The French academic landscape has been increasingly confronted with contentious debates surrounding the concept of "Islamo-leftism" and the potential influence of foreign states in higher education and research institutions. This paper intends to provide a snapshot introduction to these issues,...

This paper introduces and describes a new city-level data set on political institutions in pre-modern Europe. To be precise, it presents three variables reporting the prevalence of the different existing types of participative political institutions between 800 AD and 1800 AD in 104 cities in...

State building and state competition during the 16th century triggered a creative moment in the history of public finance. Recent scholarship has clearly identified the Papal States and their communities as active participants both in the state building process and the reorganization of public...

This paper emphasizes that the evolution of religious institutions in Europe was influenced by the expansionary threat posed by the Ottoman Empire five centuries ago. This threat intensified in the second half of the 15th century and peaked in the first half of the 16th century with the Ottoman...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that a severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and remained...

Jürgen Habermas has recently warned that the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is transforming democratic governments into ‘economic government' threatening not only economic disaster but the end of the world's first supranational project — the European Union. And, according to Habermas,...

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman policy-makers adopted a more liberal attitude towards price formation. This was accompanied by the fiscal and administrative centralization of the grain trade. These seemingly contradictory policy changes could, in part, be explained...

This paper emphasizes that the evolution of religious institutions in Europe was influenced by the expansionary threat posed by the Ottoman Empire five centuries ago. This threat intensified in the second half of the 15th century and peaked in the first half of the 16th century with the Ottoman...