Professor John Munro passed away on December 23, 2013. This site is maintained and kept online as an archive. For more infomation please visit the Centre for Medieval Studies
Prof. John H. Munro
Department of Economics
University of Toronto
These bibliographies are in the long-format only. Please see the general notes about bibliographies for
undergraduate economic history courses. The following topics are on the 'A'-list for 2003 - 2004; and some of them will
be transferred to the 'B'-list for the following year (if the course is given next year), when most of this year's 'B'-list topics will, conversely, become 'A'-list topics. Each
year a different set of 10 topics, 5 topics for each of the two terms, is chosen from the Master List of essay
topics, though with some occasional duplications, of the most important topics. The following topics are numbered in the sequence 1 - 10; but the term 'Topic no.'
following each of these numbers refers to the Topic Number in the Master List of Essay/Tutorial Topics for Eco. 201Y.
You should refer to this Master List for a more detailed discussion of the debates about and thus the significance of each
of these major topics, in European economic history.
See: Eco 201Y Master List of Tutorial Topics
These bibliographies are provided in both PDF format (default) and in MS - Word. To retrieve them, click on
the blue-highlighted topic number for the PDF version, and on the
highlighted words 'Also in MS Word', for that version; but do so only in the html version of this document
(since the pdf version will not give you that access).
In this long-format, the topic bibliographies are as complete as possible, with the readings listed chronologically
in order of publication, grouped by subtopics; and each contains a long list of questions to be considered in
reading these materials and in writing your essays. Most of these bibliographies also contain statistical tables,
which are best read in the pdf format, since MS Word does not always translate Word Perfect tables propertly. FIRST TERM 'A'-LIST TOPICS: Fall Term, September to December 2003: (1) Topic no. 1: The Great Famine, the Black Death, and the Late-Medieval Demographic
Crises: Demography and Conjuncture in 14th- and 15th-Century Europe. Also in available in MS Word.
(2) Topic no. 2: The Problem of Serfdom in European Economic Development,
I: The Decline of Serfdom in Western Europe, ca. 1300 - ca. 1500. Also available in
MS Word
(3) Topic no. 5: The 'Great Depression' of the Late Middle Ages: Economic
Slump or Economic Growth? . Also available in MS Word.
(4) Topic no. 9: Urban Governments, Guilds, and Gender-Related Occupations
in Late-Medieval European Towns, 1200 - 1500 . Also available in MS Word .
(5) Topic no. 7: The Church, the Usury Question, and Late-Medieval Banking: the
Foundations of Modern Finance. Also available in MS Word.
SECOND TERM, WINTER 2004, 'A' LIST TOPICS: January to April 2004
http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/
(6) Topic no. 13: The Population Problem and the Economic Development of Early-Modern
Europe (1500 - 1640): Was there a 'Malthusian Trap'? Also in available in MS Word.
(7)Topic no. 14: The Era of the European 'Price Revolution', ca. 1540-1640:
Inflation and Economic Growth. Also available in MS Word
(8) Topic no. 17: The 'Rise of the Gentry' Debate: On the Origins of Modern
Agrarian Capitalism Also available in MS Word
(9) Topic no. 15: The 'Rise of Capitalism' and the Protestant Reformations:
The Weber-Tawney Theses on the 'Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'.16th - 18th Centuries.
Also available in MS Word.
(10) Topic no. 20: The 'General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, c.1620 - 1740: The Hobsbawm Thesis on the Transition from 'Feudalism to Capitalism'. Also available in MS Word.