On March 3, Professor Jeremy Adelman (BA ’84 Innis) will deliver the 2026 Innis Alumni Lecture, titled “Depending on Strangers: Love, Fear, and the Making of the Modern World (with some help from Harold Innis).”
With the end of globalization and a rupture in world order, how can a historical perspective inform our options for the future? Globalization may be dead, but interdependence is not. What does it mean for distant peoples to need each other without knowing each other in the age of climate change and resurgent geopolitics? Since Adam Smith, interdependence between strangers has been the source of opportunism, utopianism, and unspeakable atrocity. This lecture puts the fevered debates about our times into historical perspective — and asks what we can learn from disputes past to create better arguments for the future.
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave
Jeremy Adelman is the director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge and Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University.
His works cover Latin American and global history, including Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of Humankind from Origins to the Present (8th Edition, W.W. Norton, 2026) and the forthcoming The Capitalist Age: Making and Unmaking of the Global Mind (Princeton University Press).