This modest book examines the world of petty entrepreneurs in a late medieval Italian town. It is based on a rare collection of 46 account books from small tradesmen in the archives of Prato, a town better known for the extraordinarily rich archive of business and personal records left by the wealthy merchant Francesco Datini. The author was guided in his study by Richard Goldthwaite, a leading expert on late medieval account books. The ledgers provide a look at a little-studied social and economic group. They are especially revealing because they were used not only for business entries but also to record family events, including births, deaths, and marriages. As Marco Spallanzani points out in a preface to the book, most scholarship on medieval tradesmen centers on guilds and guild members. The people represented in these ledgers operated outside of economic corporations. They were not a homogeneous group but included a thirteenth-century moneylender, fourteenth-century druggists, cheese sellers, cloth sellers, a tailor, a doublet maker, a grain seller, a secondhand dealer, a broker, a cloth shearer, butchers, wallers, paper makers, and a family of innkeepers who were responsible for seventeen account books. As Marshall notes, the business atmosphere was casual, and this list is a bit deceptive because people's stated occupations were not always how they made their money. One man named as a second-hand dealer in fact used a broker to trade commodities, including 318 pounds of Sardinian cheese, bought one day and sold at a profit the next.

The development of real income series that are comparable both over time and across countries significantly expanded the possibilities for research in quantitative economic history and long-run economic growth.This dissertation was completed in 2000 in the Department of Economics at the University of Miami (FL) under the supervision of Professor John Devereux. Professor Luis Locay also contributed significantly to this work's progress. This dissertation re-examines the long-run GDP estimates that span over 100 years (henceforth, long-span GDP estimates). While these estimates are used extensively in the literature, their reliability has received limited attention.For example, this data are central to the large body of work on catch-up and convergence. The seminal papers in this area are Abramovitz, “Catching Up”; and Baumol, “Productivity Growth.” Elsewhere in the growth literature they have been used to test competing growth theories in papers such as Kocherlakota and Yi, “Is There Endogenous Long Run Growth.” My findings are first, that there are persistent discrepancies between the long-span GDP estimates and alternative benchmark estimates of comparative GDP. Second, the long-span GDP estimates may result in the mismeasurement of economic performance for individual countries and the forces of catch-up and convergence across countries.

Books on disasters will never go out of fashion, and overarching syntheses of the really major catastrophes of human history are a publisher's dream. John Aberth offers his own rather idiosyncratic synthesis of what is generally termed the “crisis” of the later Middle Ages. This was a period that included a major famine (1315–1322) and other significant, though somewhat more localized, shortages. There were seemingly interminable wars, the Hundred Years War being the most famous, in which the long intervals of truce, with unpaid troops harrying the land, were worse than the formal campaigns. And there was plague: first the Black Death of 1347–1351, and then revisitations of pestilence (plague, presumably, but other devastating diseases as well) in nearly every generation for the next three hundred years.

This book is a study of all aspects of private finance from ca. 300 BC to 300 AD. It is intended for students and more advanced readers; among the latter, economic historians of medieval and early modern Europe are included. In other words: Jean Andreau is an adept of the comparative study of the various phases of preindustrial European history, beginning with that of the Roman Empire. The focus of the book is on the late Republic and the first three centuries of the Roman Empire. Andreau discerns a three-tier structure in the Roman financial world. The top tier consisted of the imperial elite of senators and knights, who made loans either directly or through intermediaries. These loans financed a variety of operations: conspicuous consumption, tax obligations of provincial cities, and, to a lesser extent, also “some production and trade” (pp. 28, 148). These elite financiers did not call themselves bankers. They were basically wealthy landowners, not entrepreneurs, who cherished a “strategy of security, not of profit” (p. 24). This mentality “imposed limits on the Roman economy” (p. 28). This elite thought in terms of networks, not of commercial companies; and this complex is supposed to explain the absence of a bill of exchange (p. 26). One may wonder whether the behavior and mentality of a small group of Roman senators were representative of the economic strategies of all urban elites in the Empire.

