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The volume explores late medieval market mechanisms and associated institutional, fiscal and monetary, organizational, decision-making, legal and ethical issues, as well as selected aspects of production, consumption and market integration. The essays span a variety of local, regional, and long-distance markets and networks.

Assembled in honour of John H. A. Munro (University of Toronto), the volume groups nineteen original studies by a diversified panel of scholars. The essays explore late medieval market mechanisms and associated institutional, fiscal and monetary, organizational, decision-making, legal and ethical issues, as well as various aspects of production, consumption and market integration. The geographical scope stretches from North-Western and Central Europe to North and West Africa, and the individual contributions deal with a variety of local, regional, and long-distance markets and networks. The mix of approaches, cutting-edge archival research, and presentations of current projects addresses the interests of scholars in diverse fields, from economic to social and institutional history. The volume offers a full bibliography of John H. A. Munro's works.

The volume explores late medieval market mechanisms and associated institutional, fiscal and monetary, organizational, decision-making, legal and ethical issues, as well as selected aspects of production, consumption and market integration. The essays span a variety of local, regional, and long-distance markets and networks.

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West.

Cities of Commerce develops a model of institutional change in European commerce based on urban rivalry. Cities continuously competed with each other by adapting commercial, legal, and financial institutions to the evolving needs of merchants. Oscar Gelderblom traces the successive rise of Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to commercial primacy between 1250 and 1650, showing how dominant cities feared being displaced by challengers while lesser cities sought to keep up by cultivating policies favorable to trade. He argues that it was this competitive urban network that promoted open-access institutions in the Low Countries, and emphasizes the central role played by the urban power holders--the magistrates--in fostering these inclusive institutional arrangements. Gelderblom describes how the city fathers resisted the predatory or reckless actions of their territorial rulers, and how their nonrestrictive approach to commercial life succeeded in attracting merchants from all over Europe. Cities of Commerce intervenes in an important debate on the growth of trade in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Challenging influential theories that attribute this commercial expansion to the political strength of merchants, this book demonstrates how urban rivalry fostered the creation of open-access institutions in international trade.

Defense establishments and the armed forces they organize, train, equip, and deploy depend upon the security of capital and capital flows, mechanisms that have become increasingly globalized. Military capabilities are thus closely tied not only to the size of the economic base from which they are drawn, but also to the viability of global convertibility and exchange arrangements. Although the general public has a stake in these economic matters, the interests and interpretive understandings held by policy elites matter most—in particular those among the owners or managers of capital who focus on international finance and the international monetary regimes that sustain global commerce and their capital positions. In The Dollar and National Security, Paul Viotti explores the links between global capital flows, these policy elites, and national security. After establishing the historical link between currency, gold, and security, he continues the monetary-security story by examining the instrumental role the dollar has played in American economic and national security over the past seven decades. He reveals how perceived individual and collective interests are the key drivers toward building the kind of durable consensus necessary to sustain the external financing of American foreign and national security policy, and addresses the future implications for national security as decision-makers in the BRICs and other countries position themselves to assume an even larger policy presence in global commercial, monetary, and security matters.

Is the European crisis over? By no means, according to economist and journalist Carlo Bastasin. In fact, the problems that developed between 2008 and 2011 -described in the first edition of Saving Europe - have grown more insidious. The crisis originated when national governments failed to act openly and responsibly, putting in jeopardy not only their own countries but also the well-being of future generations and foreign taxpayers. This failure continued even after the crisis became evident; leaders did not explain clearly to their citizens why the financial crisis had occurred and what was being done about it. From a crisis of politics, it has turned into an outright crisis of European democracy, and a warning for the future of globalization. Carlo Bastasin paints a unique, gripping picture of the events, people, and ideas behind the scenes of the European crisis. From the historic roots to the most recent developments, the author unveils an engrossing chronicle of high drama and individual personalities on the world stage, including presidents, prime ministers, and central bankers. Saving Europe is the definitive book about the financial crisis - and the history as well as the future of Europe's economic and political union. Saving Europe is the definitive book about the financial crisis - and the history as well as the future of Europe's economic and political union. Praise for the first edition of Saving Europe: Bastasin does an admirable job in analysing the euro-zone's economic challenges and is a sure-footed guide through the seemingly endless European Union summit meetings that were supposed to resolve them. He also has an eye for the human detail that makes his sad account of institutional muddle surprisingly compelling. (Financial Times). Bastasin's book is worth reading for its detailed political narrative of the eurozone crisis to date, focusing on the interaction among decision-makers in Europe's capitals . (Foreign Affairs). A reconstruction that may be considered definitive. Revelations on the European negotiations are written with talent and go hand in hand with no-esoteric economic analysis and with the right amount of realism to reach the political substance

