Economic History

This course aims to provide students with knowledge and skills to examine the development and complexities of some current global phenomena from a historical perspective. The course will give students the basics to examine the development of the world economy from the first Industrial Revolution to the present, as well as the tools to understand globalisation processes occurring between the 20th and 21st century, with greater emphasis on the post-1945 period and the years between the 1990s and 2000s. Finally, the course will focus on how businesses and the job market have been affected by such processes.

By the end of the course, students will have developed:
- an understanding of the complexity of current economic trends and issues, being able to identify their continuities and discontinuities, so as to interpret some present geo-economic scenarios;
- the ability to elaborate (along the time-space axis) on how institutions, technological and social innovations, the State, markets, businesses, entrepreneurship, and labour movements and organisations impact on the economic growth;
- the ability to use the acquired knowledge to develop arguments, write reports and discuss problems, and to apply such knowledge to different fields, evaluating inferences and consequences of the processes studied;
- the ability to identify and critically assess trustworthy information, and to make connections between information sources to develop personal and well-founded arguments;
- a good command of the subject-specific terminology and concepts for a clear communication.