This paper discusses the emergence and growth of various media industries in Britain. It shows how a rise in real wages and leisure time, rapid urbanisation and the development of fast urban transport networks, and a rapid growth of the market’s size let to a sharp rise in the demand for media...

The classical gold standard, which prevailed from the 1870s to the First World War, was characterised by fixed exchange rates, free convertibility and perfect capital mobility and was considered the dominant international monetary system of the time. As trilemma hypothesis suggests, the Ottoman...

This present paper focuses on the diffusion of wu-wei (an ancient Chinese concept of political economy) throughout Europe, between 1648 and 1848. It argues that at the core of this diffusion process were three major developments; firstly the importation and active transmission of wu-wei by the...

Written on board of US Steamer San Jacinto – anchored in Shanghai in October 1856 - a report to the New York Times on the “Progress of the Rebellion in China” indicated that the US government “was forced to buy the Carolus dollars at an increasing sacrifice in order to pay its high...

Sir Francis Bacon explored as a medical question the issue of how human life spans might be returned to the near-thousand years enjoyed by Adam and the Patriarchs. Extended old age seemed feasible: reports told of people living well into their centenary. Meanwhile, New World natives were said to...

This paper revisits Bairoch’s hypothesis that in the late 19th century tariffs were positively associated with growth, as recently confirmed by a new generation of quantitative studies (see O`Rourke (2000), Jacks (2006) and Clemens-Williamson (2002, 2004)). This paper highlights the importance...

In a new approach to a long-ranging debate on the causes of the Late Medieval Debasement, we offer an institutional case-study of Russia and the Levant. Avoiding the complexity of the “upstream” financial/minting centres of Western Europe, we consider the effects of debasement...

Eugenics has played an important role in the relations between social and biological scientists of population through time. Having served as a site for the sharing of data and methods between disciplines in the early twentieth century, scientists and historians have tended to view its legacy in...

The great merit of North’s and Weingast’s insight into the importance of a ruler’s credible commitment to protecting property rights is that it is both parsimonious and it lends itself beautifully to generalizations. It has e.g. inspired the economic literature on the importance of legal...

This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where growing conflict between various ethnic and national groups within an empire might have contributed to the emergence of internal borders and even its eventual dissolution. To this end we adopt an...