Yale Conference on Economic and Environmental History. “Resources: Endowment or curse, better or worse?”

Noticia publicada el 24-10-2011

• February 24 - 25, 2012
• Yale University

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Co-Sponsored by the Yale Program in Economic History and Yale Environmental History

CONFERENCE OVERVIEW

How do the characteristics and availability of natural resources shape political institutions? How have tates mobilized resources to bolster their legitimacy and extend their influence? How have economic and environmental historians, political scientists, and others approached the concept of resources in the past and what are some directions for future work?

This two-day conference at Yale University will engage an interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine these questions and others at the intersection of environmental change, economics, and political development.

As scholarship has become more transnational, the management and movement of human and natural resources, and the circulation of commodities and ideas, have all emerged as exigent research questions. Such broad empirical and methodological investigations invite comparative approaches across social science and humanistic disciplines and geographic and temporal distinctions. This conference therefore engages the Ancient Mediterranean to imperial China and the modern United States to understand the economics and histories of such problems and to provide perspective on current conflicts over natural resources and their implications for state development and geopolitical struggles.

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CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24

1:15PM INTRODUCTION: Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale University)

1:30-2:45pm PANEL 1: Resources and State-building I

Chair: Seven Agir (Yale University)

Joe Manning (Yale University)
“Water, Irrigation and their Connection to State Power in Egypt”

Bin Wong (UCLA)
“Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Resource Management in Chinese
Empires”

Respondent: Daniel Headrick (Roosevelt University)

3:15-4:30pm PANEL 2: Resources and State-building II

Chair: Peter Perdue (Yale University)

Alan Mikhail (Yale University)
“Domestic Animals and Economic Transformation in Ottoman Egypt”

Anne McCants (MIT)
“Building in Stone: Clerical and Lay Political Struggle in the High Middle
Ages”

Respondent: Ken Pomeranz (UC Irvine)

5:00PM KEYNOTE LECTURE: Richard White (Stanford University)

“Incommensurate Measures: Nature, History, and Economics”

Introduced and moderated by John Mack Faragher (Yale University)

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25

9:00-10:15AM PANEL 3: Empire and Resources in the Ancient Mediterranean

Chair: Francesca Trivellato (Yale University)

R. Bruce Hitchner, (Tufts University)
“Too Many Men: Population, Resources, and the Origins of Roman
Expansionism"

John Haldon (Princeton University)
“Resources, Markets and the State: The Case of Byzantium”

Respondent: Peter Temin (MIT)

10:45-12:00PM PANEL 4 Water

Chair: K. (Shivi) Sivaramakrishnan (Yale University)

Ling Zhang (Yale Agrarian Studies Fellow/Boston College)
“From ‘Controlling Floods’ to ‘Managing a River’: The Chinese State
and the Political History of the Yellow River”

Arupjyoti Saikia (Yale Agrarian Studies Fellow/ IIT Guwahati)
“Jute or Flood: Exploring the fate of certain schemes in the Brahmaputra
River Valley”

Respondent: Richard Hornbeck (Harvard University)

12:00-1:00PM BUFFET LUNCH

1:00-2:30 PANEL 5 Comparative Perspectives on Resources and Governance

Moderator: Paul Sabin (Yale University)

Stephen Haber (Stanford University)

Nancy Langston (University of Wisconsin)

John McNeill (Georgetown University)

Timothy Mitchell (Columbia University)

Further information and updates about the conference will be posted on the
website of the Yale Program in Economic History: www.econ.yale.edu/~egcenter/EHindex.htm