Research Feature: A System with a Troubled Past - The Making of Contemporary Capitalism, Property Rights, and the Global Order, with Zsuzsanna Török

On a global scale, private property rights function as the foundation of our current liberal world order. Laws and regulations provide safety and stability for nation-states and the individual, ensuring social order and free trade by creating accountability and liability. In this ever globalizing world, these pillars have become a reliant tool to turn to in case of fraudulent or unfair activities.

At the same time, not all global citizens have benefited equally from the liberal property regime and legal protection set up during the 19th century. Vulnerable and marginalized parts of the global community are often held to different standards and exposed to unpredictable external dynamics. So the questions remain if first, this liberal legislative framework created in the 19th century is as stable and functioning as we may often think? And second, is it time for improvement and adjustment to create something more sustainable and fair for all?

Our guest for this episode is Dr. Zsuzsanna Török who has been a senior research fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research and part of the research group “Legitimation and De-legitimation in Global Cooperation” from March 2021 until February 2022. At the Center, her research project focused on the Critique of the Liberal State, Private Property and Legal Reform: Late 19th Century Experiences and Their Legacies. Furthermore, she is a Post Doc at the University of Vienna at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies. Zsuzsanna received her Master and PhD in History at the Central University in Budapest. She has extensively researched the history of nationalism, state-building, and the history of the Habsburg Monarchy in global contexts. Her research project focuses on the Habsburger Monarchy and liberal capitalist private property in the 19th century within a transnational framework.

For feedback or questions we welcome your comments directed at @GCR21 on Twitter under the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast or you can get in touch via e-mail: cooperadio@gcr21.uni-due.de.

Further reading & sources:

https://www.gcr21.org/the-centre/news/year/current/they-constructed-an-idea-of-the-state-by-data-a-talk-with-borbala-zsuzsanna-toeroek

https://www.gcr21.org/publications/gcr/gcr-quarterly-magazine/qm-2/2021-articles/qm-2-2021-toeroek-critique-of-the-liberal-state-private-property-and-legal-reform-late-19th-century-experiences-and-their-legacies

Török, Zsuzsana B. (2021). Staatenkunde and State Building in the Habsburg Monarchy, ca. 1790–1880. Habilitation Manuscript, defended at the University of Vienna, 17.02.

Török, Zsuzsana B. (2020). “Exploring the k.u.k. Province – Landeskunde and honismeret in nineteenth-century Transylvania,” in Jan Arend (ed.), Science and Empire in Eastern Europe. Imperial Russia and the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th Century (Bad Wiesseer Tagungen des Collegium Carolinum, 38), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 187–203.