Recent empirical studies claim to have identified roots of Africa’s poverty in its colonial past, particularly in the ‘extractive’ or ‘illegitimate’ institutions that the colonial powers bequeathed. While taking a similar quantitative approach this paper accepts the view of many...

A review of the United Nations Human Rights Council is currently under way in Geneva and New York and is set to be finished by July 2011. This study analyses the role of the European Union in the Human Rights Council since the inception of the Council in 2006, and then considers its role in the...

The European Online Games, Social Media and Mobile Application sector has grown substantially in recent years and children are exposed to increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques online which are often outside the purview of existing regulatory frameworks. This study aims to provide a...

The Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) aims to increasecompetition and to foster client protection in the European financialmarket. Among other provisions, it abolishes the concentration rule andchallenges the market ower of existing trading venues. The directiveintroduces venue...

This paper tests whether the so-called ‘reach of the market’ helps to explain ‘why Europe’ and ‘why north-western Europe’. By looking at grain markets from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, this study concludes that the process of commodity market integration...

The paper explores the link between international economic integration and technological capability in colonial India. The example of iron industry shows that many new ideas and skills flowed into India from Europe, but not all met with commercial success. The essay suggests that in those fields...

In England, across the whole period of the Great Debasement, the mint issued six different kinds of silver coins and three kinds of gold coins. According to Gresham’s Law, coins with the same face value but different intrinsic values can not circulate side by side for too long: only those...

Leaving home and entering service was a key transition in early modern England. This paper presents evidence on the age of apprenticeship in London. Using a new sample of 22,156 apprentices bound between 1575 and 1810, we find that apprentices became younger (from 17.4 to 14.7 years) and more...

This article offers a critical review of recent literature on Chinese legal tradition and argues that some subtle but fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese legal traditions are highly relevant to our explanation of the economic divergence in the modern era. By elucidating the...