Production and Consumption in World History, 1450 to 1950

FAIN: FV-50197-08

Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)
Edmund Burke (Project Director: March 2008 to June 2010)

A four-week summer seminar for fifteen school teachers examining the history of trade in several important commodities from the mid-fifteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.

The purpose of the Summer Seminar on "Production and Consumption in World History, 1450-1950" is to explore the historical connections between producers and consumers of basic commodities across the globe as a way of understanding how the modern world economy emerged. By studying the linked histories of production and consumption we can better see how the world economy has fashioned and refashioned the world, linking South Asian spinners, textile factory workers in the East Midlands, and consumers in Europe, the Americas and Australasia, most of them predominantly female. The subject of production and consumption thus provides a point of entry for a variety of approaches to the study of the emergence of the modern world economy from its sixteenth century origins to the present.