This book is the first to provide English readers with a brief and comprehensive survey of economic life in Italy during the period of its greatest splendour: the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
The wealth of Renaissance Italy was the product of centuries of growth, and the great Renaissance cities, Venice, Milan and Florence, were first and foremost centres of international trade, which taught the rest of Europe the rudiments of modern business techniques. In a masterly synthesis, based upon a lifetime of study and research, Professor Gino Luzzatto, the greatest of living...

Historians have long considered the ways in which the expansion of English trade beyond Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed to the growth of English overseas trade as a whole, and to the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Their concentration on trade between England and her own colonies has led them, however, to neglect the importance of trade with the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. Dr Fishers examination of Anglo-Portuguese trade between 1700 and 1770, and of the commercial links between the English North American colonies and Portugal,...

Most historical accounts of economic policy set out to describe the way in which governments have attempted to solve their economic problems and to achieve their economic objectives. Jim Tomlinson, however, focuses on the problems themselves, arguing that the way in which areas of economic policy become problems for policy makers is always problematic itself, that it is never obvious and never happens naturally.
This approach is quite distinct from the Marxist, the Keynesian or the neo-classical accounts of economic policy, the schools of thought which are described and...

The pit brow lasses who sorted coal and performed a variety of jobs above ground at British coal mines prompted a violent debate about womens work in the nineteenth century.
Seen as the prime example of degraded womanhood, the pit brow woman was regarded as an aberration in a masculine domain, cruelly torn from her natural sphere, the home. The, attempt to restrict womens work at the mines in the 1880s highlights the dichotomy between the fashionable ideal of womanhood and the necessity and reality of female manual labour.
Although only a tiny percentage of the...

Technical changes in the first half of the nineteenth century led to unprecedented economic growth and capital formation throughout Western Europe; and yet Ireland hardly participated in this process at all. While the Northern Atlantic Economy prospered, the Great Irish Famine of 184550 killed a million and a half people and caused hundreds of thousands to flee the country. Why the Irish economy failed to grow, and why Ireland starved remains an unresolved riddle of economic history.
Professor Mokyr maintains that the Hungry Forties were caused by the overall...

This book breaks fresh ground in the most challenging aspect of economics and economic history the nature of economic growth.
Professor Gould considers a wide range of theories about growth and its causes, and examines these theories in the light of modern economic history. The first chapter sketches the historical experience of growth in its broad contours. There follow discussions of the contribution made by agriculture, savings and investment, foreign trade, industrialization, technological change and a number of residual elements. A final chapter offers a critical...

Of all fluctuations in economic activity, the long wave or Kondratieff cycle is easily the most puzzling and least understood one. Does it really exist, and if so, is it only a cycle in prices or a cycle in economic activity at large? What causes it, and has it been confined to Europe or does it affect the world economy as a whole?
These questions, which seemed of little relevance in the prosperous years of the postwar growth era, have gained new importance since 1973. With the downturn of the long wave, interest in it has enjoyed a revival, as it did in the 1930s. A great...

First published in 1967, Professor Bairochs Diagnostic de LEvolution Economique du Tiers-Monde has gone into four editions, and has brought the author an international reputation.
This English translation is, in effect, another edition based on the latest French text but incorporating much which is not to be found there. The statistical tables have been revised and expanded wherever possible to include figures up to the end of 1972; the bibliography has been specially adapted to include the literature on the subject in the English language; and two new chapters have been...