Global History and Capitalism 1400-1820

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In the last twenty years the history of capitalism has re-emerged as one of the most important research agendas in Global History. This course will introduce students to the important literature in the field and open up some crucial debates. The central concern of the course is to consider how capitalism emerged as a global system in the early nineteenth century. The course will begin with an introductory topic that will enable students to understand capitalism as a specific kind of economic, political and social organisation, We will also engage with the periodisation for capitalism. This introduction will be the basis on which will develop our thinking on the relative importance of international trade and domestic institutions in the development of the modern economy. In this section we will look at work by O'Rourke and Williamson and contrast that with Robert Brenner's arguments for the agrarian roots of capitalism. The central section of the course will be taken up with the debates around consumption, slavery, and empire. Core reading in this section wlll include the classic Williams thesis, and its development in the literature on the relationship between cotton and chattel slavery in the group around Rockman and Beckert. We will extend this debate by looking at very new work by colleagues such as Philip Stern, Elizabeth Cross and Felicia Gottmann on chartered companies. The penultimate section will address the history of finance capitalism, looking at the inflationary effects of silver supply from the Americas in the early period, the era of financial experimentation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the eventual emergence of a recognisable world of international finance around the Gold Standard in the early nineteenth century. We will conclude with a consideration of Pomeranz's " Great Divergence" between Atlantic and Asian economies and the relationship between the transition to capitalism and the energy transition of the nineteenth century.