The Currency and Empire Sawyer Seminar is honored to host Dr. Utsa Patnaik for a keynote address: “Imperialism, Gold Standard and the Colonized.” Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emerita, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research interests include: the processes of transition from peasant-predominant society to industrial society; colonialism and imperialism; and food security and poverty. She has authored Peasant Class Differentiation (1987), The Long Transition (1999), The Republic of Hunger (2007) and, with Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (2016), and has edited several books includingAgrarian relations and Accumulation and, in two volumes, The Agrarian Question in Marx and his Successors. She has received several awards the most recent being, along with Prabhat Patnaik, the Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy memorial award for Capital and Imperialism (2021).

“Currency and Empire: Monetary Policy, Race, and Power” is supported by a Sawyer Seminar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The seminar brings together an interdisciplinary team of faculty, graduate students, and guests to study the deep interplay among monetary policy, historical and contemporary dynamics of imperialism.