Category Archives: Economic History

Book free on Amazon for 48 hours! (Kindle)

Posted on by under Economic History, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

Hello everyone- I am making a Kindle version of 1000 Castaways: Fundamentals of Economics FREE on Amazon for reviewers for a short time – but anyone here can take advantage of this and get their free copy.
It is free for the next 48 hours  (all day Sunday & Monday, Pacific time USA). You guys can help out immensely by posting a review on Amazon – good or bad!! – if you feel it merits it. Thanks! (on the reviews, you will be considered a “verified purchaser” even though the price was “0” 🙂 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PWRXTF2
Even if you don’t usually read ebooks, you can read/review this by using Amazons easy free kindle reader for desktops/laptops.
(This is how I am doing the ARC [Advance Reader Copy] for the forthcoming paperback rather than try to mail/print galley copies around the world etc.)

UK website https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07PWRXTF2

Canadian website https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07PWRXTF2

Australian website https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07PWRXTF2

Of Bitcoins and Balance Sheets: The Real Lesson From Bitcoin

Posted on by under Bitcoin, Circuitism / MCT / Keen / Bank Reform / Credit Money, Cryptocurrency, Economic History, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

The monetary systems of nations operate on two types of balance sheet expansion:

  1. National, where the government spends into the economy expanding a national balance sheet
  2. (The sum of) banks’ balance sheet expansions, where bank loans create deposits

The asset side of both of the above are traded around as “money”.

The national government creates the numeraire for the system (the “Dollar” in the US, the “Pound” in the UK etc.) and in addition to spending directly in to the economy in that numeraire, the government allows a public/private system (publicly regulated private banking system) to operate with the same numeraire. This creates a single system for the public but in fact arises from two separate but linked balance sheet expansions.

But why do the tokens from either of these balance sheet expansions have and maintain value?

The government maintains the value of its balance sheet tokens by demanding that some of its tokens, once a year, must be paid back to the government. This guarantees that everyone in that nation will accept and value the tokens from the national balance-sheet expansion.

The tokens that arise from the public/private bank balance-sheet expansion maintain their value analogously – by the obligation to repay bank loans.

Together, the obligation to pay taxes and the obligation to repay bank loans maintain the value of a currency. Note that both of these rest on the government/legal system of a nation.

An organized, effective government with a sound legal system that does not use foreign currencies can always maintain the value of its currency. (Hyperinflations are always the result of governments and their legal systems becoming corrupted or destroyed in some way, and never the result of runaway money creation).

What does this mean for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?

Bitcoin is not the result of a balance sheet expansion. There is no inherent obligation for repayment of bitcoin to any government (taxes) or to extinguish private debt (banking system). There is no in-built demand for bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency).

Bitcoin is worth zero dollars (or Yen or Pounds etc).

National currencies will always do two things 1) extinguish tax obligations and 2) extinguish private debt obligations. Even if you have neither, there are always enough people with tax and bank debts that you can be sure that your money will be voraciously sought after by merchants of all types. Unless we are in Mad Max territory, they will give you a loaf of bread for it.

Bitcoin is not part of a balance sheet. It does not inherently extinguish debt of any kind – neither a tax obligation nor a bank debt. Nor do other cryptocurrencies. Once the fad for them subsides, the realization that you can’t pay taxes or repay a debt with them will become evident and their true value of 0 will become evident.

Because they don’t understand money or balance sheets, bitcoin collectors and cryptocurrency creators don’t understand why their tokens are inherently worthless. They won’t understand why, when the fad passes, no one will be willing to take their play tokens for real goods.

The only benefit from the bitcoin fad may be a better understanding of the balance-sheet nature of national economies, and the relationship of this to the real resources of a nation. This will prove to be the real lesson from bitcoin. The sooner it is learned the sooner nations can get on with the real work of using their national balance sheets and good legal environments to improve the real economy.

_______

P.S.  A common refrain is that yes, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are worthless, but Blockchain is really a big deal.

Well, not so much…

The blockchain paradox: Why distributed ledger technologies may do little to transform the economy

Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

As I have said before – blockchain is going to turn out to be the Wankel engine of the finance world. Interesting concept but not that useful in real life, never quite filling a real need.

Check out my new book “1000 Castaways: Fundamentals of Economics,” Aetiology Press. 

