Publications
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- September 2024 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Burn the Gondolas? Venice, the Ghetto, and the Seasons of Capitalism
By: Sophus A. Reinert, Charlotte Robertson and Robert Fredona
This case uses the history of Venice—from the driving of the first pylons in the lagoon to the abdication of the city’s last doge, across the ages of Marco Polo and Vivaldi—to explore the invention and global diffusion of capitalism, as well as the cyclical rise and... View Details
- February 2023
- Teaching Note
The Dutch East India Company (VOC)
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona
Teaching Note for HBS Case No.723-002. View Details
- 2022
- Article
Before Plagiarism: Lawyers and Copynorms in Europe, 1300–1600
By: Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
This essay uses the concept of 'copynorms', social norms about copying expressive works that can be distinct from legal norms about the same, in order to understand the meaning of intellectual property among Roman law and canon law jurists from the fourteenth through... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised October 2023)
- Case
The Dutch East India Company (VOC)
By: Sophus A. Reinert, Paul M. Healy and Robert Fredona
- 2022
- Chapter
The Origins of the Developmental State: The European Experience
Book Abstract: There has been a major revival of interest in State Capitalism: what it is, where it is found, and why it is seemingly becoming more ubiquitous. As a concept, it has evolved from radical critiques of the Soviet Union, to being deployed by neo-liberals to... View Details
- January 2022 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Mercantilism, the Medici, and the Making of the Modern World (A)
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona
- January 2022
- Supplement
Mercantilism, the Medici, and the Making of the Modern World (B)
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona
- 2021
- Working Paper
Caccia Selvaggia: Myth, Rites, and the Right in Carlo Ginzburg's Storia notturna
By: Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939) is widely considered one of Europe’s leading historians. His masterpiece Storia notturna (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), widely praised for its extraordinary erudition and creativity, is now over three decades old but it continues to inspire... View Details
- November 2021 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
The Global Great Depression, 1929-1939
By: Alberto Cavallo, Sophus A. Reinert and Federica Gabrieli
The Great Depression was, by far, the worst economic contraction of the twentieth century, and some of the most important ideas about both fiscal and monetary policy in the second half of the century were developed in response to it. The economic collapse, which... View Details
- Summer 2019
- Article
Breaking Even: Political Economy and Private Enterprise in the Norwegian Glass Industry, 1739-1803
By: Rolv Petter Amdam, Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the 18th-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic... View Details
- 2019
- Book
The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe
By: Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert
The mid-eighteenth century witnessed what might be dubbed an “economic turn” that resolutely changed the trajectory of world history. From the birth of new agricultural practices and the foundation of private societies to the sustained and popular theorization of... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
Merchants and the Origins of Capitalism
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona
N.S.B. Gras, the father of business history in the United States, argued that the era of mercantile capitalism was defined by the figure of the “sedentary merchant,” who managed his business from home, using correspondence and intermediaries, in contrast to the earlier... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
Angola Starts Now
By: Jeremy Friedman and Sophus A. Reinert
After five centuries of colonialism, four decades of civil war, an extended experiment with Marxism-Leninism, and nearly four decades of rule by a single man, José Eduardo Dos Santos, Angola finally has a chance to realize its enormous economic potential. A country... View Details
- 2018
- Book
The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy
The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the 18th century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the 19th, they paradoxically sought to make the... View Details
Keywords: Enlightenment; Political Economy; Italy; Commercial Society; Economic Systems; Trade; History; Markets; Society; Italy
- November 2018 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Bangladesh: Into the Maelstrom
By: Reshmaan Hussam, Sophus A. Reinert and Namrata Arora
In the fall of 2018, Rohima Begum considered her options as the small island, or “char,” on which her family’s house rested slowly but inescapably eroded into the mighty Brahmaputra River in northern Bangladesh. The country, once unceremoniously dubbed a “basket case”... View Details
- 2018
- Introduction
Introduction: History and Political Economy
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona
This volume offers a snapshot of the resurgent historiography of political economy in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis, and suggests fruitful new agendas for research on the political-economic nexus as it has developed in the Western world since the end... View Details
- 2018
- Book
New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy
By: Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
This volume offers a snapshot of the resurgent historiography of political economy in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis and suggests fruitful new agendas for research on the political-economic nexus as it has developed in the Western world since the end... View Details
- December 2017 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Globalization Past, 1850–1914 (A)
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Federica Gabrieli
On the evening of 3 August 1914, British Foreign Secretary Lord Edward Grey contemplated whether to advise King and Parliament to declare war on Germany in the wake of the country’s invasion of Belgium or to stay out of what quickly was becoming a world war triggered... View Details