Suchergebnisse

L'idée que la vie était plus intime avant la révolution industrielle qu'à l'époque moderne est l'un des clichés du XIXesiècle qui a survécu jusqu'à nos jours. C'est comme un commentaire sur l'anonymat des relations sociales dans la société post-capitaliste (ou post-communiste) de la fin du XXesiècle, qu'il faudrait interpréter ce cliché plus que comme une représentation exacte du passé. Des travaux tels que ceux d'Eugen Weber(Peasants into Frenchmen, 1976) continuent néanmoins de renforcer le cliché selon lequel les communautés locales intimes auraient progressivement évolué en sociétés nationales anonymes.

Over the last forty years, 'the world' has entered 'the museum'. Collections and presentations that were supposed to be self-evident had to be reconsidered. This chapter demonstrates that two more or less simultaneous influences shaped this process in Dutch museums. On the one hand, many Dutch museums were transformed from institutions of the local or national government into independent charities and forced to take greater responsibility for their own finances. On the other hand, the social exclusivity of the collections and presentations (dominated by white males) was questioned. The article describes how museums dealt with these challenges and their sometimes contradictory implications.

Human capital is central to current debates about the sources of growth and divergence in the premodern economy. Apprenticeship, the key formal arrangement by which occupational skills were transferred in this period, has in the past often been associated with guild monopolies and exclusion, implying a drag on the accumulation of human capital. Several stimulating recent contributions have pointed to apprenticeship as a potentially important explanation for English or European advances in manufacturing and technology in the run up to industrialisation. In this paper, we explore mechanisms that helped improve quality among artisans. We focus on one in particular: the selection of training masters by apprentices.

How medieval Dutch society laid the foundations for modern capitalismThe Netherlands was one of the pioneers of capitalism in the Middle Ages, giving rise to the spectacular Dutch Golden Age while ushering in an era of unprecedented, long-term economic growth across Europe. Pioneers of Capitalism examines the informal institutions in the Netherlands that made this economic miracle possible, providing a groundbreaking new history of the emergence and early development of capitalism.Drawing on the latest quantitative theories in economic research, Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden show how Dutch cities, corporations, guilds, commons, and other private and semipublic organizations provided safeguards for market transactions in the state's absence. Informal institutions developed in the Netherlands long before the state created public safeguards for economic activity. Prak and van Zanden argue that, in the Netherlands itself, capitalism emerged within a robust civil society that constrained and counterbalanced its centrifugal forces, but that an unrestrained capitalism ruled in the overseas territories. Rather than collapsing under unrestricted greed, the Dutch economy flourished, but prosperity at home came at the price of slavery and other dire consequences for people outside Europe.Pioneers of Capitalism offers a panoramic account of the early history of capitalism, revealing how a small region of medieval Europe transformed itself into a powerhouse of sustained economic growth, and changed the world in the process