Exploring the characteristics of inflations and comparing historical cases from Roman times up to the modern day, this book provides an in depth discussion of the subject. It analyses the high and moderate inflations caused by the inflationary bias of political systems and economic relationships, as well as the importance of different monetary regimes in containing them. The differences for the possible size of inflations among monetary regimes like metallic currencies, the gold standard a...

This volume confronts an important historical hypothesis with empirical evidence from selected periods of history. The hypothesis in question states that competition among political and legal organisations in developing rules has been a crucial condition for liberty, innovation and growth in the history of mankind. It is due to Immanuel Kant, Edward Gibbon and Max Weber and has been revived and further developed by Nobel-Laureate Douglass C. North who contributes the first chapter. The vol...

Applying a rational choice perspective, this book presents a dynamic theory of the evolution of totalitarian regimes and terrorism. By demonstrating that totalitarian regimes rest on ideologies involving supreme values that are assumed to be absolutely true, the author identifies the factors that lead to totalitarian regimes, and those that transform or abolish those regimes with time. The author addresses different ideologies, such as National Socialism, Communism, and religious movements...

This book discusses theories of monetary and financial innovation and applies them to key monetary and financial innovations in history – starting with the use of silver bars in Mesopotamia and ending with the emergence of the Eurodollar market in London. The key monetary innovations are coinage (Asia minor, China, India), the payment of interest on loans, the bill of exchange and deposit banking (Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London). The main financial innovation is the emergence of bond m...

Many books have been written about the success of the West, analyzing why Europe was able to pull ahead of the rest of the world by the end of the Middle Ages. The most common explanations cite the West’s superior geography, commerce, and technology. Completely overlooked is the fact that faith in reason, rooted in Christianity’s commitment to rational theology, made all these developments possible. Simply put, the conventional wisdom that Western success depended upon overcoming religious...

David Hackett Fischer, one of our most prominent historians, has garnered a reputation for making history come alive--even stories as familiar as Paul Revere's ride, or as complicated as the assimilation of British culture in North America. Now, in The Great Wave, Fischer has done it again, marshaling an astonishing array of historical facts in lucid and compelling prose to outline a history of prices--"the history of change," as Fischer puts it--covering the dazzling sweep of Western hi...

The Third Edition includes substantial revisions and new material throughout the book that will secure its standing as the most useful history available of preindustrial Europe.During the seven hundred years before the Industrial Revolution, the stage was set for Europe's transformation from a backward agrarian society to a powerful industrialized society. An economic historian of international reputation, Carlo M. Cipolla explores the process that made this transf...

What was the role of merchant guilds in the medieval and early modern economy? Does their wide prevalence and long survival mean they were efficient institutions that benefited the whole economy? Or did merchant guilds simply offer an effective way for the rich and powerful to increase their wealth, at the expense of outsiders, customers and society as a whole? These privileged associations of businessmen were key institutions in the European economy from 1000 to 1800. Historians debate me...

Immanuel Wallerstein’s highly influential, multi-volume opus, The Modern World-System, is one of this century’s greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

This book was the first to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the impact of money on the economy, society and culture of the Greek and Roman worlds. It uses new approaches in economic history to explore how money affected the economy in antiquity and demonstrates that the crucial factors in its increasing influence were state-formation, expanding political networks, metal supply and above all an increasing sophistication of credit and contractual law. Covering a wide range of monetary c...

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s. In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequate...

"An ambitious attempt to map the transformation of lifestyles and experience among Rome's provincial subjects in the first three centuries AD. . . . "History from below" at its best" ( Times Literary Supplement, UK).Despite what history has taught us about imperialism's destructive effects on colonial societies, many classicists continue to emphasize disproportionately the civilizing and assimilative nature of the Roman E...