Topic Subtopic Finance & Economics Economics An Economic History of the World since 1400 Course Guidebook Professor Donald J. Harreld Brigham Young University PUBLISHED BY: THE GREAT COURSES Corporate Headquarters 4840 Westfields Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-2299 Phone: 1-800-832-2412 Fax: 703-378-3819 www.thegreatcourses.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2016 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. Donald J. Harreld, Ph.D. Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History Brigham Young University r. Donald J. Harreld is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Brigham Young University, where he has Dtaught since 2001. Dr. Harreld graduated from the University of Minnesota with academic majors in History and Psychology. He received his M.A. from Minnesota in 1996. He was named an honorary fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation and a Fulbright fellow to the University of Antwerp from 1996 to 1997. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2000. In 2005, Dr. Harreld returned to the University of Antwerp, where he was a visiting research scholar in the Centre for Urban History. Since 2007, he has served as executive director of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Dr. Harreld specializes in the social and economic history of early modern Europe. His specific area of interest is in the economic history of the Low Countries. His work has focused on merchant communities, the expansion of Europe, early modern business communications, and commercial networks. In addition to teaching courses on economic history and the history of European expansion, Dr. Harreld teaches world history, urban history, and the history of identity. He has twice been named an Alcuin fellow by Brigham Young University for excellence in teaching general education courses. i An Economic History of the World since 1400 Dr. Harreld is the author of High Germans in the Low Countries: German Merchants and Commerce in Golden Age Antwerp and several articles on various aspects of European economic and urban history. He is the editor of the Companion to the Hanseatic League and is working on a book about Dutch voyages of exploration in the early 17th century. ■ ii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Professor Biography ........................................... i Course Scope ................................................1 LECTURE GUIDES Lecture 1 Self-Interest, Human Survival, and History .........................4 Lecture 2 Marco Polo, China, and Silk Road Trade ..........................12 Lecture 3 Manorial Society in Medieval Europe ............................20 Lecture 4 How Black Death Reshaped Town and Field .......................28 Lecture 5 Late-14th-Century Guilds and Monopolies ........................36 Lecture 6 European Discovery Routes: East and West .......................43 Lecture 7 1571: Spain, Portugal Encircle the Globe .........................51 Lecture 8 Old World Bourses and Market Information .......................59 Lecture 9 The Europeans’ Plantation Labor Problem ........................67 iii An Economic History of the World since 1400 Lecture 10 Adam Smith, Mercantilism, State Building ........................75 Lecture 11 British and Dutch Joint-Stock Companies .........................83 Lecture 12 Europe, the Printing Press, and Science ..........................90 Lecture 13 The Industrious Revolution: Demand Grows .......................98 Lecture 14 Why Didn’t China Industrialize Earlier? ..........................106 Lecture 15 18th-Century Agriculture and Production .........................114 Lecture 16 Industrial Revolution: The Textile Trade .........................122 Lecture 17 British Coal, Coke, and a New Age of Iron .......................130 Lecture 18 Power: From Peat Bogs to Steam Engines .......................138 Lecture 19 A Second Industrial Revolution after 1850 .......................145 Lecture 20 Family Labor Evolves into Factory Work .........................153 Lecture 21 Cornelius Vanderbilt and the Modern Firm .......................161 Lecture 22 19th-Century Farm Technology, Land Reform .....................169 Lecture 23 Speeding Up: Canals, Steamships, Railroads .....................176 iv Table of Contents Lecture 24 European Urbanization and Emigration .........................184 Lecture 25 Unions, Strikes, and the Haymarket Affair ........................191 Lecture 26 Banks, Central Banks, and Modern States .......................198 Lecture 27 Understanding Uneven Economic Development ..................206 Lecture 28 Adam Smith’s Argument for Free Trade .........................214 Lecture 29 Middle-Class Catalogs and Mass Consumption ...................222 Lecture 30 Imperialism: Land Grabs and Morality Plays ......................229 Lecture 31 World War I: Industrial Powers Collide ..........................237 Lecture 32 Russia’s Marxist-Leninist Experiment ............................244 Lecture 33 The Trouble with the Gold Standard ............................252 Lecture 34 Tariffs, Cartels, and John Maynard Keynes .......................260 Lecture 35 Japanese Expansionism: Manchurian Incident ....................268 Lecture 36 U.S. Aid and a Postwar Economic Miracle. 276 Lecture 37 Colonialism and the Independence Movement ...................284 v An Economic History of the World since 1400 Lecture 38 Japan, the Transistor, and Asia’s Tigers ..........................293 Lecture 39 The Welfare State: From Bismarck to Obama .....................300 Lecture 40 The End of American Exceptionalism? ..........................308 Lecture 41 Middle East: From Pawn to Power Broker ........................316 Lecture 42 Germany, the European Union, and the Euro .....................324 Lecture 43 Free Trade: Global versus Regional Blocs ........................332 Lecture 44 Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Soviet Decline .......................340 Lecture 45 Half the World Left behind in Poverty ...........................347 Lecture 46 China, India: Two Paths to Wealth Extremes ......................355 Lecture 47 The Information Economy: Telegraph to Tech ....................363 Lecture 48 Leverage with Globalization in Its Grip ..........................371 SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Bibliography ..............................................379 Image Credits .............................................395 vi An Economic History of the World since 1400 Scope: At its most basic, economic history concerns itself with the ways that mankind has structured his environment in the past in order to provide food, shelter, and clothing. Actually, most of human history has been shaped by how people have struggled to meet these basic needs. This course will examine the ways in which people and societies have provided for themselves by focusing on what they produce, how they produce it, and how production is distributed and consumed. Modern economic history, which for most scholars treats the past 500 or so years, has been shaped by all aspects of the human experience, and a wide range of extraordinary events, such as wars, plagues, exploration, technological innovation, and trade, have all affected economic reality over time. This course takes a chronologically presented thematic approach to modern economic history. Although it does not attempt to touch on every possible topic that economic historians are concerned with, it has sought to present the most important topics and trends in economic history since 1400. It is true that a course like this one will be quite Eurocentric, meaning that the point of view is from the European, or Western, perspective, but this is because the modern world economy has been so dominated by Western ideas and ideals that if we are trying to understand the world we live in today, we will necessarily focus on Europe. It is also true that in the distant past, Europe’s economy was rather insignificant compared to the economies of the great empires of Asia, such as India and China, but in our modern world, the economic system and institutions that developed in Europe over the past 500 years are the ones that have taken hold and predominate in our own time. Even though our focus will be on Europe, we will explore various regions of the world as they begin to play a role in the development of the modern economy. 1 An Economic History of the World since 1400 In this course, we will explore the development of productive agriculture in the modern era. Mankind transitioned from hunter-gatherer to cultivator millennia ago, but only recently has agriculture been productive enough to allow people to focus their efforts on other activities, such as manufacturing and commerce. Thus, we will examine the development of business contracts and agreements, the form these took, and how they changed over time to give rise to a variety of partnerships and corporative relationships. We will also review the expansion of trade as discovery voyages and overland trade brought various regions of the world into closer contact than ever before. With the increase in maritime trade, an idea of economic nationalism, or what Adam Smith would have