Capitalism in Context: Commodification and Appropriation of Land and Labor in the Modern World (CCCALL)

Cotton market in Amraoti, India, in the late 19th century (source: Volkart Archives, Winterthur

project abstract

The research group Capitalism in Context (CCCALL) at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg explores the global history of land and labor commodification from the early enclosures in 16th-century Europe to the emergence of large estates, colonial plantation systems, and contemporary land grabbing. We investigate how these extractive economies have shaped social relations, gender dynamics, labor regimes, environmental change, and systems of inequality—past and present. Our work draws from a range of historical and interdisciplinary approaches, integrating local case studies into broader global frameworks.

CCCALL is an open and welcoming research group that encourages the active participation of MA and PhD students, postdocs and experienced researchers from across the university. Whether you are developing your own research, seeking collaboration, or simply interested in the historical and contemporary dimensions of capitalism, inequality, extractivism, or social transformation, we invite you to reach out and get involved. You are welcome to join our discussions, propose initiatives, attend events, or collaborate on future projects. Our aim is to create an inclusive, critical, and intellectually vibrant community for exchanging ideas and advancing knowledge on the commodification and appropriation of land and labor.

This group is an open exchange between all UniBe-members that are interested in capitalism in some way. We will meet for three sessions with pre-circulated texts. To be added to the mailing list, please send a short message to either Melina Teubner or Stefan Leins (contact see below). Please let potential colleagues know about our meetings!

13.03.	Dr. Kirthana Ganeson from the Word Trade Institute will discuss her new project on the historical ideological evolution of the WTO and UNCTAD. \|12.15pm-2pm
17.04.	Dr. Tanushree Kaushal from the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Studies will talk about her work on gendered labour in finance \|12.15pm-2pm
22.05.	Dr. Juri Auderset from the Institute of History will speak about his new SNSF project on commodity frontiers \|12.15pm-2pm

news & events

“Capitalism in Context” Research group meeting with Dr. Tanushree Kaushal on Gendered Labour in Finance, 14 April

March 26, 2026

This group is an open exchange between all UniBe-members that are interested in capitalism. The group meets for three sessions with pre-circulated texts. On 17 April, Dr. Tanushree Kaushal from the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Studies will talk about her work on gendered labour in finance |12.15pm-2pm. Get in touch with Melina Teubner or Stefan Leins and join!

further info

links

Capitalism in Context, University of Bern

Contact

Prof. Dr. Stefan Leins

Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern

Dr. Melina Teubner

Institute of History, University of Bern

Team members

Dr. Juri Auderset

Institute of History, University of Bern
Juri Auderset is Lecturer at the Institute of History at the University of Bern and research fellow at the Archives of Rural History in Bern. He currently leads the SNF-supported research-project “At the Crossroads of Commodity Frontiers: Food, Agriculture, and the Environment in Switzerland in the Age of Global Capitalism, 1870s-1930s”. His research and teaching interests include the intersections between agricultural, environmental and labor history, the history of capitalism, the history of human-animal relations, and the history of drugs and alcohol.

Dr. Fulvio Bertuccelli

Institute Middle East and Muslim Societies, University of Bern
Fulvio Bertuccelli is 2024 MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, the University of Bern and the Hrant Dink Foundation for the project IhaNeT- Identiy Nation and Treason in the Turkish Concept of Authority. Covering the period from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (1918) to the failed military coup of 2016, IhaNeT aims to elucidate the evolution of treason in its legal, discursive, and subjective dimensions.

Nicolà Bezzola

Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern
Nicolà Bezzola is a research associate at the Centre for Development and Environment of the University of Bern (CDE). As an economic historian he focuses on the history and future of work and the role the reorganisation of work can play for a sustainable transformation. He is furthermore interested in the political economy of work and capitalism, its history, and the history of economic thought.

