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...

Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) have increasingly received attention from International Relations scholars. While most of the research has thus far been conducted with the aim to define the actor, assess the consequences of the services they perform for states’ monopoly over...

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 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...

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...

The public sector allocates 40 percent of expenditure in Britain. Why do affluent consumers acquire so much welfare outside the market? If choice is affected by myopic bias, optimisation is costly, consumer choice is fallible, and collective consumption provides a "commitment device". For a...