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
Professor John H. Munro
Department of Economics
University of Toronto
150 St. George Street: Room N - 108
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G7
CANADA
Updated: 23 August 2013
EUROPEAN ECONOMIC HISTORY COURSES OFFERED IN 2013 - 2014
UNDERGRADUATE LECTURE COURSES ONLY
Course Offerings in 2013 - 2014:
- In the current academic year, 2013 - 2014, I am again offering only one course: ECO 301Y: The Economic History of Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 1250 - 1750 .
In the previous academic year (2012-2013), I taught ECO 303Y: the Economic History of Modern Europe to 1914 . Thus, I am not offering it this year,
but I hope to offer it again the following year (2014-15).
My courses do require some basic understanding of both micro- and macro-economic theory; and a knowledge of not
just statistics but elementary econometrics would also be most helpful. Students will do better in both of my courses if
they have had both second-year micro- and macro-economics, statistics or econometrics, and some courses
or at least some background in European history. Nevertheless, the level of such theoretical and practical knowledge of these theory and
quantitative courses is probably less than that required in other upper-level Economics courses: so do not be dissuaded by these very modest requirements.
All of the courses listed below, undergraduate only, are 'year courses', covering two semesters: commencing in
mid September and finishing in early-April. All such courses are indicated by the suffix Y or Y1.
To gain access to the web pages for the following courses, click on the underlined and highlighted
ECO course no. designation.
- Economics 301Y1: The Economic History of Late-Medieval and
Early Modern Europe, 1250 - 1750. Offered this academic year, 2013 - 2014
- Economics 303Y1: The Economic History of Modern Europe,
to 1914 (World War I): Not offered in 2013 - 2014.
Economic History Lectures:
- Wednesdays: from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M.;but to 5:30 p.m. four times each semester: classroom to be announced
- Most, or two-thirds, of the lectures will be for only two-hours: from 3:00 to 5:00 pm. But since the Faculty of Arts has now reduced the number of weeks for
lectures from 13 to 12 -- thus eliminating four lecture hours for the entire (year-long) course, and since I refuse to cut any more subjects from my courses, I have to
make up those four missing hours by lecturing for an extra half hour (to 5:30 pm), four times each semester. Even before this reduction, we in the Faculty of Arts at
the University of Toronto had been lecturing for far fewer hours than is the 'norm' for North American and European universities: i.e., three hours per week, per course.
- All of my undergraduate lectures will be posted, when revised and delivered; and these postings
will be found in the Lecture Schedules at the end of the following sections for ECO 301Y1 and 303Y1, respectively.
The lectures will be posted in both PDF and Word formats. As noted eleswhere, the pdf version
provides the best and clearest text, but not one that you can edit;
and I have so far not found an effective means of including graphs in a file small enough in bytes to be downloaded easily. The MS Word
versions are converted from Word Perfect, but such conversions are not indeed always perfect. Also to be
posted in MS -Word files are the various graphs, maps, drawings, etc. relevant to each lecture. You are
strongly advised to open the Word file first, and thus not to 'save to disk'. Save the file from within Word
itself. The lectures, in these two formats,will be posted not as a set, but as individual lectures, usually on a weekly
basis, after each has been delivered in class (and, if necessary, after further revisions, in the
light of class discussions).
- The Lecture Notes for Eco 301Y1: Schedule of lectures for 2013 - 2014.
The lectures themselves can be accessed and downloaded only from the html document.
- Power-Point Summaries of the lectures in ECO 301Y: in both Power Point and PDF formats, week by week.
- The Lecture Notes for Eco 303Y1: Schedule of Postings for 2012 - 2013 [html]. These lectures will remain online until at least 31 August 2014.
- website for summaries of the ECO 303Y Lectures: an html web document for the ECO 303Y lecture summaries: containing a PDf file for the entire set of lectures, and also individual
PDF files for the weekly, individual lectures,
as delivered from mid-September 2012.
GRADUATE SEMINAR: on medieval European economic history
Not offered; and it probably it will never
be offered again, after my 'mandatory retirement' in 2003. [The Economics Department was no longer willing to pay a stipend for a graduate course
for students who came chiefly from the Centre for Medieval Studies and the History Department] Nevertheless, I shall retain the bibliographies
and other course materials on this website (though I do not promise to update them.
Economics 2210Y: Topics in the Economic and Social History of Later Medieval
and Renaissance Europe :
See the course syllabus , or
the course outline itself,
for further information on this seminar.
MY POST-RETIREMENT TEACHING CAREER
- Although I was required to retire on 1 July 2003 (having reached the age of 65),
I agreed to continue teaching my two undergraduate courses in European economic history.
If I had not agreed to do so, no European economic history before 1914 would be offered, at all,
in this university. After many years of failing to attract and hire a new economic historian, our department succeeded in doing so for the 2011-2012 academic year: but her field is 19th
and 20th century American economic history (an obviously important field and lacuna to be filled.) So hiring another European economic historian is most unlikely.
To be sure, some courses in social history are being offered by other departments;
but social history is not economic history. So you have what is called a Hobson's Choice: either me or nobody, for
European economic history. At least I can say that I live and breathe the field, and really enjoy both teaching and research: they identify who I am (and I could not exit without them).
- For the first five years of my so-called 'retirement', I taught a full course load: two-full year courses (= four semester courses), in European
economic history: ECO 301Y and ECO 303Y. But in 2008-09, I decided to reduce my teaching schedule to one-full year course: and to alternate
these two courses. The reason was not any diminution in my joy in teaching, but rather one of opportunity cost. Having passed the age of 70, I realized that
the number of productive years left to me to achieve at least some of goals were likely to be few; and I had found that teaching two full-years courses occupied
me for at least three days a week, during term (plus various weeks in preparing my course for each term, in grading, etc.).
- When this course (ECO 301Y) is completed, in early April 2014, I will have completed 50 years -- a full half-century -- as a university professor (beginning in Sept. 1964, at the University of B.C.
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