This week’s review! — on Avner Greif’s Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy. Games, institutions, and mediaeval Jewish-Egyptian merchants. Also the closest I’ve ever come to reviewing a work of fiction…
07.10.2025 15:57 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0@angusbylsma.bsky.social
Writing about economic history at https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com
This week’s review! — on Avner Greif’s Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy. Games, institutions, and mediaeval Jewish-Egyptian merchants. Also the closest I’ve ever come to reviewing a work of fiction…
07.10.2025 15:57 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Thank you, Sam!
24.09.2025 07:35 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review — THE FINAL WICKHAM POST. Sizing up the mediaeval Italian city-states properly.
23.09.2025 16:03 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review! — more Chris Wickham, this time about the mediaeval commercial revolution. What, where, why and whether it was even a thing.
10.09.2025 20:38 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review — on central bank independence and… wait no, not that! Actually a much more relevant topic: Chris Wickham’s Inheritance of Rome. On the Byzantine economy, mediaeval Egypt, and the Arab conquest.
26.08.2025 15:19 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review! — pt. 2 on Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. Peasants, Pots, and Pirenne!
12.08.2025 10:55 — 👍 4 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review! — beginning a medieval odyssey with Chris Wickham’s mammoth book, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Taxes, demesnes, slaves, and why Britain really dropped the ball in the 5th century.
29.07.2025 12:32 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1This week’s review! — on Catherine Schenk’s superb The Decline of Sterling, and how sterling can and can not help us think about the dollar today (plus some personal news).
02.07.2025 11:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Thank you, David!
17.06.2025 21:03 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This is a wonderful discussion of my Rise and Fall of the British Nation, and the first to note the importance to it of my critique of Cain and Hopkins, which I took, along with that of Anderson and Nairn, to be richest existing analyses of the twentieth century British nation and empire.
17.06.2025 15:38 — 👍 8 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0This week’s review! — on @davidedgerton.bsky.social’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. Well, less of a review than a discussion of how Edgerton sheds light on the pitfalls of gentlemanly capitalism. Plus a bit about Hobsbawm the nationalist at the end!
17.06.2025 11:40 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1Final maths exam next week… here we go!
05.06.2025 11:04 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Some absolutely fantastic Grossberg paintings here
05.06.2025 10:16 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review! - finishing up my look at Cain and Hopkins’ British Imperialism, on the 20th century. There’s something for everyone - expansion, decline, Sterling, and Eurodollars!
02.06.2025 11:40 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Economic historians getting creative
20.05.2025 11:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0The Apple Music Classical app has no right being as good as it is
20.05.2025 11:16 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review! — part one of my look into Cain and Hopkin’s monumental book, British Imperialism 1688-2015. Gentlemanly capitalism, services, and who ran the British Empire (supposedly)…
19.05.2025 10:48 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0For this week’s review, I read @jamestwotree.bsky.social’s new history of Taiwanese agrarian development at home and abroad, In the Global Vanguard. Land reform, Africa, and Straw Hat Diplomats!
05.05.2025 10:57 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 1This week’s review! — something a little bit different (and more light-hearted) to wrap up my focus on interwar monetary history, for now. Liaquat Ahamed’s very entertaining if dubious Lords of Finance!
22.04.2025 10:48 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0The right to watch television should be conditional on first having seen Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The Peano axioms of culture.
14.04.2025 11:12 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0More brilliant Minard flow-maps — here we have the impact of the American Civil War on European Cotton Imports! I can’t get enough…
08.04.2025 11:42 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review — my brief reflections on Charles Kindleberger’s World in Depression 1929-1939. I couldn’t resist thinking about our present moment… a very timely read!
(With unavoidable reference to @adamtooze.bsky.social and @delong.social)
Fantastic paintings from an artist I had never heard from before. The art is what keeps bringing me back to chartbook - helps break me out of my futurism/expressionism shell!
26.03.2025 11:55 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0The first shows British coal exports (1864), while the second is a representation of Napoleon’s Russia campaign, where the thickness of the line shows the number of men alive, yellow for advance and black for the retreat! (From 1869).
26.03.2025 11:49 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0You can’t help but fall in love with Charles Joseph Minard’s flow maps!
The godfather of data visualisation.
Thank you! I remember Timothy Mitchell wrote about Veblen’s sabotage in Carbon Democracy.. Arun seems to be picking up the same point!
25.03.2025 01:36 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review! - on Charles Kindleberger’s unrealised vision for the dollar system, according to Perry Mehrling.
24.03.2025 20:23 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This week’s review! - on how a changing money market changed central banking, according to Perry Mehrling. Check it out!
10.03.2025 19:54 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Central bankers need to bring back the pointy beards! Adds mystique befitting a bearer of arcane knowledge… how could anyone believe in CBI if they don’t look a little bit like wizards?
(Pictured: Montagu Norman and Rudolf Havenstein)