Major Issues in Medieval and Early Modern Economies

A graduate seminar that traces how Europe and the Near East moved from a late Roman monetary world through manorialism, the commercial revolution, the Black Death, and the Price Revolution into the threshold of the modern economy. You'll work through the big historiographical debates — Pirenne, Postan, the seventeenth-century crisis — via weekly readings, two presentations, a term essay, and a take-home final that ask you to argue, not just summarize. The point is to learn to read economic history critically, weighing structural change against contingent shocks, which is the foundation for anything you'll do later in economic or social history.