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...

The water-mill, though known in the Roman Empire from the second century BCE, did not come to enjoy any widespread use until the 4th or 5th centuries CE, and then chiefly in the West, which was then experiencing not only a rapid decline in the supply of slaves, but also widespread depopulation,...

North, with many other Samuelsonian economists, thinks of “institutions” as budget constraints in a maximization problem. But as Clifford Geertz put it, an institution such as a toll for safe passage is “rather more than a mere payment,” that is, a mere monetary constraint. “It was...

The physical stature of lower- and upper-class English youth are compared to one another and to their European and North American counterparts. The height gap between the rich and poor was the greatest in England, reaching 22 cm at age 16. The poverty-stricken English children were shorter for...

Reviews the evidence on early-industrial height cycles and shows why the economic transition put downward pressure on the nutritional status of the European and American populations.

Proposes an economic-growth model that adheres to the salient features of the European economies during the millennium prior to the Industrial Revolution and shows how the Industrial Revolution, generated by the model, can be conceptualized as an escape from the Malthusian trap.

Proposes an economic-growth model that adheres to the salient features of the European economies during the millennium prior to the Industrial Revolution and shows how the Industrial Revolution, generated by the model, can be conceptualized as an escape from the Malthusian trap.

Argues that on the basis of evidence of British soldiers there was a threat of a Malthusian crisis on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

Considers the development of the European economies from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution to argue that the accumulation of physical and human capital played a major role in the escape from the Malthusian trap.

Argues that the Industrial Revolution is best conceptualized as having grown out of a process that began millennia earlier, and became possible only when the European populations were able to escape from the Malthusian trap which constrained their growth in prior centuries.