Jason Nguyen presents “Globes, Stock Markets, and Speculative Capitalism”.
The talk looks at a small handheld globe manufactured by the British cartographer Herman Moll in 1719. Though small in size and overtly commercial in use, the object serves as a particularly useful case study for understanding the relationship between cartography, consumerism, and certain geopolitical developments that historians have seen as president of global modernity, namely speculative capitalism—including its troubling connections to colonialism and slavery. Additionally, the talk sketches the parameters of a new line of architectural research on the history of European-supported entrepôts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as they relate to early modern shipping networks and the formalization of the modern stock exchange in Amsterdam and London.
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