The paper introduces the notion of different methods of calculating and analysing profitability as signatures of capitalism at different stages of development. Its point of departure is Bryer's thesis of the capitalist mentality, which is subject to theoretical and empirical critique and...

The role of natural resources in contributing to stable economic development is of growing interest to economists and politicians. In evaluations of the prospects for development of a given country it was once assumed that rich natural resources and a vast territory provided favorable conditions...

This paper utilises a dataset of freehold land and property transactions from medieval England to highlight the growing commercialisation of the economy. By drawing on the legal records we are able to demonstrate that the medieval real estate market provided the opportunity for investors to...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a...

This paper re-examines the late medieval market in freehold land, the extent to which it was governed by market forces as opposed to political or social constraints, and how this contributed to the commercialisation of the late medieval English economy. We employ a valuable new resource for...

This paper shows that railroad building in Russia, as in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, improved the value of land, a classic benefit of transportation investment in largely agrarian countries. From a database constructed for this paper, we use cross-sectional data for the fifty...

In this paper we investigate the relation between population, real wages and urbanization in the Italian economy during the period 1320-1870. In this period the prevailing conditions were those of a poor, mainly agricultural economy with limited human capital and rudimentary technology. However,...

The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469 began the process of the eventual unification of Spain. Over the ensuing decades, Spain finally conquered the Muslims at Granada in 1492 and completed the Reconquista. Spain then began a period of imperial expansion with...

On the basis of available sources the present paper seeks to map entrepreneurial industrial activities the Norwegian puritan revivalist Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771-1824) was involved in and quantify his financial activities. It also tries to map entrepreneurial activities by his followers. The...