Next to the local craftsmen and the non-agrarian activities that families undertook for their own use or local consumption, which had always existed in the countryside, in some places rural industries aimed at non-local markets developed as early as in the late 14th century. In some parts of the...

Comparative analysis of the markets for land, labor, and capital in north-central Italy and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period reveals that urbanization in itself was not the crucial variable in the quality and effect of developing factor markets. More...

Inequality studies tend to assume a positive correlation between income and wealth inequality. We doubt whether this holds for Rhineland welfare states as they seem to combine low income inequality with high wealth inequality levels. We hypothesize that publicly funded life-time income security,...

The Low Countries-an area roughly embracing the present-day Netherlands and Belgium-formed a patchwork of varied economic and social development in the Middle Ages, with some regions displaying a remarkable dynamism. Manors and Markets charts the history of these vibrant economies and societies,...

Although the importance of the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development is widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess, let alone to quantify the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets in this era. In this paper we demonstrate to...

The Invisible Hand' offers a radical departure from the conventional wisdom of economists and economic historians, by showing that 'factor markets' and the economies dominated by them - the market economies - are not modern, but have existed at various times in the past. This work analyses three...