From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources. This universal truth unites three bodies of thought--economics, evolution, and history--that have developed largely in mutual isolation. Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics, and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems--competition, cooperation, adaptation, and feedback--govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns (...) in both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle.Using a wealth of examples of evolutionary innovations, Vermeij argues that evolution and economics are one. Powerful consumers and producers exercise disproportionate controls on the characteristics, activities, and distribution of all life forms. Competition-driven demand by consumers, when coupled with supply-side conditions permitting economic growth, leads to adaptation and escalation among organisms. Although disruptions in production halt or reverse these processes temporarily, they amplify escalation in the long run to produce trends in all economic systems toward greater power, higher production rates, and a wider reach for economic systems and their strongest members.Despite our unprecedented power to shape our surroundings, we humans are subject to all the economic principles and historical trends that emerged at life's origin more than 3 billion years ago. Engagingly written, brilliantly argued, and sweeping in scope, Nature: An Economic History shows that the human institutions most likely to preserve opportunity and adaptability are, after all, built like successful living things. (shrink)

A growing literature on scholarly and practical approaches to conservation and development uses a livelihood approach to understand rural peoples’ diverse assets and activities, especially as they serve to minimize vulnerability to economic and ecological shocks. In recent years, the suite of potential assets available to rural households has been theorized as human, natural, physical, social, and cultural capitals and includes the context in which they are used. Here we explore Wounaan livelihood strategies and how they articulate with the (...) dynamic political economic history of eastern Panama. Known in Panama as forest dependent swiddeners, semi-structured interviews and participant observation revealed Wounaan’s increasing reliance on fishing, artisanship, and ecotourism in their income profiles. While these income sources are linked to decreasing land availability and increasing market opportunities, we address the role of cultural beliefs and values in Wounaan negotiation of their income strategies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this polemical book, Francesco Boldizzoni argues that economic history is so moribund as to require resurrection. He maintains that economic history has been converted into a subfield of economics and has embraced the antihistorical and a priori intellectual style of mainstream economics departments: it has, in effect, ceased to be a form of history. Boldizzoni hopes to force a recognition of contemporary economic history's bankruptcy and to show the way toward a revitalization.He (...) criticizes both economic history as retrospective econometrics, as in the work of Robert Fogel, and economic history as a branch of the new institutional economics, as in the work of Douglas North. Boldizzoni suggests that economic history should return to the sort of research and models that prevailed earlier in its own history—models based on induction from observed economic life rather than on deduction from the theories of contemporary microeconomics. He particularly singles out the work of Witold Kula, Moses Finley, and the Annales historians for emulation, but also praises the perspectives of economic sociology and economic anthropology.Boldizzoni's call for a return to a more inductive form of economic history is welcome, and his discussions of his heroes should remind us that economic history was once a vibrant and creative part of the history profession. But the book's advice is more useful for historians working on premodern than on modern economic life. The claim that self‐governing markets and interest‐maximizing individual actors are pure figments of economists' imaginations seems far less certain for recent than for premodern times. And his insistence that each society has its own distinct form of economic life that must be discovered inductively leaves unconceptualized the world‐spanning forces of capitalist development that increasingly shape societies everywhere. Boldizzoni's critique and his positive suggestions are certainly valuable, but he by no means supplies a sufficient recipe for economic history's resurrection as a vibrant field. (shrink)

This paper attempts to quantify the development of the key monetary values and changes in monetary trust that occurred during Roman times under ever-increasing prices. To track those developments, the paper introduces a minimal-parameter model that builds on available numismatic data relating to the Roman landmark coinages and on papyrological findings. The modelling produces a series of graphs which clearly signal the occurrence of a later crisis of confidence. It is argued that the monetary measures typically taken by the Roman (...) authorities actually fostered a crisis of confidence, and even made it inevitable. (shrink)

This is a slightly longer version of an entry prepared for the 2nd edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Steven Durlauf and Lawrence Blume (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming). Since the New Palgrave does not include acknowledgments, I should use this chance to thank Roger Backhouse, Philippe Fontaine, Daniel Kahneman, Kyu Sang Lee, Ivan Moscati, and Vernon Smith for their help and suggestions in preparing this paper.

We need a few words on the economic system and structure of the country before the sea change brought about by French colonialists could be fully appreciated in terms of economic performance and social context. Generally speaking, until early Xth century, Vietnam–with many name variants adopted by various feudalist kings–had been most of the time under the Chinese domination, approximately 1053 years.

