DV480      Half Unit
Development Transformations: The Political Economy of Colonialism, Revolution and Reform

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

No specific course pre-requisites.  A good social science background will be very helpful, especially politics and economics.

Rapid development is a wrenching political, economic and social process. How is it best done? Rapidly and discontinuously? With violence if necessary? Is violence ever really necessary? If so, when and why? Is rapid change best driven by outsiders, or must change come from within if it is to benefit a society and be sustainable? Or is peacefully reform a better path?

This course examines the social, political and economic changes associated with development transformations through the lens of distinct, powerful modes of change: Revolution, Reform, and Colonialism. We critically examine the roots of each, and then analyse their successes and failures as models of change in generating large and sustainable improvements in development broadly construed.

We begin by defining each of these as a discrete, analytically distinct model of change. We then examine specific cases of colonialism, revolution, evolution/reform, as well as failed cases of each. We evaluate the immediate and long-term costs of these episodes in light of the changes that resulted in each country's development trajectory. We focus on the conditions that sustained discontinuous, violent vs. continuous, non-violent processes of change in each empirical case, and then on the ability of each model of change to cause lasting improvements in societies' economic, political and social development.

Much of the theoretical debate in development concerns either specific reforms (e.g. market liberalisation), or general institutional systems (e.g. democracy), that will hopefully lead to higher levels of development. But the process of change itself, both its intention and directionality (i.e. originating from within or imposed from without), and the speed and violence that characterise it, remain mostly in the background. This course seeks to bring processes of change into the foreground, analysing both their drivers and their ultimate effects on development.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars in the AT. Seminars will be at or upwards of 45 minutes duration and lectures will be at or above 90 minutes duration. There will also be 4 hours of workshop in the AT.

Student on this course will have a reading week in week 6.

Lectures will present key facts and theoretical insights, and lay out the contours of major debates from the literature.  Seminars will be student-led, and will probe each week's topic in more detail, both to clarify concepts and to test them against evidence, some of which students will draw up and present independently.  The workshop is a different sort of exercise, intended to give thorough review to students' research proposals in a constructively critical, collegial atmosphere.  Students will present their research proposals and then receive feedback from fellow students and faculty.

Presentation

Presentation

Students will be expected to produce 1 presentation and 1 other piece of coursework in the AT.

In preparation for their research essay, students will submit a formative research proposal, which they will present in a research workshop in AT.  This will receive detailed written, and also oral, feedback intended to improve the proposal.  They will then revise the proposal and re-submit as summative work.

Students will also complete seminar presentations, individually or in groups (depending on student numbers), which will also receive formative feedback.

A detailed, weekly reading list will be provided at the start of term:

• Arendt, Hannah. 2006. On Revolution. London: Penguin Classics.
• Boix, Carles. 2015. Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and their Consequences for Human Welfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Brady, H. and D. Collier. 2010. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (second, expanded edition). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Dix, Robert H. 1983. "The Varieties of Revolution." Comparative Politics, 15 (3): 281-294.
• Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Moore, Barrington. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
• North, D., J. Wallis, and B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Procter, Margaret. The Academic Proposal.  University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto.
• Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Tilly, Charles. 1995. European Revolutions: 1492-1992. Oxford: Blackwell.
• de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1865. The Old Regime and the Revolution. New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Tucker, Robert C. (Ed.). 1975. The Lenin Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
• University Library. Writing a Research Proposal. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Assessment Pathway 1

Exam (80%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Presentation (20%)

Assessment Pathway 2

Presentation (10%)

Proposal (20%)

Research paper (70%)

Two assessment paths are available for this course.  The default path is No.1 (written exam).  Students who prefer path 2 (research paper) should speak to the professor and apply with a 1-page research proposal no later than Friday of reading week (week 6).

Path 1 - Final Exam

Seminar presentation (oral, 20%) in AT.

Exam (80%, duration 2 hours) in ST – Centrally scheduled.

Path 2 - Research Paper

Seminar presentation (oral, 10%) in AT.

Research proposal (1,500 - 2,000 words, 20%) due on Monday WT 1

Research paper (6,000 words, 70%) due on Monday of ST2