A renegade band of Modern Monetary Theorists has overturned mainstream economics in part by emphasizing that there is not one, but two systems of modern money, the “vertical” and the “horizontal.” They conclusively demonstrate how unifying our understanding of these is crucial for grasping modern economics.

“the key to understanding Modern Monetary Theory is this vertical-horizontal relationship”

(Warren Mosler)

1000 Castaways develops Mosler’s statement into a concise, book-length treatment that is accessible to all readers, starting from first principles and, step-by-step, leading the reader up to the complexities of the real world.

Our one thousand castaways develop, before our eyes, a “perfect” economy, and demonstrate how the horizontal and vertical systems of money naturally emerge from even more fundamental organizational needs of a large society.

1000 Castaways then contrasts the Island’s “economics” with real-world “economics,” in an enlightening illustration of the last few steps in our common economic understanding that we must take in order to run our modern economies in a way that maximizes wellbeing.

Paperback $9.99 Kindle $2.99 Hardback $21.99 Also available as Barnes and Noble Nook, Kobo etc.

Mercantilism – Rejected by both Left & Right: Part II of Mercantilism and the Rise of the West

Posted on by under Economic History

Mercantilism – Rejected by both the Left and the Right

Mercantilism has received very little attention in the twentieth century,[1] and much of the attention it has received has often used mercantilism as a straw-man against which to present other theories in a good light, with numerous misrepresentations often intentionally introduced. This has led to widespread acceptance of simplistic and erroneous views of mercantilism which in turn still further decreases attention to the subject. Paul Rich states that ‘There are few better examples of trying to lend misleading coherence to complex matters than the way in which mercantilism has been dismissed as a spent philosophy’ (Rich 2006, 183).[2]

Mercantilism seems to have been ignored and even disparaged by both the right and the left, accounting for the scant attention paid to the historical impact of these policies in the twentieth century. The left, while embracing the state’s role in development, rejects the capitalist and ‘internalist’ (and often, viewed as triumphalist) view of Europe as a region developing economically largely due to internal institutional development stimulated by its own internal dynamics of intra-state competition and commerce.[3] Conversely, the right, while embracing the emphasis of mercantilism on a ‘fragmented and thus competitive’ internalist model of European expansion, cannot embrace mercantilism because of its emphasis on the role of the state in development. Thus mercantilism has found little support or attention in the twentieth century from any side.[4]

Consequently, there are a number of widespread misunderstandings concerning mercantilist policies. One is that mercantilism is simply a naïve focus on the balance of trade (or worse still, as an even more simplistic focus on the stock of precious metals, properly called ‘bullionism’). The mercantilist approach to trade and development was in practice much more nuanced, based on views of ‘good’ trade and ‘bad’ trade. Good trade is trade that increases the amount of increasing returns activities (in that time especially, essentially manufacturing) within a country’s borders; bad trade is trade that increases a reliance on raw materials exports (see Reinert 1998). Crucially, much confusion also arises because of the difference in the significance of arguments concerning trade originating in the context of the country by far more industrialized (Great Britain, and later, also the US) and the significance of those arguments for everyone else: In the real world, the implications of ‘free’ trade turned out to be very different for the world leaders in industrial production than for less industrialized nations. It has seldom been grasped how fundamentally this influenced the interpretation of economic theory in different countries, especially in the English speaking countries vis-à-vis the rest of the world (Reinert 1998).

Mercantilism and the Zero Sum game fallacy

Another misunderstanding concerning mercantilist policies is that they are frequently portrayed as attempting to capture trade and industry due to a naïve belief that these are a ‘zero sum game’ when in reality trade and industrial growth are very much a non-zero sum game, with cooperative free trade increasing the total amount of goods for all. Mercantilists are portrayed, in effect, as believing (in their ignorance of the non-zero sum nature of development) that if considering two countries starting on equal terms, taking one country’s ten percent meant the winner would have sixty percent and the loser be left with forty percent of the pre-existing trade or industry levels, and ignorant of the possibility that with increased trade there may be 500 percent more goods and industry in the future for all to share.

However, in a non-zero sum world strongly marked by agglomerative forces (whatever these may be), mercantilist strategies make more, not less sense than non-competitive policies: that is, taking a rival’s ten percent now might leave the ‘winner’ with the lion’s share of the 500 percent more trade/industry in the future, and the loser with almost none, a more likely outcome in the real world of agglomeration than each ending up with greater equal amounts of growth. Crucially, in a non-zero sum world of increasing returns and agglomeration, mercantilist strategies were especially astute and beneficial, although only, of course, for the ‘winners’.

