What has allowed inequalities in material resources to mount in advanced democracies? This chapter considers the role of media reporting on the economy in weakening accountability mechanisms that might otherwise have incentivized governments to pursue more equal outcomes. Building on prior work on the United States, we investigate how journalistic depictions of the economy relate to real distributional developments across OECD countries. Using sentiment analysis of economic news content, we demonstrate that the evaluative content of the economic news strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the very rich and that good (bad) economic news is more common in periods of rising (falling) income shares at the top. We then propose and test an explanation in which pro-rich biases in news tone arise from a journalistic focus on the performance of the economy in the aggregate, while aggregate growth is itself positively correlated with relative gains for the rich. The chapter’s findings suggest that the democratic politics of inequality may be shaped in important ways by the skewed nature of the informational environment within which citizens form economic evaluations.

A short conclusion ties major findings of Bankrolling Empire to wider understandings of early modern political economy in India, and to the comparative history of such transitions world-wide in that crucial period. Scholars such as Braudel, Wallerstein, Mann, and Goldstone have done major work on this period, and the story of the Mughal Empire, the Jhaveri family, and new political upstarts offered in this book helps to fill important gaps on the world scene. By focusing on how four generations of a single business family interacted with sources of political authority in South Asia, we learn how a major imperial formation atrophied, and the mechanisms by which various smaller successor states relied on finance to emerge in its wake. This work suggests that business leaders like the Jhaveris were not complacent, but maintained a keen eye towards political developments of the day. When opportunities arose, they relied on their expertise and wealth to shape political power. In the twenty-first century, as relationships between private capital and political authority continue to be intertwined, this work reminds us that while politics certainly impacts business, commercial actors often possess greater resources that can reorient the very contours of state power and its capacity to govern.

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, rapid demographic and economic growth among the settler colonial population of British America drew the attention of competing European empires to the potential wealth of the continent. By the 1750s, large-scale imperial warfare had broken out, a contest for control of these future riches. Over the next six decades, this conflict would evolve into a multi-sided civil war, drawing the continent’s indigenous peoples and settler colonists into the struggle. At the revolution’s beginning, circa 1754, the resources of North America lay mainly in the hands of indigenous people, distributed across hundreds of polities, while three European empires held footholds of varying size and strength, mainly on the continent’s edges. At its end, circa 1814, a single confederated nation, created out of wars fought to control America’s resources, and led by the children of empire, was positioned to take the whole for itself. The transformation included a new form of government and political economy which concentrated power in the hands of American citizens under a constitution designed to promote endless economic growth. The revolution’s outcome set a path for the continent’s future and projected an implicit vision of a new form of global empire.

In this chapter economic aspects of constitutions are explored. Basically there are three. Constitutions, firstly, act as a condition for markets and the overall economy: they are, most of the time, criticial preconditions for economic development by the - predictable - laws they generate and the protection they offer for property and capital). Secondly constitutions act as a factor in markets and the economy. They, for instance, lower transaction costs. And. thirdly, constitutions act as a catalyst in economic relations, e.g. by boosting mutual trust.

The history of environmental economics is interwined with other histories and movements. These include (1) humanitys thinking about its relationship to Nature; (2) a redefinition of economics from the study of material welfare to the study of tradeoffs, including tradeoffs between developing resources and preserving them; (3) rising consumer movements and a shift in economic focus from the producer to the consumer, which in turn facilitiated a shift from thinking about the exploitation of resources to the enjoyment of preserved landscapes; (4) developments in economic theories of externalities and public goods; and (5) the increasing involvement of economics in government policy, from agricultural and resource economics to planning government spending and regulation.

this chapter discusses the outline of the legal regulation of the global economy, focusing on how the system is divided into separate domains (trade, finance, investment, etc) and provides basic overviews of each of these

This chapter focuses on the impact of trade on the functioning of the economy of favor. It argues that the growing importance of conspicuous consumption in New Spain and the introduction of new venal practices raised questions about the assessment process that, according to many, was the key to a just distributive process. In the context of these discussions surrounding such impact, transpacific trade was thematized as well. After discussing critical reflections about the ways in which consumption and trade affected ideas of worthiness, the chapter returns to Rodrigo de Vivero’s Abisos to analyze his critique of the growing influence of commerce on New Spanish society and distributive processes in the Spanish empire. Subsequently, it examines the efforts of Mexico City’s cabildo to fashion a particular image of a deserving community while negotiating with the Crown over financial contributions to the Armada de Barlovento. By juxtaposing Vivero’s reflections with those of Mexico City’s cabildo, the chapter seeks once more to exhibit how calls for isolationism or economic integration were each, in their discrete way, crucial to the distributive struggles within the viceroyalty.

The contemporary revival of interest in political economy highlights the coexistence of different and opposed conceptions among scholars and policy makers in addressing the interface between the economy and the polity. One set of approaches focuses on individual actors in the marketplace or in the public sphere, while another set of approaches shifts the emphasis to the state as a self-contained and internally undifferentiated collective actor. This chapter outlines a conception of political economy that moves beyond this dichotomy and develops the view that individuals, markets, and states are embedded in a relational field composed of multi-level social interdependencies and institutions. The aim of the chapter is to explore the ‘constitution’ of political economy as the multi-layered and relatively persistent configuration of domains and sub-domains in which economic structures and political actions mutually reinforce or hinder one another, thereby determining the dynamics of social wealth – what we call ‘commonweal.’ The chapter conceptualises political economy as a relational field resulting from overlapping spheres of social life. It refers to the social relationships enabling the material provision of human needs and brings to the fore the political dimension of need satisfaction, which involves balancing and coordinating differentiated interests in society.

