EH308      One Unit
Historical Economic Geography: Cities, Markets and Regions in the 19th and 20th Centuries

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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The course explores how and why the location of economic activities changes across time and space from industrialization up to the present. One goal for this course is to demonstrate the importance of history in the formation of the present-day economic landscape. An equally important goal is to demonstrate the applicability of the study of economic geography to the understanding of historical patterns of development and underdevelopment. The course is not organized chronologically but thematically. Particular attention focuses on four major issues: the development of cities, the creation of national markets, the historical basis for manufacturing agglomeration, and the historical evolution and sources of regional inequality.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

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

This course is delivered via 2-hour seminars in Autum and Winter Term. 

Combes, Pierre-Philippe, Thierry Mayer and Jacques-François Thisse, Economic Geography: The Integration of Regions and Nations. Princeton University Press, 2008. Garretsen, Harry and Martin, Ron (2010), Rethinking (New) Economic Geography Models: Taking Geography and History More Seriously, Spatial Economic Analysis, 5, 2, pp. 127-160. Joan Ramón Rosés and Nikolaus Wolf (eds), The Economic Development of Europe's Regions: A Quantitative History since 1900, Routledge, 2018. Daniel A. Tirado-Fabregat, Marc Badia-Miro, Henry Willebald (eds) Time and Space: Latin American Regional Development in Historical Perspective, Palgrave, 2020. W.Walker Hanlon and Stephan Heblich (2022), History and urban economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, 94.

Exam (45%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Continuous assessment (10%)

Essay (45%, 4000 words)