Based on these observations this work might be described as a ‘geography of mercantilism’ that seeks to understand how mercantilist policies, so intricately associated with both the military and commercial expansion of Europe that subsequently shaped global patterns of development, became spatially ‘centered’, as writers such as Blaut and A.G. Frank often characterize the process, on Europe.

Next Post – An Empirical Approach to the Geography of Mercantilism: Part III of Mercantilism and the Rise of the West

Bibliography 

NOTES

[1] Mokyr, for example, in discussing Heckscher’s (1931) extensive treatment of mercantilism, observes ‘the book seems to have been strangely neglected by economic historians in recent decades. Mercantilism as a major topic in the institutional development of Europe has not yet been taken up by the New Institutional Economics.’ (Mokyr 2003, 1). In a footnote Mokyr notes: ‘Of the forty five references to Heckscher’s work on Mercantilism in the two leading Economic History journals, thirty five were made before 1971, and only four since 1980. Of the thirteen citations in the entire economics and history sections of JSTOR to Heckscher’s work on Mercantilism, only five papers qualify as economic history proper. A recent well-reviewed book (Epstein, 2000), clearly concerned with similar issues, does not even refer to it. (Mokyr 2003, 1). McCusker writes ‘Indeed, by mid-century, some were prepared to deny that mercantilism as an economic doctrine had ever existed’ (McCusker 2000, para. 1) and that after World War II ‘mercantilism was irrelevant. After the demise of the world of nation states, it seemed to some best forgotten and, with it, the doctrine that had served to underpin its foundation. By the middle of the twentieth century more than one writer on the early modern period of Western European history was prepared to deny mercantilism’s very existence. … The most extreme of these writers, D. C. Coleman (1980, p. 791), classed mercantilism with other “non-existent entities.”’. (McCusker 2000, para. 10).

More generally, if all of the JSTOR articles from history, political science, and economics from the entire twentieth century and to the present with any of the words ‘mercantilism’, ‘colbertism’, or ‘cameralism’ in the title are considered, there are only 46 articles, of which only 12 have been published after 1980 (the date of Coleman’s ‘Mercantilism Revisited’), and these are mostly either narrowly focused responses to Ekelund and Tollison’s (1982) public choice interpretation of mercantilism or discussions of modern trade theory as ‘neo mercantilism’.

[2] McCusker, for example, in discussing one of the few modern widely read discussions of mercantilism notes: ‘Unfortunately in their exploration of the subject Ekelund and Tollison offer little more than “poor history,” “circular arguments,” and a disinterest “in what the mercantilist writer actually wrote,” according to Magnusson (p. 50), an evaluation with which I can only agree, sadly’ (McCusker, note 8).

[3] Even in its ‘neo’ form mercantilism is criticized for its association with capitalism from the left. Lovering 1999 sees ‘new-regionalism’ as a form of neo-mercantilism and criticizes it accordingly as ‘instrumentalist’ ‘Hayekian rhetoric’. Simply (mis)applying the word to a description of policy automatically paints the policy in a bad light; e.g. ‘[Texas Governor] Perry’s economic vision is the kind of race-to-the-bottom mercantilism we’ve come to expect from developing nations in the globalized economy…’ (Meyerson 2011. The term is misapplied because capturing particular sectors of increasing returns industry and thus raising the wealth of a region or state was traditionally the goal of mercantilist policies, not reducing living standards to indiscriminately attract sectors that enrich a minority capitalist class).

[4] McCusker makes a similar argument in discussing the reception of Heckscher’s (1931) book on mercantilism:  ‘The book and its subject had less play in the second half of the twentieth century when the worries of the world shifted from a fear of totalitarianism of the right to a fear of totalitarianism of the left. Indeed, by mid-century, some were prepared to deny that mercantilism as an economic doctrine had ever existed’ (McCusker 2000, para. 1)

and

As World War II came and passed, many thought they saw the future in an even newer and now victorious doctrine, socialism. For them Heckscher was even less relevant – or, better put, mercantilism was irrelevant. After the demise of the world of nation states, it seemed to some best forgotten and, with it, the doctrine that had served to underpin its foundation. By the middle of the twentieth century more than one writer on the early modern period of Western European history was prepared to deny mercantilism’s very existence. … The most extreme of these writers, D. C. Coleman (1980, p. 791), classed mercantilism with other “non-existent entities.” It was an invention, conjured up “to prevent the study of history from falling into the abyss of antiquarianism” (7). With hated capitalism under attack from the bastions of academe, mercantilism suffered the even worse fate of being ignored. (McCusker 2000, para. 10).

