155 Yet for over two centuries, from about 1637 to 1867, nearly the entire period in which feudal Japan was ruled from Edo (Tokyo) by the Tokugawa shoguns, the feudal lords (daimyo) and warrior class (bushi) ignored or disparaged the gun (matchlock) as a combat weapon. In Japan the sword was preeminent from the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 to the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877-twenty-five years after...

Neoliberal logic and institutional lethargy may well explain part of the reason why governments pay little attention to how their economic and development policies negatively affect health outcomes associated with the global diffusion of unhealthy commodities. In calling attention to this the authors encourage health advocates to consider strategies other than just regu...

The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are “coercive,” in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose a tractable principal-agent model of coercion, based on the idea that coercive activities by employe...

Introduction In his 1971 Journal of Asian Studies article, "Serfdom and Mobility: An Examination of the Institution of 'Human Lease' in Traditional Tibetan Society," Melvyn Goldstein proclaims, "Tibet was characterized by a form of institutionalized inequality that can be called pervasive serfdom," and thereby launched his narrative of serfdom. In this chapter I will deconstruct Goldstein's nar...

records of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is that they enable us to study not the learned culture but the beliefs and views of the common people. Were it not for the fact that so many were hauled before the Inquisitorial courts, we would have had very little evidence about them at all. In this particular case, these sources are of inestimable value because they constitute almost the only s...

The article investigates the intellectual roots of concept colonial revolution, which goes back to 2nd congress Communist International, examines its importance in shaping political thought and outlines subsequent transformation wake post-colonial theory. author starts with analyzing ideas Georgi Safarov—Comintern [the International] theorist. He was among most original thinkers who elaborated ...

This paper documents a divergence in the duration of rule for monarchs in Western Europe and the Islamic world beginning in the medieval period. While leadership tenures in the two regions were similar in 700 CE, Christian kings became increasingly long-lived compared to Muslim sultans. To better understand the roots of this divergence, we investigate the empirical relevance of an historical li...