Intro -- Contents -- Contributors -- Editors' Introduction -- 1. The Stanford Tradition in Economic History -- Part One. Evolutionary Processes in Economics -- 2. Natural Resources and Economic Outcomes -- 3. The Institutionalization of Science in Europe, 1650- 1850 -- 4. The Fundamental Impact...

Douglass North once emphasized that development takes centuries, but he did not have a theory of how and why change occurs. This groundbreaking book advances such a theory by examining in detail why England and Spain developed so slowly from 1000 to 1800. A colonial legacy must go back centuries...

Nineteenth-century Japan remains a void in the literature on institutions and growth. Developmental institutions evolved in Japan after the Meiji Restoration despite the absence of political participation. Authoritarian change agents usually face a trade-off between reform and stability: they...

Our purpose here is to challenge the "big-bang" approach to economic history in which some alleged institutional imposition - a deus machine - is claimed to launch a series of new economic behaviors. This so-called prime mover is then carried forward by the inexorable forces of path dependency...