The State System and Mercantilist Policies: Part I of Mercantilism and the Rise of the West

Posted on by under Economic History

Mercantilist policies are intricately associated with the historical military and commercial expansion of Europe which in turn profoundly shaped global development patterns with effects still felt today. 

It has become common to note the failure of neoclassical economics to explain economic divergence between countries and regions. In recent years this has frequently been attributed to some countries developing or capturing industries with increasing returns; i.e. that the agglomeration effects typical of increasing returns industries are sensitive to slight differences in initial conditions that over time lead to further agglomeration and thus increasing divergence rather than convergence between regions and countries (Romer 1986, Krugman and Venables 1995, Fujita and Thisse 2002).[1]

Just as the lack of short-term convergence among modern economies can be attributed to the capturing of increasing returns-to-scale activities, many believe Europe (and its settler colonies) did this on a long-term, global scale as well, in a global division of labor at the country and world-regional level. In the economic history literature this process is sometimes explained in other language, i.e., that Europe deindustrialized its colonies e.g., in dependency theory in general, and works such as Amin 1976, Forbes and Rimmer 1984, and Alam 2000. This long-term, increasing returns perspective is interesting because it can be seen as (regarding reasons proposed for the ‘great divergence’ in levels of development that economic historians now tell us happened mainly in the last few centuries[2]) merging or at least compatible with both many recent mainstream economic observations related to regional economics, agglomeration, and increasing returns-to-scale activities (‘new’ trade theory) and aspects of important heterodox arguments (Marxist/dependency theories, some Austrian economics, and much evolutionary economics – related to competition, for example).

How, then, did European states rise in the international division of labor? A frequent answer is that European expansion – ‘trading-post’, colonial, and imperial expansion [3] – was a crucial cause for many reasons including through windfall effects on Europe’s place in world trade (emphasized, for example, by Blaut 1993 and Frank 1998), its effects on avoiding material limits to European growth (e.g., Pomeranz 2000) and its influence on European institutional development (e.g., Acemoglu et. al. 2005).

The State System and Mercantilist Policies

This answer, though, only serves to raise another question: Why, then, was Europe so aggressive at and successful in expansion? Perhaps one of the most commonly shared answers, besides the global exchange of diseases favorable to Eurasians, especially in the Americas,[4] is that the European state system and the competition that it fostered both caused the competitive and therefore aggressive expansion and increased the chances it would be successful, as earlier state competition had increased the technological, military, and bureaucratic capability of European states vis-à-vis non-European states. Indeed, of all of the factors viewed as important to European development, Europe’s state system is probably the most widely agreed upon factor: In a recent comprehensive review of the role of the state in ‘the rise of the West’ P.H.H. Vries notes ‘There is hardly a text on the rise of the West in which reference to [the European state system] and its positive effects is not made’ (2002, 68) and goes on to list a wide range of scholars from many political orientations: Arrighi (1994), Baechler (1995), Baechler and Mann (1988), Braudel (1979), Cosandey (1997), Crone (1989), Gellner (1988), Goldstone (1991), Hall (1985), Huang (1999), Jones (1981), Landes (1998), Mann (1986a and 1986b), McNeill (1982), Pomeranz (2000), Powelson (1994), Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986), Sanderson (1995), Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989), Weiss and Hobson (1995), and Wright (2000).

Even scholars critical of arguments that seem to privilege the West or capitalism emphasize the importance of the state system in Europe’s unique development trajectory. For example, Anthony Giddens writes that ‘However much one might distrust the nature of the contrast drawn between Europe and the “despotic” East by Montesquieu and his contemporaries, there is no question that the character of Europe, as a series of socio-political formations, differed over the long term from the imperial societies of Meso-America, the Near and Far East. During the sixteen hundred years or so which succeeded the disintegration of “its” empire, Rome, Europe did not experience the rise of another imperial society in its midst…Europe was a “state system” for the whole of this period’ (Giddens 1981, 183). The fact that these scholars disagree on so many other points related to development yet are in basic agreement concerning the centrality of the European state system to Europe’s unique development trajectory suggests that there is indeed something important about this factor.

