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...

Argues that the Industrial Revolution occurred at a time when the demographic system ceased to be Malthusian.

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...

Proposes an economic-growth model that adheres to the salient features of the European economies during the millennium prior to the Industrial Revolution and shows how the Industrial Revolution, generated by the model, can be conceptualized as an escape from the Malthusian trap.

This study documents, though it cannot fully explain, the striking shift in the spectrum of colour patterns in woollen textiles, from those of the Black Death era in the mid to late fourteenth century to those of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century, in the southern Low...

The water-mill, though known in the Roman Empire from the second century BCE, did not come to enjoy any widespread use until the 4th or 5th centuries CE, and then chiefly in the West, which was then experiencing not only a rapid decline in the supply of slaves, but also widespread depopulation,...

North, with many other Samuelsonian economists, thinks of “institutions” as budget constraints in a maximization problem. But as Clifford Geertz put it, an institution such as a toll for safe passage is “rather more than a mere payment,” that is, a mere monetary constraint. “It was...

Reviews the evidence on early-industrial height cycles and shows why the economic transition put downward pressure on the nutritional status of the European and American populations.

Proposes an economic-growth model that adheres to the salient features of the European economies during the millennium prior to the Industrial Revolution and shows how the Industrial Revolution, generated by the model, can be conceptualized as an escape from the Malthusian trap.

Proposes an economic-growth model that adheres to the salient features of the European economies during the millennium prior to the Industrial Revolution and shows how the Industrial Revolution, generated by the model, can be conceptualized as an escape from the Malthusian trap.