This course is available on the MSc in Development Management (Political Economy), MSc in Development Management (Political Economy) (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in Development Studies, MSc in Economic Policy for International Development, MSc in Health and International Development and MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

How to apply: Places will be allocated with priority to MSc in Economic Policy for International Development, then other ID programmes. If there are more requests than can be accommodated, these places will be allocated randomly. Non-ID students will be allocated to spare places by random selection with the preference given first to those degrees where the regulations permit this option.

Deadline for application: You should make your request to take ID courses by 12 noon Friday 25 September 2026.

You will be informed of the outcome by 12 noon Monday 28 September 2026

In this course we will consider:

How did capitalism emerge and why did its expansion generate such uneven development outcomes in different parts of the world? This course studies capitalism as a historical process, tracing how changing relations among markets, labor, states, technology, empire, and finance reshaped the global distribution of wealth and power.

Rather than treating capitalism as a purely modern phenomenon, the course examines its deeper historical roots and studies its evolution through commercial expansion, the rise of merchant and financial capitalism, overseas empire and chartered corporations, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence, and the successive transformations of the world economy from the nineteenth century to the present. Throughout, the course asks how capitalist expansion shaped the prospects for structural transformation, industrialization, and catch-up growth in different societies, and why it instead locked many others into coercive labor regimes, extraction, deindustrialization, or peripheral specialization.

The course places this history in direct conversation with the central questions of development economics and political economy. Across the semester, students will use historical episodes to evaluate competing explanations of growth and underdevelopment, including the roles of trade, institutions, labor systems, colonialism, state capacity, technological change, and globalization. The aim is to understand capitalism not simply as an economic system, but as a historically evolving social and political order shaping the past and future trajectory of world development.

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

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars in the WT. Seminars will be at 90 minutes duration and lectures will be at or above 60 minutes duration.

For each session up to five readings will be given in advance of the seminar. Students will be asked to read the literature in advance and discuss their findings in an interactive debate during the seminar, monitored and led by the academic instructor. For certain topics, special designed policy-relevant tasks will be assigned and team discussion and debate will be encouraged. A general reading list for the course will be provided at the start of the course.

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

Essay proposal 800 words in the WT.

A detailed reading list will be provided at the start of the course each year.

Course participation (60%).

Essay (40%, 3000 words).