The copyright world system: Modernism, colonial copyright, and literary authorship
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the British and French empires expanded and consolidated the reach of copyright across their dominions. At the same time, the local production and circulation of written matter in colonial territories grew explosively. The development of colonial copyright offered both protections and provocations to writers in colonial regions such as the Caribbean where the force of colonial law was strongly felt: copyright offered a way of self-presenting as an author and reaching wide literary markets, but also, for some writers, represented a European individualist and idealist notion of authorship that was sharply at odds with alternative and counterhegemonic ideas of literary production.
His dissertation makes two interlinked arguments. The first is that literary modernism’s
celebrated challenges to the idea of authorship were in part provoked by the legal changes that brought about the copyright world system. I examine the way in which writers such as Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire were prompted by this swelling legal frontier to reevaluate the idea of authorship. These writers move from the periphery to the centre in my account of modernism’s rethinking of authorship; but he shows that even ‘metropolitan’ modernists, such as Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, were crucially influenced, in their thinking about authorship, by the expansion of colonial copyright law.
The second argument concerns the ideological failure of various twentieth-century attempts to critique the copyright world system. I find that the triumph of globalised copyright during the twentieth century resulted from a lack of any successful alternative to economic liberalism as a way of conceptualising intellectual products. Describing how no successful critique of copyright was developed by either Marxist, fascist, or antimodernist thinkers during the early twentieth century, he turns to anticolonial writers as representing the only ideological tradition that can still promise a coherent and compelling critique of copyright world system as it still exists.
Alexander Hartley is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His dissertation provides a comparative study of colonial copyright in the first half of the twentieth century, examining how writers in the British and French empires responded to the expanding legal frontier of copyright in shaping their self-presentation as authors. Beyond this project, he is broadly interested in twentieth-century culture and critical theory, and a second vein of his research focuses on ‘urban renewal’, race and the city in the poems and novels of Gwendolyn Brooks. His research has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature and has been supported by the Kennedy Trust and the I. H. Levin Scholarship.
Radical Agency and Business History
In his presentation he will start wit ha brief example of why the approach of forward-looking history (see Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin in the American Historical Review 108(2) (April 2003): 404-433 and Enterprise & Society 5(3) (September 2004): 376-387) can be valuable and then spend the bulk of its time on the deeper considerations involved in writing the history of organizations and industries in this fashion. In particular, he will attempt to clarify and relate a group of concepts commonly assumed (and often actually deployed) in management academia (in which many active business historians work) and historical research, especially research in either category amounting to the history of organizations. The concepts are analysis, causation, explanation, agency (of individuals and in the context of formal organizations), and those of a causal order and of causal ordering. The paper’s most important conclusions are that statistical analysis common in business schools and the quantitative social sciences more broadly represents a very modest portion of the domain of analysis, that an extended version of the possible worlds semantics deriving from modal logic is helpful in understanding causation and that thorough explanations include answers to “How?” questions as well as “Why?” questions, that the agency of individuals is to be understood in terms of processes rather than mere actions and that in the context of all of the preceding the Nelson-Winter and Feldman-Pentland notions of organizational routines are not as remote from one another as is sometimes thought, and finally that ex ante causal indeterminacy is the most helpful assumption concerning the background causal order when exploring both strategic decision-making and organizational development and evolution. The sharp edge of all of this is that penetrating analysis may well require seeing agency of one sort or another close to the heart of the sort of history in question, a perspective which should be some comfort to many historians. He will argue that this sheds interesting light on how business history is different in more than subject matter from more general economic history. A concluding Section of the underlying text draws out the import of all of the preceding for business education and the discussion of business historical narratives more broadly.
Daniel Raff is Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School, Associate Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences, and Lecturer in the Law School at the University of Pennsylvania and a longtime Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was educated at the Friends School in Sandy Spring, Maryland, and holds an undergraduate degree from New College, Florida, and graduate degrees from Princeton, Oxford, and MIT. He is an economic and business historian, the author or co-author of many articles (in journals such as the American Economic Review, the American Historical Review, Business History, the Business History Review, Enterprise & Society, Entreprises et Histoire, the Journal of Economic History, the Journal of Political Economy, and others) and book chapters and is the co-editor of five collective works, the most recent of which being The Emergence of Routines: Entrepreneurship, Organization and Business History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) [edited with Philip Scranton]. He is a former trustee of both the Economic History Association and the Business History Conference. Prior to coming to Penn, he taught (in reverse order) at the business and law schools of Columbia University, the Harvard Business School, and Magdalen College, Oxford. While teaching at Columbia, he and his colleagues there Ronald Gilson and Victor Goldberg developed what is now the standard way of teaching deal design principles to law and business school students.
Practical information
The seminar will be organized as a hybrid event at Håndbiblioteket on the 5th floor in Niels Treschow’s hus, University of Oslo.
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About the event
This event is part of Creative IPR and History of Capitalism's series of open seminars. The research group and project hosts open seminars on the last Monday of every month. This is a public research seminar bringing together researchers and other professionals from across the social sciences, law, the humanities and beyond to present their research or field of expertise followed by a Q&A session.
As of spring 2022, seminars will be hybrid, with the option to attend on Zoom and in person. The seminars are open to all.