The role of this optional module is to provide students with the historical background to their studies on other economics courses and to prepare them for post-graduate study in the discipline.

The aim of the module is to analyse the historical development of the global economy from the nineteenth-century to the late twentieth century, utilising case studies from such countries as China, India, USA, Brazil and Russia.

A    Knowledge and Understanding:

• demonstrate a command of the main methodological tools used in the study of economic history
• make use of the main secondary sources of historical data employed in the subject
• demonstrate an overall knowledge and understanding of recent international economic history
• undertake post-graduate study in economic history

B    Intellectual Skills: 

• synthesise and evaluate secondary data.
• solve problems in the historical context.
• exercise powers of inquiry, logic, critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation of arguments and evidence.
• sustain a critical argument in writing.

C    Discipline Specific Skills: 

• apply theoretical concepts to explain the development of the modern global economy

D    Transferable Skills: 

• to be able to seek out from libraries, databases or the Internet data of a statistical or documentary nature relevant to a particular topic of study.
• to organise and formulate arguments based on this statistical and documentary data in answer to specific questions.
• to make oral answers to specific questions and handle questioning from members of the group.
• write assignments in a structured and well argued fashion.

 Teaching will take place in the Autumn and Spring semesters. There will be approximately 33 hours of lectures and 9 hours of classes.

 Students are provided with relevant data and other handouts (maps, glossaries, timelines, etc) and are encouraged to take notes during the lecture, and to ask questions while the lecture is in progress. Lecture summaries and powerpoint slides are posted on the internet Learning Central database to download.

For each class, students are provided with reading material and a series of questions on a particular topic to which answers will be prepared in advance for discussion.

Indicative study hours: 200

 Formal Assessment:

The three assignments each count for 10% of the final mark. The assignments will require a thorough understanding of the topic derived from secondary reading. At this level the students are expected to include in their reading, recent research published in the leading journals.

Summer Examination:

The examination paper consists of one compulsory section (A) of 25 short answer questions, and a series of 12 questions divided into three sections (Sections B, C, D), with four questions in each section. The exam is three hours long and is designed to test student’s understanding of underlying concepts, factual knowledge of the subject and the ability to order their thoughts, answer questions directly and relevantly and demonstrate their skill at written presentation.

 Informal Assessment:

Informal assessment is provided through the class programme. Classes consist of a wide variety of questions/problems, based on lecture material but requiring further reading. The class questions are designed to get students to order their material and their own thoughts in order to answer specific questions in a focused and relevant manner.

The module sets out to describe and explain the economic development of the world economy since the nineteenth-century up to the contemporary period, focusing on developments in Asia, in Europe and Russia, and in America, noting distinctions between early and late developing industrial economies. For Asia, topics will include the Great Divergence, along with analysis of developments in India, China, Japan and the ‘four little dragons’ (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan). A second topic area concerns Imperialism which will be considered from both a European and Japanese perspective. For Russia and the USSR, debates surrounding its economic ‘backwardness’ and ‘failure’ will be considered, whilst for America, there will be a focus on slavery, railways and the Great Slump in the USA, along with the economic development of Brazil and Latin America.

Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory (Princeton, 2003)

Barry Eichengreen. Globalizing Capital. A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton 1996)

Niall Ferguson, Civilization (Allen Lane, 2011)

Ronald Findlay & Kevin H O’Rourke, Power and Plenty. Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, 2007)

Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in an Asian Age, (Berkeley: University of California Press)

Penelope Francks, Japanese Economic Development: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 1992)

J. Hughes, American Economic History (Scott, Foreman, 1994).

A.G. Kenwood & A.L. Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy 1820-1990 (Routledge, 1992)

Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 (OUP, 2007)

Ian Morris, Why the West Rules for Now: The Patterns of History and what they reveal about

the Future, (London: Profile Books, 2010).

Prasanann Parthasarathi, Why Europe grew rich and Asia did not. Global economic divergence 1600-1850 (CUP, 2011)

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000)

Ezra F Vogel, The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (Harvard, 1991)