Economic and Social History Blog

History

How to measure the impact of slavery on the early modern economy?

Written by Jan Luiten van Zanden NWO, the National Science Foundation of the Netherlands, has a usually rather boring glossy in which it presents the successes of the research funded by the organization. Recently, however, it published the summary of a debate, significantly printed in black and white, about the importance of the slave trade…

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Books do not die: the price of information, Human Capital and the Black Death in the long fourteenth century

In this blog I will explain why I am busy working on trends in the prices of medieval hand-written books between circa 1250 and 1500. It may seem as escapism in these times of Corona, but because my time-window includes the Black Death – that killed approximately one third of the European population back then…

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