Since trade was not an engine, neither was a part of trade, such as the trade in slaves. And certainly the profits from the trade did not finance the Industrial Revolution. Imperialism, too, was a mere part of trade, and despite the well-deserved guilt that Europeans feel in having perpetrated...

Britain was first, though the classical (and many of the neoclassical) economists did not recognize that its course was beginning the factor of 16. The slow British growth in the 18th century proposed by Crafts and Harley is unbelievable, but however one assigns growth within the period...

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

An extreme materialist hypothesis explaining the Industrial Revolution would be simply genetic. Gregory Clark asserts such a theory of sociobiological inheritance in his Farewell to Alms (2007). Rich people proliferated in England, Clark argues, and by a social Darwinian struggle the poor and...

Thrift was not the cause of the Industrial Revolution or its astonishing follow on. For one thing, every human society must practice thrift, and pre-industrial Europe, with its low yield-seed ratios, did so on a big scale. British thrift during the Industrial Revolution, for another, was rather...

Corrects some of the statistical mistakes of previous studies of the trend in the height of British soldiers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Finds that heights decreased substantially in the late-18th century in keeping with many other findings. The inference is that an incipient Malthusian...

The difficulties to obtain regular and trustworthy data series, which describe the set of demographic characteristics we could consider standard (number of existing persons, births and deaths, distributed by age, sex and social condition, within a certain geographic area) are notorious. Lacking...

This article assesses the US discussion on the material roots of racism in which writers such as Malcolm X have been heavily criticised by ‘marxists’ for substituting race for class in the analysis of society. The article argues that such criticism departs from the classical Marxist...

The ``land abundance'' view of African history uses sparse population to explain economic institutions. I provide supporting evidence from the Egba of Nigeria. I use early colonial court records to show that Egba institutions fit the theory's predictions. Before 1914, the Egba had poorly defined...