We’re a network of scholars who seek to develop enchantment as an organizing theme in historical studies of capitalism. We hope to provide a platform for those interested in the historical role of enchantment as a tool, structure, or foundation for the organisation and the development of modern markets, economic institutions, and economic relationships.

Here’s what we’ve been up to…

We ran a series of roundtables — and wrote up some memos.

We recorded podcasts.

We hold work-in-progress meetings.

We held a conference on 29-30 June at King’s College London.

We curate a shared library.

Network coordinators

Anat Rosenberg is Professor of Law and the Humanities at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, where she leads the Law and Humanities Hub (LHub). She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Anat studies the history of modern capitalism, liberalism, and media, drawing on multidisciplinary methods in Law and the Humanities, including law and visuality, law and materiality, and law and literature. She is author of Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (2018), and The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (2022, open access).

Kristof Smeyers is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp. His research interests are magic, the supernatural and the occult, and their connections to the histories of religion, science and folklore, as well as their historiography and their archive history.

Astrid Van den Bossche is Lecturer in Digital Marketing and Communications at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is particularly interested in scepticism and humour as forms of engagement with promotional culture, and the application of computational methods in historical studies.

This network has been generously funded by the Department of Digital Humanities and the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London.