One of the great puzzles of Sub-Saharan African economic history is that wheeled transportation was barely used prior to the colonial period. Instead, head porterage was the main method of transportation. The consensus among historians is that this was a rational adaption to the underlying...

This two volume set reprints 37 important contributions dealing with international trade throughout the world during the rise of Great Britain to world dominance, the industrialization of Western Europe, and the political and economic expansion of European powers into Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Although we cannot conceive of processes of economic growth that do not involve institutional change, in this essay we outline some reasons why one should be cautious about grounding a theory of growth on institutions. We emphasize how very different institutional structures have often been...