WILLIAM R. SUMMERHILL

PROFESSOR & VICE CHAIR FOR ACADEMIC PERSONNEL

PhD, Stanford University, 1995

Homepage

Phone: 310-206-7600
Fax: 310-206-9630
E-mail: wrs@history.ucla.edu

Mailing Address:

Class Websites

Field

Brazil/Latin America; Economic History

Research Interests

William Summerhill has taught at UCLA since 1994. His research focuses on the determinants of long-run political and economic change in Latin America, with particular emphasis on Brazil.

His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has held visiting appointments in the Departamento de Economia of the Universidade de São Paulo, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a member of the steering committee of the UCLA Center for Economic History. In partnership with economists and historians from eight Brazilian universities he is a founding member of the Instituições e História Econômica Brasileira working group of the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq). Over the last few years he has presented his findings at invited talks at the Universidade de São Paulo, the Escola de Pós-Graduação em Economia of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, the Instituto de Estudos de Política Econômica/Casa das Garças, the Instituto de Economia of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada of the Brazilian Planning Ministry, the Escola Superior de Agricultura, the Instituto Brasileiro dos Mercados de Capitais; the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, and the Universidade Federal de Pelotas.

He is presently at work on a book-length study re-examining the broad economic consequences of colonialism, dependency, and slavery, provisionally titled “The Origins of Economic Backwardness in Brazil, 1750-1900.” He is also engaged in projects on the economic impact of railroads in Argentina, and the politics of sovereign debt in nineteenth-century Chile.

Notes

Interview in Valor Econômico, 19 September 2008, with comments on the history of regulation in Brazil, the role of the state, and the politics and economics of newly discovered oil reserves ("camada pré-sal"): "Lições da história econômica"

Coverage of Summerhill's work on the history of sovereign debt in Brazil, by the research foundation of the state of São Paulo: "Quem não deve não tem crédito"

Recent Conferences:

"Latin American Economies: Globalization and History," April 24-25, 2009, sponsored by the UCLA Latin America Institute, the Center for Economic History, and CIDE

Inaugural Mini-Conference of the UCLA Center for Economic History, October 21, 2006: "States and Capital Markets in Comparative Historical Perspective"

Selected Publications

Inglorious Revolution: Political Institutions, Sovereign Debt, and Financial Underdevelopment in Imperial Brazil (Yale University Press, forthcoming).

"Fiscal Bargains, Political Institutions, and Economic Performance," Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 88, no. 2 (2008): 219-33.

"Infrastructure," in Victor Bulmer-Thomas, John H. Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortes Conde, The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, Vol. II, The Long Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

"Big Social Savings in a Small Laggard Economy: Railroad-Led Growth in Brazil," Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, no. 1 (2005): 72-102.

"State bank transformation in Brazil – choices and consequences" (with Thorsten Beck and Juan Miguel Crivelli), Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 29, no. 8 (2005): 2223-2257.

Order Against Progress: Government, Foreign Investment, and Railroads in Brazil, 1854-1913 (Stanford University Press, 2003).

“Order, Disorder, and Economic Change: Latin America vs. North America,” (with Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast), in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton Root, eds., Governing for Prosperity (Yale University Press, 2000).

"Market Intervention in a Backward Economy: Railway Subsidy in Brazil, 1854-1913," Economic History Review, Vol. 53, no. 3 (1998): 542-568.

Grants

ACLS-Burkhardt Fellowship in the Humanities (2006-2007)
National Science Foundation (2004-2007)
Fulbright-Hays (2004-2005, 1998-1999, 1993-1994)
National Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (1999-2000)
NEH Faculty Summer Research Fellowship (1997)

Awards

Alexander Gerschenkron Prize, Economic History Association (1995)

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