Introduction As is well known, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were not just unusually lengthy and bloody, but involved widespread economic warfare as well. As early as 1793, when war broke out between Britain and France, France banned the...

In his seminal publications between the 1930s and 1960s, Frederick Lane offered three hypotheses regarding the impact of the Voyages of Discovery that have guided debate ever since. First, pepper and other spice prices did not rise in European markets in the century before the 1490s, and thus...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth...

This paper uses international survey data to document two stylized facts. First, risk aversion is associated with anti-trade attitudes. Second, this effect is smaller in countries with greater levels of government expenditure. The paper thus provides evidence for the microeconomic underpinnings...

The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...

This book provides the first systematic, integrated, analytical account of the evolution of the international economy during the last millennium. It emphasizes the two-way interaction between trade and geopolitics, and the importance of such interactions for world economic development