This book is the first to systematically examine the sources of medieval statistics. It will be useful as a handbook for researchers in financial and cultural history, as a history of financial record-keeping, and as a review of recent research into medieval finance and accounting based on statistical sources.Medieval statistics provide a unique window on the past. Medieval documents produced by royal governments, monastic and ecclesiastical institutions, urban boroughs and legal c...

Local enterprise, institutional quality and strategic location were of central importance in the growth of medieval towns. This book, comprising a study of 112 English towns, emphasises these key factors. Downstream locations on major rivers attracted international trade, and thereby stimulated the local processing of imports and exports, while the early establishment of richly endowed religious institutions funnelled agricultural rental income into a town, where it was spent on luxury goo...

‘Big data’ is now readily available to economic historians, thanks to the digitisation of primary sources, collaborative research linking different data sets, and the publication of databases on the internet. Key economic indicators, such as the consumer price index, can be tracked over long periods, and qualitative information, such as land use, can be converted to a quantitative form. In order to fully exploit these innovations it is necessary to use sophisticated statistical techniques ...

It may seem like a recent trend, but businesses have been practising compassionate capitalism for nearly a thousand years.Based on the newly discovered historical documents on Cambridge’s sophisticated urban property market during the Commercial Revolution in the thirteenth century, this book explores how successful entrepreneurs employed the wealth they had accumulated to the benefit of the community.Cutting across disciplines, from economic and business history to entrepr...

One of the most important manuscripts surviving from thirteenth-century England, the corpus of documents known as the Hundred Rolls for Cambridge have been incomplete until the recent discovery of an additional roll.This invaluable volume replaces the previous inaccurate transcription by the record commission of 1818 and provides new translations and additional appendices.Shedding new light on important facets of business activity in thirteenth-century Cambridge, this volum...

In The Multinational Enterprise, Mark Casson - an important thinker in international business for more than 40 years - provides a state-of-the art review of recent developments in the economic theory of the multinational enterprise. He shows how recent developments in theory shed new light on the historical emergence of multinational enterprises, and explains the different forms that multinationality has taken in different industries and different regions of the world.Mark...

This collection of essays brings together historians examining social and economic crises from the thirteenth century to the twenty-first. Crisis is an almost ubiquitous concept for historians, applicable across (amongst others) the histories of agriculture, disease, finance and trade. Yet there has been little attempt to compare its use as an explanatory tool between these discrete fields of research. This volume breaks down the boundaries between traditional historical time periods and s...

Demonstrating why economic modelling is so important in understanding international business, this stimulating and highly original book sets out a new and exciting research agenda in international business studies. The author explains what economic models are, how they are constructed and the way in which they can be used. It illustrates how models clarify important issues in international business – explaining empirical anomalies, analyzing strategies and evaluating government policies to...

The papers in this volume demonstrate that it can be fruitful to apply institutional theory to business history. In addition, the volume shows that the wider study of the institutional environment is inseparable from the study of business. It is clear, however, that although 'institutionalism' in business history has a long pedigree, many areas of research and potential interaction with theory remain to be explored. The extent to which this will occur inevitably depends upon the degree to ...

This book integrates the work of economists, management scientists and business historians. It applies the related concepts of transaction costs, internalisation, corporate strategy and market structure to explain the historical process of corporate growth in the international economy. Each chapter is written by a scholar who has specialized in a particular aspect of the growth of international business.

First published in 1986, this work reports the results of the Leverhulme project on multinationals and intermediate product trade based at the University of Reading during the academic year 1982/3. Chapter 1 summaries the main results of this project.Part I focuses upon the theoretical component of world trade, dealing with both the theories of division of labour and vertical integration. Part II presents a number of specially-commissioned case studies relating to the project, conc...

The neo-liberalism that dominated economic thinking since the advent of Thatcher and Reagan is now seen to have serious flaws. Progressive Capitalism seeks to replace it with a new Progressive political economy, based on an analysis of why the growth rates of countries differ, and what firms have to do to achieve competitive advantage in today's global economy. The cornerstone of the political economy of Progressive Capitalism is a belief in capitalism. But it also incorporates the three d...