Anglo-American financial interrelations in the decades before the American Civil War have long been studied to understand better the business cycle phenomena surrounding the demise of the Second Bank of the United States and the victory of the Currency School over the Bank of England in 1844....

This paper is a necessary companion to the one entitled The West European Woollen Industries and their Struggles for International Markets, c.1000 - 1500. No one can properly comprehend that five-century history of international competition for textile markets, without some basic understanding...

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major 'institutional' international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the...

We study the consequences of the introduction of widespread limited liability for corporations, with particular reference to the liability reforms introduced in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. In the view that is most widely accepted, by reducing transactions costs associated with...

In 1795, the French Revolutionary government, in establishing our modern metric system, also established the metric values for the historic European mint weights of the ancien re,gime era. If those mint-weights are undoubtedly valid for the 18th century, can we be certain that all had remained...

Inspired by Gerschenkron's thesis, this paper contends that conditions of institutional 'backwardness' in late-medieval England stimulated legal innovations to provide the foundations for negotiability in international financial instruments. Though late-medieval England was not 'backward' in the...

This paper offers a new intrepretation of United States balance of payments adjustment in the bimetallic period from 1820 to 1860 during which President Jackson vetoed the charter renewal of the Second Bank of the United States--an event destined to spark controversy over the macroeconomic...

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-century era of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the Price Revolution'; and in particular it provides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the...

Although this paper is, ostensibly, a macro- and micro-economic historical study of competition in the West European woollen textile ind ustries, in France, the Low Countries, England, Italy, and Iberia (Catalonia and Aragon), and of their related wool and cloth trades, covering all of Europe...

The basic thesis is that the modern 'financial revolution', usually dated to eighteenth century England, but far more properly to the sixteenth-century Netherlands, in terms of those institutions for both government finance (borrowing) and international finance (bills of exchange), owed its...