With the life story of Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931), one of the most important financiers and industrialists in modern Japanese history, as its narrative focal point, this book explores the challenges of importing modern business enterprises to Japan, where the pursuit of profit was considered...

This book is devoted to analyzing contemporary capitalism both in Japan and in the world economy by using the theoretical framework of the French régulation theory and by revisiting the theory of civil society in postwar Japan. The Japanese theory of civil society proposed unique thinking about...

This book surveys Poland’s move from being a post-feudal, backward, peripheral country to being a modern, capitalist, European state: from the partition of the commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania to the abolishment of ‘second serfdom’; late industrialization to state socialism;...

Without economic history, economics runs the risk of being too abstract or parochial, of failing to notice precedents, trends and cycles, of overlooking the long-run and thus misunderstanding ‘how we got here’. Recent financial and economic crises illustrate spectacularly how the economics...

This text offers an accessible guide to the ways in which our growing knowledge of development in early-modern and modernising Japan can throw light on the paths that industrialisation was eventually to take across the globe. It has long been taken as read that the industrial revolution was the...

This book - the first of two volumes- looks at episodes in American economic history from a public choice perspective. Each chapter discusses citizens, special interests, and government officials responding to economic incentives in both markets and politics. In doing so, the book provides fresh...

This book provides a unique and refreshing look at the Korean economy over the past 60 years. While most books and articles on the Korean economy would be technical or specifically address some aspect of Korea, this text takes a overarching view of Korea’s economic development. It assesses...

This book provides an economic analysis of the earliest Islamic society, focusing on the policies of the Messenger of Islam (Sawa) and his successors during the first four formative decades of Islam. Two institutions of great importance - the market and the public treasury (Baitul Mal) - and...

This book challenges the notion that economic crises are modern phenomena through its exploration of the tumultuous ‘credit-crunch’ of the later Middle Ages. It illustrates clearly how influences such as the Black Death, inter-European warfare, climate change and a bullion famine occasioned...

German economic history in the industrial age has classically formed an important basis for the study of economic growth and industrialisation more generally. This book aims to introduce English-language readers to modern German economic history based on a selection of work by one of Germany's...