The new institutional economics offers a bold and simple argument for how states promoted commercial expansion in early modern Europe. Focused on the importance of secure property rights for reducing transaction costs, commerce expands much as an engine burns fuel more efficiently and creates...

This paper is challenging mainstream views about the contemporary Chinese system as a developmental state and a variety of capitalism. Based on a comparative analytical model (Csanádi, 1997, 2006) I will demonstrate that in China the general features of a communist system prevail to date, and...

The aim of this paper is to show the relationship between the nominations for seats in the Cabildo of Buenos Aires between 1776 and 1810, and the network status of council individuals and families. We test hypothesis on the importance of networks metrics of elite individuals and families with...

Since the dawn of their prolific collaboration in 1998, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson have confronted a plethora of cardinal questions in social sciences: Which institutions support long-term growth (Acemoglu et al., 2005)? What economic conditions facilitate the consolidation of...

This article explores how Bolshevik/Soviet authorities took on and adapted the Russian imperial topography of power i.e. the system of special structures that intended to convey state ideology (monuments to tsars and statesmen, emperors' residences with their various ceremonial spaces,...

Election time is around the corner once again for Brazil. In early October, the country will go to the polls to elect its new President. This time, like in 2006 when Lula was reelected, the elections are not expected to cause the major financial disruptions as seen in 2002 for example. The major...

In Debt as Power, Di Muzio and Robbins present a historical account of the modern origins of capitalist debt by looking at how commercial money is produced as debt in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They expertly demonstrate their key contention - that debt is a technology...

Im Europäischen Jahr der Kreativität und Innovation legt Arbeit 2.0 zum ersten Mal eine umfassende Darstellung der Arbeitsproblematik in der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft im Digitalzeitalter vor. Den Kern der Untersuchung bilden die Portraits von fünf Schlüsselbranchen: die drei Branchen mit...