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Previous Penn Economic History Forums

2010-2011

All sessions of the Penn Economic History Forum, unless otherwise noted, will be held from 2-4PM in the Lea Library on the 6th Floor of the Van Pelt Library.

Co-Conveners:
Walter Licht (Department of History, University of Pennsylvania)
Daniel Raff (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

October 8, 2010

Edward Balleison, Department of History, Duke University

“Policing Business Fraud in the United States”   

November 5, 2010

David Ludden, Department of History, New York University

"Uneven Development, Spatial Inequity, and Territorial Politics: Remapping 1905 in Bengal and Assam"  

NOTE: This event will be held in College Hall 209.

December 3, 2010

Robert DuPlessis, Department of History, Swarthmore College

“Consumer Credit and Consumers Without Credit in Colonial North America”  

January 28, 2011

Se Yan, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University

“Big BRICs, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China, 1880–1930”   

NOTE: This event will be held in College Hall 209.

February 25, 2011

Emma Rothschild, Department of History, Harvard University and Magdalene College, Cambridge

“The Inner Life of Empires" (tentative)

NOTE: Please contact Daniel Raff for a copy of the paper.

March 25, 2011 

Robert Geraci, University of Virginia

Faith Hillis, University of Chicago
Jessica Goldberg, University of Pennsylvania

“Foreign Trade, Foreign Capital, and Low Economic Self-Esteem in Late Tsarist Russia"

NOTE: This event will be held in College Hall 209.

April 22, 2011

Peter Temin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Price Behaviour in the Roman Empire”

NOTE: This event will be held in College Hall 209.

2009-2010

All sessions of the Penn Economic History Forum, unless otherwise noted, will be held from 2-4PM in the Lea Library on the 6th Floor of the Van Pelt Library.

Co-Conveners:
Walter Licht (Department of History, University of Pennsylvania)
Daniel Raff (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

October 2, 2009

Jonathan Levy, Department of History, Princeton University

"Farmers and Risk: The Fate of Landed Independence in 19th Century America"

November 6 , 2009

Ekaterina Pravilova, Department of History, Princeton University

"Public Goods and the Censure of Private Property in Imperial Russia"

Note that due to an event connected to Homecoming on the 6th , this session will meet in College Hall 209.

December 4, 2009

Anne Sudrow, Technische Universität München and Deutsches Museum

"'Product Line Analysis': A Comparative Approach to the Social History of Products in a Global Perspective"

January 22, 2010

Marina Martin, Department of History and Macmillen Center South Asian Studies Program, Yale University

"Hundi in the Dock: The Impact of the British Indian Courts on a South Asian Indigenous Credit Institution"

February 19, 2010

Claire Priest, Law School, Yale University

"Understanding the End of Entail: Information, Institutions, and Slavery in the American Revolutionary Period"

April 2, 2010

Mary O'Sullivan, Management Department, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

"Bonding and Sharing Corporate America : The US Securities Markets, Industrial Dynamics and Corporate Development, 1885-1930"

"Chapter 10: Merchants Go to Market: Retailers & the U.S. Securities Markets, 1901-1930"

DISCUSSANTS
Jeff Fear, University of Redlands
Dan Raff, University of Pennsylvania

April 23, 2010

Warren Whatley, Department of Economics, University of Michigan

"The Impact of the Slave Trade on African Economies"

Please note that the time and venue will be different for this session: 12:00 - 2:00 PM, in the Bowman Room at the back of Suite 2000 of the Steinberg-Dietrich Building (brown-bag lunch).

2008-2009

All sessions of the Penn Economic History Forum, unless otherwise noted, will be held from 2-4PM in the Lea Library on the 6th Floor of the Van Pelt Library.

