Europe in the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth century was engulfed in a wave of Sinophilia. However, by the eighteenth century a dramatic shift in the popular view of China in Europe occurred and Sinophobic writings began to dominate. The primary scholarly argument about the causes behind...

What is the origin and essence of fashion? This question has engaged scholars of various disciplines over the past decades, most of whom approach this subject with a Western or European focus. This paper argues instead that Asia was also pivotal in the articulation of the fashion system in...

In early modern north-western Europe, real wages declined while GDP per capita was on the increase. In contrast, wage growth in Tokugawa Japan went hand in hand with output growth. Based on this finding, the paper revisits Thomas Smith’s thesis on ‘Pre-modern Economic Growth: Japan and the...

This present paper focuses on the diffusion of wu-wei (an ancient Chinese concept of political economy) throughout Europe, between 1648 and 1848. It argues that at the core of this diffusion process were three major developments; firstly the importation and active transmission of wu-wei by the...

This paper re-examines the economics of premodern apprenticeship in England. I present new data showing that a high proportion of apprenticeships in seventeenth century London ended before the term of service was finished. I then propose a new account of how training costs and repayments were...

In the 1900s, the European film industry exported throughout the world, at times supplying half the US market. By 1920, however, European films had virtually disappeared from America, and had become marginal in Europe. Theory on sunk costs and market structure suggests that an escalation of sunk...

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...