For most countries, economic development involves a process of 'catching up' with leading countries at the time. This is never achieved solely by physical assets and labour alone: also needed are the accumulation of technological capabilities, educational attainment, entrepreneurship, and the...

Volume 121 of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains 12 lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2002. Contributors to this volume - Jianjun Mei Charles Higham Ralph Hanna Christopher Ricks Tony Wrigley Linda Colley Murray Pittock Peter Pulzer Wolf Lepenies Angela Leighton Nicholas...

The topical issues debated in this volume include the patenting of AIDS drugs, the future pensions crisis, Britain's universities, and Pan-Islam.There are studies of Shakespeare, Pope, Montaigne, Robert Graves, and William Faulkner. And there are lectures on the Inquisition, empires in history,...

Volume 151 of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains 15 Lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2006. From consideration of Einstein, to discussions of coercion and consent in Nazi Germany, and judicial independence. Contributors to this volume - Margaret Reynolds Ken Binmore James...

There is widespread agreement that climate change is a serious problem. If we fail to regulate greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, or use alternative strategies for addressing the problem, the damages could be significant, and perhaps catastrophic. After several international...

Thorvald Nicolai Thiele was a brilliant Danish researcher of the 19th Century. He was a professor of Astronomy at the University of Copenhagen and the founder of Hafnia, the first Danish private insurance company. Thiele worked in astronomy, mathematics, actuarial science, and statistics, his...

Over its long lifetime, "political economy" has had many different meanings: the science of managing the resources of a nation so as to provide wealth to its inhabitants for Adam Smith; the study of how the ownership of the means of production influenced historical processes for Marx; the study...

Volume 125 of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains 15 lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2003. Contributors to this volume - Fergus Kelly, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies Brian Pullan, University of Manchester Noel Malcolm, All Souls College, Oxford H. R. Woudhuysen,...

At the end of the 20th century nearly all developed nations have become countries of immigration, absorbing growing numbers of immigrants not only from developed regions, but increasingly from developing nations of the Third World. Although international migration has come to play a central role...

During the last three decades, obesity has emerged as a big public health issue in affluent societies. A number of academic and policy approaches have been taken, none of which has been very effective. Most of the academic research, whether biological, epidemiological, social-scientific, or in...