Course Handbook - Faculty of History - University of Cambridge

technological and financial innovations as focal points of asset-price bubbles. By bringing
new capital into markets, asset-price bubbles serve first to foster and then, by their collapse,
to resolve what economists describe as the ‘lemons problem.’ Those who cannot tell good
wine from bad will overpay for the latter but reject the former as commanding too high a
price. Yet this is also how untested ideas attract financing. In Weeks 4, 5 and 6, students will
learn about the development of international capital markets and their role in financing both
state and private ventures. Students will decide for themselves what both behavioral finance
and closely historicized studies of market microstructure can offer historians of financial
capitalism. Students will learn why modern financial and economic historians consider
interpretations of asset-price bubbles pivotal to theoretical debates about rational and
efficient markets. In the second half of the course, we will apply these models to three
nineteenth and twentieth-century financial bubbles. Students will then develop their own
research projects in which they interrogate the market realities behind a financial bubble of
their choosing.
General Reading
• Eichengreen, Barry. Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary
System (Princeton University Press, 2008).
• Kindleberger, Charles. Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crisis.
(John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
• Michie, Ranald. The Global Securities Market (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• Vogel, Harold. Financial Market Bubbles and Crashes (Cambridge University Press,
2009).
6) Language and society (a course taught by the MPhil in Early Modern History)
Dr P Withington
This course invites students to think about what words meant in early-modern Europe – not
merely to social and intellectual elites (though they are certainly part of the mix) but also
ordinary men and women. In so doing it encourages reflection about the implications of
these meanings – and their changes and continuities over time – for social attitudes,
relationships, and practices. These aims reflect not only the impact of the infamous
‘linguistic turn’ on early modern studies, but also that some of the most interesting recent
work on language and meaning has been done at the intersection between literary,
intellectual, and social history. To this end students will discuss the way historians have
approached language and discourse over the past forty years and consider the cultural
movements that transformed European vernaculars from the later fifteenth century. They
will be introduced to the kinds of evidence available to historians and the possibilities of
interpretation. They will also think about particular words and vocabularies that have
attracted especial historical attention. In the final week they will research a word of their
own choice. The focus will be on English, though there will be opportunities for students to
consider words in other vernaculars if they so wish. There will be a moderate amount of
preparation for each class, and students will be expected to give a short presentation over the
course of the term. Assessment will be by an essay on one aspect of the course (title agreed
with the tutor) and by evidence of satisfactory participation.
Classes are likely to cover:
• Approaches to language and society
• Humanism and vernacularization
• Sources and interpretation
• Economic vocabularies
• Political language
• Language and social identity
• Personal research
Some Suggestions for Introductory Reading
Robert M. Burns, ed., Historiography. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies (New York,
2005), Part One.
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