Bristol is a major city and port in the south-west of England. In medieval times, it became the third largest city in the kingdom, behind London and York. Bristol was founded in the late Saxon period and grew rapidly in the 12th and 13th centuries. Initially, seaborne trading links with Ireland and France were particularly significant; later, from the 16th century onwards, the city became a foc…
In Defense of Monopoly offers an unconventional but empirically grounded argument in favor of market monopolies. Authors McKenzie and Lee claim that conventional, static models exaggerate the harm done by real-world monopolies, and they show why some degree of monopoly presence is necessary to maximize the improvement of human welfare over time. Inspired by Joseph Schumpeter's suggestion that m…
With sustainability having gained a lot of momentum over the last years and companies implementing strategies to create corporate sustainability, there are lots of opportunities for innovation. Thus, the two concepts of sustainability and innovation should not be considered separately – they are closely interlinked with one another. The main goal of sustainable innovation is to develop n…
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historians of England pioneered a series of new approaches to the history of economic policy. Commerce, finance and statecraft charts the development of these forms of writing and explores the role they played in the period's economic, political and historiographical thought. Through doing so, the book makes a significant intervention in the study of…
The book discusses how culture simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the economy. Over the past few years, as the world has staggered from one financial crisis to another, the neat separation of economics and culture has been consistently challenged. To understand the current state of affairs, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the conjuncture that rules the production of value…
One of the biggest debates in economic history deals with the Great Divergence. How can we explain that at a certain moment in time (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) a certain part of the world (the West) escaped from general poverty and became much richer than it had ever been before and than the rest of the world? Many prominent scholars discussed this question and came up with many d…
Cities are gaining importance and influence worldwide. They sustain the global economy, set cultural trends, produce greenhouse gas emissions and consume energy; they attract migration flows and foster new political waves. While cities were supposed to be declining back in the 1980s, the globalised economy has established them as crucial world hubs leading billions of people on every continent,…
Who are the dominant owners of US public debt? Is it widely held, or concentrated in the hands of a few? Does ownership of public debt give these bondholders power over our government? What do we make of the fact that foreign-owned debt has ballooned to nearly 50 percent today? Until now, we have not had any satisfactory answers to these questions. Public Debt, Inequality, and Power is the firs…
A classic text long out of print, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar traces the historical development of slave labor and plantation agriculture in Martinique during the period immediately preceding slave emancipation in 1848. Interpreting these events against the broader background of the world-economy, Dale W. Tomich analyzes the importance of topics such as British hegemony in the nineteenth ce…
One of the most original and prolific economists of the twentieth century, Joan Robinson (1903–83) is widely regarded as the most important woman in the history of economic thought. Robinson studied economics at Cambridge University, where she made a career that lasted some fifty years. She was an unlikely candidate for success at Cambridge. A young woman in 1930 in a university dominated by …