In 1795, the French Revolutionary government, in establishing our modern metric system, also established the metric values for the historic European mint weights of the ancien re,gime era. If those mint-weights are undoubtedly valid for the 18th century, can we be certain that all had remained...

Inspired by Gerschenkron's thesis, this paper contends that conditions of institutional 'backwardness' in late-medieval England stimulated legal innovations to provide the foundations for negotiability in international financial instruments. Though late-medieval England was not 'backward' in the...

This paper explores the impact of the Count of Flanders' monetary and wage policies upon the fortunes of the Flemish woollen cloth industry in a crucial but penultimate phase of its irredeemable decline, from 1390 to 1435, when it was beginning to yield to the growing supremacy of the now...

Over many millennia, mankind has laboured to consume and satisfy three very necessary material wants or needs: food (including drink), shelter, and clothing. Each of these, however, has also been a major object of luxury consumption in most European societies. Textiles were necessities in...

This paper seeks to answer two questions: were the coinage debasements in Burgundian Flanders (1384-1482) undertaken principally as monetary or fiscal policies; and were they beneficial or harmful? In a recent monograph, Sargent and Velde (Big Problem of Small Change: 2002) contend that monetary...