This article describes a comprehensive geographic information system of Third-Republic France: the TRF-GIS. It provides annual nomenclatures and shapefiles of administrative constituencies of metropolitan France from 1870 to 1940, encompassing general administrative constituencies...

The history of the Netherlands reveals major shifts from centralisation of government tasks towards decentralisation and vice versa. In the seventeenth century, the Republic of United Provinces was the first federal state in modern history. Many transformations later the Kingdom of the...

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”...

The theory of social choice stresses that the general interest determined through the aggregation of individual preferences implies interpersonal utility comparisons and hence necessarily a notion of common good beyond individual preferences. The pursuit of the common good falls to all services...

We investigate the roles of individual characteristics and punishment progressivity on crime. Our analysis reconciles low crime rates with light punishments in self-governed communities (Ostrom, 1990), using formal punishments to deter crime (Becker, 1968). We use a novel trial dataset on water...

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...

Do capitalism and conflicts go hand in hand? Are the military and markets complements? Indeed, many conservative advocates of markets also passionately support the military, and many people who oppose war also oppose markets. Nineteenth-century writer Richard Cobden, however, maintained that the...

Religion was one of the factors that was frequently identified by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economists as exerting an important influence on the pre-industrial European economies. These writers were especially interested in the economic effects of the Reformation on the economic...

This paper explores the rise of the fiscal state in the early modern period and its impact on legal capacity. To measure legal capacity, we establish that witchcraft trials were more likely to take place where the central state had weak legal insti- tutions. Combining data on the geographic...