Co-Conveners:
Walter Licht (Department of History, University of Pennsylvania)
Daniel Raff (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

October 3, 2008

Richard White, Margaret Bryne Professor of American History, Stanford University

“Kilkenny Cats: Transcontinental railroads, destructive competition, and the odd road to North American modernity” 

November 7, 2008

Francesca Carnevali, Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Birmingham

“Communities of Interest. Social capital and trade associations in England and America in the late 19 th century”

December 5, 2008

Gavin Wright, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History, Stanford University

"Economics and the Civil Rights Revolution"

January 23, 2009

Michael McCormick, Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History, Harvard University

“Movements and markets in the first millennium: information, containers and shipwrecks”

February 13, 2009

Yanni Kotsonis, Associate Professor of Russian and European History, New York University

"The Old Regime and Economic Liberalism: Tax Reform and the Emergence of the Idea of an Economy in Nineteenth Century”

March 6, 2009

Andrew Godley, Professor of Management, University of Reading

'The Chicken, the Factory Farm, and the Supermarket: Technological Innovation and Vertical Restraints in Poultry Farming in Britain, Australia and the United States, 1950-1980”

This event has been CANCELLED.

April 3, 2009

Howell Harris, Professor of History, Durham University

“What Price Competition? Cooperative Associationalism in the US Stove Industry, c. 1870-1925”

2007-2008

All sessions of the Penn Economic History Forum, unless otherwise noted, will be held from 2-4PM in the Lea Library on the 6th Floor of the Van Pelt Library.

Co-Conveners:
Walter Licht (Department of History, University of Pennsylvania)
Daniel Raff (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

October 5, 2007

Bill Summerhill, Department of History, University of California-Los Angeles

"The Origins of Economic Backwardness in Nineteenth-Century Brazil"

November 9, 2007

Alan Olmstead, Department of Economics, University of California-Davis

"Wait a Cotton-Pickin' Minute! A New View of Slave Productivity"

December 7, 2007

Jessica Goldberg, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania

"Principals and Agents? Re-Thinking Relations between Merchants from the Cairo Geniza"

Please contact Professor Goldberg for a copy of the revised version of the text.

January 18, 2008

Leon Fink, Department of History, University of Illinois-Chicago

"Liberty before the Mast: The Nineteenth Century Sailor and the Political Narrative of Freedom"

February 15, 2008

Meir Kohn, Department of Economics, Dartmouth College

"The Expansion of Trade and the Development of European Industry to 1600"

March 7, 2008

John K. Brown, Department of Science, Technology, and Society, University of Virginia

"A Front Man for a Speculative Age: The Pennsylvania Railroad and the Rise of Andy Carnegie, 1864 - 1874"

April 4, 2008

Ghislaine Lydon, Department of History, University of California - Los Angeles

"A 'Paper Economy of Faith' without Faith in Paper: A Contribution to Understanding Islamic Institutional Constraints"

2006-2007

All sessions of the Penn Economic History Forum, unless otherwise noted, will be held from 2:00 - 4:00 P.M. in the Lea Library on the 6th Floor of the Van Pelt Library. Papers will be available by calling the History Department of the University of Pennsylvania at (215) 898-8452 or on this site.

Co-Conveners:
Walter Licht (History Department, University of Pennsylvania)
Daniel Raff (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

October 6, 2006

Lawrence Mitchell, School of Law, George Washington University

"The Rise of American Corporate Capitalism"

November 10, 2006

Molly Greene, Department of History, Princeton University

"Networks of Protection in the Early Modern Mediterranean"

December 1, 2006

Patrick O'Brien, Economic History Department, London School of Economics

"The Formation of a Mercantilist State and the Economic Growth of the United Kingdom, 1453-1815"

January 19, 2007

Timothy Leunig, Economic History Department, London School of Economics

"Transport improvements, agglomeration economies and city productivity: at what point did motorised transport raise British wages?"

February 9, 2007

Prasannan Parthasarathi, Department of History, Boston College

"Trade and industry in the Indian Subcontinent, 1750-1913"

March 2, 2007

Bruce Carruthers, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University

"The Mechanization of Trust: Credit Rating in 19th-c. America"

April 6, 2007

William St. Clair, Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge

"The Political Economy of Reading"

2005-2006

All sessions of the Penn Economic History Forum, unless otherwise noted, will be held from 2:00 - 4:00 P.M. in the Lea Library on the 6th Floor of the Van Pelt Library. Papers will be available by calling the History Department of the University of Pennsylvania at (215) 898-8452 or on this site.

Co-Conveners:
Walter Licht (History Department, University of Pennsylvania)
Daniel Raff (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

October 7, 2005

William Collins, Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University

"The Economic Aftermath of the 1960's Riots: Evidence from Property Values"

November 11, 2005

Paul Duguid, School of Information Management and Systems, University of California-Berkeley

"Brands in Chains: The History of Trademarks and the Management of Supply Chains in Nineteenth Century Britain and Twentieth Century Silicon Valley"

December 9, 2005

Nathan Ensmenger, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

"The Computer Boys Take Over: The Organizational Politics of Technological Expertise, 1952-1968"

January 20, 2006

Philip Scranton, Rutgers University, Department of History and Hagley Museum and Library

"Technology-Led Innovation: Jet Engines, Cold War Contracting, and the Dilemmas of Science"

February 17, 2006

Regina Blaszczyk, Hagley Museum and Library

"The Color Revolution: Innovations in 20th Century Fashion and Marketing"

February 20, 2006

Richard von Glahn, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles

"Foreign Silver Coins and Market Culture in 19th-Century China"

Hosted by the Department of History, The Center for East Asian Studies and the Penn Economic History Forum

March 24, 2006

Steven Topik, Department of History, University of California-Irvine

"Historicizing Commodity Chains. Thinking About Things, Structures, Systems and Especially Coffee"

April 14, 2006

David Washbrook, St. Anthony's College, Oxford

"Colonialism and Capitalism in South Asia"

2004-2005

All sessions of the Penn Economic History Forum, unless otherwise noted, will be held from 2:00 - 4:00 P.M. in the Lea Library on the 6th Floor of the Van Pelt Library. Papers will be available by calling the History Department of the University of Pennsylvania at (215) 898-8452 or on this site.

Co-Conveners:
Walter Licht (History Department, University of Pennsylvania)
Daniel Raff (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

October 1, 2004

Peter Lindert, Department of Economics, UC-Davis

"Preliminary Global Price Comparisons, 1500-1870"

November 12, 2004

Mary O'Sullivan, INSEAD Strategy

"Living with the U.S. Financial System: The Experiences of General Electric and Westinghouse in the Last Century"

December 20, 2004

Michael Gilsenan, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, New York University

"A Trust in the Family: Arab Kinship, English Law, and the Transmission of Property in Colonial Singapore"

January 21, 2005

Margaret Levenstein, Office of Survey Research, University of Michigan

"Financing Invention during the Second Industrial Revolution: Cleveland, Ohio, 1870-1920"

February 18, 2005

Walter Licht, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania

"Facing Economic Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century -- The Responses and Roles of Organized Capital and Labor"

March 18, 2005

Carol Heim, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

"Border Wars: Tax Revenues, Annexation, and Urban Growth in Phoenix"

April 15, 2005

Lynn Lees, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania

"Constructing Colonial Spaces in British Malaya: Alternative Worlds of Town and Plantation"

2003-2004

October 3, 2003

Katherine van Wezel Stone, Law School and Industrial and Labor Relations School, Cornell University

"Widgets to Digits and the Legal Regulation of the Workplace in its Historical Context"

November 7, 2003

Frederick M. Scherer, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

"Intellectual Property in Music Composition, 1750-1900"

December 12, 2003

Robert Vitalis, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

January 30, 2004

Eric Orts, Department of Legal Studies, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

"Historical Perspectives on a Social Theory of the Business Enterprise"

February 13, 2004

Harold James, Department of History, Princeton University

"Family Capitalism and Steel in a Comparative Perspective: Italy, France and Germany"

March 5, 2004

Daniel Raff, Department of Management, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

April 9, 2004

Ron Harris, School of Law, Tel Aviv University

"Institutional Innovation and Theories of the Firm: The Formation of the East India Company"