Homework answers / question archive / Q1: One way to understand Partha Dasgupta’s argument is that he believes Desta and her family are poor because rural Ethiopia does not provide the background infrastructure of trust needed for a sophisticated and finely-divided division of labor

Q1: One way to understand Partha Dasgupta’s argument is that he believes Desta and her family are poor because rural Ethiopia does not provide the background infrastructure of trust needed for a sophisticated and finely-divided division of labor

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Q1: One way to understand Partha Dasgupta’s argument is that he believes Desta and her family are poor because rural Ethiopia does not provide the background infrastructure of trust needed for a sophisticated and finely-divided division of labor. But even so, Desta and her family have access to vastly more productive technologies then did their predecessors of three centuries ago. Why does not that compensate to a great degree, and allow them to be much richer than their three centuries-ago predecessors? (Reading Attached)

Q2: What is the strongest argument you can think of against the professor's claim that the most appropriate history of the long 20th century is primarily an economic history?

Q3: Do you think it would have been possible to have had the industrial research labs and corporations of 1870 to 1914 without globalization? Or were the two sets of factors too closely linked for a non-globalized yet technologically-progressive 1870-1914 to have been a serious possibility?

Q4: Suppose you were carried back in time to 1853 with some not very credible plot device, and a ruler back then—a ruler of Japan, or Korea, or Thailand, or Iran, or Egypt, or Ethiopia—has asked you whether he should accept the advice of Westerners that his country should focus on exporting primary products, buying manufacturers from Europe, and embracing globalization as much as possible. What do you think would have been the wisest thing for you to tell him?

Q5: Supposedly 1000s of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had missed their aim in 1914. What do you think would have most likely been the two greatest differences between the world that would then have followed and the world that actually was?