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WORLD HISTORY STUDY GROUP 2011-2012

Regional Trading Networks and the History of World Trade

Logistics | Readings and Resources | Book suggestions for future sessions

LOGISTICS

Educators may join this group by contacting Michele Delattre at ORIAS.

LOCATION: Mercy High School in San Francisco.

3250 Nineteenth Avenue (across from SFSU and Stonestown Galleria).

TIME: 5:00-7:00 pm from October to December, 2011. Note: We will switch to the 3rd Wednesday beginning in January.

 

To Register:  You may register online or by contacting Michele at ORIAS.

This year's topic will focus on one of the most important topics to both world history and contemporary political economy: the relationship of regional trading networks to the global economy. We will begin with a work of historical fiction: A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, set in London in the period leading up to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720.

Our non-fiction selections will begin with a romp through some classical political economy (i.e. Adam Smith), the group then plans to study how different world trading regions became integrated, or refused to be integrated, into an emerging global political economy. Though each region approached its local and regional economy differently, every region eventually had to deal with neighboring regions as they engaged in commerce with each other. As usual, a mix of history and historical fiction (along with a smattering of social sciences) will be selected by the group's participants.
READINGS AND RESOURCES

NYT book review for A Conspiracy of Paper.

Other selected online resources:

Wealth of Nations:
OTHER BOOK SUGGESTIONS

Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series) by Jane I. Guyer (recommended by Martha Saavedra, Center for African Studies, UCB)

In America, almost all the money in circulation passes through financial institutions every day. But in Nigeria's "cash and carry" system, 90 percent of the currency never comes back to a bank after it's issued. What happens when two such radically different economies meet and mingle, as they have for centuries in Atlantic Africa?

The answer is a rich diversity of economic practices responsive to both local and global circumstances. In Marginal Gains, Jane I. Guyer explores and explains these often bewildering practices, including trade with coastal capitalism and across indigenous currency zones, and within the modern popular economy. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Guyer demonstrates that the region shares a coherent, if loosely knit, commercial culture. She shows how that culture actually works in daily practice, addressing both its differing scales of value and the many settings in which it operates, from crisis conditions to ordinary household budgets. The result is a landmark study that reveals not just how popular economic systems work in Africa, but possibly elsewhere in the Third World.

Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia. Editor(s): Eric Tagliacozzo , Wen-chin Chang (recommended by Sarah Maxim, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, UCB)

Chinese merchants have traded with Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning and sometimes settling, during their voyages. These ventures have taken place by land and by sea, over mountains and across deserts, linking China with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mercantile embrace. Chinese Circulations provides an unprecedented overview of this trade, its scope, diversity, and complexity. This collection of twenty groundbreaking essays foregrounds the commodities that have linked China and Southeast Asia over the centuries, including fish, jade, metal, textiles, cotton, rice, opium, timber, books, and edible birds’ nests. Human labor, the Bible, and the coins used in regional trade are among the more unexpected commodities considered. In addition to focusing on a certain time period or geographic area, each of the essays explores a particular commodity or class of commodities, following its trajectory from production, through exchange and distribution, to consumption. The first four pieces put Chinese mercantile trade with Southeast Asia in broad historical perspective; the other essays appear in chronologically ordered sections covering the precolonial period to the present. Incorporating research conducted in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, and several Western languages, Chinese Circulations is a major contribution not only to Sino-Southeast Asian studies but also to the analysis of globalization past and present.

The History of Money by Jack Weatherford

Weatherford brings a cultural anthropologist's wide-angled perspective to this illuminating investigation of money's role in shaping human affairs. He identifies three great mutations in the story of money. The first began with the invention of coins in the Anatolian kingdom of Lydia 3000 years ago, sparking a monetary revolution that underpinned classical Greek and Roman civilizations. Next, family-owned, credit-giving banks of Renaissance Italy ushered in the modern world capitalist system, which swept away feudalism and abetted the expansion of European hegemony to the Americas. In the third major transition, predicts Weatherford (Savages and Civilization), the current age of paper money will give way to an era of cybermoney, or electronic cash, in which transactions are conducted via the Internet and by other forms of electronic transfer. Full of forgotten lore and provocative opinions (e.g., harmful inflation is identified as the dominant monetary theme of our century), and sprinkled with allusions to Voltaire, Goethe, L. Frank Baum and Gertrude Stein, this intriguing selective survey will captivate even readers with no particular yen for financial knowledge.

Suggestions from Eva Mo:

The first two books, Free Fall and Flat Broke are just books I ran across and thought were interesting. The reviews are just what I found first, and not any kind of research (although the first review is from the Guardian). All the other books listed are from a colleague who graduated from the London School of Economics. I had given her our theme and asked her what classic economic pieces she would recommend to our group. --Eva

Stiglitz, Joseph. Free Fall: Free markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy, 2011 (This might be a little too U.S.-focused to fit with the global theme for the working group.)

o one can say they weren't warned. A decade ago, newly sacked from his job as chief economist at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz laid bare how the free-market ideologues at the US ­Treasury and the International Monetary Fund had botched the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. It was a full-on attack from a Washington insider and it hurt, especially when Stiglitz said many of those responsible for forcing countries such as Thailand and Indonesia into deeper, longer recessions were "third-rate graduates from first-rate universities".

He concluded his essay in the New Republic by warning the IMF and the US Treasury that unless they began a dialogue with their critics "things will continue to go very, very wrong".Now they have. The Asian crisis of 1997-98 was merely the warm-up act for the events of the past two and a half years. Problems that first surfaced on the periphery of the global economy gradually worked their way to its core – the United States. The warnings of Stiglitz and a handful of other ­dissident voices were ignored, as a naïve ­belief in the self-correcting ­nature of markets allowed the conditions to develop for the biggest financial and economic shock since the great depression in the 1930s.In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Freefall reeks of "I told you so". Stiglitz has waited a long time for his views to be vindicated and was not going to spurn the opportunity to settle some scores. Some of the targets are obvious enough – corporate welfare for Wall Street, George Bush's tax breaks for the rich, the failed nostrums from the Chicago school of free-market economists. But he also finds time for some personal revenge.

Larry Summers, formerly Bill Clinton's treasury secretary and now chief economic adviser to Barack Obama, is a particular hate figure. Stiglitz says Summers was too accommodating to the demands of Wall Street in the 90s and is making the same mistake now. It was Summers, incensed by the constant criticism of the Washington consensus, who orchestrated Stiglitz's departure from the World Bank.

There is more, though, to Freefall than sheer gloating – however justified. Stiglitz's argument is simple; the period of unchallenged American economic hegemony lasted a mere 19 years, from the demolition of the Berlin wall in the autumn of 1989 to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Swift action by governments – forced to abandon a hands-off approach to economic management by the scale of the crisis – has prevented a great recession from turning into a second great depression. Lessons need to be learned from this near-death experience; if they are not, if the warnings go unheeded as they did a decade ago, the future will be punctuated by systemic crises.

The chances of that happening are quite high. Already, there is a whiff of business as usual as a receding sense of danger blunts the appetite for radical reform. Obama soft-pedalled on reform of Wall Street until goaded into action this month by the loss of the Senate seat in Massachusetts; in Britain the imminent election will be dominated not by which party has the right policies to cut the City down to size but which can be trusted to cut the budget deficit. Revisionist versions of the crisis, suggesting the problem was too much government rather than too little, are doing the rounds.

In that respect, Freefall is the wrong title for this book. It was clearly commissioned and conceived about a year ago, when the charts showed industrial production and trade collapsing at the same pace as they had in the early 30s. But conditions have improved since the panic of late 2008 and early 2009; by pursuing policies that were diametrically opposite to those foisted on struggling Asian countries by the IMF and the US Treasury in the late 90s, growth has returned far more quickly than expected. China is booming, while Europe, Japan and the United States all started growing again by the third quarter of 2009.
Having dished it out, Stiglitz can expect to cop it from his opponents if, as looks entirely possible, 2010 is a year of recovery. But his underlying analysis is correct. The global economy was – and remains – seriously unbalanced between debtor and creditor nations. Corporate welfare has reached fresh heights with the billions of dollars ladled out to commercial banks, investment banks and America's biggest insurance company, AIG. America, as the book rightly notes, has lived off one bubble after another for years.
Stiglitz wants this to be a moment of "reckoning and reflection" – a re­assessment of the sort of economy in which financiers enriched themselves by selling over-priced and risky products to some of the most vulnerable citizens in America. Materialism has outweighed moral commitment, the needs of the environment have been ignored, and there has been a catastrophic break down in trust.

He concludes the book by asking: "Will we seize the opportunity to restore our sense of balance between the market and the state, between individualism and the community, between man and nature, between means and ends?" Faced with a similar set of circumstances in the 30s, the New Deal generation of Roosevelt proved ready to meet the challenge. Stiglitz clearly doubts whether Obama is made of the same stern stuff.
Larry Elliott is co-author, with Dan Atkinson, of The Gods That Failed: How the Financial Elite Have Gambled Away Our Futures (Vintage).

Jeter, Jon. Flat broke 2011
A powerful, accessible, and eye-opening analysis of the global economy. Growing up in an African American working-class family in the Midwest, Jon Jeter watched the jobs undergirding a community disappear. As a journalist for the Washington Post (twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist), he reported on the freemarket reforms of the IMF and the World Bank, which in a single generation created a transnational underclass.

Led by the United States, nations around the world stopped making things and starting buying them, imbibing a risky cocktail of deindustrialization, privatization, and anti-inflationary monetary policy. Jeter gives the consequences of abstract economic policies a human face, and shows how our chickens are coming home to roost in the form of the subprime mortgage scandal, the food crisis, and the fraying of traditional social bonds (marriage). From Rio de Janeiro to Shanghai to Soweto to Chicago's South Side and Washington, DC, Jeter shows us how the economic prescriptions of "the Washington Consensus" have only deepened poverty-while countries like Chile and Venezuela have flouted the conventional wisdom and prospered.

Storper, Michael and Richard Walker. Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth, 1989.
279 pages
Why do cities, regions and nations experience periods of pronounced growth and decline? Why have the world's centres of economic activity been continually reshuffled as the industrial revolution has spread to new parts of the globe?

This book demonstrates that under capitalism, the process central to growth is geographical industrialization, and that the creation and use of territory is fundamental to economic development. In doing so, they make new contributions to the study of growth theory, industrial economics, technological change, industrial organization, labour market, urban and regional development, and theoretical human geography. Beginning with the economics of disequilibrium growth, the authors reveal the technological, organizational and political foundations of industrialization, and conclude by showing that the territorial forms that industry takes are central to the shape and survival of capitalism itself.

Storper, Michael. The Regional World; Territorial Development in a Global Economy, 1997.
"A major contribution to both regional science and modern social science. This book treats in an integrated way the major themes of regional economics: industrial districts, urbanization, and globalization. The approach is interdisciplinary, and the author succeeds in bringing together in his own original theoretical framework major elements from the most up-to-date theoretical debates in economics and sociology....The book will certainly become a classic among regional economists, and it has much to offer to anyone interested in what is going on in the social sciences in our time." --Bengt-Aake Lundvall, Department of Business Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark

"This is a path-breaking book written by one of our most prominent economic geographers. It offers a novel and compelling theorization of why regions continue to matter in a global age. In conceptualizing the region, inter alia, as a nexus of untraded interdependencies, Michael Storper forces recognition of the decisive influence upon economic competitiveness, innovation and adaptability, of the social relations of proximity such as sedimented actor rationalities, local knowledge and learning environments, social and cultural conventions, and industrial and institutional legacies. His approach considerably advances regional theory beyond the recent rediscovery of external economies of agglomeration within economics. It paves the way for a new institutionalist and evolutionary paradigm in regional development studies." --Ash Amin, Professor of Geography, University of Durham, UK 
Product Description
This volume proposes a theory of how regions have sustained their economic viability in the era of multinational corporations. Rather than analyzing economic systems in terms of their mechanics such as inputs, outputs, prices and technology, this work views them as systems for co-ordinating human actions and relationships. Reconceptualizing the role of learning, technology and local institutions in development, Storper highlights the key role of regional economics as building blocks of the increasingly connected world.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System, 1987.
Here is a shorten article I found in pdf form:
From Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins
of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1976,
pp. 229-233.
http://marriottschool.byu.edu/emp/WPW/Class%209%20%20The%20World%20System%20Perspective.pdf

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Capitalist World Economy Essays, 1979. 305 pages
In The Capitalist World-Economy Immanuel Wallerstein focuses on the two central conflicts of capitalism, bourgeois versus proletarian and core versus periphery, in an attempt to describe both the cyclical rhythms and the secular transformations of capitalism, conceived as a singular world-system. The essays include discussions of the relationship of class and ethnonational consciousness, clarification of the meaning of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the utility of the concept of the semi peripheral state, and the relationship of socialist states to the capitalist world-economy. This book is the first in a three volume collection of Wallerstein's essays. The Politics of World-Economy (1984) elaborates on the role of states, the antisystemic movements and the civilizational project. Geopolitics and Geoculture (1991) analyses both the events leading up to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the subsequent process of perestroika in the light of Wallerstein's own interpretations, and the ways in which the renewed concern with culture is a product of the changing world-system.

Braudel, Ferdinan. Civilization and Capitalism, 1992. 
This three-volume set should be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the pre-industrial past. The work abounds with useful information on the past conditions of everyday life on a wide variety of subjects. I was interested while reading to gauge Braudel's economic theories--he more or less equates capitalism with big business and admits that market trade at least at the smaller level of everyday life was largely beneficial to the people. It makes an interesting read in terms of the shifting definitions of capitalism current in the literature and reminds us that when different authors talk about capitalism that they are using the same term to refer to numerous different things.
It's hard to imagine a modern historical landscape without Braudel's influence. I really, really like the idea of a "bottom up" history that takes into account all the raw material that makes up everyday life.

OK, so he's a Eurocentrist and, maybe worse, a Francocentrist. Oh well. Take the bad with the good. I'd probably like him a bit more if he focused on specific material histories rather than trying to write a History of Everything Everywhere, but if I think of this as a theoretical primer rather than an explicit history, I'm much more fond of it.

Originally published in the early 1980s, Civilization traces the social and economic history of the world from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, although his primary focus is Europe. Braudel skims over politics, wars, etc., in favor of examining life at the grass roots: food, drink, clothing, housing, town markets, money, credit, technology, the growth of towns and cities, and more. The history is fascinating and made even more interesting by period prints and drawings.

Some other late thoughts from Michele

Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton Economic History of the Western World). Ronald Findlay, Kevin H. O'Rourke.

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Kenneth Pomeranz.
MIDDLE EAST / ARAB WORLD

Recommendations from Emily Gottrich at Center for Middle Eastern Studies:

E. Bovill. The Golden Trade of the Moors: West African Kingdoms in the Fourteenth Century

Janet L. Abu Lughod. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350.

"In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth century economy--a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it. Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony."

Roger Owen. Middle East and World Economy.

"Examines the growth and transformation of the Middle East economy during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The text looks at how the region's economic structures were fundamentally altered by the growing impact of European trade and finance, and by the internal reforms of the rulers of Egypt. It also examines in detail the impact of this process on the four central areas of the Middle East. The result, the author argues, was the creation of a fixed pattern of agricultural, industrial and financial activity. The states formed after the collapse of teh Ottoman Empire found that altering this pattern in their attempts to promote a less dependent form of development was frought with difficulty; and the problems they faced and their different approaches are still highly relevant to the Middle East's economic development today."

WHO ARE WE?

 

 

The World History book study group meets monthly from fall to spring in San Francisco. The group chooses six to seven books per school year dealing with an annual theme; the book discussions are facilitated by Alan Karras, author and professor in the International and Area Studies department at University of California, Berkeley. Meetings are open to all advanced pre-collegiate and community college faculty. Space is limited to 20 teachers.

Topics explored in past study groups have included Transnational Transgressions; Africa as an Atlantic culture; the nature and origins of nationalism; the Middle East; Power, Poverty and Politics; and the Caribbean and Central America.

Participants are reimbursed for the cost of the books if they attend at least 5 meetings.

The study group goals are to:

  1. Discuss trends and scholarship in the teaching of World History.
  2. Provide a collegial community for educators to build their content background.
  3. Infuse international studies into current classroom instruction and share best practices.
  4. Demonstrate links between historical and contemporary issues.

The group began meeting in 1999 and topics explored in past study groups have included the nature and origins of nationalism; the Middle East; Power, Poverty and Politics; Africa as an Atlantic culture; the Caribbean and Central America; Transnational Transgressions; and the Indian Ocean.

This study group is sponsored by ORIAS , the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Institute of East Asian Studies, International and Area Studies Teaching Program, U. C. Berkeley. Co-sponsored by World Savvy.