Seminars page

2007–2008

Michelmas term 2007

• Seminars
• Special Lectures
• Workshops (including Graduate Workshop)

Hilary term 2008

• Seminars
• Special Lectures
• Workshops (including Graduate Workshop)

Trinity term 2008

• Seminars
• Special Lectures (including Hicks Lecture)
• Workshops (including Graduate Workshop)
• Other seminars (Ancient History/Archaeology)

Michaelmas Term 2007 Seminars

Seminar in Economic and Social History

The Seminar meets on Tuesdays at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College
Convenor: Professor Avner Offer

Week 1 (9 October);
Jay Gershuny (Oxford):
British longitudinal studies 1946-2007                                                              

Week 2 (16 October)  
Haggay Etkes (Jerusalem):
Legalizing extortion: Containing Bedouin tribes in Ottoman Gaza, 1519–1582                                                                                           

Week 3 (23 October)
SEMINAR CANCELLED     
See below: Clarendon Lectures, which run from 22 to 24 October at 5.30pm                                

Week 4 (30 October)
Guillaume Daudin (Paris):
Domestic trade and market size in late eighteenth century France                                                                                                       

Week 5 (6 November)
Deborah Oxley (Oxford):
The market for convict labour in Tasmania 1840–1857 

Week 6 (13 November)
David Chambers (Oxford):
Keynes as an investor           

Week 7 (20 November)
Lizabeth Cohen (Harvard):
Renewing the city in postwar America

Week 8 (27 November)
Edmund (Valpy) Fitzgerald (Oxford):
Kuznets south of the Rio Bravo: Income distribution in Latin America 1900–2000

Michaelmas Term 2007 Special Lectures

The Clarendon Lectures in Economics

Daron Acemoglu (MIT):
Directed Technical Change and Economic Growth
22, 23, 24 October 2007 at 5.30 p.m. in Manor Road Building.

Acemoglu is one of the most distinguished younger economists in the world. His recent book with John Robinson, Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy (2006) is a daring attempt to explain the emergence of democracy in many countries with a fairly simple econometric model. This series is not guaranteed to be about economic history, but is likely to be stimulating.

I apply this framework to develop possible explanations to the following questions: why technical
change over the past 60 years was skill biased, and why the skill bias may have accelerated over the past
25 years? Why new technologies introduced during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were
unskill biased? What is the effect of biased technical change on the income gap between rich and poor
countries? Does international trade affect the skill bias of technical change? What are the implications of
wage push for technical change? Why is technical change generally labour augmenting rather than capital
augmenting?

From the abstract of Daron Acemoglu's paper 'Directed Technical Change',
Review of Economic Studies, vol. 69 (2002)

McGovern Annual Lecture in the History of Medicine

Allan Brandt (Professor of the History of Science; Kass Professor of the History of Medicine, Harvard University)

The Tobacco Pandemic: History, Culture, and Science

Thursday 6 December 2007 at 6pm in the E.P. Abraham Lecture Theatre, Green College

Michaelmas Term 2007 Workshops

History of Childhood Workshops

Graduate Workshop in Economic and Social History

Thursdays at 12.45 pm in the Seminar Room, Nuffield College

Week 1 (11 October)
Gerhard Kling (University of the West of England):
Resiliency of the pre-World War I German Stock Exchange

Week 2 (18 October)
Alexander Moradi (Department of Economics, University of Oxford):
Regional Inequality in Nutritional Outcomes, Kenya, 1880-1980: A Study of Stature in Kenyan African Army Recruits and Civilians

Week 3 (25 October)
Sarah Cochrane (Worcester College, University of Oxford):
Explaining British Dominance in the Financial Services Sector, 1870-1913

Week 4 (1 November)
Kiril Kossev (Nuffield College, University of Oxford):
“When People from the Same Trade Met”: Interlocking and Banks during the Great Depression – A Case Study of Bulgaria

Week 5 (8 November)
Carsten Burhop (Max Planck Institute):
The Market for Patents in Imperial Germany, 1877-1913

Week 6 (15 November)
John James (University of Virginia):
The National Banking Act and the Transformation of New York Banking after the Civil War

Week 7 (22 November)
Kerstin Manzel (University of Tuebingen):
‘Gender Inequality in Numeracy: The Case of Latin America, 1870-1940

