At the start of the long wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the taxes available to the British state fell mainly on outlays made by its citizens, upon domestically produced commodities and services. Smaller proportions came from import duties and direct taxes upon their incomes...

The Rise Of Britain’s Fiscal Naval StateIn outline (if not in the chronological detail required for a complete and satisfactory historical narrative) the reasons why the United Kingdom evolved between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Congress of Vienna of 1815, into the most powerful...

In recent decades the new institutional economics has redrawn attention to the significance of state sponsored and regulated institutions, organisations, laws, rules, customs and culturally conditioned behaviour for the promotion of long term economic development (Menard and Shirley, 2005)....

The Industrial Revolution continues to be analysed by economic historians deploying the conceptual vocabularies of modern social science, particularly economics. Their approach which gives priority to the elaboration of causes and processes of evolution is far too often and superficially...

Historical narratives which place the Glorious Revolution at the beginning and Parliament near the centre of explanations for the rise and success of Britain’s fiscal military state begin to seem truncated in chronology, narrow in conception and insular in focus. Nevertheless, their stories...

In 1967 Marshal Hodgson (the godfather of global economic history) wrote these percipient words: “Without the cumulative history of the whole Afro-Asian Oikumene of which the Occident had been an integral part, the western transmutation would be almost unthinkable”. Alas, the recommendation...

Under the international economic order which prevailed between the end of mercantilism and decolonisation (referred to in this essay as liberal imperialism) the costs of transacting, transporting and trading commodities, both within and across national and imperial frontiers declined sharply.1...

Microfinance continues to play an ever increasing role in approaches topoverty alleviation around the world. Yet despite the attention paid tomicrofinance, the design of credit contracts for small uncollateralized loansremains a bit of a mystery. From its inception, microfinance generated agreat...

We analyze optimal contracts and optimal matching patterns in a simple model of partnershipwhere there is a double-sided moral hazard problem and potential partners differ intheir productivity in two tasks. It is possible for one individual to accomplish both tasks (soleproduction) and there are...

The National Health Insurance Scheme (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, RSBY) aims to improve poor people’s access to quality health care in India. This paper looks at the implementation of the scheme in Karnataka, drawing on a large survey of eligible households and interviews with empanelled...