Pre-Spring Vacation Readings for: Econ 210a: Introduction to Economic History

My course this semester for first-year Economics Ph.D. graduate students...

My course this semester for first-year Economics Ph.D. graduate students...

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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.

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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>.

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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>.

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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 

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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>.

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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>.

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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>.

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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>. 

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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>.

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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>.