Programme details
The programme will develop the historical curiosity of students interested in economic and social history topics, providing a critical understanding of those periods of historical flux in which economic and social change take place.
It will enable students to relate specific local and regional interests to a world wide literature and will stimulate student interest through its mode of delivery.
The programme provides a wide-ranging academic experience, and aims:
- Provide students with the intellectual background, training and support necessary for the conduct and critical assessment of historical research in a social science context.
- Provide advanced knowledge of and competency in a specific field of economic and social history.
- Enable students to work in a manner which is theoretically engaged and informed by a wide variety of social scientific concepts and methodologies.
- Equip students with a familiarity with historiography and modes of historical explanation.
- Ensure training in the skills and research design and strategy required to achieve the focus, precision and time management required by modern research conditions.
- Develop and test the ability to formulate and sustain a substantive piece of research in economic and social history.
Structure
Street scene in Sao Paolo, Brazil; staff research interests cover such areas as human interactions in an international setting
The programme consists of four compulsory courses, each worth 20 credits, and a final dissertation worth 60 credits. Each course is assessed by essays (usually 2500 words). The online courses have two shorter assignments which are a mixture of report, critique, and essay formats.
Core courses: semester one
Historical Research: Skills and Sources
This provides a very clearly structured range of skills that you will find useful in all our MSc courses.
Economic and Social Theory for Historical Analysis
This course surveys a variety of frameworks and concepts used by historians and applies them to particular topics in economic and social history, giving you an illustration of how you might use and adapt concepts and theories in your own essays and dissertation.
Core courses: semester two
In the second semester there are three core elements; the two optional courses cover useful areas of economics and basic statistics.
Historical Methodology
A wide-ranging series of seminars that develop a meaningful familiarity with the interpretive strategies and secondary materials that define major approaches in current historical scholarship. Weekly online discussion of the assigned readings in advance of each seminar meeting, moderated by the course organiser, supports class cohesion.
Supervised Reading Course
A customised reading course to develop in detail the background context for your dissertation. You will work on a one-to-one basis with your supervisor who will help you flesh out the bibliographical and historiographical context of your topic.
Courses that may be available
| Course | Core / optional | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Historical Research: Skills and Sources | Core | 20 |
| Economic and Social Theory for Historical Analysis | Core | 20 |
| Historical Methodology | Core | 20 |
| Supervised Reading Course (E&SH) | Core | 20 |
| Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain | Optional | 20 |
| Slavery in the Atlantic World | Optional | 20 |
| Material Culture of Gender in 18th C Britain | Optional | 20 |
| Cinema and Society in Britain | Optional | 20 |
| Clothing and Culture in Comparative Historical Contexts | Optional | 20 |
| Introduction: Why study Landscapes and Environments? (online) | Optional | 20 |
| Reinventing the Urban (online) | Optional | 20 |
| The Built Heritage and the Landscape of Conservation (online) | Optional | 20 |
| Cinema and Society in South Asia, 1947-present | Optional | 20 |
Dissertation
The preparation for this begins formally in the second semester. It is closely linked to the supervised reading course and involves primary research materials, incorporating some of the contexts and concepts you have acquired in your other courses. The dissertation continues through the summer and is 12,500 words long.
Possible dissertation topics
The wide range local, regional, national and international interests and time periods allow the economic and social historians at the University of Edinburgh to supervise an extraordinary range of topics. You can consult the staff profiles and look at the topics supervised and theses completed by the staff members to get an idea of the potential scope for dissertation topics.
Transferable skills
A range of transferable skills include the ability to:
- Analyse, deploy, and focus a range of secondary literature in order to address specific questions.
- Formulate hypotheses and to test them by marshalling a range of primary and secondary evidence.
- Identify appropriate social scientific theories and methodologies for sustaining such hypotheses.
- Identify and critique a range of historical sources and to apply valid and reliable methods of inference from them.
This article was published on Jul 6, 2012