An important feature of Iran’s political economy is the variety of opportunities it provides, through which individuals and groups can accrue economic benefits from and through the state. At the broadest level, the Iranian economy cannot be said to be in a healthy state. The Iranian economy is structurally unhealthy. But the economy’s maladies are products of, and also contributing factors to, means of personal enrichment for those with the right political connections. There are a number of areas to focus on, including the strong connections between the state and bazaari merchants; the perverse consequences of resource curses such as overreliance on oil and rampant corruption; the state’s efforts at various welfare schemes and the impulse toward statist economics; and the processes and consequences of pulling back from statism through privatization. All of these developments have combined to undermine the economy’s developmental potential. They have also coalesced to provide multiple means of patronage and clientelism in which the state plays a critical facilitating role. As such, Iran’s economy, diseased and underperforming as it is, provides important sources of support and resilience for the state.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

The Conclusions explore the consequences of our arguments for the study of late antiquity more generally and the patterns of Roman military organization. The Roman military was among the most important institutions in the ancient world, and revising its history has ramifications for such perennial questions as imperial decision-making and Roman identity. Moreover, our reconstruction creates new questions, in particular about the economy of the fifth-century east Roman empire and its ability to mobilize and sustain the armies described by the Notitia. This chapter concludes by situating our revised narrative within the longe durée of Roman military history from Augustus to Byzantium and identifying the major considerations, including many non-military considerations, that motivated the empire’s various military configurations.

In Chapter 4, we continue our explanation of tradeoffs between expenditure categories by focusing on how domestic and international contextual factors can constrain or facilitate government budgetary behavior. For the domestic contexts, we consider election timing, unemployment, and economic growth. In the international realm, we focus on globalization and conflict involvement. For each of these contextual factors, we develop a set of expectations about the spending tradeoffs between policy areas if left and right governments remain ideologically consistent to their preferences versus if context overwhelms those ideological concerns. Our results and conclusions are mixed across the domestic contexts. We find almost no tradeoffs and none that are consistent with either type of expectations for election timing. For an increasing unemployment, we find a mixture of ideological and strategic tradeoff decisions, while, for positive economic growth, we find substantial evidence that governments take advantage of the circumstances to go beyond their ideological priorities. Results for international contexts are also mixed with government spending allocations lacking ideological differences in the face of increased globalization. But, for increased conflict, right and left governments reallocate expenditures in similar ways – highlighting how contexts can overwhelm governments.

The concept of productive sexual continence was widespread in the nineteenth century. Writing on sexual health, medical and otherwise, agreed that excessive sexual activity involved a loss that threatened one’s health or wellbeing, though disagreed over how much was too much. And although suspicion of prolonged continence was common, many inferred that if sex lost something precious then continence must involve gain. The chapter begins with medicine, finding that productive continence was worked into thinking about the sexual body even as conceptions of sexuality and bodily function changed dramatically. It then looks at influential popular and intellectual genres to which a similar concept of continence was important: quack adverts, advice for young men, New Women literature, nineteenth-century Platonism, and the Oxford Movement. In this literature, unlike medical writing, the idea was often extended to women with the justification that sexual activity involved a loss of some spiritual or emotional quality rather than physical substance. It was a concept that would have been very difficult to avoid in the nineteenth century and would have been plausible to both men and women.

Zimbabwe’s longest election season span from the February 2000 referendum to the 2002 presidential election. In 2002, voters became wary and weary of violent elections. Politically motivated violence continued as Mugabe and Tsvangirai had their moment of reckoning as to who should be president of Zimbabwe. Over time, Mugabe become ever more dependent on violence and dictatorial methods, and less and less interested in the welfare of his people, treating Zimbabwe’s wealth and resources as rewards for loyal Zanu PF supporters, boasting that there was no vacancy at State House. A closer study of the incidence of election violence shows voter resilience amidst cyclical bouts of state-sponsored udlakela. Voter resilience in the ruling party and opposition showed the potential and capability of the electorate to recover from crises and shocks. Zimbabwe voter resilience revealed that no matter the number of violent disturbances Zimbabweans absorbed over time, they remained within a relatively similar political state domain without imploding. Voters in Zimbabwe were remarkably resilient, displaying abilities of self-organization under extreme periodic election stresses. They built capacity and adaptation in the face of election adversities without resorting to civil war.

Just as there are determinants of health of individuals and communities, there are determinants of health system organization and performance which we term structural determinants. This chapter focuses on a set of such determinants considered key in understanding and strengthening health systems in low- and middle-income countries (L&MICs). These determinants include politics and governance; the economy, livelihoods and poverty; climate change, environmental degradation and natural disasters; social and organizational culture; wars and conflicts. Each of these determinants has its own set of issues. For example, with regards to politics and governance, it is intersection of the form of authority, institutional arrangements, political values, citizen participation, corruption, and informal governance channels that determine health system performance. While the influence of structural determinants on health systems is acknowledged, there is still limited attention to integrating work on structural determinants in health system thinking, policies and practice. This chapter argues for a multi-pronged strategy to address this gap: focusing on tackling inequities; removing misconceptions about health determinants among health workers; easing the path to health system work on health determinants; engaging concerned communities; evaluating innovations to address health determinants; and strengthening intersectoral collaboration.