Despite the dominant role it plays in the Beninese economy, the cotton sector has not succeeded in accelerating the country’s economic growth. Yields have been volatile, and production practically stagnated from the mid-1990s to 2016. This poor performance mainly relates to the sector’s unstable management, which has oscillated between public and private monopolies. In its turn, this unstable management relates to several institutional factors including changes in ideology of the donors supporting the sector and the country’s political leader, elite bargaining, and clientelist contracts motivated by rent-seeking. These factors gave way to institutional instability, with the government abruptly overturning policies and planned actions by the previous government or re-assigning the mandates of management organisations in the cotton sector, which caused uncertainty in the sector and increased the cost of agriculture services in the sector.

The series Economic Ideas That Built Europe aims at making classical economic texts – first published on the European Continent – available in English. We aim at finding and making available important works that provide insights that are lost in today's mainstream and neoclassical traditions. This tone was set already in the first text published, in 2011: Antonio Serra's A Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1613). Serra introduced the dichotomy of increasing and diminishing returns to explain the wealth-creating capacity of manufacturing (operating under increasing returns to scale) and the lack of generalised wealth in countries specialising in activities where one factor of production is limited by nature (agriculture, fisheries, mining) and therefore, after a certain point, are subject to diminishing returns. This counterpoint – a key to understanding the wealth and poverty of nations – is not compatible with equilibrium, and therefore disappeared from mainstream economics in the early 1900s.

We have published first ever English translations of key works on economic policy from Italian, both published in Naples – Antonio Serra (1613) and Carlo Tapia's Treatise on Abundance (1638) – in a period (1503–1707) when the Kingdom of Naples was ruled by the kings of Spain. From German, we published Wilhelm von Hörnigk's highly influential Austria Supreme (if it so wishes) (1684), and from Spanish, Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos’ Report of the Agrarian Law (1795). In addition, we have republished Martin Luther's work On Trade and Usury (1524). The first English translation of Albert Aftalion's Periodic Crises of Overproduction (1913) is forthcoming in this series.

In this volume we combine two small works representing the economics of the 1500s. With a work authored by Barthélemy de Laffemas (1545–1612) we add an important French text, and with Leonhard Fronsperger (ca. 1520–1575) a pioneering German text. Despite their age, these two pragmatic texts still provide important insights.

We are pleased to present the first-ever translation of Barthélemy de Laffemas Reiglement (sic) général pour dresser les manufactures en ce royaume, originally a 40-page booklet, and also a 15-page addition – with questions and answers – entitled Response aux difficultez proposées à l’encontre du règlement général touchant les manufactures. The first work is dated 1597, and Bibliothèque Nationale de France also considers the second work as published in that year.

Full title:

General regulation for the establishment of manufactures in this kingdom to contain the cost of silk fabric and other merchandise that harms and ruins the state, which is the true way of restoring France to her splendor, provide work for the poor, and keep them from begging for a living.

With an extract of the opinion which the Lords of the Assembly held in Rouen have sent to his Majesty, that the entrance of all sorts of gold thread and woolens manufactured outside the kingdom be prohibited here, and that levies on woolens and raw silk be suppressed.

Along with the means of producing silks throughout France.

A note by the translator and the general editor.

The introduction will show that Mr. Laffemas was not raised as a man of letters. If anything, the author of this treatise was certainly more accustomed to legal documents than anything else. His language is often rigid and haphazardly punctuated, so I have had to take some risks in modernising it. Its pre-economic and pre-industrial vocabulary is fraught with difficulties, of which the most general are these:

1. Police is used to designate a system: an economic policy but also the structure that is adopted to support it. Thus, it should be understood that policy in this document does not mean only policy but also this frame. Accordingly, a dictionary of 1606 gives this complex definition: Police ‘is a regulation of a state and community, whether monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic, in supplies, clothing, trade, and other things that concern the welfare of all. It comes from the Greek politéia, derived from polis, city, because the city was first subject to such regulation […].’