All of the above authors argue in part or entirely that:

  • The military technology and capacity of European states (particularly vis-à-vis non-European regions) was enhanced through war or the threat of war. This would become highly relevant once colonization became a competition between European states.
  • The bureaucratic capacity of European states was enhanced through war or the threat of war.
  • Political competition led to economic and territorial competition, exploration, and expansionist policies.
  • State competition (and a large number of states and high degree of trade) increased the chances that early trading-post and colonial (and later imperial) expansion would occur in the first place.

The competitive policies towards technological development, trade and acquisition of raw materials for manufacturing were sometimes ill-defined and erratic, but nevertheless the very real policy among European states starting as early as the 1500s and lasting for centuries (Reinert 1994, 1995, 1998). These policies can broadly be described as (or said to define) mercantilism (and colbertism and cameralism in the French and German traditions, which would also strongly influence Japan, the US, and other nations); as Schmoller describes the mercantilist system: ‘The essence of the system lies not in some doctrine of money, or of the balance of trade; not in tariff barriers, protective duties, or navigation laws; but in something far greater: – namely in the total transformation of society and its organizations, as well as of the state and its institutions, in the replacing of a local and territorial economy by that of the national state’ (Schmoller 1896 from Reinert 2004, 10).

Next Post: “Mercantilism – Rejected by both the Left and the Right: Part II of Mercantilism and the Rise of the West“

Bibliography

NOTES

[1] ‘In technical papers written between 1983 and 1986, Krugman observed that the received wisdom about free trade was substantially wrong…“Instead, trade seems to reflect arbitrary or temporary advantages resulting from economies of scale or shifting leads in close technological races.” In some cases, Krugman added, comparative advantage can be created. By strategically intervening to capture advantage in industries with technological dynamism, nations could produce spillover benefits for their economies….This revisionism was explosive. It came to be known as the “new view” of trade.’  (Kuttner 1996, para. 7-8).

[2] It is now generally accepted that much of the divergence between Europe and other advanced economies occurred since the industrial revolution, with Europe no more or even less developed than much of Asia prior to the industrial revolution. This suggests that the divergence is less due to  ‘internal’ or basic sociocultural differences between world regions but rather to more recent processes inherent in worldwide industrialization. However, arguments have been made that the industrial revolution itself is due to earlier, more innate differences between Europe and other regions; Jones 1981 and 1988, among others, use the language of ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ views of European development.

[3] See Curtin 1989 and 2000 for the important yet often ignored distinctions between stages and types of European expansion.

[4] And – often overlooked – especially unfavorable in Africa, greatly changing both the nature and the timing of African/European interaction compared to other regions (Curtin 1989).

Bibliography, Mercantilism and the Rise of the West

Posted on by under Economic History, The social & human sciences

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2003. Disease and Development in Historical Perspective. Journal of the European Economic Association 1(2-3): 397-405.

Acemoglu, Daron; Johnson, Simon; Robinson, James. 2005. The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth. The American Economic Review 95(3): 546-579. (Previously available as 2002, MIT Department of Economics Working Paper No. 02-43; MIT Sloan Working Paper No. 4269-02).

Alam, M. Shahid. 2000. Poverty from the Wealth of Nations. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Amin, Samir. 1976. Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994 . The long twentieth century. London and New York: Routledge.

Baechler, Jean, John A. Hall, and Michael Mann, eds. 1988 . Europe and the rise of capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Baechler, Jean. 1995 . Le capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard.

Bairoch, Paul. 1993. Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Ballinger, Clint. 2008b. Initial conditions as exogenous actors in spatial explanation, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Geography, Univ. of Cambridge. Available online, http://philpapers.org/rec/BALICA-2

Ballinger, Clint, 2011a, Why inferential statistics are inappropriate for development studies and how the same data can be better used. Working paper, Munich RePEc Archive  http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/29780/

Ballinger, Clint, 2011b, Why geographic factors are necessary in development studies, Working paper, Social Science Research Network SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1791127

Blaut, James M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World.  New York: Guilford Press.

Blaut, James M. 2000. Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford Press.

