Origins of Capitalism

4 credits · Undergraduate

This is a survey of the economic and social origins and development of the modern economy, beginning in early modern Europe and extending until the construction of the global capitalist system in the late nineteenth century. It attends to scholarly disputes over the origins of the distinctive economic features of capitalism: private property, the international monetary system, free wage labor and slavery, commodification and cultures of consumption, credit and banking, crises and inequality, as well as industrialization and economic growth. This course is a companion to the ideas studied in History 159B and is intended to lead in to the material covered in History 160. No prior quantitative methods training is required, or assumed.