Amy C. Offer: "Sorting Out the Mixed Economy"

Amy C. Offer, University of Pennsylvania: Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019)

Presentation
Amy C. Offner (assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania) studies twentieth-century US history in global perspective, with special focus on Latin America. Her research and teaching address the history of capitalism and political economy, empire and foreign relations, and social and intellectual history.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economytakes readers through half a century of US and Colombian history, offering a transnational history of state formation and capitalist reconstruction since 1945. In the process, it shows the influence of Latin American developmentalism on the formation of the US welfare state and reveals the midcentury origins of practices that are regarded today as hallmarks of neoliberalism, including austere systems of social welfare provision, changing systems of state decentralization, and novel forms of for-profit and private delegation.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economywon the First Monograph Prize from the Economic History Society. It was also a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and received an honorable mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. 

The seminar is organised by the Neoliberalism in the Nordics research group and the Departments of the History of Ideas and Science, Uppsala University, the Economic History Department, Uppsala University, and the Center for Modern European studies, Copenhagen University.