The oceanic explorations of the 1490s led to countless material innovations worldwide and caused profound ruptures. Beverly Lemire explores the rise of key commodities across the globe, and charts how cosmopolitan consumption emerged as the most distinctive feature of material life after 1500 as...

Early globalization, rising cosmopolitanism and a new world of goods -- Fabric and furs: a new framework of global consumption -- Dressing world peoples: regulation and cosmopolitan desire -- Smuggling, wrecking and scavenging: or, the informal pathways to consumption -- Tobacco and the politics...

[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models,...

Irving Fisher's encounter with the Quantity theory of Money began in the 1890s, during the debate about bimetallism, and reached its high point in 1911 with the publication of The Purchasing Power of Money. His most important refinement of the theory, derived from his recognition of bank...

We consider an environment where the general equilibrium assumption that every agent buys and sells simultaneously is relaxed. We show that fiat money can implement a Pareto optimal allocation only if taxes are type-specific. We then consider intermediated money by assuming that financial...

This paper contributes to the micro-foundation of money in centralized markets with idiosyncratic uncertainty. It shows existence of stationary monetary equilibria and ensures that there is an optimum quantity of money. The rational solution of our model is compared with actual behavior in a...