2. Manufacture as a noun has no obvious equivalent in modern English. It means a place or structure where things are made by man, as opposed to the production of raw materials, or the process itself. The same dictionary just quoted calls it ‘the making of some piece of work by hand’. Here we use the term in the same sense as Alexander Hamilton's famous 1791 Report on Manufactures to the US House of Representatives.

THE CHANSON DE ROLAND, although contemporary with the development of chivalry,shows the value system of a highly aristocratic society of revenge, preserved in holy war. It exudes disdain for serfs, used as a foil for the “baron (ber)” and the “vassal,” and is not interested in the bulk of the army, largely consisting of “soudoyers.” It glorifies the heroic death of great warriors wishing to live up to their lineage and their ancestors, all Franks, and for this reason they are not afraid of dying or killing.

The Chanson d’Aspremont was composed shortly before 1190, either in southern Italy or in the French domains of the Plantagenets, or in both. Widely circulated during the Middle Ages, it lacks the poetic force of the Chanson de Roland. Perhaps nearer to a romance than an epic poem, it is two and a half times longer. The climate is changing and there is no unity of action. Martí de Riquer was even able to write that, “it had more than a little literary success, but the enormous mass of the chanson makes it tough to read.” The tensions and social diversity it reveals are also interesting for the historian: it may be that we can learn more from it than from Chanson de Roland, which Aspremont wishes to complete by recounting the “enfances” of Roland during one of Charlemagne's great battles in Calabria, on the slopes of Aspromonte. It was fought to defend Roma and the empire against the offensive of King Agoulant, preceded by his son Eaumont.

The Chanson d’Aspremont appears to borrow all its great values from the Song of Roland: its elegy of the great but terrible fight to the death in fair combat; its aristo cratic system; and a number of its formulas and narrative motifs. However, all this is transposed, shifted, and inserted into a more prosaic form, even diluted in a composite ensemble of interesting debates and combats, which are piquant rather than moving. Its composition is more like a game, and it juxtaposes various value systems. Most important, I think, is being able to read into it more truly chivalric elements. In fact, the succession of Frankish victories pushes sacrificial death somewhat into the background; instead, the stress placed on the actual ritual of knighting involves the theme of the promotion of the young, vavasours, and even serfs.

The Battle of Bouvines is known in detail from the narratives of William le Breton but his reports are less objective than modern historians, let alone those in military studies, have generally thought them to be. William's accounts are infused with Capetian propaganda in the way they put King Philip Augustus at the centre of the battle. Here, constructive criticism is offered of that line of argument relying in particular on the report by the so-called Anonymous of Béthune. It is suggested that the scale of the battle should be reduced and a discussion of what was at stake and what the battle's impact was is set out along similar lines as has been done for other battles in the context of warfare and feudal relations.

Bouvines appears at the juncture of two types of operations. A true chivalric battle engaged the right flank of the French and Count Ferran's knights with its codes and scenes similar to those found in the Anglo-Norman world of Orderic Vitalis, such as the use of a knife, and not arrows, with which to kill horses, as in the games of the ‘poignées’. Further to the left, it was essential for the French to disperse the footsoldiers, who protected the mounted knights, and whose flight left the calvalry exposed. It is uncertain whether organised mercenaries took part in the battle of Bouvines. The defection by the duke of Louvain was an important reason for the defeat of Emperor Otto and the ‘men from Brabant’ who offered resistance to the last man standing – for which they were praised by many French commentators – and who were probably men who had come with the emperor.

Orderic Vital n'a pas relaté la bataille de Bouvines. Pareil oubli s'explique vraisemblablement par le fait qu'il est mort près de soixante-dix ans auparavant. Mais c'est bien regrettable car du coup nous ignorons s'il aurait été frappé, comme à Brémule, par le petit nombre de morts et s'il aurait laissé entrevoir là une des ces batailles partielles dont l'histoire de la conflictualité féodale est émaillée, et qui ne sont que des fractures exceptionnelles, vite réduites, de la société chevaleresque et chrétienne.