New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy

Contents

Editors and Contributors

Introduction: History and Political Economy

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

What Were the Compere?

Communal Debt, Regional Subjects, Taxation, and Membership

Fiscal Change and Regional Dynamics

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

Capitalism and the Special Economic Zone, 1590–2014

Regional Competition and the Free Port System of Early Modern Italy

Administrative Relimitation and Contemporary Capitalism

Special Zones, Special Interests

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

Introduction

The Swedish Improvement Discourse

Anders Berch

Introduction to General Householding

Theatrum Œconomicum

Conclusion

Gulliver’s Travels, Party Politics, and Empire

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

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

Ideological Foundations: John Law’s Geopolitics

Law’s Ideological Legacy

The Geopolitics of the Compagnie des Indes

Commerce and Conquest in the Final Years of the Company

Conclusion: The Compagnie des Indes in the History of Political Economy

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

Antipodean Economics: The Two Models

Free Trade or Aggression? Bougainville and Lapérouse in Asia

An Export Colony or a Subsistence Colony? Poivre and Expeditions to the South Seas

Conclusion

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

Imperial Opium and Excise Taxation

What Causes Contraband (in Bengal)

What Causes Contraband (in Burma)

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

The Political Economy of Weltpolitik Around 1900

Lessons from Venezuela and the Philippines

Farmers and Frontiers

Hamilton, List and the Heritage of “Whig” Political Economy

Conclusion

Wesley Mitchell’s Business Cycles After 100 Years

Mitchell

Business Cycles

The Term “Business Cycles”

Economists and Statisticians

Entrepreneurs and Forecasters

Politicians

Conclusion

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

Ways of Seeing Knowledge and Blindness

Regression and the Herd

All Animals Are Equal, Some More Than Others

By Way of Concluding: Or the Case of the Disappearing Giraffe

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

Interwar Institutional Economics

Social Control and the Administrative State

Academic Experts and Intermediary Organizations

Punishment, Political Economy, and the Genealogy of Morals

Introduction

Epilogue

Index