03.07.2026

Lecture: Xu Guanmian, “More Labour to Beast, and Less to Man”? Multispecies Capitalism in Early Modern Asia

On Tue, 7 July, Prof. XU Guanmian will present a lecture on Multispecies Capitalism in Early Modern Asia

Prof. Xu Guanmian (Peking University), “More Labour to Beast, and Less to Man”? Multispecies Capitalism in Early Modern Asia

Abstract Water buffaloes have long been viewed as the most symbolic animals of Asian peasantry, standing on the other side of modern capitalism. This research project overturns that view by revealing them instead as vital drivers of the early acceleration of capitalist expansion in Asia. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Taiwan and Java, water buffaloes anchored multispecies regimes across diverse socio-ecologies, from smallholdings to plantations and from lowlands to uplands. These regimes produced global commodities for long-distance trade, such as sugar and coffee, drove the unprecedented expansion of commodity frontiers, and reproduced animal labour to sustain this expansion. By tracing this little-known history, the project offers a more-than-human account of capitalism’s global rise, arguing that capitalism was built not only upon specific social relations among humans, but, more fundamentally, upon multiple sets of interspecies relationships among humans and nonhumans.

Bio Xu Guanmian is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Peking University. His research interests encompass capitalism, plantations, animals, the ocean, and the body. He is currently working on two manuscripts: one explores the capitalist past of water buffaloes, while the other examines the Indo-Pacific Ocean as an embodied ecology.

Tuesday, 7 July 2026, 16:00
Wilhelmstr. 133, Raum 30
Online Zoom Meeting ID: 936 0056 4476 Passcode: 928919