Chapter 2 shifts from representation to reality by looking at how patients navigated the city in search of cures. We follow a student as he searches for a healing powder in the back room of a coffee shop and imagine patients navigating the city in search of cures, often armed with little more than a healer’s inexact address. Using promotional material and advertisements, the chapter charts 230 different shops, taverns, bathhouses, and homes where antivenereal remedies were sold between 1650 and 1750. Mapping an urban geography of pox cures exposes the sheer number of medicines for sale for a single disease and how purchasing them brought patients far from the neighborhoods and homes of specific healers. Venereal treatments could be had just about anywhere in early modern London, from upscale thoroughfares to cheese shops and bookstalls lining the Royal Exchange. What is more, patients could find the very same remedy at a range of retail establishments, a uniform shopping experience that historians tend to associate with department stores of the Victorian era.

The Ptolemaic state did not pursue a policy of ‘state monopolies’ in industry and trade. Although state intervention was extensive in some sectors, markets played an important role in others. Fiscal contracts leased out to entrepreneurs shared certain procedures and terminology, but the reality of state control was different in every industry, determined by strategic concerns and practical considerations. Together, these institutions show a pragmatic state concerned primarily with securing revenues from economic activities. While the papyri also highlight the limits of state control and the possibilities to evade regulations, they do not show a general decline of state capacity in the second century. The impact of the regulations on economic performance varied. While the ‘oil monopoly’ caused significant inefficiencies, the same was not necessarily true in other sectors. The regulations stimulated the circulation of coinage, leading to increased market performance, to an extent supported also by state enforcement of agreements and property rights. Finally, the analysis underscores the significant fiscal and economic role of temples and professional associations.

In the ‘Coda’ to Part III, I reflect on the relationship between late medieval religious and economic practices, brought together through the theme of alchemy.

This chapter examines how markets influence decisions regarding animals. It begins by analyzing the supply side, focusing on production costs associated with improving animal welfare. It then explores whether markets erode moral considerations and discusses corporate social responsibility strategies, specifically voluntary actions taken by firms to enhance animal welfare.

Market institutions, including institutions in the political marketplace, are created to facilitate the ability of individuals to exchange for their mutual benefit. This chapter begins with an analysis of markets for goods and services, with the idea that those same principles of market exchange carry over into political markets. A general equilibrium framework is used to depict the outcome of exchange under the assumption that there are no transaction costs to impede mutually advantageous exchanges. That model is institution-free, so the chapter continues to analyze what institutions would be necessary to produce that general equilibrium outcome in an environment in which there are transaction costs. The chapter notes that institutions have three economic functions: lowering transaction costs, enforcing rights and contracts, and redistribution. The chapter analyzes those first two functions, deferring a discussion of redistribution until Chapter 8.

This chapter studies how land disputes characterized the North American backcountry from the Green Mountains to the Piedmont and west into the territory of the Ohio and Kentucky Rivers. Whatever their specific circumstances, rural rebels throughout the North American colonies shared goals: They wanted secure possession of the land they occupied and improved, and they wanted to rule themselves. These intertwined goals were considered rebellious in the 1750s and 1760s, and became revolutionary in the 1770s when farmers yoked their aims to the growing imperial struggle with Britain. As a result, these uprisings became the kinds of attacks on authority and property that encouraged British officials to intensify their efforts to keep colonial order. Because rebellious farmers wanted secure possession of the land, free access to markets, and to rule themselves, they fought for a brand of independence that contributed to the boiling tensions that inspired colonists to rebel against Britain in the 1770s.

This chapter focuses on the role of institutions in shaping economic efficiency and development throughout European history. It argues that institutional innovations have been central to Europe’s long-term economic progress, even though inefficient institutions have sometimes persisted due to vested interests. We first discuss what is considered a development-friendly institutional setup, and then analyse relevant historical institutions such as serfdom, open fields, guilds, cooperatives, the modern business firm and socialist central planning to understand their specific (in)efficiency contributions and distributional consequences.

This chapter asks: how did notions and practices of individual equality arise out of the growing marketisation and monetarisation of economic production, exchange and consumption?

This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.

Even as a romantic conception of innovation – emphasizing its uncertain and serendipitous nature, for instance – might suggest that it is inherently hard to manage, the brute fact of the matter is that most innovation, in most organizations, is managed. In this chapter, we look into what happens to innovation when it is subjected to management, paying particular attention to the unintended and second-order consequences of those efforts to manage. Management can surely “get things under control,” but the interesting questions relate to what happens next, to what also happens when things do get under control. The first three readings provide three different angles on that. In the first, we read about a pretty neutral-looking management technique and think through why it might not be so neutral. In the second, we are shown how innocuous things like accounting numbers can drive innovation strategies. In the third, we are introduced to the dynamics of hidden innovation projects and think about what formal management actually gets to manage and the limits of managerial influence. The final reading zooms out and asks what happens when organizations actually lean into the unmanageability of innovation and attempt to be less organized and to manage innovation less.