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Economic History, Institutions, and Institutional Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

Şevket Pamuk
Şevket Pamuk*
Affiliation:
Ataturk Institute of Modern Turkish History, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, and European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, London; e-mail: s.pamuk@lse.ac.uk
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Extract

Until recently the discipline of economic history was concerned mostly with the Industrial Revolution and the period since. A large majority of the research and writing focused on Great Britain, western Europe, and the United States. There has been a striking change in the last three decades. Economic historians today are much more interested in the earlier periods: the early modern and medieval eras and even the ancient economies of the Old World. They have been gathering empirical materials and employing various theories to make sense of the evolution of these economies. Equally important, there has been a resurgence in the studies of developing regions of the world. Global economic history, focusing on all regions of the world and their interconnectedness since ancient times, is on its way to becoming a major field of study. Even the Industrial Revolution, the most central event of economic history, is being studied and reinterpreted today not as a British or even western European event but as a breakthrough resulting from many centuries of interaction between Europe and the rest of the world.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 532 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

1 Allen, Robert C., Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 A recent example is O'Brien, Patrick and Yun-Casalilla, Bartolome, eds., The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, 1500–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

3 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Talcott (New York: Scribners, 1958)Google Scholar; Weber, Max, Economy and Society, ed. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus, 2 vols. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

4 Hanna, Nelly, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Ismail Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600–1800) (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011).

5 Kuran, Timur, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

6 Gerber, Haim, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Farnham: Ashgate–Variorum, 2010)Google Scholar; Peirce, Leslie, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar.