In an excellent, deep-dive Alice Evans looks at patriarchy in Egypt using pictures drawn from four thousand years of history. Here are three examples. A wealthy woman, shown at right circa 116 CE...
Forthcoming from the QJE, here is a new paper by Andrea Matanga: The Neolithic revolution saw the independent development of agriculture among at least seven unconnected hunter-gatherer populatio...
He is one of the greatest of living American historians, here is from Wikipedia: Alan Shaw Taylor (born June 17, 1955) is an American historian and scholar who is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial F...
With a group of friends I was having a chat about the merits of the current vs. past America. Battle of the Ancients and Moderns! I generally favor current times, but not unconditionally. S...
Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia. We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian his...
The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell. A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt: The First Republic is sixteen years of un...
These topics seem underexplored to me: Montesquieu Economics in the Talmud Rise of econometrics in the 19th century The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield The last 50 years of econ...
An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular: Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than ...
At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical...
It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal manageme...
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his bio: Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a seasoned analyst of Latin American politics, with more than 20 y...
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. You can tell he knows what an interview is! At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying c...
Let’s say the Sumerians were gifted strong AI, simply as an exogenous shock to a historical model. Could they put it to much use? Electricity would be one immediate problem, but not the onl...
Open borders hasn’t been getting a lot of good press recently but next week Bulgaria and Romania will join the Schengen Area for air and sea travel (road travel will likely follow). No more pas...
Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago....