Fiscal and Financial Preconditions for the Rise of British Naval Hegemony1485-1815

In recent decades the new institutional economics has redrawn attention to the significance of state sponsored and regulated institutions, organisations, laws, rules, customs and culturally conditioned behaviour for the promotion of long term economic development (Menard and Shirley, 2005). Modern economics has expanded its remit to include matters that Cunningham recommended to Marshall and has sustained an enlightening programme of classifying, theorizing (but only occasionally measuring) how a range of institutional variables promoted or retarded both the flow and the productivity of the inputs of land, labour, capital, technology and other proximate determinants behind histories of the economic growth of nations. Perhaps economic historians, engaged with traditions of enquiry going back to the German historical school, and who have retained links with political history, had less need than their colleagues in economics to be reminded that production and exchange across early modern Eurasia had for centuries been embedded in disabling frameworks of law, institutions and cultures (Hodgson, 2001).[...]