Sons Speaker Series Lecture: Prof. Emma Hart
“Colonial Trade, American Capitalism and The American Revolution”
Professor Emma Hart will be sharing with us her scholarship about colonial trade and the origins of our American capitalist culture. Her book, Trading Spaces, looks seriously into the geographical challenges laid down by the North American continent to European settlers. It proposes that the expansive nature of the continent made it very hard for rulers to apply customary government regulation, the likes of which had limited dealers in Europe. By the American Revolution, Americans had already become used to trading freely and following the money. The Revolution severely disrupted trade and led some to question these freedoms. Nevertheless, they persisted to become the foundation of our American capitalist culture.
Location: Historic Waynesborough
Address: 2055 Waynesborough Road, Paoli, PA 19301
Date: March 31 2026
Time: 6 pm (please arrive early)
Subscription: $20/person (please pay below)
**Students are welcome to attend for FREE. To register as a student, we ask you to please email the office directly to request a student ticket: [email protected]
All attendees are welcome to join us after the lecture for a brief reception where wine and beer will be served to those 21 and older. Non-alcoholic beverages will also be available.
Professor Emma Hart is the author of three books on the history of colonial America and the Atlantic world. Her major research interests lie in urban history, social, and economic history, as well as in the intersections of history, material culture, urban studies, geography and sociology. She has written two books; Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (UVA Press, 2010/University of South Carolina Press, 2015) and Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Additionally, she has published scholarly articles in, among other places, The William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, The Journal of Southern History, Urban History (where she co-edited a special issue on early modern cities and globalization with Mariana Dantas), Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Journal of Urban History. Her essays are also part of The Cambridge History of America and the World (2021), and The Cambridge History of the American Revolution (forthcoming).
She is a founding board member of the Global Urban History Project, a transnational online collective of scholars who research the history of the city as a space and as an agent of globalization. Her work has been supported by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies’ Barra Sabbatical Fellowship, the Huntington Library, The Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, The Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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[email protected] or (215) 545-1888