Bockstette, Valerie, Areendam Chanda and Louis Putterman. 2002. States and Markets: The Advantage of an Early Start. Journal of Economic Growth 7(4): 347-69.

Braudel, Fernand. 1979. Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme XVe-XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Armand Colin.

Coleman, D.C., 1980. “Mercantilism Revisited”, The Historical Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4. (Dec., 1980), pp. 773-791.

Cosandey, David. 1997. Le secret de l’Occident. Du miracle passé au marasme présent. Paris: Arléa.

Crone, Patricia. 1989. Pre-industrial societies. Oxford: Blackwell.

Crosby, Alfred. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Connecticut: Greenwood Press 1972,

Crosby, Alfred. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Curtin, Philip D. 1989. Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Curtin, Philip D. 2000. The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dahl, Robert and Edward Tufte. 1971. Size and Democracy. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Davis, Mike. 2002. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso.

Doll, Christopher N.H., Jan-Peter Muller and Christopher D. Elvidge. 2000. Night-time imagery as a tool for global mapping of socio-economic parameters and greenhouse gas emissions. Ambio 29(3): 159–164.

Forbes D.K. and P. J. Rimmer (eds). 1984. Uneven Development and the Geographic Transfer of Value. Canberra: Australia National University Press.

Fox, Edward Whiting. 1971. History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France. New York: Norton.

Fox, Edward Whiting. 1989. ‘The Argument: Some Reinforcements and Projections’, pp. 331-342 in Eugene D. Genovese and Leonard Hochberg, eds. Geographic Perspectives in History. London: Blackwell.

Fox, Edward Whiting. 1991. The Emergence of the Modern European World. Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell.

Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fujita, Masahisa and Jacques-François Thisse. 2002. Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gallup, J.L., Sachs, J.D., and Mellinger, A.D. 1999. Geography and economic development. International Regional Science Review 22: 179-232. (Also published as 1998 NBER Working Paper No. W6849 and again as Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University, Working Paper no. 1, March.)

Gellner, Ernest. 1988. Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History. London: Collins Harvill.

Gellner, Ernest. 1997. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1981. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. I: Power, Property, and the State. London: Macmillan.

Goldstone, Jack A. 1992. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goudsblom, Johan. 1996. ‘The Formation of Military-Agrarian Regimes’, pp. 49-62  in Johan Goudsblom, Eric Jones and Stephen Mennell, The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilization. Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe.

Hall, John A. 1985. Powers and liberties: The causes and consequences of the rise of the West. Oxford: Blackwell.

Heckscher, Eli, 1936. “Revisions in Economic History: V. Mercantilism”, The Economic History Review, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Nov., 1936), pp. 44-54.

Hoeschele, Wolfgang. 2002. The Wealth of Nations at the Turn of the Millennium: A Classification System Based on the International Division of Labor. Economic Geography 78(2): 221-244.

Huang, Ray. 1999. Broadening the horizons of Chinese history. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe.

Jacobs, Jane. 1969 (1970). The Economy of Cities. New York: Vintage.

Jacobs, Jane. 1984. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House.

Jones, E.L. 1981. The European Miracle. Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jones, E.L. 1988. Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Knack, S. and Keefer, P. 1995. Institutions and economic performance: Cross-country test using alternative measures. Economics and Politics 7: 207–227.

Krugman, Paul. 1999. ‘Was it all in Ohlin?’

Krugman, Paul and Anthony J. Venables. 1995. Globalization and the Inequality of Nations. Quarterly Journal of Economics 110(4): 857-880.

Kuttner, Robert. 1996. ‘Peddling Krugman’. The American Prospect 7(28) September 1-October 1.

Landes, David S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: Norton.

Lewis, Martin W., and Kären E. Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents, A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lovering, John. 1999. Theory Led by Policy: The Inadequacies of the ‘New Regionalism’ (Illustrated from the Case of Wales). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 23(2): 379-395.

Maddison, Angus. 1995.  Monitoring the World Economy: 1820-1992. Paris: OECD.

Maddison, Angus. 2001. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris: OECD.  

Magnusson, Lars. 1994. Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language. Routledge.

Mann, Michael. 1986a. The sources of social power. Vol. I. A history of power from the beginning to 1760 A.D. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mann, Michael. 1986b. The autonomous power of the state; its origins, mechanisms, and results. In States in history, ed. John A. Hall, 109-136 . Oxford; New York, Basil Blackwell.

