This study looks at the past 500 years to demonstrate that nations which became great powers declined as their growth rate slowed and their spending on defence continued to increase. The author explains how this can be eased or worsened by clever or short-sighted policy decisions.

A magisterial history book on why some nations are rich and others poor.

This updated edition of a text first published in 1985 explores the economic history of classical antiquity. It highlights the depth of the transformation from the ancient consumer economy based on slave and serf labour to the modern capitalist, investment, production and profit economy.

Records of prices span history, from tables of medieval grain prices to the overabundance of modern statistics. In The Great Wave, David Hackett Fischer marshals this data to outline a history of prices that covers Western history.

Examines the 'gold-rush fantasy' in American psychology and describes its dire consequences.

Describes Britain's rise as the world's first industrial world power, its decline from the temporary dominance of the pioneer, its rather special relationship with the rest of the world (notably the underdeveloped countries) and the effects of all these on the life of the British people.

Professor Robert Lopez provides an incisive analysis of the economic structure of the Middle Ages.

This edition contains generous selections from all five volumes of The Wealth of Nations, and places Smith's inquiry into its historical, intellectual, and cultural context.

Defines the common thread linking the world's greatest economic thinkers and explores the philosophies that motivate them. This work enables us to see more deeply into our history, and provides the new theme that connects thinkers as different as Adam Smith and Karl Marx: the desire to understand how a capitalist society works.

A major treatment of the crucial years 1848-1875 - a penetrating analysis of the rise of capitalism throught the world. In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: capitalism ; the triumph of a society which believed in competitive private enterprise.

First published in 1974, this reissue examines the economic foundations of American slavery in the light of recent scholarship and debate.

Offers an insight into one of the classic questions of history: why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? This book shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households.

Covering economic history beginning from prehistoric times and offering introductions to both economic history and economic development, this work explores the fundamental and highly topical question of why some nations have become rich and others have not.

Human existence is based upon risk. This text charts the adventures of a group of thinkers who embarked on a voyage of intellectual discovery, transforming primeval superstition into the powerful tools of risk control employed today.

The Industrial Revolution is sometimes regarded as a catastrophe, but this text presents it as an important mark of progress. Ashton argues that the material standards of British people improved, technical innovation brought economic reward, and greater intellectual ingenuity was provoked.

Generations of historians have shied away from the truth behind the cliche: money makes the world go around. This book answers questions about finance and its crucial place in bringing happiness and despair, warfare and welfare, boom and crash to nations buffeted by the onward march of history.

Widely considered as the most informed work ever written on the social effects of advanced capitalism, this remarkable volume holds its own as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century.

This work abandons the conventional distinctions between history and science. Diamond focuses on what ancient people were endowed with in the way of land, animals and plants, and on the confrontations between less and more advanced people to see how this led to today's inequalities.