What drove the entrepreneurs of early modern Europe? Short-run profit maximization, long-run business continuity, or aspirations of upward social mobility? Such questions increasingly attract the attention of a younger generation of economic historians focusing on the period before the Industrial Revolution. Leos Müller's study, which was defended as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, is a highly interesting specimen of this new trend in economic–historical research. One suspects that it was intended as a sequel to Kurt Samuelsson's De stora köpmanshusen i Stockholm 1730–1815 (Stockholm: Esselte, 1951), which considered the community of Stockholm merchants but lacked an analytical framework. The book now under review, by contrast, is exemplary in applying an explicit theoretical framework, relying on original primary materials, and stressing themes above individuals or events. This all makes for a systematic connection between empirical findings and theory. At the same time, however, it also provides illustrations of the bottlenecks and difficulties that the enterprising economic historian may come across.

To the vast and burgeoning literature on the rise, fall, and consequences of European empire-building, David Loades, a distinguished historian of Tudor England, adds this brief and stimulating book on the origins and course of the country's overseas expansion in the two centuries after 1490. He is not concerned with models or with the analysis of global balances of power. Taking a more modest perspective, he argues that between 1490 and 1690 England changed from being the decayed remnant of a once-formidable expansionist power on the Continent to a nascent oceanic and imperial state. By the mid-1500s, he claims, the foundations of the country's subsequent maritime and colonial achievements were already in place. He identifies the vital elements as the creation of a standing specialist fighting navy; the development, from the mid-sixteenth century, of an interest in long-distance voyages and trading ventures, sustained under Elizabeth I by an “enterprise partnership” between the queen and some of her subjects; and the emergence, in the years of the Commonwealth and the Cromwellian Republic, of the navy as an instrument of state rather than dynastic ambition. However, as the argument unfolds he admits the importance of other factors, not least the pursuit of profit and the desire of some of England's populace to escape from religious or political regimes they found intolerable.

This volume was written in commemoration of West Germany's postwar currency reform and its product, the Deutschmark. In June 1948 the U.S. Army distributed a new currency in the Western occupation zones of Germany. These banknotes, which had been printed in the United States, carried no signatures and made no mention of an issuing authority. But they did carry the name Deutsche Mark. Seldom has a military initiative created such a successful brand name, but that is not the theme of this book. Its purpose, rather, is to burnish the Bundesbank's once-formidable reputation as an inflation fighter. As the European Central Bank is taking a decidedly different course, the magic of the Bundesbank is vanishing at an amazing speed. The Bundesbank has been downgraded to a mere member bank, has suffered severe budget cuts, and has had to lay off half its personnel. Meanwhile, those who remain regard the new system with apparent bewilderment and sometimes outright fury.

The United State has experienced tremendous improvements in its standard of living over the past hundred years, as have most nations in the developed world.This dissertation was completed at Ohio State University under the supervision of Richard Steckel. We now accept as necessities many things that our grandparents would have considered to be luxuries; we also enjoy countless goods, devices, and services completely unknown a century ago. Far fewer workers are required to produce the necessities of life that we now consume, and therefore an increasing number of us have time to devote to leisure activities, such as entertainment and recreation.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, French historians composed some of the greatest rural history—indeed, the greatest history—ever written. Scholars such as Marc Bloch, Pierre Goubert, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie produced extraordinary works of social history, which pioneered in borrowing techniques from other fields such as geography, demography, and anthropology. Many of their best books—such as Ladurie's Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974)—were local or regional studies; and although they were by and large uninformed by neoclassical economics, they created a consensus about the rural economy of Old Regime France. According to that consensus, French agriculture stagnated because rising population levels fragmented landholdings, and because the peasants' attitudes and village institutions blocked economic growth. The consensus endured for a number of years, but it has now begun to collapse under the weight of exciting new research conducted on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of this research is cliometric; some is innovative social history. Nearly all of it is fascinating, but it is proliferating at such a rate that it is hard to keep track of, even for the specialist. It is even harder to see whether a new consensus is beginning to form.