Week 8 (29 November)
Elise Huillery (DIAL-IRD and Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques):
Does Political Climate Play a Persistent Role? Evidence from Colonial Experience in French West Africa

Hilary term 2008 Seminars

Seminar in Economic and Social History

Nuffield College, Chester Room, Tuesdays, 5–7 pm

Convenors: Professor Robert Allen, Professor Knick Harley, and Dr Alexander Moradi

Week 1 (15 January)
Phil Mirowski (Notre Dame):
The commercialization of science and the response of science and technology studies

Week 2 (22 January)
Rui Esteves (Oxford):
A fantastic rain of gold. European migrants’ remittances and balance of payments adjustment during the Gold Standard period

Week 3 (29 January)
Bruce Campbell (Queen’s):
The anatomy of a crisis: Britain and Ireland, 1290–1390

Week 4 (5 February)
Stuart Sweeney (St Antony’s):
Indian railroading: floating railway companies in the late nineteenth century

Week 5 (12 February)
Gagan Soon (Cambridge):
The case for ‘Islamic Eurasia’ in the early modern world

Week 6 (19 February)
Bob Allen (Nuffield):
The industrial revolution in miniature: the spinning jenny in Britain, France, and India

Week 7 (26 February)
Joshua Getzler (Law):
What type of finance does the common law favour?  Secured lending and industrial banking in Britain c.1850–1920

Week 8 (4 March)
Marc Flandreau (Sciences-Po):
Bonds and brands: Foundation of sovereign debt markets 1820–1830

Hilary Term 2008 Special Lectures

Organizational Genesis in Florentine history: Four multiple-network mechanisms

Wednesday 16 January, 2008 (Week 1)
5pm: Clay Room, Nuffield College

John F. Padgett (Professor in Political Science, University of Chicago and Research Professor & Program Director, Santa Fe Institute

John F. Padgett currently conducts research in the related areas of organizational invention and of state and market co-evolution, mostly in the context of Renaissance Florence but also through agent-based modeling. In the past, Padgett has published in the topics of organization theory, social network analysis, federal budgeting, plea bargaining, and stochastic processes.

For the past twenty years he has been constructing from primary archival sources a very large relational database about social-network evolution over the two hundred years, 1300-1500, in Renaissance Florence. This unprecedented data set contains information on about 60,000 persons: 10,000+ marriages, 14,000+ loans, 3,000+ business partnerships/firms, 40,000+ tax records, 12,000+ political-office elections, and other matters. Renaissance Florence was the arena for many history-altering organizational and technical inventions, in numerous domains, which Padgett studies primarily through tracing empirically and through modeling the catalytic co-evolution of multiple, cross-cutting social networks over time.

Hilary Term 2008 Workshops

Graduate Workshop in Economic and Social History

Thursdays at 12.45 pm in the Seminar Room, Nuffield College

Week 1 (17 January)
Markus Lampe (University of Münster):
Bilateral trade flows in Europe, 1857-1875: A new dataset

Week 2 (24 January)
Laura Inglis (Brasenose College, University of Oxford):
The creation of the Lochner Myth: Characterizations of the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 20th century

Week 3 (31 January)
Carlos Santiago-Caballero (London School of Economics):
Amartya Sen revisited: Population growth, grain production and income inequality in 18th-century Guadalajara

Week 4 (7 February)
David Chambers (Economics Department, University of Oxford):
Keynes the investor

Week 5 (14 February)
Dan Sinnott (Magdalen College, University of Oxford):
Banking on butter: Finance and the decline of the Irish dairy industry, 1880-1914

Week 6 (21 February)
Lewis Allan (Trinity College, University of Oxford):
Economists in government: the British case in the 1970s and 1980s

Week 7 (28 February)
Nick Juravich (Christ Church, University of Oxford):
‘Your fight is our fight’: Transnationalism and the development of black protest in Britain

Week 8 (6 March)
Chelsea Purvis (Merton College, University of Oxford):
Land tenure in the British Empire during the interwar period

Special Workshop

Modern European History Research Centre, University of Oxford and Forum of Contemporary History, University of Oslo

The Transition to Market Liberalism in Western and Nordic Europe

Saturday, 15 March 2008 in the History Faculty Building, The old Boys High School, George Street.
Please register your intention to attend with Ilze Gehe Numbers may have to be limited, so please register early.

