This book combines intellectual history with contemporary events to offer a critique of mainstream economic thought and its neoliberal policy incarnation in global capitalism. The critique operates both theoretically, at the level of metaphysics and the philosophy of science, and concretely, in case studies of globalization and world events. Trent Schroyer provides a moral and cultural interpretation of modernity and scientism, highlighting their political and economic consequences – but the book’s main purpose is not to criticize. The author moves beyond this to offer alternative "economic cultures," again combining abstract theoretical analysis with concrete case studies of alternative economic formations from local self-sufficiency movements to cooperatives and other anti-capitalist institutional experiments. These case studies exhibit an impressive range of variation, from first world to third world, from reformist to utopian transformative. Finally, Schroyer links the project to the global justice movement that opposes corporate globalization and eventually links participatory economics and democratic politics to a new image of science as "participatory social learning."

This book combines intellectual history with contemporary events to offer a critique of mainstream economic thought and its neoliberal policy incarnation in global capitalism. The critique operates both theoretically, at the level of metaphysics and the philosophy of science, and concretely, in case studies of globalization and world events. Trent Schroyer provides a moral and cultural interpretation of modernity and scientism, highlighting their political and economic consequences – but the book’s main purpose is not to criticize. The author moves beyond this to offer alternative "economic cultures," again combining abstract theoretical analysis with concrete case studies of alternative economic formations from local self-sufficiency movements to cooperatives and other anti-capitalist institutional experiments. These case studies exhibit an impressive range of variation, from first world to third world, from reformist to utopian transformative. Finally, Schroyer links the project to the global justice movement that opposes corporate globalization and eventually links participatory economics and democratic politics to a new image of science as "participatory social learning."

Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in Ó Gráda's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years. Central to Irish and British history, European demography, the world history of famines, and the story of American immigration, the Great Irish Famine is presented here from a variety of new perspectives. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, Ó Gráda concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and sociological features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders and markets, by medical science, and by migration. Other topics include how the Irish climate, usually hospitable to the potato, exacerbated the failure of the crops in 1845-1847, and the controversial issue of Britain's failure to provide adequate relief to the dying Irish. Ó Gráda also examines the impact on urban Dublin of what was mainly a rural disaster and offers a critical analysis of the famine as represented in folk memory and tradition. The broad scope of this book is matched by its remarkable range of sources, published and archival. The book will be the starting point for all future research into the Irish famine.

This introduction to the main heterodox schools of economic thought examines their main concepts and their critiques of mainstream theory. The schools examined include Austrian economics, geo-economics, the Virginia school of political economy, feminist economics, humanist economics, institutional economics, and nondeterminist Marxism. The aim of these essays is to understand the ideas and methodology of these approaches, and also to explain why there are different approaches to economics, and how the various schools relate to each other.

Develops a fresh non-Eurocentric analysis of the rise and development of the global economy in the last half-millennium.

First published in 1991, Beyond the Welfare State? has been thoroughly revised and updated for this new edition, which draws on the latest theoretical developments and empirical evidence. It remains the most comprehensive and sophisticated guide to the condition of the welfare state in a time of rapid and sometimes bewildering change. The opening chapters offer a scholarly but accessible review of competing interpretations of the historical and contemporary roles of the welfare state. This evaluation, based on the most recent empirical research, gives full weight to feminist, ecological, and "anti-racist" critiques and also develops a clear account of globalization and its contested impact upon existing welfare regimes. The book constructs a distinctive history of the international growth of welfare states and offers a comprehensive account of recent developments from "crisis" to "structural adjustment." The final chapters bring the story right up to date with an assessment of the important changes effected in the 1990s and the prospects for welfare states in the new millennium.

China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible both for China’s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe’s difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early industrialization. Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on institutional change has surprising implications for understanding modern transformations in China and Europe and for future expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic history, essential to any larger social science account of modern world history.