In pre-industrial Europe, rising productivity both in agriculture and in industry depended on the expansion of trade, and the expansion of trade depended in turn on the reduction of trading costs. An important component of trading costs--for some goods the most important--was the cost of...

The expansion of trade in pre-industrial Europe led to a transformation of agriculture. It induced specialization to exploit comparative advantage as well as a restructuring of the process of production, with manorial agriculture giving way to an agriculture of family farms. Technological...

The development of pre-industrial Europe was driven by the expansion of trade. This paper describes the patterns of trade and shows how they can be understood in terms of differences in trading costs. It discusses how the different levels of trade?from local to transoceanic-contributed, both...

In pre-industrial Europe, growth was driven by the expansion of trade, and the expansion of trade was driven by falling trading costs. This paper discusses the mechanisms linking these processes: profit-seeking behavior by merchants, changes in the organization of production, technological...

In pre-industrial Europe, many of the functions performed today by large corporations and governments were performed by merchant associations of various types - merchant guilds, regulated companies, merchant-controlled cities, and merchant colonies. Merchant association provided their members...

This paper examines the management issues faced by a businessman in pre-industrial Europe and how he addressed those issues. Management focused on four main areas - managing agents (personnel); financial management; risk management; and information management (communications and accounting)

Economic growth in pre-industrial Europe was driven by the expansion of the market. The "market" was a complex commercial structure made up of merchant firms, merchant associations, and organized markets. This paper provides an overview of the pre-industrial commercial structure, of how it...

Why are we rich and others poor? What is preventing the less-developed countries from catching up with the more developed? How did we become rich? Underlying these questions are more fundamental ones: What is the nature of economic progress? What are its causes? I seek the answers to these...