The following is a short introduction to this special issue, which builds on and significantly extends and updates the research published recently in the Iwanami Series on Japanese economic history. First, we offer a modern interpretation of four institutional elements that are particularly important for understanding the growth path of the Japanese economy. These are (a) ownership; (b) regulation of factor markets; (c) labor mobility and (d) the judiciary. These four elements properly clarify the incentive structure behind (...) class='Hi'>economic institutions. We then briefly explain how the four articles in this special issue—two at the macro level providing updated estimates of long-run rates of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) and total factor productivity (TFP), and two at the micro level examining institutional changes in specific markets—build on this unified framework, and deepen our understanding of Japanese economic history. (shrink)

In this volume, Charles Kindleberger makes a powerful case against the idea that any one model could be used to unlock the basic secret of economic history. It is essentially an exercise in methodology, addressed to economists and economic historians alike. He argues that too many economists discover a relationship or a uniformity in economic behaviour, develop a model, and use it to explain more than it is capable of, including, on occasion, all economic behaviour. (...) These lectures discuss four 'laws' in economics to show how uniformities can illuminate economic history in particular aspects. They illustrate the view that the economist or economic historian seeking to test analysis against historical data should have a variety of different models, and not just one. The implication is that however scientific and technical the tools, choosing them carefully to fit particular circumstances is itself an art. (shrink)

O'Brien provides a critical assessment of Ernest Mandel's 1975 monograph Late Capitalism. In so doing, he offers a historical narrative that puts into question Mandel's framing of 'waves' of capitalist development as a process of capital accumulation that was dependent upon uneven development in the Third World. O'Brien starts by problematising Mandel's argument that an initial concentration of money, capital and bullion in the hands of Europeans explains combined and uneven development. He goes on to demonstrate that Mandel's notion of (...) imperialism as a necessary conduit for the flow of surplus capital from industrialising Europe does not stand up to the historical evidence. In fact, O'Brien maintains an alternative thesis, namely that these marginalised regions were insuffciently penetrated by European capital. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates institution reconstructing critique—the central methodological strategy employed by Axel Honneth in his latest book Freedom’s Right designed to articulate and justify the normative standards employed by a critical theory of the present. It begins by considering, at a general level, the promises and limits of three ideal-typical normative methodologies of social critique: first principles critique, intuition refining critique, and institution reconstructing critique. It then turns to the details of Honneth’s history and diagnosis of market spheres (...) of society as one key example of institution reconstruction critique. This leads to a consideration of some challenges facing this kind of critique, paying particular attention to problems posed by alternative reconstructions of the same data. It argues, in particular, that there is a troubling indeterminacy in this reconstruction, since alternative teleologies yield substantively different normative analyses of capitalism, and hence substantively different social critiques. In conclusion, the paper suggests some methodological remedies which might need to be adopted in order to make good on the promise of institution reconstructing critique while avoiding some of its most challenging problems. (shrink)

This encyclopedia is the first of its kind in bringing together philosophy and the social sciences. It is not only about the philosophy of the social sciences but, going beyond that, it is also about the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. The subject of this encyclopedia is purposefully multi- and inter-disciplinary. Knowledge boundaries are both delineated and crossed over. The goal is to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and to mark out (...) a detailed picture of how the two are interrelated: interwoven at certain times but also differentiated and contrasted at others. The Entries cover topics of central significance but also those that are both controversial and on the cutting-edge, underlining the unique mark of this Encyclopedia: the interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences, especially as it is found in fresh ideas and unprecedented hybrid disciplinary areas. The Encyclopedia serves a further dual purpose: it contributes to the renewal of the philosophy of the social sciences and helps to promote novel modes of thinking about some of its classic problems. (shrink)

This encyclopedia is the first of its kind in bringing together philosophy and the social sciences. It is not only about the philosophy of the social sciences but, going beyond that, it is also about the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. The subject of this encyclopedia is purposefully multi- and inter-disciplinary. Knowledge boundaries are both delineated and crossed over. The goal is to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and to mark out (...) a detailed picture of how the two are interrelated: interwoven at certain times but also differentiated and contrasted at others. The Entries cover topics of central significance but also those that are both controversial and on the cutting-edge, underlining the unique mark of this Encyclopedia: the interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences, especially as it is found in fresh ideas and unprecedented hybrid disciplinary areas. The Encyclopedia serves a further dual purpose: it contributes to the renewal of the philosophy of the social sciences and helps to promote novel modes of thinking about some of its classic problems. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research is frequently viewed as an important component of the research landscape through its innovative ability to integrate knowledge from different areas. However, support for interdisciplinary research is often strategic rhetoric, with policy-makers and universities frequently adopting practices that favour disciplinary performance. We argue that disciplinary and interdisciplinary research are complementary, and we develop a simple framework that demonstrates this for a semi-permanent interdisciplinary research field. We argue that the presence of communicating infrastructures fosters communication and integration between disciplines (...) and the interdisciplinary research field to generate innovative knowledge. We apply this to the experience of economic history in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century to demonstrate the life cycle of a semi-permanent interdisciplinary research field. (shrink)

