The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominance Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations—such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution—fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

This is the first book to explore the causes of the decline of British manufacturing in the 20th century by focusing on the troubled relationship between banks and small firms in a comparative historical perspective. Since the mid-1970s, the 'rediscovery' of small firms and of the important role they have played in the economies of continental Europe have occupied a substantial part of the literature on the sources of economic competitiveness. In Britain, the relationship between banks and industry has been the object of intense speculation since before the First World War. Since then banks have been accused by the business community, academics and politicians of neglecting industrial finance and by doing so of reducing the competitiveness of British firms. By comparing the rise of small firms in France, Germany and Italy and their decline in Britain this book analyses how the structure of these countries' banking systems has affected small firms' growth. This analysis is placed in the historical context of the political economy of these four countries, to show how banking and industrial structures developed over the century as a consequence of the state's need to mediate between different social and economic groups. This approach allows the author to show why British banking came to be so concentrated and the negative impact that this had on the supply of finance to small firms. The experiences of France, Germany and Italy show alternative structures and policy responses towards small firms.

"Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history."—Bill Gates In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.

This work analyses how political economic shifts contribute to competition within higher education systems in the US, EU, and Canada. The authors highlight competition for prestige and public and private subsidies, exploring the consequences of these processes through theoretical and empirical analyses. Accordingly, the work highlights topics that will be of interest to a wide range of audiences. Concepts addressed include stratification, privatization of formerly public subsidies, preference for “high tech” academic fields, and the vocationalization of the curriculum (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: [STEM] fields, selected professions, and business) rather than the liberal arts or the Humboldtian vision of the university. Across national contexts and analytic methods, authors analyze the growth of national policies that see universities as a sub set of economic development, casting universities as corporate research laboratories and education as central to job creation. Throughout the volume, the authors make the case that national and regional approaches to politics and markets result in different experiences of consequences of academic capitalism. While these shifts serve the interests of some institutions, others find themselves struggling to meet ever-greater expectations with stagnant or shrinking resource bases.

By the end of this century, 9 out of 10 Europeans will live in an urban area. But what kind of city will they call home? You'll find all the answers in CITY, TRANSFORMED, the new essay series from the European Investment Bank. This panoramic first essay in the series lays out a great sweeping history of European cities over the last fifty years—and showcases new directions being taken by some of our most innovative cities. Urban experts Greg Clark, Tim Moonen, and Jake Nunley based at University College London take a definitive look at how Europe's cities transformed from post-industrial decline to thriving metropolises that are as prosperous and liveable as anywhere on Earth.

This book examines the trends, determinants, and impacts of migration of high-skilled workers within the European Union (EU) over the last two decades. The main thesis is that high-skilled migration, whether internal or international, is largely a symptom rather than a cause of the gaps persisting across European regions in terms of labor market and educational opportunities, productivity, welfare and quality of institutions. Free movement within the EU enables workers and firms to take advantage of these gaps by moving from low- to high-productivity sectors and regions. This process, however, generates winners and losers depending on the extent of the complementarity and substitutability between migrants and natives and on the capacity of sending regions to realize benefits from return or circular migration and other knowledge spillovers. The study assesses the economic benefits and the costs of skilled migration in the short and long run, emphasizing the potential implications of a large outflow of highly qualified workers on the economies of the sending regions. Based on the empirical analysis carried out, the book formulates recommendations for labor market and education policies. The ultimate aim is to identify effective ways to address the various costs that migration induces among different skill groups within both migrant- sending and receiving regions and improving cross-country coordination to better unlock the overall benefits of migration.

Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.