Sagnik Bhattacharya

Institut of History, University of Bern
Sagnik Bhattacharya is a doctoral researcher at the Chair of Modern History at the University of Bern. His current project, How the Subalterns Speak? Indigeneity and the Global History of the Adivasis of Eastern India (1930s–1990s), examines the global trajectories of ‘Adivasi' (indigenous) political thought and indigenous rights discourse in twentieth-century South Asia. His research focuses on modern South Asia, colonial and postcolonial history, agrarian capitalism and subaltern studies, and he has published on questions of colonial governance and marginality in colonial India.

Prof. Dr. Moritz von Brescius

Institute for European Global Studies, University of Basel
Prof. Dr. Moritz von Brescius is a global historian of Europe and Asia, working on resource and environmental history, political economy, and science and empire. He is currently completing the book Empire of Scarcity: A Global History of Rubber and leads the SNSF Consolidator Grant project “The Battle of Materials: Commodity ‘Research and Propaganda’ and the Road to Immoderate Consumption, 1900–1980” at the Institute for European Global Studies at Basel. Before that, he was a Senior Researcher at the Institute of History at Bern.

Samuel Brülisauer

Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern
Samuel Brülisauer is a researcher at the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE). His focus lies on agricultural value chains, the social and solidarity economy and the role of justice in shaping human perceptions and organizational outcomes. He holds a Master in Development Studies of the Geneva Graduate Institute and is currently completing his PhD in Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of Bern.

Prof. Dr. Christian Büschges

Iberian and Latin American History
Christian Büschges is a Professor for Iberian and Latin American History at the Institute of History at the University of Bern. He is a co-director of the international research project ‘Turning Land into Capital. Historical Periods of (Re)Production of Wealth in Latin America from the 19th to the 21st Century’, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (2023 - 2027). His current research focusses on the owners of large estates in the Andes in the colonial period and on Latin American social movements in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Prof. Dr. Christof Dejung

Institute of History, University of Bern
Christof Dejung is a Professor in Modern History at the University of Bern. His research and teaching interests include European and global history, social and economic history and theory and methodology of history. He is the author of Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market (Routledge, 2018) and the co-editor, together with David Motadel and Jürgen Osterhammel, of The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Dr. Moslem Ghomashlouyan

Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Moslem Ghomashlouyan is a postdoc at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern. His current research examines the social lives of informal trade and cryptocurrencies in and around sanctioned Iran. It focuses on how goods and currencies circulate to and from Iran and how saving, moving capital, and mitigating the effects of currency instability are sustained with cryptocurrency trade under conditions of trade and financial restrictions.

Prof. Dr. Tobias Haller

Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Tobias Haller is Professor at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Department Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (SAKS), University of Bern. He has specialized on ecological and economic anthropology and done research in different African countries (Cameroon, Zambia, Kenya) on common property institutions as well as colonial and post-colonial land and green grabbing in the context of development projects and conservation. He is also doing research on local institution building processes and local envionmental perceptions as well as more than human relations.

Jyothy Karat

Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Jyothy Karat is a filmmaker and PhD candidate at the University of Bern (SAKS), researching India's deep-tech evolution. Her work explores how elite entrepreneurs have shifted from socially conscious innovation to aligning with state priorities in defence and surveillance. By analysing the intersection of techno-nationalism and the political economy of venture capital, she traces the systemic co-option of start-ups, revealing how deep-tech architecture becomes entwined with the sovereign interests of the state.

Dr. Tanushree Kaushal

Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Tanushree Kaushal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. She is interested in the relationship between labour, social reproduction and finance, particularly how financial flows co-constitute household relations, community ties and cultures of aspiration. Politically, she is interested in developing new ways of critiquing and contesting finance capitalism that resist techniques of co-optation. Currently, she is conducting an ethnography of fintechs, digital infrastructures and state surveillance in India. She has previously held positions at the University of Edinburgh, the Geneva Graduate Institute, Centre de Sciences Humaines and the University of Amsterdam.

