At the start of the long wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the taxes available to the British state fell mainly on outlays made by its citizens, upon domestically produced commodities and services. Smaller proportions came from import duties and direct taxes upon their incomes...

The Rise Of Britain’s Fiscal Naval StateIn outline (if not in the chronological detail required for a complete and satisfactory historical narrative) the reasons why the United Kingdom evolved between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Congress of Vienna of 1815, into the most powerful...

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)....

The Industrial Revolution continues to be analysed by economic historians deploying the conceptual vocabularies of modern social science, particularly economics. Their approach which gives priority to the elaboration of causes and processes of evolution is far too often and superficially...

Historical narratives which place the Glorious Revolution at the beginning and Parliament near the centre of explanations for the rise and success of Britain’s fiscal military state begin to seem truncated in chronology, narrow in conception and insular in focus. Nevertheless, their stories...

In 1967 Marshal Hodgson (the godfather of global economic history) wrote these percipient words: “Without the cumulative history of the whole Afro-Asian Oikumene of which the Occident had been an integral part, the western transmutation would be almost unthinkable”. Alas, the recommendation...

Under the international economic order which prevailed between the end of mercantilism and decolonisation (referred to in this essay as liberal imperialism) the costs of transacting, transporting and trading commodities, both within and across national and imperial frontiers declined sharply.1...

This paper explores the links between school, family and areabackground influences during adolescence and later adult economicoutcomes. The empirical analysis is based on data covering the period1979 to 1996, drawn from the 1979 US National Longitudinal Survey ofYouth. For a sample of...

This paper is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship betweenaggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive aframework based on individuals’ risks of unemployment and poverty,and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the BritishHousehold Panel Survey for...

We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures ofincome risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as asource of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution tototal income risk of demographic and labour market factors....