Product Description: This collection of papers reflects the variety of interpretations and definitions connected with the concept of `mercantilism' which have evolved historically during the last two centuries. They range from interpretations of `mercantilistic' ideas to interpretations of policies...read more

Product Description: The EU's stated objective to make Europe ‘the most competitive and knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable growth and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ has led to an increased focus on the area of vocational education and training...read more

Product Description: The notion and interpretation of path dependence have been discussed and utilized in various social sciences during the last two decades. This innovative book provides significant new insights onto how the different applications of path dependence have developed and evolved...read more

Product Description: 'England is a nation of shopkeepers'. Long before Napolean disdainfully paraphrased Adam Smith, British commerce had become a motor for economic growth and increased state power. This four-volume facsimile edition brings together a range of rare seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents about the mercantile system...read more

Product Description: When Europe was Western Europe and socially rather cohesive, the question of economic integration through free market exchanges for labour, commodities and services was not a major problem. The integration of markets was hardly recognised as a real threat to social cohesion...read more

The aim of this book is to explore and reflect upon preconditions of a specific European social dimension, or more specifically of a European social citizenship. Welfare and social policies in Europe are deeply entrenched in state histories; the success of the welfare state stems from its ability during a fairly long historical period to unify social citizenship, full employment, mass education and a functional industrial relations system. The historical connection between welfare regimes built upon the nation state, and popular democracy founded in party voting, makes the deepening and widening of a common European project a highly risky undertaking and an open process with a radically uncertain outcome. The dilemma in the form of uneasy relationships among national welfare regimes and the evolutionary process of increased market integration – driven both by market forces (globalisation) and the European Union as a political project – is well known and has been demonstrated by different commentators. Every step of deepening market integration in Europe tends to threaten and put pressure on the existing national welfare regimes. As their own populations generally support them, the legitimacy of the EU is at risk. The book analyses the prospects of a coordinated social dimension at the European level, matching the market integration, and what role the concept of citizenship can play in such a scenario.

In the nineteenth century Adam Smith and others gradually invented a 'tradition' of free trade. This was a towering achievement and has proved to be influential to this day. This book examines this construction of the free trade tradition.Showing how historical contruction is a vital component in the writing of doctrinal history, Lars Magnusson argues that it is important for historians of economic thought to distance themselves from the practice of writing history backwards. Contrasting what occurred in Britain in the nineteenth century with what occurred in the United States and in Sweden, this book shows that perhaps the classical tradition meant something else entirely in different national contexts.This original and thought-provoking book is written such that it will be of great interest not only to historians specializing in economic thought, but also historians with other areas of interest.

Represents the attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment of Sweden's economic development since the middle of the 18th century. This book traces the industrialisation, the political currents and the social ambitions, that transformed Sweden from a backward agrarian economy into what is regarded by many as a model welfare state.

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Product Description: Trade is the dominant subject in nineteenth century economics. During the course of the century, Britain was transformed from a protectionist power to an open economy, a change embodied by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. This is reflected in the economic literature of the period, with the qualified free trade advocacy of the early classical economists developing into more strident views of the Manchester School...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Evolutionary Economics and Path Dependence presents important new theoretical and empirical work on economic change, learning processes, institutional change, choice and path dependency. The theoretical section includes discussion of the microfoundations of path dependency, path dependency in industrial networks, path dependence and the theory of the firm, lock-in effects in relation to professional organizations, the notion of bricolage in relation to path dependency and new and neo-institutional perspectives on the theory of the firm...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Ever since the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, mercantilism or 'the mercantile system' have been described as the opposite of classical political economy. This view is very much brought into question by the current book. It argues that the sharp distinction between mercantilism and 19th century laissez-faire economics has obscured the meaning, content and contribution of the former. This book presents a full-scale account of the development of mercantilism as a trend of economic thought during the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead of accepting existing interpretations, it begins with the most fundamental questions: What was mercantilism? Did it have a central message? Was it really a coherent school of thought? A central theme of the book is its critique of narrow definitions of its subject. Mercantilism must be understood as a series of written texts appearing in a particular political and economic context, rather than as an all-embracing system of economic thought. Within this context a language and vocabulary of economics was developed that was an essential precondition for the subsequent growth of economic thought and knowledge. In this sense mercantilism was much more modern than has been previously appreciated.