In Classical Athens, being at war was much more common than peace. The military expenditures were correspondingly large. The real enigmatic issue, however, is not financial but where they found the manpower needed for this policy. The number of warships (triremes) was so great that there is no...

The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469 began the process of the eventual unification of Spain. Over the ensuing decades, Spain finally conquered the Muslims at Granada in 1492 and completed the Reconquista. Spain then began a period of imperial expansion with...

Cherso (Cres in Croatian) is the largest island in the Adriatic. Placed in the northern part of this sea, namely in the Kvarner Gulf and lying off the east coast of the Istrian peninsula, Cherso today belongs to the Republic of Croatia, but for centuries this island had been a faithful and...

The paper reconsiders the boom of the mid 1890s in which a large number of firms in the bicycle, vehicle and pneumatic tyre industries were floated. It investigates why so many of these issues featured aristocratic directors listed in their prospectuses and finds that they exemplified City...

Lira convertibility in the 19th century was mainly advocated due to the need to attract foreign capital, to avoid the temptation of monetizing the huge state debt, to keep the state budget under control and to limit the uncertainties in trade settlements with Italy's main partners, which were...

This paper utilises a dataset of freehold land and property transactions from medieval England to highlight the growing commercialisation of the economy. By drawing on the legal records we are able to demonstrate that the medieval real estate market provided the opportunity for investors to...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a...

This paper re-examines the late medieval market in freehold land, the extent to which it was governed by market forces as opposed to political or social constraints, and how this contributed to the commercialisation of the late medieval English economy. We employ a valuable new resource for...

The limited partnership emerged as a key societal innovation during the early modern age. It allowed an effective separation between partners – those acting and those conferring capital – and it granted limited liability to partners in case of insolvency. The diffusion of limited partnership...

From its foundation as a private corporation in 1694 the Bank of England extended large amounts of credit to support the British private economy and to support an increasingly centralized British state. The Bank helped the British state reach a position of geopolitical and economic hegemony in...