In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge oneelement has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of aGross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity.This paper suggests approaching the history of developmentthinking by travelling with the GDP through this...

The facts of social sciences are ones that stem from scientificexpertise, but in the social world, everyone is their own expert.Everyone lives in society, and experiences either first-hand, orclosely second-hand, the same phenomena that social scientistsinvestigate. Consequently, people are not...

The core question addressed in this paper is: What happens tofacts after their construction? The main contribution is to analysethe different practices of disseminating, circulating and crossfertilizingmodel-produced facts about Haemophilus influenzaetype b and Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterial...

The question of how Italian Renaissance architecture was takenup in other European countries has been the subject of numerousstudies. One interesting example is the building activity in southGermany at the beginning of the 17th century. Major cities like Stuttgartand Augsburg implemented plans...

In everyday scientific practice, facts come in two sizes: smallfacts (data acquired by researchers through experimentation orfield work), and big facts (claims about phenomena for whichdata function as evidence). This paper explores the processesthrough which small and big facts are circulated...

This paper re-examines the economics of premodernapprenticeship in England. I present new data showing that ahigh proportion of apprenticeships in seventeenth centuryLondon ended before the term of service was finished. I thenpropose a new account of how training costs and repaymentswere...

In 1866, the Midland Railway Company demolished Agar Town,an area Victorian writers called the foulest slum in London, tomake way for the development of St Pancras railway station.Most Londoners lauded the action. But what kind of tenantsactually inhabited the area before it was destroyed, and...

One of the many miracles of Victorian Britain’s market economy was that it worked most efficiently when it was left to regulate itself – or at least, this is what the great majority of Victorians believed. The prevailing economic orthodoxy throughout the nineteenth century assumed, following...

The role of technology in the transition from premodern to modern economies in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe is among the major questions in economic history, but it is still poorly understood. A plausible explanation of premodern European technological development must account...