Masters, William and Jeffrey Sachs, 2001. “Climate and Development.” Presented at the annual meetings of the AEA, New Orleans LA, 7 January 2001.

Masters, Bruce. 1988. The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600-1750. New York: New York University Press.

Masters, William A. and Margaret S. McMillan. 2000. ‘Climate and Scale in Economic Growth’, Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University Working Paper no. 48, June.

Masters, William and Keith Wiebe. 2000. ‘Climate and Agricultural Productivity’. Paper presented at the conference Raising Agricultural Productivity in the Tropics: Biophysical Challenges for Technology and Policy, Center for International Development, HarvardUniversity, October 17.

McCusker, John J. 2000. ‘Review of Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism’. EH.Net Economic History Services, Dec 4 2000. URL: http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/mccusker

McNeill, William H. 1982. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society Since AD 1000. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mellinger, Andrew D., Jeffrey D. Sachs and John L. Gallup. 1999. Climate, Water Navigability, and Economic Development, Center for International Development CID at Harvard University Working Paper no. 24, September.

Meyerson, Harold. 2011. ‘The sad facts behind Rick Perry’s Texas miracle’, The Washington Post. August 17.

Midlarsky Manus I. 1995. Environmental Influences on Democracy: Aridity, Warfare, and a Reversal of the Causal Arrow. The Journal of Conflict Resolution 39(2):  224-262.

Mokyr, Joel. 2003. ‘Mercantilism, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution’. Paper presented to the conference in honor of Eli F. Heckscher, Stockholm, May 2003.

NASA . 2001. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg accessed November, 2007.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Powelson, John P. 1994. Centuries of economic endeavor: Parallel paths in Japan and Europe and their contrast with the third world. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Rappaport, Jordan and Jeffrey D. Sachs. 2001. ‘The U.S. as a Coastal Nation’, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and Center for International Development (CID) at HarvardUniversity, Working Paper, July.

Reinert, Eric S. 1994. ‘Catching-up from way behind – A Third World perspective on First World history’ in Fagerberg, Jan, Bart Verspagen and Nick von Tunzelmann (eds.) The Dynamics of Technology, Trade, and Growth, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, pp. 168-197.

Reinert, Eric S. 2004. How Rich Nations got Rich: Essays in the History of Economic Policy. Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Working Paper no. 2004/01.

Reinert, Erik S. 1995. Competitiveness and its Predecessors – a 500 year Cross-National Perspective. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 6: 23-42.

Reinert, Erik S. 1996. ‘The Role of Technology in the Creation of Rich Nations and Poor Nations: Underdevelopment in a Schumpeterian System’, in Rich Nations-Poor Nations, The Long Run Perspective. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, pp. 161-188.

Reinert, Erik S. 1998. ‘Raw Materials in the History of Economic Policy: Or Why List (the Protectionist) and Cobden (the Free Trader) Both Agreed on Free Trade in Corn’, pp. 275-300 in Gary Cook, ed. The Economics and Politics of Free Trade; Freedom and Trade: Volume II. London: Routledge, pp. 275-300.

Rich, Paul. 2006. ‘Mercantilism and the Future: The Future Lives of an Old Philosophy’ pp. 183-194 in Handbook of Organization Theory and Management: The Philosophical Approach, Thomas Dexter Lynch and Peter L. Cruise. Boca Raton, Fl.: CRC Press (Taylor and Francis).

Robbins, Paul. 2003. Networks and Knowledge Systems: An Alternative to “Race or Place”. Antipode 35(4): 818-822.

Romer, Paul M. 1986. Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth. The Journal of Political Economy 94(5):1002-1037

Rosenberg, Nathan, and Luther E. Birdzell. 1986. How the West grew rich: the economic transformation of the industrial world. New York: Basic Books.

Sachs, Jeffrey D. 1997. ‘Geography and Economic Transition’, Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University Working Paper, November.

Sanderson, Stephen K. 1995. Social transformations: A general theory of historical development. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sluyter, Andrew. 2003. Neo-environmental determinism, intellectual damage control, and nature/society science. Antipode 35(4): 813-817.

Sowell, Thomas. 1996. Migrations and Cultures: A World View. New York: Basic Books.

Sowell, Thomas. 1998. Conquests and Cultures: An International History. New York: Basic Books.

