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Honors 3293 Wealth, Poverty, Environment, and Culture Why some parts of the globe are rich and others are poor is one of the most vexing questions facing the world historian. Why were New Guineans using stone tools in the 1920s when western Europeans were plying the seas in steamships, communicating with telephones, and wearing mass-produced clothes? Is there something wrong with New Guineans and their culture? Or is their something special about Europeans and their culture? Or can these differences in wealth best be explained by environmental and geographical factors rather than cultural ones? This course looks at these questions through two recently published books, Jarred Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and David Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, one of which takes the environmental position and the other the cultural position. This course is open to juniors, seniors, and exceptional sophomores. Exceptional sophomores please consult me before registering. The first bit of the course will focus on the two core texts and excerpts of related texts. If you have never read Weber but always wanted to be able to amaze your friends and terrify your enemies with casual references to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this is your chance. The final third of the course will be devoted to student research. Everybody will write a major paper that addresses some facet of the larger question addressed in the course. If you are a biology major and want to look more closely at Diamond's evolutionary arguments you can do so. If you are an economics major or business major you may wish to look at business culture. We will spend the last couple of weeks of the course presenting our papers to the seminar - this after all is what a seminar is about. For the newly addes syllabus click here. For a taste of the nature of the argument over why come people are rich and other poor, visit this site which includes a transcript of the Landes-Frank debate. |