杏吧论坛

Dr Jordan Claridge (Room SAR 5.05) and Dr Annie Ruderman (Room SAR 5.06)

This course is available on the MA in Asian and International History (杏吧论坛 and NUS), MA in Modern History, MSc in China in Comparative Perspective, MSc in Economic History, MSc in Economic History (Research), MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in Global Economic History, MSc in Global Economic History (Erasmus Mundus), MSc in International and Asian History and MSc in Political Economy of Late Development. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access).  In previous years we have been able to provide places for all students that apply, but that may not continue to be the case.

This course surveys long-term processes of growth and development in pre-modern Europe and the wider world. Its central question is how and why economic performance differed between differently structured societies and across societies at the same point in time. The course raises fundamental questions about the nature of pre-industrial societies and economies and it critically examines the numerous theories put forward to explain long-run economic change. 

First, it asks if stagnation and poverty were normal conditions in pre-industrial societies and growth an aberration.  Were societies 'Malthusian', and what kind of growth and development did they experience? Second, it addresses debates over the timing and causes of Western economic growth and its connections with the region’s expanding political and military power.  Was British or European success from the 17th century the result of unique social, institutional, or cultural features? It focuses on the developments of markets and their integration, on the development of technology and on the extension of manufactory in a fundamentally agrarian world. Third, it explores the range of alternative development paths within Europe and in other regions of the world, such as premodern China and India, considering both regions’ internal economic dynamics and the impact of interactions with European powers as contact grew over the course of the early modern period.

The course is not chronologically arranged but rather along core topics relevant in economic history. These are presented and discussed in an explicitly comparative way. Themes include: population, ag