Department of History

32 Williams Hall

419-372-2030
rseavoy@bgsu.edu

http://personal.bgsu.edu/~rseavoy/

Dr. Ronald Seavoy, Emeritus Professor.  Dr. Seavoy's principal interest is the political economy of economic development.  He focuses on the policies adopted by central governments to maximize the production of new wealth.  The production of new wealth is not accidental.  Seavoy has a special interest in producing assured food surpluses because city workers must be fed during industrialization. Another principal interest is the production of raw materials, particularly metals and fuels, because they are the sinews of industrialization.  Seavoy has worked as an exploration geologist in Canada and Indonesia.  After he retired from BGSU he taught for 7 years in the Department of Business Economics and Public Policy at Indiana University, Bloomington.  He is the author of:  The Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784-1855: Broadening the Concept of Public Service during Industrialization (Greenwood, 1982);  Famine in Peasant Societies (Greenwood, 1986);  Famine in East Africa: Food Production and Food Policies (Greenwood, 1989);  The American Peasantry: Southern Agricultural Labor and its Legacy, 1850-1995 (Greenwood, 1998);  Subsistence and Economic Development (Praeger, 2000);  A New Exploration of the Canadian Arctic (Hancock House, 2002);  Origins and Growth of the Global Economy: From the Fifteenth Century Onward (Praeger, 2003);  An Economic History of the United States: from 1607 to the Present (Routledge, 2006); Extinction: The Future of Humanity (Hancock House, 2010).