In the development of Roman Catholic social thought from the teachings of the scholastics to the modern social encyclicals, changes in normative economics reflect the transformation of an economic terrain from its feudal roots to the modern industrial economy. The preeminence accorded by the modern market to the allocative over the distributive function of price broke the convenient convergence of commutative and distributive justice in scholastic just price theory. Furthermore, the loss of custom, law, and usage in defining the (...) boundaries of economic behavior led to a depersonalization of economic relationships that had previously provided effective informal means of protecting individual well-being. Hence, recent economic ethics has had to look for nonprice, nonmarket mechanisms for distributive justice. This is reflected, for example, in the shift in attitude from the medieval antipathy toward unions to the contemporary defense of organized labor on moral grounds. (shrink)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Where is rapid economic growth taking us? Why has its spread throughout the world been so limited? What are the causes of the great twentieth century advance in life expectancy? Of the revolution in childbearing that is bringing fertility worldwide to near replacement levels? Have free markets been the source of human improvement? Economics provides a start on these questions, but only a start, argues economist Richard A. Easterlin. To answer them calls for merging economics with concepts and data (...) from other social sciences, and with quantitative and qualitative history. Easterlin demonstrates this approach in seeking answers to these and other questions about world or American experience in the last two centuries, drawing on economics, demography, sociology, history, and psychology. The opening chapter gives an autobiographical account of the evolution of this approach, and why Easterlin is a 'reluctant economist'. (shrink)

In this essay, I use a general argument about the evidential role of data in ongoing inquiry to show that it is fruitful for economic historians and historians of economics to collaborate more frequently. The shared aim of this collaboration should be to learn from past economic experience in order to improve the cutting edge of economic theory. Along the way, I attack a too rigorous distinction between the history of economics and economic history. (...) By drawing on the history of physics, I argue that the history of a discipline can be a source of important evidence in ongoing inquiry. My argument relies on the claim that it is a constitutive element of science that evidence is never discarded forever and is thus historical in nature. In the final section, I offer a case study by explaining a research proposal that turns on a long-running data-set Babylonian whole-sale prices of six commodities noted in pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic times. To motivate my reading of this data-set, I critically discuss Aristotle's successful attempt to distinguish between astrology and political economy. (shrink)

In the first comprehensive and full-length study of the English historical economists, Gerard Koot traces their revolt against the theory, policy recommendations and academic dominance of classical and neoclassical economics in Britain between 1870 and 1926. English Historical Economics, 1870–1926 shows how these historical critics challenged the deductive method and mechanistic assumptions of the economic orthodoxy, developing an historical and inductive method for economic studies and laying the foundation for the professional study of economic history. The (...) author examines the effect of this new methodology upon English politics, discussing the intellectual framework that the historical economists provided for the conservative attack on laissez-faire philosophy in links between such larger social, economic, political and intellectual controversies and the origin and growth of English historical economics. (shrink)

This essay examines the experience of rewriting historical narratives from a world-system perspective, drawing on the author's attempt to construct an integrated image of the world economy in the thirteenth century. Searching for an intermediate epistemological path between unanchored postmodern hermeneutics and overconfident positivism, the author argues that three apparent deviations from the "ideals of positivist social science," which she ironically labels eccentricity, ideology, and idiosyncrasy, can yield significant "remakings" of world history. Eccentricity, namely, recognizing perspectives other than those (...) that conventionally view the world through the eyes of the West, can help historians to escape from ethnocentrism or Eurocentrism. Ideology, more conventionally called theory, is essential if historians are to select and integrate new material. And idiosyncrasy in the interests and backgrounds of historians can often be the source of the re-vision so essential for challenging earlier historical narratives. The author alludes to parallels with ethnographic research methods and cautions against substituting these three aids to research for rigorous attention to empirical sources and "the real world.". (shrink)

The literature of comparative economics as well as economic history is replete with references to productivity differences as reflecting relative efficiency in production. In socialist economics, for example, the longevity of the relative-productivity/relative-efficiency theme is apparent from Abram Bergson's early survey where, commenting on a productivity debate that had already been going on for over twenty years, he identified “the only issue outstanding” as the question “which is more efficient, socialism or capitalism?” The issue has continued to be (...) addressed vigorously since then, and it is still outstanding. Again, in European economic history, John Nye recently pointed out that relative efficiency as reflected in relative productivity has been part and parcel of the postwar debate on French industrialization: the view that less productive and, therefore, “inefficient” family firms led to French “backwardness” in production. (shrink)