Towards A Theoretical Framework For British And International Economic History

States reject inequality when they choose to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), but to date the ICESCR has not yet figured prominently in the policy calculus behind States' international economic decisions. This book responds to the modern challenge of operationalizing the ICESCR, particularly in the context of States' decisions within international trade, finance, and investment. Differentiating between public policy mechanisms and institutional functional mandates in the international trade, finance, and investment systems, this book shows legal and policy gateways for States to feasibly translate their fundamental duties to respect, protect, and fulfil economic, social and cultural rights into their trade, finance, and investment commitments, agreements, and contracts. It approaches the problem of harmonizing social protection objectives under the ICESCR with a State's international economic treaty obligations, from the designing and interpreting international treaty texts, up to the institutional monitoring and empirical analysis of ICESCR compliance. In examining public policy options, the book takes into account around five decades of States' implementation of social protection commitments under the ICESCR; its normative evolution through the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Committee's expanded fact-finding and adjudicative competences under the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR; as well as the critical, dialectical, and deliberative roles of diverse functional interpretive communities within international trade, finance, and investment law. Ultimately, the book shoes how States' ICESCR commitments operate as the normative foundation of their trade, finance, and investment decisions.

This book presents a general theory of the economics of prosperity. Drawing upon both historic and contemporary Austrian economic thinking, it looks beyond merely identifying various isolated causes of economic growth and development to describe and explain the process of economic progress. It brings together various economic principles related to production, exchange, the market division of labor, capital, technology, entrepreneurship, and economic calculation, and a further understanding of how different institutional settings and specific policies all affect the process of economic progress. It also provides a helpful critique of modern growth theory.

The marginalization of women in economics has a history as long as the discipline itself. Throughout the history of economics, women contributed substantial novel ideas, methods of inquiry, and analytical insights, with much of this discounted, ignored, or shifted into alternative disciplines and writing outlets. This handbook presents new and much-needed analytical research of women’s contributions in the history of economic thought, focusing primarily on the period from the 1770s into the beginning of the 21st century. Chapters address the institutional, sociological and historical factors that have influenced women economists’ thinking, and explore women’s contributions to economic analysis, method, policies and debates. Coverage is international, moving beyond Europe and the US into the Arab world, China, India, Japan, Latin America, Russia and the Soviet Union, and sub-Saharan Africa. This new global perspective adds depth as well as scope to our understanding of women’s contribution to the history of economic thought. The book offers crucial new insights into previously underexplored work by women in the history of economic thought, and will prove to be a seminal volume with relevance beyond that field, into women’s studies, sociology, and history.

This book, the first of two volumes, explores the impact of Jesús Huerta de Soto and his role in the modern revival of the Austrian School of Economics. The chapters focusing on monetary economics, business cycle theory, and entrepreneurship, combine established ideas with novel topics to explore the new directions forged by Huerta de Soto’s ideas. This approach presents Huerta de Soto’s influence on modern economics. It also outlines his current research paradigm. This book aims to highlight and build upon the intellectual legacy of Jesús Huerta de Soto through its contribution to the Austrian School of Economics. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in monetary policy and Austrian economics.

Ludwig Von Mises’s 1912 contribution to the theory of monetary policy and the current prevailing consensus in modern economic liberalism, The Theory of Money and Credit, was a milestone achievement. The author’s familiarity with the historical literature on banking and credit allows him to present a coherent theoretical structure that links private exchange between individuals, business and banks to condition the markets affecting money and credit. Through its wider influence on liberal thinkers and politicians, the Theory of Money and Credit has become a classic reference for those seeking to understand the advance of economic liberalism since the 20th century.

With their dramatic descriptions of black masses and cannibalistic feasts, the records generated by the Basque witch-craze of 160914 provide us with arguably the most demonologically-stereotypical accounts of the witches sabbath or akelarre to have emerged from early modern Europe. While the trials have attracted scholarly attention, the most substantial monograph on the subject was written nearly forty years ago and most works have focused on the ways in which interrogators shaped the pattern of prosecutions and the testimonies of defendants. Invoking the Akelarre diverts from this norm by employing more recent historiographical paradigms to analyze the contributions of the accused. Through interdisciplinary analyses of both French- and Spanish-Basque records, it argues that suspects were not passive recipients of elite demonological stereotypes but animated these received templates with their own belief and experience, from the dark exoticism of magical conjuration, liturgical cursing and theatrical misrule to the sharp pragmatism of domestic medical practice and everyday religious observance. In highlighting the range of raw materials available to the suspects, the book helps us to understand how the fiction of the witches sabbath emerged to such prominence in contemporary mentalities, whilst also restoring some agency to the defendants and nuancing the historical thesis that stereotypical content points to interrogatorial opinion and folkloric content to the voices of the accused. In its local context, this study provides an intimate portrait of peasant communities as they flourished in the Basque region in this period and leaves us with the irony that Europes most sensationally-demonological accounts of the witches sabbath may have evolved out of a particularly ardent commitment, on the part of ordinary Basques, to the social and devotional structures of popular Catholicism.