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).

The class explores major works in HPE in two ways. First, it tackles two dimensions of the scholarly endeavor that make the field distinct from its origin fields. The first part of the class focuses on the concept of "persistence" in behavior and institutions and the political-economy "mechanisms" behind it. Second, the class takes up key topics of the literature in the rest of the course. The main theme is the state, where topics include state capacity, its evolution and (often longue-durée) consequences such as land reform, slavery, religion, religious conflict, censorship, colonialism, and ethnicity. The readings are drawn not only from those now considered to be loci classici but also from the cutting-edge. These aim to shed a new light on the conventional understanding of well-known historical events, which, in turn, advances the scholarly knowledge of how historical forces shape the political and economic contexts today.