Guilds ruled many crafts and trades from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, and have always attracted debate and controversy. They were sometimes viewed as efficient institutions that guaranteed quality and skills. But they also excluded competitors, manipulated markets, and blocked...

This book is the first comprehensive account of how Australia attained the world's highest living standards within a few decades of European settlement, and how the nation has sustained an enviable level of income to the present. Beginning with the Aboriginal economy at the end of the eighteenth...

Introduction : the sixteen-page economic history of the world -- The logic of the Malthusian economy -- Material living standards -- Fertility -- Life expectancy -- Malthus and Darwin : survival of the richest -- Technological advance -- Institutions and growth -- The emergence of modern man --...

The study explores the narrative structure of Alexandr Nikitenko's diary, one of the core sources for the history of Russian censorship, and on the role of the genre of anecdote in particular. Through an analysis of the ‘anecdotal' entries about censorship in Nikitenko's diary and their...

"Recent works by economic historians of early modern Europe have argued for a link between encyclopedias of the 18th century and the developments culminating in the Industrial Revolution. Diderot and D'Alembert's great Encyclopedie aimed to disseminate useful knowledge for productive growth and...

This paper reconstructs the origins and the meaning of the “Most Illustrious and Incomparable Order of Antisobres,” that was to be instituted in 1728 in St Petersburg by Duke de Liria, the Spanish ambassador. While this unusual fraternal society might have never taken off the ground and...