The state is conceptually distinct from both economy and society, with inherent interests in expanding its scope for autonomous action, asserting control over economic and social interactions, and structuring economic and social relations. These interests derive primarily from the state’s...

[...]What explains New York’s ongoing ability to dominateAmerica’s urban landscape? In this paper, we explore theeconomic history of the city and argue that three themesemerge. First, New York’s emergence as the nation’s premier port was not the result of happenstance followed by...

[...]This paper builds primarily on research on agglomerationeconomies. Much of the empirical work on agglomeration hassought to estimate the effect on productivity of anestablishment’s local environment. The estimation hassometimes involved direct estimates of productivity(Henderson 2003) and...

[...]This paper empirically examines the spatial and temporalresponses of the New York City economy to a large, butspatially concentrated, exogenous shock to its capital stock:the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Our focus on thecity’s response allows us to draw inferences about how...

[...]This paper examines the operation of the U.S. labor marketin the 2001 recovery. Because the United States is in the middleof the recovery, ours is a real-time analysis; thus, someconclusions could change if the recovery stalls or employmentgrows suddenly. For instance, since August 2003,...

The nature of the seventeenth-century Mughal state and its land revenue taxation system has become a matter of controversy in recent years. Irfan Habib and his followers dominated thinking on this subject from the sixties onwards. They saw the regime as highly centralized and essentially...

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...

This paper examines the economic organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries on those routes that moved slaves from Sudanic Africa via entrepôts in the Sahel and Sahara to the Maghrib. The commercial framework of this trade was integrated...

Under the international economic order which prevailed between the end of mercantilism and decolonisation (referred to in this essay as liberal imperialism) the costs of transacting, transporting and trading commodities, both within and across national and imperial frontiers declined sharply.1...

This paper is an exploration of the world coffee market in the nineteenth century when world trade expanded some 20 fold. Coffee is often dismissed as a "dessert crop," and an unnecessary luxury. True, it provided no nutrition, but its role in stimulating sociability, labor and diminishing...