How did the economy become bound up with faith in infinite wealth creation and obsessive consumption? Drawing on the economic writings of eighteenth-century French theologians, historian Charly Coleman uncovers the surprising influence of the Catholic Church on the development of capitalism. Even during the Enlightenment, a sense of the miraculous did not wither under the cold light of calculation. Scarcity, long regarded as the inescapable fate of a fallen world, gradually gave way to a new belief in heavenly as well as worldly affluence. Animating this spiritual imperative of the French economy was a distinctly Catholic ethic that—in contrast to Weber's famous \"Protestant ethic\"—privileged the marvelous over the mundane, consumption over production, and the pleasures of enjoyment over the rigors of delayed gratification. By viewing money, luxury, and debt through the lens of sacramental theory, Coleman demonstrates that the modern economy casts far beyond rational action and disenchanted designs, and in ways that we have yet to apprehend fully.

What explains Eurozone member-states' divergent exposure to Europe's sovereign debt crisis? Deviating from current fiscal and financial views,From Convergence to Crisisfocuses on labor markets in a narrative that distinguishes the winners from the losers in the euro crisis. Alison Johnston argues that Europe's monetary union was structured in a way that advantaged the corporatist labor markets of its northern economies in external trade and financial lending. Northern Europe's distinct economic advantage lay not with its fiscal capabilities, which were not that different from those of southern Eurozone countries, but with its wage-setting institutions. Through highly coordinated collective bargaining, the euro North persistently undercut the inflation performance of southern trading partners, destining them to a perpetual cycle of competitive decline and external borrowing. While northern Europe's corporatist labor markets were always low inflation performers, monetary union ultimately made their wage-setting institutions toxic for the South. The euro's institutional predecessor, the European Monetary System, included economic and institutional mechanisms that facilitated macroeconomic adjustment and convergence between the common currency's corporatist and noncorporatist economies. Combining cross-national statistical analysis with detailed qualitative case studies of Denmark, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain, Johnston reveals that monetary union's removal of these mechanisms allowed external imbalances between these two blocs to grow unchecked, underpinning the crisis in which Europe currently finds itself. Rather than achieving the EU's goal of an ever-closer union, the common currency produced a monetary environment that destabilized the economic integration of its diverse labor markets.

This book, written on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, addresses three questions that relate to recession, recovery, and reform, respectively, in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) transition countries. Did the transition from a command to a market economy and the period when it took place, plant the seeds of vulnerability that made transition countries (the region excluding Turkey) more prone to crisis than developing countries generally? Did choices made on the road from plan to market shape the ability of affected countries to recover from the crisis? What structural reforms do transition countries need to undertake to address the most binding constraints to growth in a world where financial markets have become more discriminating and where capital flows to transition and developing countries are likely to be considerably lower than before the crisis? This report is structured as follows: chapter one of the book analyses how countries fell into recession and crisis, why not all of them were equally affected, and whether different policies could have positioned them better to face the crisis. Chapter two discusses rescue and stabilization and the role of international collective action. The next two chapters focus on policies for recovery, chapter three on restructuring bank, corporate and household debt and chapter four on scaling up social safety nets. Chapters five and six focus on reform, examining the binding constraints to growth and the policy agenda in the most important sectors identified by that analysis.