"How was life in 1820, and how has it improved since then? What are the long-term trends in global well-being? Views on social progress since the Industrial Revolution are largely based on historical national accounting in the tradition of Kuznets and Maddison. But trends in real GDP per capita...

Inhalt: Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: The Market as a party? -- 2. Eight hundred years of economic growth, 1000-1800 -- 3. Between feudalism and freedom, 1000-1350 -- 4. Capitalism and civil society in late Medieval Holland, 1350-1566 -- 5. A capitalist revolution? The Dutch...

"The Origins of Globalization: For better or for worse, in recent times the rapid growth of international economic exchange has changed our lives. But when did this process of globalisation begin, and what effects did it have on economies and societies? Pim de Zwart and Jan Luiten van Zanden...

There is a general consensus that human capital is a major factor behind long-run economic growth. Yet, on a macro level, the empirical results do not always seem to concur with this view. To explain this gap between theory and empirics, more focus has been laid on measurement error and data...

This paper reconstructs GDP from the output side for medieval and early modern Britain. In contrast to the long run stagnation of living standards suggested by daily real wage rates, output-based GDP per capita exhibits modest but positive trend growth. One way of reconciling the two series is...