The name of Margaret Garritsen de Vries may not be the first that pops into people’s mind when thinking about the International Monetary Fund. It is through her work, as long-standing official Fund Historian, that those interested in the Fund history will travel through. An operational...

MIT emerged from "nowhere" in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred. In this paper the author argues that the immediate postwar period saw a...

This article offers a historical analysis of the contributions of U.S. interwar agricultural economics to the economics of information. Concerned with improving the circulation of information on agricultural markets, agricultural economists analyzed the relationship between agents’ information...

Besides their ideas and social networks, émigré intellectuals bring with themselves practices for engagement with intellectual work. This article focuses on one such practice: the intellectual Kreis [circle]. It focuses on the Geistkreis, an interwar Viennese interdisciplinary intellectual...

Can colonialism affect today's urban outcomes? This paper examines the long-run impact of Concessions - foreign-run enclaves established in the late nineteenth century inside Chinese cities by European settlers for residence and investment purposes. They soon became the new economic hubs of...

The explicit concepts of a central bank and monetary policy were not fully articulated until the 20th century, although, with some degree of circumspection, they can be used retrospectively in regard to earlier times. The oldest central banks were hardly central banks in the modern sense at...