070133 SE Seminar Historical sources and critique - Economic ideas and public policies (2023W)

The course aims to assist students in understanding texts by economists as sources for the economic history of the early modern and modern period.
Economists played a key role in shaping the debates around policy making, but their contributions are wrapped in the technical language of the discipline. Their texts, therefore, are often obscure for both historians – who have received no training in economics – and contemporary economists – who are unaware of their own disciplinary past. The voice of economists in policy debates, therefore, which resonates in theoretical tracts, pamphlets and reports, remains unintelligible and their sophisticated arguments are lost to historians.
Nevertheless, it would be important for anyone who is interested in understanding the making of economic policy to be able to interpret the work of past economists and their distinctive contribution to politics. This course follows one crucial policy debate, on international trade, as it evolved over the course of three centuries in different contexts. It invites students to analyse how economists defined and shaped discussions on international trade.
The first part of the course helps students interpret arguments in favour and against free-trade that shaped British policy in the 18th and 19th century, by inviting them to read through the technicalities of British political economy and pay attention to the details of every argument as well as to the rhetorical strategies of economists and their position in society. Authors such as David Hume, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Richard Cobden will be the main focus.
In the second part of the course, students will be invited to follow the persistence of these arguments in the debate around free trade, trade agreements and tariffs that took place in the interwar period at the economic conferences of the League of Nation, with a special focus on Bertil Ohlin and Mihail Manoilescu.
The third part of the course, instead, will discuss how economists framed the relation between development and trade in the post-war period, analysing the ideas of the structuralists and dependency theorists as well as economists who underlined the benefits of international trade.
The pointed analysis of economic theories will be accompanied by a careful consideration of the economists’ strategies to influence the policy making processes of their time, helping students to integrate the study of ideas and theories with rhetorical analysis and traditional historical work.
This course is open to historians and most of the readings will be relatively accessible, but it does require some knowledge of basic economic concepts and terminology. Students with no prior knowledge of economics will have to catch up as we go along with the course content.
The course will take place in English.