The study of long term growth in Africa has recently been invigorated by the work of economists. To date, this literature has been motivated by explaining a divergence of income and has focussed on finding persistent factors that can explain a chronic failure of growth in Africa. This chapter...

During the interwar years, Japanese industrialisation accelerated alongside the expansion of industrial exports to regional markets. Trade blocs in the interwar years were used as an instrument of imperial power to foster exports and as a substitute for productivity to encourage industrial...

This article shows some important aspects of a worldwide, historical phenomenon: the globalization of commerce and art which started in the second half of the sixteenth century and had the American, Asian and European territories of the Hispanic Monarchy as main protagonist during the Early...

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

Urban governance has been considered a key feature in the political and economic development in Europe in the medieval and early modern times. This paper aims to explore the different institutional settings that characterized the community organization in the Kingdom of Naples, with a particular...

This historical survey examines the relationship between proprietorship, state structure, and cultures of power, over the broad expanse of South Asian History. In doing so the focus is kept upon the major Indian empires (Maurya, Delhi Sultanate, Mughal, British). The paper maintains that in...

Prize Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1993.

I was born in New York City in 1926, four years after my parents and my brother migrated to the United States from the city of Odessa in Russia. Although they arrived in New York penniless, my parents scraped together enough savings to establish the first of several small businesses just after I...

Interview with Professor Robert W. Fogel at the 1st Meeting of Laureates in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany, September 1-4, 2004. Interviewer is freelance journalist Marika Griehsel.

The overall objective of the paper is to evaluate the growth performance of Cyprus during the interwar (1921-38) period. Pamuk and Williamson assure us that with the exception of Mandated Palestine, the economic performance of Mediterranean states was poor. In order to evaluate the performance...