Oscar Broughton

Oscar Broughton is a British-German historian with a Ph.D. from the Freie Universität Berlin in Modern Global Intellectual History with particular regional interests in Britain, Brazil, and Germany. He has been employed at Universität Leipzig, SOAS University of London, German Historical Institute London, Humboldt Universität Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. He is an expert in subjects related to histories of socialism, nationalism, capitalism, animal commodification, and knowledge transfers. He has been published in prominent journals and has founded and edited media including an academic student journal, a blog, and a digital interview series.

Currently, he is working on two research projects. The first is about the history of the Brazilian beef industry during the twentieth century and the roles played by forms of scientific and culinary knowledge toward the construction of national identity and the development of vast global meat markets that are central to the growth of Brazilian capitalism.

The second project is about the history of British Marxist historians during the twentieth century. This project engages with how these historians drew on different forms of knowledge to produce divergent ideas about capitalism, why the context of Britain and the Cold War influenced their work, and the different patterns of reception that characterised the global circulation of their ideas.



His research project examines guild socialism a rare and striking example of a radical political idea, which grasped the intellects and imaginations of theorists predominantly within the anglophone world during the twentieth century. Developing initially in Britain around a group of mostly British intellectuals, the movement began as an anti-statist response to the state socialist policies of the Fabian Society. While the development of guild socialism as both an ideology and an intellectual movement started in Britain its influence and linkages beyond this setting are numerous, and have been seldom commented upon and never understood collectively by historians. These connections include ties to Austria, specifically to Karl Polanyi and the Austro-marxists Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding; Australia where guild socialism influenced local socialists, nationalists and labour organisations, particularly in Melbourne; and in the US where multitudes of socialist observers such as Ordway Tead, Harry W. Laidler, William English Walling and the International Workers of the World, keenly discussed guild socialism in relation to the question of industrial democracy.

This project investigates the growth and decline of the guild socialism between 1900 and 1926. It seeks to go beyond the methodological nationalism, which has defined previous historical work on this topic by examining the global entanglements between intellectuals and ideologies that fostered guild socialism. Furthermore it also aims to highlight the panoramic world view of the guild socialists themselves, who sought various optics in their search for a socialist future and were ultimately mediated by their experiences of nation-states and empire.









✉️ oscar.broughton@fu-berlin.de