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...

This article seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the 'nouvelles draperies' chose to use them, and why their resort to such merino wools allowed at least some of them to escape the...

This article seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the 'nouvelles draperies' chose to use them, and why their resort to such merino wools allowed at least some of them to escape the...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs,...

The objectives of this study are three-fold. The first is to rebut Charles Kindleberger’s famous dictum that usury ‘belongs less to economic history than to the history of ideas’; and in particular to demonstrate that the resuscitation of the anti-usury campaign from the early 13th century...

A recurrent and indeed persistent problem in European economic history – a veritable deus ex machina -- from medieval to modern times, is Europe’s supposed ‘balance of payments’ problem in trade with the ‘East’. This supposed problem has often been couched in Mercantilist overtones:...

The water-mill, though known in the Roman Empire from the second century BCE, did not come to enjoy any widespread use until the 4th or 5th centuries CE, and then chiefly in the West, which was then experiencing not only a rapid decline in the supply of slaves, but also widespread depopulation,...

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major ‘institutional’ international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the...

This study of the Italian wool-based textile industries (woollens, worsteds, and serges) seeks to examine its rise, expansion, and ultimate decline, over a period of five centuries (from ca. 1200 to ca. 1730) in the context of both international competition and economic conjoncture, in the...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the ‘draperies’ or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic...