Pre-Spring Vacation Readings for: Econ 210a: Introduction to Economic History
My course this semester for first-year Economics Ph.D. graduate students…
The mission of the course, inherited from long ago, is this:
This course provides a graduate-level introduction to economic history. The focus is on the approaches and tools of historical analysis, and how those approaches can be useful to economists in a wide range of fields. Thus, the topics and readings are chosen largely with the goal of illustrating various approaches, techniques, and issues; the course does not provide a comprehensive introduction to all of economic history. Geographically, the course deals primarily with the United States and Europe, although some readings focus on other regions or on the world as a whole. Temporally, the focus is on the period since the beginning of industrialization, though, again, some readings consider earlier periods. Substantively, the emphasis is on long-run growth, the development and functioning of markets, and macroeconomic fluctuations…
How should we change this for the modern age? The idea is not to do a survey, but to leave the students with about the same background knowledge of what is what if it had been a survey. And the idea is not to teach controversies, but rather to teach how a historical orientation can make your analysis much more far-reaching and substantively correct and important than simply grabbing a data set and looking for a way to do an internally valid estimate of some single causal link or other.
Malthusian Economies (January 17, DeLong)
Robert M. Solow. 1985. “Economic History and Economics.” The American Economic Review 75 (May): 328-331. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/1805620.pdf>.
Richard Steckel. 2008. “Biological Measures of the Standard of Living” Journal of Economic Perspectives 22 (Winter): 129-152. <http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.22.1.129>.
Gregory Clark. 2005. “The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004.” Journal of Political Economy 112 (December): 1307-1340. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/10.1086/498123>.
Bouscasse, Paul, Emi Nakamura, & Jón Steinsson. 2021. “When Did Growth Begin? New Estimates of Productivity Growth in England from 1250 to 1870.” NBER <https://www.nber.org/papers/w28623>.
2. Domination Economies & Technological Change (January 24, DeLong)
Crone, Patricia. 2014. Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World. Oneworld Publications. <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL34028800M/Pre-Industrial_Societies>, pp. 1-57.
Moses Finley. 1965. “Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World.” Economic History Review, pp. 29-45. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/2591872>.
Michael Kremer. 1993): “Population Growth & Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990”, Quarterly Journal of Economics <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2118405>.
William D. Nordhaus. 1997. “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not.” In The Economics of New Goods edited by Timothy F. Bresnahan and Robert J. Gordon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for NBER, pp. 29–66. <http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6064.pdf>.
Patriarchy & Underdevelopment (January 31, DeLong)
Alice Evans & Shruti Rajagopalan. 2021. “The Great Gender Divergence”. Transcript. <https://www.mercatus.org/ideasofindia/alice-evans-great-gender-divergence>.
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, & Nathan Nunn. 2013. “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128 (May): 469–530. https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/26372505
Nathan Nunn. 2008. “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (May): 139-176. https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/25098896
Gunpowder-Empire & Commercial Societies (February 7, DeLong)
Robert P. Brenner. 2001. “The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism”, Past and Present <https://web.archive.org/web/20160910131149if_/http://www.unsa.edu.ar:80/histocat/haeconomica07/lecturas/lawcountries.pdf>
Wyman, Patrick. 2021. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World. New York: Twelve <https://www.amazon.com/Verge-Reformation-Renaissance-Forty-Years-ebook/dp/B08P1MF813>, Intro., ch. 3, & Conc.
Gregory Clark. 2001. “The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution.” Unpublished manuscript. <http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/secret2001.pdf>.
Industrial & Demographic Revolutions (February 14, DeLong)
Allen, Robert C. . 2011. “Why the Industrial Revolution Was British: Commerce, Induced Invention, & the Scientific Revolution.” Economic History Review 64 (May): 357-384. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/41262428>.
Lee, Ronald. 2003. “The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (4): 167–190 <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533003772034943>.
Nicholas, Stephen, and Richard H. Steckel. 1991. “Heights and Living Standards of English Workers during the Early Years of Industrialization, 1770–1815.” Journal of Economic History 51 (December): 937–957. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2123399.pdf>.
Bailey, Martha. 2013. “Fifty Years of Family Planning: New Evidence on the Long-Run Effects of Increasing Access to Contraception.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring): 341-395. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/23594871>.
Modern Economic Growth (February 21, DeLong)
Kuznets, Simon. 1971. “Modern Economic Growth: Findings and Reflections.” Nobel Prize Lecture. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/lecture/>.
Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963 <http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>, 358–73.
David Teece. 1993. “The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Perspectives on Alfred Chandler’s Scale and Scope,” Journal of Economic Literature 31, pp.199-225. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/2728154>.
Claudia Goldin. 2001. “The Human-Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past.” Journal of Economic History 61 (June): 263-292. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/2698021>.
Institutions & the World Market (February 29, DeLong)
Baldwin, Richard E. 2016. The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press <https://archive.org/details/TheGreatConvergenceInformationTechnologyAndTheNewGlobalization>, pp. 1-15, 79-141, 177-206, 242-279.
Lewis, W. Arthur. 1978. The Evolution of the International Economic Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press. <https://archive.org/details/evolutionofinter0000lewi>, pp. 1-25, 31-7, 67-77.
Christopher Meissner. 2005. “A New World Order: Explaining the International Diffusion of the Gold Standard, 1870-1913.” Journal of International Economics 66 (July): 385-406. <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022199604001187>.
Local & Global Inequality (March 6, DeLong)
Pritchett, Lant. 1997. “Divergence, Bigtime.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11 (3): 3-17. <https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:jecper:v:11:y:1997:i:3:p:3-17>.
Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert, & Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2011. “Pre-Industrial Inequality.” Economic Journal 121 (March): 255-272. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/41057775>.
Patel, Dev, Justin Sandefur, & Arvind Subramanian. 2021. “The New Era of Unconditional Convergence.” Journal of Development Economics 152. <https://scholar.harvard.edu/devpatel/publications/new-era-unconditional-convergence>.
Modes of Political Economy in History (March 13, DeLong)
Gerstle, Gary. 2022. “The New Deal Order: Rise” & “The New Deal Order: Fall”. In The Rise & Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America & the World in the Free-Market Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19-69.
Chad Jones. 2015. The Facts of Economic Growth <https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/facts.pdf>.
Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, & James A. Robinson. 2001. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” American Economic Review 91(5): 1369-1401. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2677930>.