Jan 28: The treasure captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital." -- Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 Ch. 32. Do the other assigned readings provide any basis for assessing the general truth of this passage from Marx? In what sense did colonial trade in the 1497-1800 period contribute to capital formation in Europe?
Feb 4: Weekly memo question: Most economic historians now think that the agricultural revolution was more a gradual and drawn out process than previously believed. Why do they now think this?
Feb 11: Weekly memo question: Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson write that the "historiography of the industrial revolution in England has moved away from viewing the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a unique turning point in economic and social development." Do you agree with their conclusion that the literature has moved too far in this direction? Why or why not?
Feb 18: Weekly memo question: An influential literature cites the scarcity of labor as a key factor in the emergence of the "American System of Production." How much of this argument (if any) survives Peter Temin's 1966 critique?
Feb 25: Weekly memo question: What are the most striking similarities between the pre-1914 life-insurance-mortgage company connection described by Kenneth Snowden and the subprime crisis?
Mar 4: Weekly memo question: Sanford Jacoby and John James both suggest that late-19th century American labor markets were very different from American labor markets today. What are the three most important factors they point to as explaining these differences?
Mar 11: Weekly memo question: Adam Smith confidently predicted that slavery was on its way out for economic reasons. In commercial society, manumission would be the rule because the carrot of working for yourself is much more efficient than the stick of being whipped by others. Was Smith right? If you conclude he was wrong, why was he wrong?
Mar 18: Weekly memo question: The economies settled from northwestern Europe--the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand--were all resource rich. So why did they industrialize early? Why didn't they simply become gigantic Denmarks, shipping agricultural and other resource-based products to the European industral powers in return for manufactures?
Apr 1: Weekly memo question: It is popularly argued that the world was even more globalized a hundred years ago than it is today. Is this an accurate characterization? If so, why? If not, why not?
Apr 8: Weekly memo question: Textbooks say that the gold standard had internal mechanisms that worked automatically to maintain both price and balance-of-payments stability. On what grounds does Arthur Bloomfield challenge this textbook view? Are his points convincing?
Apr 15: Weekly memo question: What similarities strike you between what you have been reading about the global financial crisis over the past eighteen months and what you read for this week? What differences?
Apr 22: Weekly memo question: Why was recovery from the Great Depression so partial and delayed?
Apr 29: Weekly memo question: John Maynard Keynes said, near the end of his life, that the problem of controlling inflation while maintaining full employment was fundamentally a political and not an economic question. Did the 1970s in the developed world prove him right, or prove him wrong?
May 6: Weekly memo question: The economic history of the world both in the post-WWII period 1945-1990 and, in broader perspective, over the past two centuries has been one in which the world has shrunken enormously in distance along every conceivable measurement, and yet in which income and productivity differences between societies have grown enormously. What, in your judgment, are the possible big-picture theories for explaining this phenomenon that are worth investigating?
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