Paul J.J.G. Janssens

A collection of papers which look at how aristocrats managed their estates and fostered or hindered development of a modern economy. The quality is very uneven, by far the best was Richard Hellie's about Russia which gave a succinct history of Russian aristocracy since the days of Ivan IV. Once again, the idea of applying modern concepts of economics to historical societies strikes me as ludicrous, but these papers for the most part put the focus on history. The final summary essay by Patrick Karl O'Brien deftly puts the straightforward chronological narrative of the previous papers into economists' gobbledegook.… (plus d'informations)