Economics 305

European Economic History

Spring 1999

R. N. Langlois

This course studies the economic development of Europe from prehistoric times to the early twentieth century. Although the course is chronological, the vastness of such a history necessarily means that we will be selective in our treatment, focusing on a few episodes and approaches. Nevertheless, I will expect you to be broadly familiar with the facts of that history, as reported in, say, Rondo Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World, which is conveniently available at the bookstore.

I have also asked the bookstore to order the following:

· Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton, 1981.

· Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: Norton, 1997.

· Joel Mokyr, The British Industrial Revolution. 2d edition. Westview Press, 1998.

· David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Cambridge University Press, 1969.

· Alfred D. Chandler, Scale and Scope. Harvard, 1990.

Sequence of topics.

1. Introduction.

A. Why study economic history?

D. N. McCloskey, "Does the Past Have a Useful Economics?" Journal of Economic Literature (1976), pp. 434-61

D. N. McCloskey, "Economics as an Historical Science," in William N. Parker, ed., Economic History and the Modern Economist. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. (On reserve.)

Paul David, "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY," American Economic Review 75(2): 320-337 (May 1985), reprinted in Parker, Economic History, op cit.

B. Evolution and Institutions.

Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. (On reserve.)

Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton, 1981, chapters 1-6.

Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches. New York: Oxford, 1990, chapters 7 and 11.

David Feeny, "The Demand for and Supply of Institutional Arrangements," in Vincent Ostrom, David Feeny, and Hartmut Picht, eds., Rethinking Institutional Analysis and Development. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1988. (On reserve.)

2. “Ecological Processes with an Economic Component.”

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: Norton, 1997, ad lib. (On reserve.)

Cameron, chapter 2.

David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations : Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: Norton, 1998.

E. L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, chapters 1-3.

North, Structure and Change, chapters 7-9.

3. Feudalism.

A. The rise of the manor.

North, Structure and Change, chapter 10.

Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, "The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System: A Theoretical Model," Journal of Economic History (December 1971), pp. 777-803.

B. Manorial institutions.

Richard C. Hoffmann, "Medieval Origins of the Common Fields," in W. N. Parker and E. L. Jones (eds.), European Peasants and Their Markets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, chapter 1. (On reserve.)

Carl Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. (On reserve.)

Stefano Fenoaltea, "Risk, Transaction Costs and the Organization of Medieval Agriculture," Explorations in Economic History (April 1976), pp. 129-52. See also Fenoaltea, "Transaction Costs, Whig History, and the Common Fields," Politics and Society (Summer, 1988), pp. 171-240, reprinted in B. Gustafsson (ed.) Power and Economic Institutions: Reinterpretations in Economic History, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991, pp. 107-169 (On reserve.).

Donald N. McCloskey, "English Open Fields as Behavior Towards Risk," in P. Uselding, ed., Research in Economic History, vol 1, 1976, pp. 124-70.

Donald N. McCloskey, "The Prudent Peasant: New Findings on Open Fields," Journal of Economic History 51(2): 343-55 (June 1991).

Metin M. Cosgel, "Scattering and Contracts in Medieval Agriculture: Challenges Ahead," Journal of Economic History 50(3): 663-68 (September , 1990).

Metin M. Cosgel, "Risk Sharing in Medieval Agriculture," The Journal of European Economic History 21(1): 99-110 (Spring 1992). (On reserve.)

C. Enclosure.

J. R. Wordie, "The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500-1914," Economic History Review 36(4):483-505 (November 1983).

Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond. (On reserve) .

Fenoaltea, “Transaction Costs, Whig History, and the Common Fields,” in Gustaffson. (On reserve).

Jon Cohen and Martin Weitzman, "Enclosures and Depopulation: A Marxian Analysis," in W. N Parker and E. L. Jones, eds., European Peasants and their Markets, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, pp. 161-178. (On reserve.)

Donald N. McCloskey, "The Economics of Enclosure: A Market Analysis," in Parker and Jones, eds., European Peasants and their Markets, pp. 123-60. (On reserve.)

4. Mercantilism.

A. The nature of mercantilism.

Thomas Mun, England's Treasure by Forraign Trade, excerpted in A. E. Monroe, Early Economic Thought, pp. 171-197.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapters i-vii.

Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism. Trans. Mendel Shapiro. London: G. Unwin, 1935, two volumes.

Barry Baysinger, Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., and Robert D. Tollison, "Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society," in James Buchanan, Robert Tollison, and Gordon Tullock, eds., Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980, pp. 235-268. (On reserve.)

B. Mercantilism and Economic Growth: Comparative Analysis.

Cameron, chapter 6.

C. Guilds as economic organizations.

Charles R. Hickson and Earl A. Thompson, “A New Theory of Guilds and European Economic Development,” Explorations in Economic History 28:127-68 (April 1991).

Bo Gustafsson, “The Rise and Economic Behaviour of Medieval Craft Guilds,” in B. Gustafsson (ed.) Power and Economic Institutions: Reinterpretations in Economic History, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991, pp. 69-106 (On reserve.).

D. The decline of mercantilism.

Charles Wilson, England's Apprenticeship, 1603-1763. London: Longman's, second edition, 1984, part 1. (On reserve.)

Jones, The European Miracle, chapters 5-7.

Douglass C. North and Barry W. Weingast, "The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England," Journal of Economic History 49: 803-32 (1989).

Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich. New York: Basic Books, 1986, chapter 4. (On reserve.)

5. The Industrial Revolution.

Joel Mokyr, editor’s introduction to The British Industrial Revolution. Second edition, Westview Press, 1998. (At the bookstore and on reserve.)

Mokyr, Lever of Riches, chapter 5.

Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, second edition, 1979.

Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. London: Jonathan Cape, revised edition, 1961. (On reserve.)

David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, Chs. 1 and 2. (At the bookstore and on reserve.)

Rosenberg and Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich, chapter 5.

6. The Factory System.

Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution, part II.

Rosenberg and Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich, Chapters 6-9.

Stephen Marglin, "What Do Bosses Do?" Review of Radical Political Economy 6: 60-112 (Summer 1974). Se also Marglin, “Understanding Capitalism: Control versus Efficiency,” in B. Gustafsson (ed.) Power and Economic Institutions: Reinterpretations in Economic History, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991, pp 225-252. (On reserve.)

David Landes, "What Do Bosses Really Do?" Journal of Economic History 46(3): 585-623 (September 1986).

Axel Leijonhufvud, "Capitalism and the Factory System," in R. N. Langlois, ed., Economic as a Process: Essays in the New Institutional Economics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 203-223. (On reserve.)

Paul L. Robertson and Lee J. Alston, "Technological Choice and the Organization of Work in Capitalist Firms," Economic History Review 45(2): 330-49 (May, 1992).

Richard N. Langlois, “The Coevolution of Technology and Organization in the Transition to the Factory System,” manuscript. (On reserve — and on the website.)

7. Changing Industrial Leadership.

Alfred D. Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamic of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990. (At the bookstore.)

Richard N. Langlois, "The Capabilities of Industrial Capitalism," Critical Review 5(4) (1991). (On reserve.)

Landes, Unbound Prometheus, Ch. 5 (especially the section: "Some Reasons Why," pp. 326-355).

S. B. Saul, The Myth of the Great Depression 1873-1896, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1985.

Donald N. McCloskey, "Did Victorian Britain Fail?" Economic History Review (August 1970), pp. 446-59. Reprinted, with comments by Aldcroft and others, in McCloskey, Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain. London: Allen & Unwin, 1981, Ch. 6. (On reserve.)

Donald N. McCloskey and Lars Sandberg, "From Damnation to Redemption: Judgement on the Late Victorian Entrepreneurs," Explorations in Economic History (Fall 1971), pp. 89-106 (Also in McCloskey, Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain).

Edward Ames and Nathan Rosenberg, "Changing Technological Leadership and Industrial Growth," The Economic Journal 73: 13-31 (March 1963).

Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick, eds., The Decline of the British Economy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. (On reserve.)

William Mass and William Lazonick, "The British Cotton Industry and International Comparative Advantage: the State of the Debates," Business History 32: 9-65 (October 1990).

Richard N. Langlois and Paul L. Robertson, Firms, Markets, and Economic Change: A Dynamic Theory of Business Institutions. London: Routledge, 1995, chapter 6. (On reserve.)