Girvetz 2320
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) tells us that trade is peaceful and indeed peace-making. Modern economics, the World Trade Organization, and conventional diplomacy all concur. At the same time historians and writers, activists and academics, indeed many concerned communities and citizens are increasingly interested in the slave trade, imperialism, settler colonialism, and the geopolitical world of armaments, interventions, blockades, sanctions, cyber-attacks, assassinations, territorial seizure, civil war, national interest, and security guarantees. Hardly anyone pretends that these were and are peaceful activities and nothing to do with violence. This illustrated talk by Terrell Carver (University of Bristol) will review this ongoing juxtaposition of trade-as-peace and violence as the opposite, and then offer a composite conceptualization. It will also address the discursive erasure and sanitization that make it difficult to see capitalism as global violence.