This volume suggests a new way of doing global history. Instead of offering a sweeping and generalizing overview of the past, we propose a "micro-spatial" approach, combining micro-history with the concept of space. A focus on primary sources and awareness of the historical discontinuities and...

Introduction -- The costs and benefits of running away: late medieval Florentine plague mortality and behavior -- When economic theory meets medieval contracts: calculating the Monte Comune interest rate -- The chances of getting rich in Renaissance Florence: the wool industry occupational...

Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Rosa Congost, Jorge Gelman and Rui Santos -- Migration and accommodation of property rights in the Portuguese Eastern Empire, sixteenth-nineteenth centuries / José Vicente Serrão and Eugénia Rodrigues -- Alternative uses of land and...

"On ne peut penser la Première Guerre mondiale en ignorant ce qui fut une conséquence fondamentale de celle-ci : l'essor considérable du syndicalisme dans le monde, son rôle accru dans les rapports sociaux ou les décisions des états. Vient, dès la deuxième moitié de la guerre, le temps...

"Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully....

Talking tax -- We, the taxpayers -- Canada's conservative tax structure -- Resistance in the interwar years -- Taxation at the edges of citizenship -- Honour, confidence, and federalism during the depression -- Warfare, welfare, and the mass income tax payer -- New publics and the taxman in the...

What happens when an entire modern state's material culture becomes abruptly obsolete? How do ordinary people encounter what remains? In this ethnography, Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from that vanished socialist...

"Persistent Progressives" tells the story of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union's evolution from an early movement against monopolists and wholesalers to a regional trailblazer for agriculture ideologies built on social democracy, the family farmer, and cooperative enterprises. As a continuing...

A cardboard suitcase and a backpack: Northeastern migrations to Sao Paulo in the 1950s -- Land of the Northeasterners: migration, urbanization, and factory work in Sao Miguel Paulista -- Worker community and everyday life: "becoming Northeastern" in Sao Paulo -- The right to practice politics:...

Some useful economic models in prose -- Chicago and the development of the old Northwest -- The second city : 1900-1930 -- Depression and war -- Chicago in 1950, and a look ahead -- Postwar growth and suburbanization : 1950-1970 -- The decades of urban crisis -- The old century ends on a high...

This book offers an in-depth exploration of the international phenomenon of enlightened paternalist capitalism and social engineering in the golden age of capitalism in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Erik de Gier shows how utopian socialist, religious, and craft-based...