Entrepreneurship: A Global History (254-0-20)

Instructors

Holly E. D. Swenson

Meeting Info

Annenberg Hall G01: Tues, Thurs 12:30PM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

This course sets out to answer two big questions: What can we tell a history of entrepreneurship? How has entrepreneurship shaped the modern world? We will consider how the quest for new products and new markets helped to transform societies, economies and environments from the 1780s through the 1950s. Through a combination of lectures and dynamic, business-school case studies, we will ask why and how entrepreneurs as various as Josiah Wedgwood, Madam C.J. Walker, and Kazuo Inamori exploited opportunities that other people either failed to see or failed to act on. Among the subjects we'll discuss are the strengths and weaknesses of family firms, the search for capital, resource extraction and depletion, and the dynamics of globalization and deglobalization.

Learning Objectives

· Assess competing explanations of historical transformations of economies and societies, showing an awareness of how claims are supported by evidence and how arguments are structured by analytic categories; · Interpret different sorts of primary texts, including historical datasets, visual sources, in their appropriate historical context;
· Analyze methods of historical argumentation through the assessment of debates in the secondary literature about the significance of entrepreneurship;
· Formulate original arguments based on independent interpretation of both primary and secondary sources.

Evaluation Method

Midterm exam, attendance/participation, case studies, final class "pitch"

Class Notes

History Major Concentration(s): Global
History Minor Concentration(s): Economics and Labor

Class Attributes

Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
Social and Behavioral Science Foundational Discipl
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity
SoC Individual and Social Behavior Distro