Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and co-director of Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, a center for the study of history from global perspectives that brings together members of the Harvard faculty, graduate students and fellows from all over the world. In addition Sven Beckert co-chairs the Harvard programme on the Study of Capitalism. Most recently, he published Empire of Cotton: A Global History.

Ulbe Bosma is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam and Professor of History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His most recent publications include The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production, 1770–2010.

Mindi Schneider is Assistant Professor in Sociology of Development and Change at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She is a development sociologist with specialization in food politics, political ecology, and critical agrarian studies. She has published extensively on the industrialization of food and farming and rural activism in China.

Eric Vanhaute is Professor of Economic History and World History at Ghent University and director of the interdisciplinary Ghent research group Economies, Comparisons Connections. It is recognized as one of Europe’s leading groups in the field of world history and world-systems analysis. His most recent publications include World History: An Introduction, and Rural economy and society in North-Western Europe, 500–2000.