When news first began to trickle out of China about a new virus in December 2019, risk-averse financial markets could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged and investors panicked. Adam Tooze’s new book, Shutdown, tells the story of what followed and, in conversation with Patrick Wallis, he will survey the damage and outline potential ways into recovery.

Meet our speaker and chair

Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) is the author of Crashed, The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction. He has been the recipient of the Wolfson Prize for History, the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize. Tooze has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. Adam is an alumnus of LSE.

Patrick Wallis (@phwallis) is Professor of Economic History at LSE. His research explores the economic, social and medical history of Britain and Europe from the 16th to 18th century.

More about this event

The Department of Economic History (@LSEEcHist) iis one of the world’s leading centres for research and teaching in economic history. It is home to a huge breadth and depth of knowledge and expertise ranging for the medieval period to the current century.

You can order the book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPostCOVID