INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC HISTORY

The course is a "characterizing" course for students attending their first year of the MA program in Comparative International Relations (RIC) for the curriculum in Global studies (Students of the second year should follow prof. Valentina Fava's course). It provides students with advanced knowledge in international economic history, with an emphasis on the events, processes, actors and concepts that shaped the policies of "development" throughout the 20th century. To the extent that it conveys a set of notions, it contributes to providing students with a secure knowledge of 20th century international economic history. By putting an emphasis on the historical method of inquiry, the course provides students with the capacity to autonomously analyze events and processes in the international realm, and to develop original and well-founded interpretations about them, beyond the specific object of the course itself. With its attention to the definition of the concepts under consideration, the course provides students with the possibility to become confident with their communication skills in reference to international economic history.

At the end of the course, students should have acquired:
a) a confident knowledge of the main events, actors, processes and historical interpretations related to history of development
b) a confident knowledge of the literature on a specific set of subjects;
c) the ability to communicate their knowledge with clarity and precision, and to take part in debates about international development;
d) the ability to develop their competence in the field of history of development in an autonomous and self-organized manner.

This course requires a basis in history and/or political science as from RIC's admission requirements, and a basic knowledge of modern and contemporary history as from High School programs. A deep interest for the subject and a serious approach to the lessons and the reading materials are not formal requirements, but usually help.

Until the early 1990s, economic development was commonly understood as the attempt undertaken by Western powers -and according to Western theories- to induce economic modernization in the Third World. Chronologically, these attempts were thought to have taken place mostly during the historical period we know as Cold War (1947-1989/91). However, during the last two decades development has increasingly become the object of inquiries on the part of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists who have sought to review both its definitions and the different chronologies of its implementation. Thanks to this new body of scholarship, we now have a broader conceptual, geographical and chronological understanding of the theories and practices related to development attempts. This course will lead students on a journey through such debates, helping them to gain a critical perspective on the topic.

The first section the course will show students that the history development cannot be limited to a Cold War timeframe. Development attempts were indeed originally undertaken by European powers during the late colonial era and, especially, after 1940. As the course will show such experiments were not just a product of European or American theories and experiences. They drew heavily on a variety of experiments which included the US New Deal but also Soviet industrialization and Latin American attempts to industrialize after the 1929 economic crisis. State intervention, industrialization and agricultural technification became the tenets of developmental efforts. In its second section, the course will bring students in contact with the apogee of developmental efforts, the 1950s and the 1960s, when the convergence between the Cold War and decolonization made economic modernization in the peripheries one of the main fields of bipolar competition. In this section, however, students will be able to appreciate the way in which Third World actors negotiated and appropriated languages and theories of development according to peripheral countries’ needs and perceptions of economic modernization. In its third section, the course will finally discuss the multiple crisis which development experienced especially after the 1970s.

Corinna R. Unger, International Development. A Postwar History

David Ekbladh, The great American mission: modernization and the construction of an American world order

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War

The evaluation will be based on a written exam and on an oral discussion

1. The written exam will be an "open book test" and will require students to answer to two questions. Questions will basically follow class structures and will draw on contents of the compulsory readings, plus those of the assigned manual: Corinna R. Unger, International Development. A Postwar History. To clarify, examples of possible questions could be: What could be considered the origins of developmental efforts before the beginning of the Cold War? or How has the study of development evolved during the last decades?
2. The oral exam will consist of a discussion starting from the written essay, and later expanding to cover other aspects of the course program, with particular with reference to the Compulsory readings and the assigned manual, in order to have a full assessment of the knowledge and abilities they have learned through the course. The oral examinations will take place upon realization and evaluation of the written exams. Students will receive a notification by the administrative secretary regarding the dates of the online sessions and the list of people scheduled for each session.

written and oral

The course is organized around 15 frontal lectures. Each one of the fifteen sessions will have an assigned compulsory reading and a non-compulsory reading, which students interested in achieving a deeper comprehension of the topic may find useful to read. Compulsory readings will help students to achieve an easier understanding of the contents of the lectures and they will be part of the assessment methodology described in the following section. In addition, students are asked to read an assigned textbook: Corinna R. Unger, International Development. A Postwar History (Bloomsbury, 2018).
This professor strongly encourages students to intervene during the class and through moodle forum with comments based on their appreciation of assigned readings.

English

Students with disabilities can contact the Disability and Accessibility Office (disabilita@unive.it) to take advantage of the services available (e.g. alternative examination methods, readers, etc.).

This teacher is easily available for questions concerning the course at his office hours and by email at vanni.pettina@unive.it


Please for a detailed overview of the program access the course moodle space at: https://moodle.unive.it/course/view.php?id=6115