Markets are key contemporary institutions, yet there is little agreement concerning their history or diversity. To complicate matters, markets have been considered by different academic disciplines that approach the nature of such exchange systems from diametrically opposed perspectives that...

In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs conjectured that the world's first cities preceded the origins of agriculture, a proposition that was most recently revived by Peter Taylor in the pages of this journal. Jacobs' idea was out of line with extant archaeological findings when first advanced...