Jeremy Adelman

Jeremy Adelman was born in 1960. He obtained his B.A. in political economy from the University of Toronto in 1984, followed by an M.Sc. in economic history from the London School of Economics in 1985. He completed his D.Phil. in modern history at Oxford University in 1989 as a member of St. Antony’s College. His early academic work at Princeton University focused on Latin American history. His first book, “Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada” (1994), compared agrarian systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His subsequent work, “Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World” (1999), earned the American Historical Association’s Atlantic History Prize and explored Argentina’s integration into the world market. “Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic” (2006) detailed the collapse of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the formation of South American nation-states. Adelman expanded his focus to global history, leading the Global History Lab at Princeton University and later at the University of Cambridge.

Throughout his career, Professor Adelman has contributed significantly to historical scholarship and education. He was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University from 2014 to 2023, and held leadership roles including Chair of the History Department and Director of the Council for International Teaching and Research. He is recognized for his pioneering teaching methods, including converting a gateway history course into an open-access online course on EdX. In collaboration with partners like the University of Geneva and UNHCR, he co-taught this course in refugee camps in Kenya and Jordan. His commitment to accessible education led to the Global History Lab’s expansion into a network program across 25 institutions in 23 countries, reaching tens of thousands of students globally. His book, “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” (2013), chronicled a significant 20th-century thinker. After retiring from Princeton in 2023, he relocated the Global History Lab to the University of Cambridge, where he was elected a Fellow of Darwin College in 2024 and will be a Fellow of the British Academy in 2025.

His current projects include “Latin America: A Global History,” forthcoming with Princeton University Press, which examines Latin America’s role in worldmaking and integration from 1492 to the present, and “Earth Hunger,” a study on global interdependence and attitudes towards strangers from the 1850s. He has authored or edited fifteen books, including “Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of Humankind from the Beginning to the Present” (7th edition, 2024), and “Inventing the Third World: The Search for Freedom in the Cold War Global South” (2022). Adelman’s work has been supported by prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship. He received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton in 2004.