Yara Küng

Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Yara Küng is a PhD student in Prof. Dr. Stefan Leins’ project “Cultures of Speculation” at the Institute of Social Anthropology, investigating how seasonal work, migration, digitalisation and climate change are interlinked. Taking the Swiss Alps as starting point, Yara's research will focus on the political economy of ski resorts, looking into stakeholders' decision making processes, while also investigating contemporary constellations of worker's realities at the margins.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Leins

Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Stefan Leins is Professor of Social Anthropology with a focus on economic anthropology. He conducts research on commodity trading, supply chains, financial markets, sustainable investing, and the social role of economic expertise. His book Stories of Capitalism: Inside the Role of Financial Analysts was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and was translated to multiple languages. He is currently leading an SNSF-funded project on Cultures of Speculation

Prof. Dr. Sibylle Marti

Institute of History, University of Bern
Sibylle Marti is a SNSF Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern History and Contemporary History at the University of Bern. Her research is situated at the intersection of the global history of work, the history of knowledge, and gender history. She is currently working on her second book on the history of informal work since 1970. Her new research project, funded by a SNSF Starting Grant, examines transnational women’s networks in the 1990s.

Dr. Melina Teubner

Institute of History, University of Bern
Melina Teubner is an Advanced Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of History at the University of Bern. Her doctoral thesis, “Feeding the ‘Second Slavery’: Slave Ship Cooks and Female Street Vendors in the South Atlantic (1800–1870)”, examined how workers in the food sector contributed to the infrastructure of the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade to Brazil. Her current book project, “Consuming Chicken: Continuities and Changes in Food Systems since 1990,” offers a comparative analysis of transformations in the production, distribution, and consumption of chicken meat in the Mercosur region. She is also one of the Principal Investigators of the research project “Turning Land into Capital: Historical Periods of (Re)Production of Wealth in Latin America from the 19th to the 21st Century,” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2023–2027).

Prof. Dr. Serena Tolino

Institute Middle East and Muslim Societies, University of Bern
Serena Tolino is Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Bern, and Director of the Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities and the Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Research Network at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern. Her research focuses on Islamic law and the history of gender, sexuality, and labour, as well as LGBTQI+ rights in Middle Eastern contexts. She currently leads the SNSF projects TraSIS: Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies and the SNSF Starting Grant TraIL: Tracing Labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions, and co-leads the SNSF/DFG project The Flow: From Deep-Learning to Digital Analysis and Their Role in the Humanities together with Tobias Hodel (Digital Humanities, University of Bern), Angela Huang (Research Centre for the Hanse and Baltic History), and Silke Schwandt (University of Bielefeld).

Jean Lucas Ramos Veloso

Institute of History, University of Bern
Jean Lucas Ramos Veloso is a PhD candidate in History within the Berner IberoAmerikaStudien program at the University of Bern. His research is part of the project Turning Land into Capital and examines the relationship between land, credit, and slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, with particular attention to the role of mortgage credit and banking institutions in the consolidation of agrarian elites.

Rea Vogt

Institute of History, University of Bern
Rea Vogt is a PhD candidate in modern history at the University of Bern. Her PhD project “A Returnee’s Drink”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), is on the history of yerba mate trade and consumption in Lebanon and the role of global mercantile networks and returnees during the French Mandate and early independence period. She co-edited a Special Issue on Transatlantic Work Migration around 1900 for Comparativ: Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung in 2025 (1/2) and contributed to the Exeter Digital Middle East Archive "Global Histories of MENA in the 20th Century - A Primary Source Collection", edited by Cyrus Schayegh.

Prof. em. Heinzpeter Znoj

Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Heinzpeter Znoj is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. His research interests include economic anthropology, the examination of the society and history of South East Asia with a particular focus on Indonesia, the anthropology of work and gender relations, the analysis of political corruption and the history of cultural and social anthropology. Portrait picture: Dres Hubacher.

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