New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxxii

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2. Genoa, Liguria, and the Regional Development of Medieval Public Debt

   • Jeffrey Miner

   Pages 1-28

3. Angelo degli Ubaldi and the Gulf of the Venetians: Custom, Commerce, and the Control of the Sea Before Grotius

   • Robert Fredona

   Pages 29-73

4. Capitalism and the Special Economic Zone, 1590–2014

   • Corey Tazzara

   Pages 75-102

5. Theatrum Œconomicum: Anders Berch and the Dramatization of the Swedish Improvement Discourse

   • Carl Wennerlind

   Pages 103-130

6. Gulliver’s Travels, Party Politics, and Empire

   • Steve Pincus

   Pages 131-169

7. Commerce, not Conquest: Political Economic Thought in the French Indies Company, 1719–1769

   • John Shovlin

   Pages 171-202

8. The Economics of the Antipodes: French Naval Exploration, Trade, and Empire in the Eighteenth Century

   • Arnaud Orain

   Pages 203-231

9. A “Surreptitious Introduction”: Opium Smuggling and Colonial State Formation in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal and Burma

   • Diana Kim

   Pages 233-252

10. A Place in the Sun: Rethinking the Political Economy of German Overseas Expansion and Navalism Before the Great War

    • Erik Grimmer-Solem

    Pages 253-288

11. Wesley Mitchell’s Business Cycles After 100 Years

    • Walter A. Friedman

    Pages 289-318

12. On a Certain Blindness in Economic Theory: Keynes’s Giraffes and the Ordinary Textuality of Economic Ideas

    • C. N. Biltoft

    Pages 319-347

13. Between Economic Planning and Market Competition: Institutional Law and Economics in the US

    • Laura Phillips Sawyer

    Pages 349-373

14. Punishment, Political Economy, and the Genealogy of Morals

    • Bernard E. Harcourt

    Pages 375-392

15. Back Matter

    Pages 393-413

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This volume offers a snapshot of the resurgent historiography of political economy in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis, and suggests fruitful new agendas for research on the political-economic nexus as it has developed in the Western world since the end of the Middle Ages. New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy brings together a select group of young and established scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds—history, economics, law, and political science—in an effort to begin a re-conceptualization of the origins and history of political economy through a variety of still largely distinct but complementary historical approaches—legal and intellectual, literary and philosophical, political and economic—and from a variety of related perspectives: debt and state finance, tariffs and tax policy, the encouragement and discouragement of trade, merchant communities and companies, smuggling and illicit trades, mercantile and colonial systems, economic cultures, and the history of economic doctrines more narrowly construed.

The first decade of the twenty-first century, bookended by 9/11 and a global financial crisis, witnessed the clamorous and urgent return of both 'the political' and 'the economic' to historiographical debates. It is becoming more important than ever to rethink the historical role of politics (and, indeed, of government) in business, economic production, distribution, and exchange. The artefacts of pre-modern and modern political economy, from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, remain monuments of perennial importance for understanding how human beings grappled with and overcame material hardship, organized their political and economic communities, won great wealth and lost it, conquered and were conquered.

The present volume, assembling some of the brightest lights in the field, eloquently testifies to the rich and powerful lessons to be had from such a historical understanding of political economy and of power in an economic age.

• Political economics
• Economic production
• Historiography
• Cultural economics
• Economic communities
• Monopoly
• Economic competition
• Capitalism
• Regional development
• Atlantic world
• Australasia
• Middle ages

“This book is a treasure of interdisciplinary scholarship which provides a truly refreshing new lens on the history of capitalism over the last eight hundred years.  As impressive is the overall framing of the book. It serves as a bold manifesto asserting the value of political economy as perspective on the past and future of capitalism in contrast to arid mathematical economics and vacuous cultural history.” (Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School)

“This brilliant collection shows not only how important the history of economic thought is for economics, but that the field is experiencing a rebirth. Reinert, Fredona and the contributors to this volume show that the history of political economy is still generally misunderstood. Their goal is to correct that by providing pathbreaking and meticulous scholarship. This visionary book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the history and origins ofcapitalism and economics.” (Jacob Soll, Professor of History and Accounting, University of Southern California)

• Harvard Business School, Boston, USA

  Robert Fredona, Sophus A. Reinert

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.

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