The process of industrial change energized generations of historians to explain the transformations that reformed the modern world. Over much of the twentieth century, historians of Marxist and liberal persuasions staged mighty contests to define most persuasively the effects of factory production, work discipline, class, and capital formation. The sometimes triumphalist chronicle of factory reform, capital accumulation, and trade-union growth were painted across the nineteenth century; more detailed studies of communities, corporations, and institutions had to fit in as best they could. Until the 1970s, as graduate students signed up for one or the other of these interpretative camps, few authors, liberal or Marxist, considered the experience of women. Adding women's history and gender analysis to the study of industrialization has brought about one of the most significant transformations of this chronicle. Katrina Honeyman's most recent contribution stands as an essential text for those teaching and working in this field.

Unlike other components of the Renaissance Venetian economy, such as maritime trade, shipbuilding, glassmaking, and the woolen industry, the silk industry has been largely neglected by historians: a somewhat puzzling neglect, for that industry was viewed by contemporaries as a major player in the economy, enjoyed an enviable international reputation, and employed at its peak a highly skilled labor force of several thousands. In this richly textured, exhaustive study covering three centuries and based on a prodigious amount of archival research, Luca Molà has filled a large gap and has thus greatly expanded our knowledge of a multifaceted Renaissance economy.

Social revolutions are a major historical feature of twentieth-century world history. For those countries in which they occurred, they became the axis on which their postrevolutionary histories revolved, acquiring a mythical character.This dissertation was completed at Harvard University under the supervision of John Womack. That these revolutions had created a better and more equitable world, that they had been a step towards progress, that without them, tyranny and injustice would have prevailed, became some sort of a religious faith difficult to question without being accused of heresy.

Although scholars have written many good corporate histories, few of these have been good books. History at its best requires an analytical clarity seldom found in traditional corporate history, where all too often the comprehensive coverage of a company's operations over a long period of time overwhelms the narrative focus. James Bamberg's new volume on the history of British Petroleum (BP) is an exception to the rule. Organized around a common theme, and covering a relatively short and cohesive era in which BP studied played a significant role in world history, it is at once an excellent corporate history and a good book.

This book is an English translation of the abridged edition of Professor Magnusson's grand survey of Swedish economic history. The latter has emerged as the standard introductory text on the subject within Sweden, and this book is likely finally to replace Eli Heckscher's venerable work of the same title (actually a translation of a “popular” work first published in 1957) as the Anglophone's introduction of choice to Swedish economic history. In exchange for later coverage and a more up-to-date approach, however, the reader will have to forego any discussion of the period before 1750. While Magnusson's Swedish text covers earlier centuries, this material was apparently deemed inessential for Anglo-Saxons. Unfortunately, there will also be some loss of reading pleasure. Although certainly competent and understandable, the present translation is excessively mechanical. The book's Swedish origin is apparent, without, however, preserving the smooth flow of Magnusson's prose. Nor is it up to the—admittedly very high—standard established by Goran Ohlin (with the active participation of Alexander Gerschenkron) with his translation of Heckscher.

This book offers a short account of the Great Depression in Europe, aimed at historians without a strong training in economics. The introduction sets out four key questions around which the book is organized: What were the origins of the Depression? Why was it so severe? How was recovery effected, and was it sustainable? and What were the implications of the recovery for political relations in and between nation-states?

