New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy (eBook)

Robert Fredona is an Associated Fellow of the Centre for Evolution of Global Business and Institutions at the York Management School, UK. A scholar of Medieval and early modern legal, political, business, and economic history, he has previously taught at Stanford and the University of California at Santa Barbara, as well as been Medici Fellow at Harvard Business School and a visiting scholar in Harvard University’s Department of History, USA. Sophus A. Reinert is Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School, USA. A student of political economy, he works on the long histories of capitalism, globalization, development, and business-government relations from the Renaissance to today’s emerging markets.

Contents 5
Editors and Contributors 8
Introduction: History and Political Economy 10
Genoa, Liguria, and the Regional Development of Medieval Public Debt 32
What Were the Compere? 34
Communal Debt, Regional Subjects, Taxation, and Membership 39
Fiscal Change and Regional Dynamics 48
Angelo degli Ubaldi and the Gulf of the Venetians: Custom, Commerce, and the Control of the Sea Before Grotius 60
Capitalism and the Special Economic Zone, 1590–2014 105
Regional Competition and the Free Port System of Early Modern Italy 107
Administrative Relimitation and Contemporary Capitalism 113
Special Zones, Special Interests 121
Theatrum Œconomicum: Anders Berch and the Dramatization of the Swedish Improvement Discourse 133
Introduction 133
The Swedish Improvement Discourse 135
Anders Berch 137
Introduction to General Householding 140
Theatrum Œconomicum 146
Conclusion 153
Gulliver’s Travels, Party Politics, and Empire 161
I 164
II 167
III 170
IV 176
V 181
VI 186
Commerce, not Conquest: Political Economic Thought in the French Indies Company, 1719–1769 200
Ideological Foundations: John Law’s Geopolitics 205
Law’s Ideological Legacy 210
The Geopolitics of the Compagnie des Indes 214
Commerce and Conquest in the Final Years of the Company 219
Conclusion: The Compagnie des Indes in the History of Political Economy 223
The Economics of the Antipodes: French Naval Exploration, Trade, and Empire in the Eighteenth Century 232
Antipodean Economics: The Two Models 235
Free Trade or Aggression? Bougainville and Lapérouse in Asia 240
An Export Colony or a Subsistence Colony? Poivre and Expeditions to the South Seas 245
Conclusion 254
A “Surreptitious Introduction”: Opium Smuggling and Colonial State Formation in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal and Burma 261
Imperial Opium and Excise Taxation 264
What Causes Contraband (in Bengal) 268
What Causes Contraband (in Burma) 270
A Place in the Sun: Rethinking the Political Economy of German Overseas Expansion and Navalism Before the Great War 281
The Political Economy of Weltpolitik Around 1900 284
Lessons from Venezuela and the Philippines 289
Farmers and Frontiers 293
Hamilton, List and the Heritage of “Whig” Political Economy 296
Conclusion 306
Wesley Mitchell’s Business Cycles After 100 Years 317
Mitchell 320
Business Cycles 322
The Term “Business Cycles” 326
Economists and Statisticians 329
Entrepreneurs and Forecasters 332
Politicians 336
Conclusion 338
On a Certain Blindness in Economic Theory: Keynes’s Giraffes and the Ordinary Textuality of Economic Ideas 347
Ways of Seeing Knowledge and Blindness 347
Regression and the Herd 349
All Animals Are Equal, Some More Than Others 353
By Way of Concluding: Or the Case of the Disappearing Giraffe 364
Between Economic Planning and Market Competition: Institutional Law and Economics in the US 376
Interwar Institutional Economics 378
Social Control and the Administrative State 382
Academic Experts and Intermediary Organizations 387
Punishment, Political Economy, and the Genealogy of Morals 401
Introduction 401
Epilogue 419
Index 424