070170 SE Seminar Specialisation 2 (2013S)

One of the most important problems in modern economic history without any doubt is that of the enormous differences in wealth between various parts of the world. When did they arise? What caused them? And, why, up until now, have they not disappeared? The first two questions are central to the debate that ever since Kenneth Pomeranz wrote a book with that title, is known as the debate about the Great Divergence. In this seminar the most important literature that has been published on this topic over roughly the last fifteen years will be analyzed, discussed and evaluated. The accent will be on macro-historical comparisons, but global connections will of course not be neglected. Per class, depending on the number of participants, one or two monographs plus the relevant reviews will be introduced and commented upon by a small group of students, preferably two per monograph.
Class with start with a collective reading of general introductory literature about the phenomenon that is at the core of our problem: modern economic growth and about the discipline in which its emergence and the Great Divergence tend to be studied, i.e. global economic history. We will then distinguish several schools, approaches and accents. Firstly, there is literature in which the focus is on long-term, structural, internal causes that would have turned the West in an exceptional part of the world and that led to specific institutional and cultural characteristics that are supposed to explain that the West in the end became so rich in contrast to ‘the Rest’. Monographs by Gregory Clark, Niall Ferguson, Jack Goldstone, David Landes, or Jan Luiten van Zanden might be analyzed as examples.
Then there is the approach in which it is claimed that the West in one way or another became and stayed rich over the back of ‘the Rest’. To get acquainted with this perspective, texts by dependencia-theorists, in this case, for example, monographs by ‘the young’ Andre Gunder Frank, by Immanuel Wallerstein or Fernand Braudel, might be read, again in combination with the most important reviews that have been published about their work.
Recently authors of the so-called California School have become quite influential. They claim that even in the early modern era the differences between the most advanced parts of the world, overall, were not as striking as the similarities and that the Great Divergence occurred quite late, basically only with industrialization, was quite contingent and will prove to be transient. In this case books by Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong’s and ‘the old’ Andre Gunder Frank could be analyzed. After that we will pay attention to books that are characterized by a specific approach, for example a strong focus on geography (the books by Jared Diamond or Ian Morris,) factor endowment and factor prices (books by Bob Allen, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Roy Bin Wong) or trade relations (the recent book by Jeffrey Williamson).
In the texts referred to so far there is a strong focus on comparing Britain/Western Europe with China. Therefore a couple of extra texts will be added with an explicitly different geographical focus: Timur Kuran, The long divergence. How Islamic law held back the Middle East (Princeton 2010) with a focus on the Islamic world; Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe grew rich and Asia did not. Global economic divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge 2011) with a focus on India, and Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds., Economic development in the Americas since 1500: endowments and institutions (Cambridge 2011) with a focus on the America’s. For the situation in Africa a selection of articles can be read.

The class is a seminar. That means that students are supposed to participate actively by reading, presenting and acting as commentator, plus writing a paper. Grading will be based on presence, participation, presentation and paper