Historical Political Economy

This graduate seminar considers Historical Political Economy (HPE) as a burgeoning scholarly discipline. HPE is the study of how political and economic actors have shaped institutions and vice versa, in the past or over time (Jenkins and Rubin 2024). It sits in the intersection of history, political science, and economics. The emphasis is on the historical contexts of issues under study as well as on the explicit use of social scientific methods upon constructing a conceptual framework and adducing evidence to evaluate it. Over the past decade, the scholarly significance of HPE has been increasingly recognized not just with occasional workshops but also with the launching of a journal that bears the namesake, the Journal of Historical Political Economy (February 2021) as well as of a collection of knowledge in The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy (February 2024).

In this year, the course focuses on two broad themes. The first is state capacity. It has been the most popular topic as many scholars see it as a foundation not just in political development more generally but also in economic development as well as economic growth. The course covers recently-published research on specific topics, such as geography and economic production, fragmentation and fiscal capacity-building, consequences of political transformation to state capacity, and colonial political development. The second theme is culture. This is probably the cutting-edge in HPE. It is believed that culture plays an important role, for instance, in understanding why growth-enhancing institutions or technologies are adopted. At the same time, culture remains hard to define and quantify. To gauge how HPE scholars grapple with the role of culture, we will read published as well as unpublished works that can shape our thinking of how culture affects political and economic development and vice versa. Themes include the economic consequences of religious change, the diffusion of "useful knowledge," the impact of the Counter-Reformation on science, and technology adoption under colonialism. The assigned readings for the course are drawn primarily from the cutting-edge, while the classics are saved for the assignments. These aim to advance our understanding of how this exciting field of knowledge has come to be and where it is headed. Our ultimate goal is to make smart use of history to better understand key political and economic issues today.