Mexican Economic History courses online

Diego Rivera's Pan American Unity mural, Panel 3, City College of San Francisco.

I have finished the last details of the website for the Mexican Economic History course  at UNAM, of which I am a teaching assistant. Here is part I and here is part II. I’m pretty sure the bibliography in the course is a neat overview of recent economic history in this country.

By the way, here’s an article published in the Washington Poston about rising unequality in the USA by Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at UC Davis and author of A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World.

This Week in Economic History (June 1st-7th, 2009)

On Tuesday the 2nd, there will be an international conference on “Genre, Mobilités et Mobilisations” in the University of Paris 8. You can contact Marguerite Rollinde (GTM) on it.

On Wednesday the third, Irène Favier will present a paper named “Autour des restructurations industrielles dans la France du second XXe siècle : de Faverge à Vergèze”, in the Social and Politic History of the Economy seminar organized at the École Normale Supérieure. That same day begins the Sixth Annual Conference of the Italian Association for the History of Political Economy (STOREP), with the topic “Financial Crises in the Economists’ View”, in the University of Florence, Italy. The event will last two days: you can visit the conference site here. In the University of California at Los Angeles Haggay Etkes (Stanford University) presents “Legalizing Extortion: Protection Payments, Property Rights, and Economic Growth in Ottoman Gaza” in the VonGremp Workshop in Economic and Entrepreneurial History. In Colombia, Alberto G. Flórez-Malagón (History Department, Ottawa University) will present a book he edited on cattlefarming, “El poder de la carne. Historias de ganaderías en la primera mitad del siglo XX en Colombia”, at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá.

This week in Economic History (May 25-29th, 2009)

On Monday the 25th and Tuesday the 26th, a conference on “Ambitions and Reality: Historical Perspectives on the Common Agricultural Policy” will be held in the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Paris. Also on Monday, Stephen Haber (Stanford University) will present a paper on the myth of the resource course in the Economic History Seminar in Mexico City.

On Wednesday the 27th, a workshop on “Les langues du commerce à l’époque moderne” will be held at the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme, in Aix-en-Provence, France. You can contact Olivier Raveux if you wish more information on this event. Also on Wednesday, the VonGremp Workshop in Economic and Entrepreneurial History hosts Robert Margo (Boston University). Margo will present his paper Did Railroads Induce or Follow Economic Growth? Urbanization and Population Growth in the American Midwest, 1850-1860.

On an economic historian as head of the National Public Records Office of Mexico

Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato

It is possible that readers of this entry will find it a bit too local. But I think this piece of news is relevant enough to be of interest to an international audience.

On May the 1st Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato, Professor of Economics and Economic History at CIDE, was appointed as head of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico’s National Public Records Office.

Dr. Gómez-Galvarriato earned her Ph.D in History at Harvard University. Her dissertation “The Impact of Revolution: Business and Labor in the Mexican Textile Industry, Orizaba, Veracruz, 1900 to 1930” won the Alexander Gerschenkron Prize for the Best Dissertation in non-US or Canadian Economic History in 2000.

Her main research areas are the economic and social history of Mexico from the last quarter of the 19th century to 1930. These years are also known in traditional political history periods as “el Porfiriato” (the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz) and “la revolución mexicana” (1910-1921). She has written extensively on the industrialization and Mexican economic development during the Díaz dictatorship, as well as on the impacts of the revolution of 1910 on the economy. She has also written in topics of labor, business and price history. Aurora Gómez is one of a growing number of Latin American economic historians who in recent years have used statistical methods to study important economic history problems of the region.

This Week in Economic History (May 18th-23rd, 2009)

On Monday the 18th, the  London School of Economics Business History Unit Seminar will host James Walker and Peter Scott (Henley Business School at the University of Reading). They will present a paper on “Sales and Advertising Rivalry in Interwar US Department Stores”.  That same day, there will be an interesting conference on “Work and living standards in Africa in the long run“. Gareth Austin (LSE), Issiaka Mandé (Université Paris-Diderot), Alexander Moradi (University of Sussex) and Denis Cogneau (PSE et IRD) will discuss their papers in ENS, Paris.

On Tuesday the 19th, there will be a conference on “Cuisine régionale, cuisine de ville. Histoire et identités régionales”, by Massimo Montanari, at Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7.  A two-day international conference on Sailing History begins on Tuesday in Granada. There is also an interesting seminar on “The Long Term Effects of the Ottoman Empire: Financial Development in the Regions of Europe”, by Pauline Grosjean, at Berkeley University.

On Thursday, May 21st, a two-day conference will begin in London, this on “Writing the History of the Global“. Economic historians such as Jan Luiten van Zanden, Sevket Pamuk and Patrick O’Brien, among others will participate on a topic that has caught the attention of many colleagues around the world. The organizers will post multimedia records in ITunesU: we’ll inform whenever they are available. In Barcelona, a workshop on “Innovation Economy and History of Science and Technology. The Making of the Contemporary Pharmaceutical Research System” begins that same day.

There will be a two-day open conference in Mexico City to discuss the chapters of the coming book “Historia económica general de México. De la colonia a nuestros días“. Internationally-known scholars, such as Stephen Haber (Stanford), Alan Knight (Oxford), John Coatsworth (Columbia) and Gabriel Tortella (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) will discuss a collective book that will definitely be a cornerstone in Mexican economic history.

Do you know of any other relevant economic history event in  your country? Please let us know!