Oct. 25. Trade and the Industrious Revolution:
Avner Greif (1989), "Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders," Journal of Economic History 49:4 (December), pp. 857-882 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28198912%2949%3A4%3C857%3ARACIMT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
- How is "trade without law" possible?
- How much "trade without law" can there be?
- What would Ronald Coase say about this situation?
- Are game-theoretic models of these kinds of interactions adequate?
- What if you have no insular, despised ethnic group around?
J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1993), "Princes and Merchants: City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Law and Economics 36:5 (Oct), pp. 671-702 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000638.html.
- Why isn't monarchy good enough?
- Hobbes called it "Leviathan"
- Mancur Olson called it a "stationary bandit"
- Why do DeLong and Shleifer say that "Leviathan" alone is insufficient?
- How strong is DLS's empirical evidence, really?
- Why should "merchants" be different from "princes"?
- The peculiar status of the European city...
- Why so few "merchants" elsewhere in the early-modern world?
- China
- India
- Middle East (Ibn Khaldun)
Jan de Vries (1994), "The Industrious Revolution and the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Economic History 54:2 (June), pp. 249-70 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28199406%2954%3A2%3C249%3ATIRATI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8
- What, exactly, changes to make the "industrious revolution" possible?
- What did peasants do in the evening before the "industrious revolution"?
- What did they do afterwards?
- How large can these effects plausibly be?
- What is an "entre-preneur"?
Adam Smith (1776), The Wealth of Nations, Book I and Book V http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWNtoc.html
- The literature of "political oeconomy"
- "The system of natural liberty" as a game-changing insight
- How reliant is Book V on Book I?
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