9.15 a.m. Welcome address from Dr. Patricia Clavin (University of Oxford) and Prof. Even Lange (University of Oslo)

First Session: Chair: Prof. Gro Hagemann (University of Oslo)

9.30 a.m. Prof. Avner Offer (University of Oxford): The transition to market liberalism in the USA and Europe
Discussion.

10.30 a.m. Break

10.50 a.m. Dr. Daniel Kindermann (Cornell University and Social Science Research Center Berlin): The transition to market liberalism in Germany
Discussion.

11.40 a.m. Prof. Jelle Visser (University of Amsterdam) Supply-side corporatism and market liberalism in the Netherlands
Discussion.

12.30 p.m. Lunch

Second Session. Chair: Prof. Even Lange (University of Oslo)

1.30 p.m. Prof. Einar Lie (University of Oslo) Norway in the 1970s and 1980s: Leaving the coordinated economy on a return ticket
Discussion.

2.15 p.m. Dr. Johannes Lindvall (University of Oxford, Department of Politics): Liberalization and the rise of the middle class in Sweden
Discussion.

3.00 p.m. Break

3.15 p.m. Prof. Niels Kærgård (University of Copenhagen): Denmark since 1973 - From national welfare state to international market economy
Discussion.

4.00 p.m. Plenary Discussion.

5.00 p.m. Closing remarks from the speakers

7.00 p.m. Dinner

Trinity Term 2008 Seminars

Seminar in Economic and Social History

Tuesdays at 5pm, Seminar Room of the European Studies Centre, St Antony's College

Convenors: Prof Robert Allen, Prof Knick Harley, Prof Jane Humphries, Prof Avner Offer, Dr Rui Esteves, Dr Deborah Oxley, Dr Alexander Moradi, and Dr Matthias Morys

Week 1 (Tue 22 Apr)  
Prof Clyde Reed (Simon Fraser University)
Distribution Dynamics in a Stochastic Environment with Tradable Assets: Medieval English Land Markets

Week 2 (Tue 29 Apr)  
Dr Max-Stephan Schulze (LSE)
Nationality conflict, border effects and asymmetric integration: evidence form the Habsburg customs union

Week 3 (Tue 06 May)  
Prof Bernard Harris (University of Southampton)
Height, health and mortality in continental Europe, 1700-2100

Week 4 (Tue 13 May)  
Prof Catherine Schenk (University of Glasgow)
The Origins of Hong Kong's Exchange Rate Peg to the US Dollar in the 1970s: accident or design?

Medieval Economic and Social History Seminar

A weekly seminar will be held on Wednesdays at 5pm in the MacGregor Room, Oriel College

Convenors: John Blair (Queen’s) and Ian Forrest (Oriel)

Week 1         Justine Firnhaber-Baker (All Souls College):

23 April        Seigneurial warfare and rural society in fourteenth-century Languedoc: feudal crisis or history that stands still?

Week 2         Hannah Wheeler (Wadham College):

30 April        Stereotyping students: student misbehaviour in thirteenth-century Paris

Week 3         Ann Cole (Kellogg College):

7 May           The place-name evidence for an early medieval routeway network

Week 4         John Hines (Cardiff):

14 May         Sceattas and Scyllingas: coins and values in seventh-century Anglo-Saxon society

Week 5         Guy Geltner (Lincoln College):

21 May         Towards a social history of medieval anti-fraternalism

Week 6         Peter Coss (Cardiff):

28 May         A gentry family in the mid-fourteenth century: the Multons of Frampton

Week 7         Sally Harvey:

4 June           Knights again: the horses and assets of the Anglo-Norman knight

Week 8         Charles West (Hertford College):

11 June         Breaking down immunity: on Carolingian and post-Carolingian property rights

Trinity Term 2008 Special Lectures

Hicks Lecture in Economic and Social History 2008

Friday, 23 May 2008, 5.00pm

Old Library, All Souls College

Professor Jeffrey Williamson (Harvard University)
will deliver the Hicks Lecture 2008 on the subject of
"Globalization and the Great Divergence".
All Welcome!

Trinity Term 2008 Workshops

Graduate Workshop in Economic and Social History

Thursdays at 12.45pm in the Seminar Room, Nuffield College