatterjee’s second book-length project will provide a novel perspective on the worldwide environmental and energy crisis of the early 1970s as seen from the oil-importing global South, experimenting with how historians might deploy the multisystemic lens of Earth System Science as a methodological approach. She is exploring the links between this crisis and India’s turn to both authoritarianism and fossil fuels during this decade. At the same time, she continues to work on a wide variety of other topics in energy history, including the “infrastructural turn” in environmental history, dams that cause earthquakes, and the twentieth-century history of cow dung energy.
Register here: https://bit.ly/48GejSX
Paper Link: coming soon
Event Listing: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/251694-institutions-workshop