How did religious freedom emerge? I address this question by building on the framework of Johnson and Koyama’s Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom (2019). First, I establish that premodern societies, reliant on identity rules, were incapable of liberalism and religious...

This essay reviews Escape from Rome by Walter Scheidel. It examines the argument that Europe's persistent fragmentation following the collapse of the Rome empire is responsible for the origins of the modern world. First, I consider Scheidel's argument that the rise of Rome at the end of the...

This chapter evaluates the concept of legal capacity and how it is employed in research in historical political economy. I discuss its relationship to the wider literature on state capacity, research on the rule of law, and the literature on legal origins. I go on to outline how the concept of...

Across Europe and the Americas, the Enlightenment brought intellectual and institutional tumult over that most basic attribute of the political economy – its medium. By the time the age was over, money operated according to a new design. It enabled a set of financial practices that were...

The modern self is said to live a life of performance. This raises the question of how the differences and contradictions in the lives people lived were managed in former times. I focus on the distinction between public and private roles. Textual evidence suggests that widespread disagreement...

I examine how the historical legacies of inter-ethnic complementarity and competition influence contemporary electoral competition and its effects on patterns of ethnic violence. Using local comparisons within Gujarat, a single Indian state known for its non-violent local traditions yet also for...

Recent research has indicated that the variations in generalized trust have deep historical roots. This paper argues that geopolitical history may be an important determinant of modern levels of trust. Specifically, regions that have historically been dominated by states of different sizes may...

I divide this introduction to my book in progress, Reconstructing Adam Smith's Politics, into three parts. In Part 1, I give an overview of Smith's politics and how it fits together. This analysis shows that Smith anticipated many of the central questions that animate modern political science;...

How does the interplay of geography and political-economic forces affect the shape of nations? This paper presents a quantitative framework for characterizing the equilibrium evolution of national boundaries in a world with a rich geography. The framework delivers simple equilibrium conditions...

In 1896 there were 2858 several models of job centres in Austria. The most of them (885) were situated in Bohemia. New important job centre model has rested in special hostels. From 1886 till 1895 these hostels were established in seven Austrian Lands (in Bohemia for the first time in 1895)....