Over the last 10 years or so there has been a resurgence of interest in the English king Richard III, especially after his remains are found in 2012 after being lost or missing for centuries. Prior to this, there are many publications, reports, and documentaries alluding to a “smear”...

Some selected examples from trade history and even more the rise of superstar firms in the early twenty first century make visible the eminence of monetary delocalization in the process of market creation. Market creation is highly concentrated in space. As a result, inside and outside money...

This research note/paper examines several factors that have been mentioned and debated as determinants of how Britain moves from feudalism to mercantilism and then to capitalism by way of agricultural and industrial innovations and also how it arrives at the cusp of the industrial revolution. Of...

This paper reviews the growing body of evidence on the relative economic standing of different regions of the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In general, it does not find support for Eurocentric claims regarding Western Europe’s early economic lead. The Eurocentric...

One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...

It is a materialist prejudice common in scholarship from 1890 to 1980 that economic results must have economic causes. But ideas caused the modern world. The point can be made by looking through each of the materialist explanations, from the “original accumulation” favored by early Marxist...

The trade route between Manila and Mexico was a monopoly of the Spanish Crown for more than 250 years. The Manila Galleons were “the richest ships in all the oceans”, but much of the wealth sank at sea and remain undiscovered. We introduce a newly constructed dataset of all of the ships that...

Real national income per head in Britain rose by a factor of about 16 from the 18th century to the present. Other cases, such as that of the U.S. or Korea, have been even more startling, historically speaking. Like the realization in astronomy during the 1920s that most of the “nebulae”...

Britain was first, though the classical (and many of the neoclassical) economists did not recognize that its course was beginning the factor of 16. The slow British growth in the 18th century proposed by Crafts and Harley is unbelievable, but however one assigns growth within the period...

Thrift was not the cause of the Industrial Revolution or its astonishing follow on. For one thing, every human society must practice thrift, and pre-industrial Europe, with its low yield-seed ratios, did so on a big scale. British thrift during the Industrial Revolution, for another, was rather...