This book offers a comprehensive overview of the pre-modern economic history of Central Asia and the Silk Road, covering several millennia. By analyzing an abundance of sources and materials, it illustrates the repeated economic heydays of the Silk Road, during which it linked the Orient and...

Drawing on an array of archival evidence from court records to the poems of Chaucer, this work explores how medieval thinkers understood economic activity, how their ideas were transmitted and the extent to which they were accepted. Moving beyond the impersonal operations of an economy to its...

This book describes and evaluates how institutional innovation and technological innovation have impacted on humanity from pre-historical times to modern times, and how societies have been transformed in history. The author interrogates the relationship between innovation and civilisation --...

1. Introduction: mortgages and annuities in historical perspective -- 2. Mortgages and the English peasantry c.1250-c.1350 -- 3. Mortgages raised by rural English copyhold tenants 1605-1735 -- 4. Mortgages and the Kentish yeoman in the seventeenth century -- 5. Why the equity of redemption? 6....