Feb 07, 2023; Course of talks
Colloquium: Gisela Hürlimann "A Note on the Swiss Worlds of Taxation in the Twentieth Century"
Abstract:
International scholars often focus on Switzerland’s role in the world of international offshore finance and tax havens, which play a significant role for economic globalisation with profit-shifting and increasing wealth inequalities as its corollary since the late 20th century. The talk tries to offer an entangled and historic view of the domestic and the outbound dimensions of Swiss tax laws and politics in the course of the 20th century, with a focus on the post-World War I-period, the boom to bust era (1950s to the mid-1970s), and the “neoliberal” 1990s to 2000s.
About Gisela Hürlimann:
Gisela Hürlimann is, since September 2021, Professor of History of Technology and Economic History at TU Dresden. She had graduated and earned her PhD (on technological and organizational change at the Swiss Federal Railways) at the University of Zurich, and later became an Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich (chair for the History of Technology). For her habilitation thesis on Swiss taxation and its international entanglement, she had been a fellow at the German Historical Institute at Washington D.C. and a visiting scholar at the UCSD School of Sociology and the Graduate School of Economics of Kyoto University. Before coming to Dresden, she had been a substitute professor (Vertretungsprofessorin) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
Her more specific research areas and interests refer to the history of the welfare state, of mobility, infrastructure, household and cooking technologies, fiscal sociology and the tax state, commodities, farm animals and their production cycle (also post mortem). Among her recent publications is the OA-volume: “Histories of Tax Evasion, Avoidance and Resistance” (Routledge 2023, co-edited with Korinna Schönhärl and Dorothea Rohde): https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003333197/histories-tax-evasion-avoidance-resistance-korinna-sch%C3%B6nh%C3%A4rl-gisela-h%C3%BCrlimann-dorothea-rohde