The nature of the seventeenth-century Mughal state and its land revenue taxation system has become a matter of controversy in recent years. Irfan Habib and his followers dominated thinking on this subject from the sixties onwards. They saw the regime as highly centralized and essentially...

La Rochelle, the fourth largest slaving port in France in the eighteenth-century, is used as a case study in the application of agency theory to long-distance trade. This analysis explores an area not accounted for in the literature on French commercial practices. Being broadly couched in a New...

This paper examines the economic organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries on those routes that moved slaves from Sudanic Africa via entrepôts in the Sahel and Sahara to the Maghrib. The commercial framework of this trade was integrated...

Under the international economic order which prevailed between the end of mercantilism and decolonisation (referred to in this essay as liberal imperialism) the costs of transacting, transporting and trading commodities, both within and across national and imperial frontiers declined sharply.1...

One of the many miracles of Victorian Britain’s market economy was that it worked most efficiently when it was left to regulate itself – or at least, this is what the great majority of Victorians believed. The prevailing economic orthodoxy throughout the nineteenth century assumed, following...

The findings set out in this Report challenge the perception of low population support for rights overall - and the view that the public think rights are a “charter” for criminals and terrorists. They support the reasoning of the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) that economic and...

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework forincentive-compatible regulation that would enable regulatorsto ensure that riskier banks maintain higher capitalholdings.Under the precommitment approach, a bankannounces the appropriate level of capital that covers themaximum value of...

[...]This paper presents an overview of the new capitalrequirements. In the first section, we describe the structureof the requirements and the considerations that went intotheir design. In addition, we address some of the concernsthat have been raised about the methods of calculating...

[...]We conclude that technological change, combinedwith overall growth in the capital stock, is the most importantfactor driving the growing wage inequality betweenlow-skilled and high-skilled workers. Increased competitionfrom abroad, both from developing and industrializedcountries, appears...