Spruyt, Hendrik. 1994. The sovereign state and its competitors. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stock, Robert. 1995. Africa South of the Sahara: A Geographical Interpretation.New York: Guilford.

Sutton, Paul C. and Robert Costanza. 2002. Global estimates of market and non-market values derived from nighttime satellite imagery, land cover, and ecosystem service valuation. Ecological Economics 41: 509–527.

Taagepera, Rein. 1978. Size and duration of empires: Systematics of size. Social Science  Research 7: 108-127.

Tilly Charles. 1990. Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990-1992. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ekelund, Robert and Robert Tollison. 1982. Mercantilism as a Rent Seeking Society. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

Vries, P. H. H. 2002. Governing Growth: A Comparative Analysis of the Role of the State in the Rise of the West. Journal of World History 13(1): 67-138.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York/London: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1980. The Modern World-System, vol. II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750. New York: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. The Modern World-System, vol. III: The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840’s. San Diego: Academic Press.

Weiss, Linda, and John M. Hobson. 1995. States and economic development. Cambridge: Polity.

Williamson, Jeffrey G. 2002. ‘Winners and Losers over Two Centuries of Globalization’. Paper prepared for the 2002 WIDER Annual Lecture, Copenhagen, September 5.

Wright, Robert. 2000. Nonzero: The logic of human destiny. New York: Pantheon.

 

Some other works that didn’t make it into this paper but may be of interest:

State Formation, Geography, and a Gentleman’s Education, Jonathan M. Smith, Geographical Review, Vol. 86, No. 1. (Jan., 1996), pp. 91-100.

The Age of Mercantilism: An Interpretation of the American Political Economy, 1763 to 1828, William Appleman Williams, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 15, No. 4. (Oct., 1958), pp. 419-437.

Schachtian Mercantilist, I. Momtchiloff, The Journal of Industrial Economics, Vol. 2, No. 3. (Aug., 1954), pp. 165-173.

The Other Face of Mercantilism, Charles Wilson, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Ser., Vol. 9. (1959), pp. 81-101.

The Discoveries and Mercantilism: An Essay in History and Theory, H. Dales, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne d’Economique et de Science politique, Vol. 21, No. 2. (May, 1955), pp. 141-153.

**’Mercantilism’: Some Vicissitudes of an Idea, Charles Wilson, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 2. (1957), pp. 181-188.

The Political Background to English Mercantilism, 1695-1700, F. Kearney, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 3. (1959), pp. 484-496.

The Role of Merchant Wholesalers in Industrial Agglomeration Formation, Amy Glasmeier, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 80, No. 3. (Sep., 1990), pp. 394-417.

State Power and the Structure of International Trade, Stephen D. Krasner, World Politics, Vol. 28, No. 3. (Apr., 1976), pp. 317-347.

The Idea of a Mercantile State, V. Judges, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Ser., Vol. 21. (1939), pp. 41-69.

Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Jacob Viner, World Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Oct., 1948), pp. 1-29.

Spanish Mercantilism: A Hardy Perennial, Robert S. Smith, Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1. (Jul., 1971), pp. 1-11.

The Concept of Bureaucracy in Cameralism, Hubert C. Johnson, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3. (Sep., 1964), pp. 378-402.

Cameralism and the Science of Government, Keith Tribe, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 56, No. 2. (Jun., 1984), pp. 263-284.

What is Dry Exchange? A Contribution to the Study of English Mercantilism, Raymond de Roover, The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 52, No. 3. (Sep., 1944), pp. 250-266.

Heckscher on Mercantilism, Herbert Heaton, The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 45, No. 3. (Jun., 1937), pp. 370-393.

Heckscher, Mercantilism, F. Haley, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 50, No. 2. (Feb., 1936), pp. 347-354.

Economic Theory and Economic History in Great Britain, 1650-1776, Review author[s]: Mark Blaug, Past and Present, No. 28. (Jul., 1964), pp. 111-116.

La fortune du colbertisme: Etat et industrie dans la France des lumieres, Philippe Minard, Review author[s]: Michael Sonenscher, The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3. (Jun., 2000), p. 1019.

La fortune du colbertisme: État et industrie dans la France des Lumières, Philippe Minard, Review author[s]: John Shovlin, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 72, No. 1, New Work on the Old Regime and the French Revolution: A Special Issue in Honor of Francois Furet. (Mar., 2000), pp. 223-225

Skip to toolbar