My dissertation uses historical records and a context-specific mechanism-design model to investigate the institutional and contractual arrangements that enhanced mobilization of capital and risk-sharing in late-medieval Venice.This disssertation was written at the Department of Economics at the European University Institute under the supervision of Professors Avner Greif and Ramon Marimon with support from the Social Science History Institute at Stanford University. I also wish to thank Andrea Drago, Gavin Wright, Jaime Reis, and Leandro Prados de la Escosura for their help in various ways. The funding of long-distance risky trade in late medieval Venice could potentially promote economic prosperity, but it required that merchants were able to commit ex-ante not to breach their financial contracts ex-post. Institutions for contract enforcement were thus required to mitigate this commitment problem and enable welfare-enhancing financial exchange.Institutions are constraints that enable merchants to commit. For a definition of institutions, see Greif, Historical Institutional Analysis; and North, Institutions. Distinct institutional arrangements enforce different sets of contractual forms, among which particular ones can be chosen. The selection of various contracts, and their underlying institutional foundations, has significant efficiency effects. The dissertation thus integrates a historical institutional analysis of the emergence and transition of various contracts with the study of their efficiency attributes. This approach enables me to address the following questions: What institutions for contract enforcement enabled the Venetians to commit to the sea loan (a debt-like contract) and the commenda (an equity-like contract)? What caused the transition from the former to the latter? Did the Venetians attain an optimal allocation of risk?

Excess, we learned as children in Glasgow, was the defining characteristic of Americans: big country, big cars, food served by the bucket, big talk, Texas, CGE models. Eccentricity identified the English: bird watching, Bovril, train spotting, the Archers, bus spotting, Women's Institute Teas, the standard-of-living debate. This book represents an interesting merger of all that is American with all that is English. With 2,317 pages devoted to English agrarian history between 1850 and 1914, completed 44 years after the series was initiated, and published only after the deaths of two of the principal authors, it screams American-style excess. But the loving care devoted to duck decoys, the Large Black Pig Society, Church of England music, sand dunes, malaria, Cupiss's Constitution Balls, golf courses, agrarian utopianism, ruderal [sic] habitats, the Rational Dress Society, and much, much more betrays an endearing eccentricity that could only be English.

In 1857 Alexander Herzen boasted to Giuseppe Mazzini that Russia's annexation of the Amur river region in the late 1850s signaled “one of civilization's most important steps forward” (p. 2). With a foothold in the Far East, Herzen claimed, Russia appeared poised to capitalize on the Pacific as the “Mediterranean of the future” (p. 144). From the 1840s educated Russians celebrated the Amur river, the essential artery linking Russia through Siberia to its Pacific destiny, as a “Russian Mississippi” and the key to Russia's role as a maritime power and a civilizing force in Asia. By 1865, however, this “Amur euphoria” had abruptly dissipated. Dreams of the rebirth of a prosperous and, by some accounts, “free” Russia on the Siberian Mississippi faded as suddenly as they had appeared.

This dissertation is a study of the Jamaican sugar economy and slave society on the eve of the abolition of the British slave trade.This dissertation was completed in the Department of History at the university of Minnesota (December 1999), under the direction of Professor Russell R. Menard. Published work based on this dissertation can be found in Ryden, “Does Decline” and “‘One of the Fertilest pleasentest Spotts.‘” Its most significant finding focuses on the “Decline Thesis,” as laid out by Eric Williams more than 50 years ago in his classic work, Capitalism and Slavery. Slavery, according to Williams, was doomed to failure because it encouraged planter absenteeism and plantation mismanagement, resulting in the tendency to overproduce. Thus, planters were increasingly saddled with steadily rising input costs while facing falling revenue. Williams explained that the first cracks in the sugar economy appeared with the loss of the North American colonies. From this point on, the British West Indian planters saw a fall in their profits. This late-eighteenth-century decline of the slave mode of production culminated in Parliament abolishing the slave trade in an attempt to cut production levels and thereby revive West Indian fortunes.Williams, Capitalism.

Craig Muldrew has written an imaginatively conceived and richly researched study of the meaning and practice of “credit” in early modern England. “Credit” today is understood almost exclusively in value-neutral terms, and applies principally to functional economic activities. Directed towards individuals, it refers primarily to their financial assets and their capacities to assume interest-bearing debt. This meaning was only entering into use in the later sixteenth century; it became common only in the later seventeenth. “Credit” in the medieval and early modern era referred paradigmatically to a person's moral worth, as this book abundantly demonstrates.