This paper re-examines Earl Hamilton`s famous 1929 thesis on "Profit Inflation"and the birth of modern industrial capitalism: namely, that the inflationary forces of the Price Revolution era produced a widening gap between prices and wages, thus providing industrial entrepreneurs with windfall...

The paper's thesis is that the chief causes for the well-known `industrial crisis' of the traditional English textile towns during the period c.1290 - c.1340 was not the emergence of supposedly superior, lower-cost rural competition, as is generally supposed, but rather a far-reaching economic...

In 1795, the French Revolutionary government, in establishing our modern metric system, also established the metric values for the historic European mint weights of the ancien regime era. If those mint-weights are undoubtedly valid for the 18th century, can we be certain that all had remained...

This paper, a contribution to the 'proto-industrialisation' debate, examines the relative advantages of urban and rural locations for cloth manufacturing in later-medieval England and the Low Countries. From the 11th to the mid-14th century, when the English cloth trade began its seemingly...

Inspired by Gerschenkron's thesis, this paper contends that conditions of institutional 'backwardness' in late-medieval England stimulated legal innovations to provide the foundations for negotiability in international financial instruments. Though late-medieval England was not 'backward' in the...

This paper is a case study about investor behaviour of the government of Berne on capital markets in the 18th century, focussing mainly on London. Economic theory about principal-agent problems and portfolio administration will be used to analyse quantitative and qualitative data from government...

The traditional and almost universal method of expressing real wages is by index numbers, according to the formula: RWI = NWI/CPI: i.e., the real wage is the quotient of the nominal (money) wage index divided by the consumer price index, all employing a common base period (here: 1451-75 = 100)....