Workshop

Contingency and Imagination. Rethinking Economic Agency in the Early Modern Period

Dr. Oliver Kruk
Dresden, 3-5 March 2027

Background

Contingency and imagination are fundamental conditions of economic life. Whoever invests, speculates, or ventures into business always acts under conditions of open and uncertain outcomes – and must find ways to give shape to that uncertainty imaginatively, translating it into action.

In the early modern period, merchants, investors, entrepreneurs, political actors, and households made far-reaching decisions under conditions of radical uncertainty. Historical scholarship has long explained such decisions through rational self-interest, calculation, and the emergence of probabilistic thinking. This framework has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Jens Beckert’s Imagined Futures (2016) broken new ground in debates about fictive expectations and economic action – even if his focus remains on modern capitalism. That such dynamics are far older is demonstrated by recent research on the pre-modern world, including the ERC project Back to the Future: economic action in this period too was shaped by imagination, contingency, and visions of possible futures that were often open and contested.

This workshop builds on these insights and asks what contingency, understood as an analytical category, can offer to the study of early modern economic life. It draws on Reinhart Koselleck's influential concept of horizons of expectation, but seeks to move beyond it – to explore other forms of open and alternative spaces of possibility. The workshop asks not only how early modern actors perceived and reflected on contingency, but how they actively worked with and through it. Rather than treating contingency as a background condition to which actors were exposed, it proposes to understand it as a resource: something that fostered imagination and thereby made economic action, speculation, and investment possible in the first place. The sources attest to this: merchant letters, project proposals, court records, and the minutes of commercial organizations and state institutions are shot through with expectations of the future, counterfactual reasoning, and utopian schemes – traces of imaginative thinking that far exceeded calculation and probabilistic reckoning, whether in the correspondence of a merchant brooding over future ventures and their uncertainties, or in court records where creditors and debtors dispute what might have been.

Thematic Focus

The workshop invites contributions that engage with the interplay of contingency, imagination, and economic action in the early modern period (c. 1500–1800). We are particularly interested in the following themes, though proposals need not be confined to them:

Past Futures: How did early modern economic actors envision the future, and how did such visions shape their decisions? Contributions might examine the imaginings, hopes, and expectations that merchants, tradespeople, investors, or households developed – and the ways in which such visions of the future structured, legitimized, or enabled economic decisions. The workshop asks how openly or narrowly early modern actors perceived the future, and what consequences different visions of the future had for investment, credit, or speculation. It is also interested in adjacent questions: How did individual expectations relate to collective visions of the future? How did competing visions of the future play out – between trading partners, within firms, or between creditors and debtors?

Counterfactual and Alternative Thinking: Did merchants, entrepreneurs, and rulers engage in counterfactual reasoning? How did imagined alternatives structure economic thought and action? What if things had gone differently? Contributions might take the counterfactual reflections of early modern actors as a point of departure to reconstruct their sense of possibility, their fictional expectations, and their past desires. Correspondence, court records, and account books can help to uncover such imaginings and their influence on economic practice.

Scenarios and Utopias: A distinctive form of imaginative economic thinking appears in early modern projects, plans, and utopian writings: texts that deliberately envisioned alternative economic orders, new commercial practices, sectors, or institutions. Contributions might examine the projector, the utopist, or the economic reformer as imaginative actors – figures who speculated out of the openness of the future and drafted scenarios that oscillated between vision, speculation, and self-deception. We also ask how such schemes interacted with economic practice: when did scenarios and utopias translate into action, and when did they remain without consequence?

Adjacent Questions and Perspectives: The themes sketched above naturally connect with existing research on risk and uncertainty in early modern economic life – and invite us to bring the imaginative and the contingent more fully into those debates. Of particular interest is the role of mental and social factors – emotions such as hope and fear, but also trust, creativity, alterity, or tradition – as drivers of economic decisions in their own right, not merely as accompaniments to rational action. We also welcome contributions that bring adjacent perspectives to bear – from the history of economic thought, legal history, or religious history – provided they contribute to the workshop’s conceptual discussion.

Aims

Contributors are invited to bring theoretical and conceptual thinking to the table, and to explore together what categories such as contingency, imagination, and futurity can offer to early modern economic and cultural history – and how they hold up against, and are sharpened by, concrete sources and empirical findings. The aim is to lay theoretical groundwork for an approach to early modern economic life that does not discard established explanatory models but extends and refines them – and that can be taken further beyond the workshop itself. Publication of the contributions is planned.

Submission

Proposals of approximately 300–400 words, together with a short CV, are invited to be sent by email to: oliver.kruk@tu-dresden.de. Proposals should address the research context, theoretical framework, and source base of the intended contribution. Papers may be presented in English or German; workshop discussion will be conducted in English. Contributions from early career researchers (doctoral candidates and early postdoctoral researchers) are particularly welcome.

Deadline: 19 July 2026

Travel and accommodation costs are expected to be covered for all participants. Applicants can expect to receive a response by mid-August.