DAILY: Trevor Jackson: The United States Is a Central Bank With a Country

Trevor Jackson works on early modern European economic history, with an emphasis on inequality and financial crisis. His dissertation, “Markets of Exception: An Economic History of Impunity in Britain and France, 1720-1830” examines how changes in the scope for prosecutorial discretion, technical complexity, and the international mobility of capital diffused the capacity to act with impunity in the economy across the very long eighteenth century. The project argues that impunity has shifted from the sole possession of a legally-immune sovereign to a functional characteristic of technically-skilled professional managers of capital, to an imagined quality of markets themselves, such that a constituent element of the modern economic sphere is that within it, great harm can and will happen to great many people, and nobody will be at fault. Dr. Jackson has taught courses on international economic history ranging from the early modern period to the twentieth century, as well as courses on capitalism and inequality, the history of economic crisis, and the history of human rights. Prior to joining the faculty at the George Washington University, he lectured at the University of California, Berkeley.