If you are under the impres­sion, as many are, that eco­nom­ic thought begins with Adam Smith, then this book will act as a cor­rec­tive. Hen­ry C. Clark out­lines the chang­ing themes in the dis­cus­sion of trade that took place in France dur­ing the 17th and 18th cen­turies, as well as the Eng­lish and Dutch works that they react­ed to. What strikes me is that most of the issues being dis­cussed are much the same as the ones being debat­ed today, and most of the same ideas are sim­i­lar. Adam Smith, in 1776, was not begin­ning a new dis­ci­pline, but pro­duc­ing a selec­tive syn­the­sis of a long-exist­ing and com­plex one. Along the way to The Wealth of Nations, there was a long list of impor­tant and inter­est­ing peo­ple com­ment­ing on the nature of trade, mon­ey, and the prop­er roles of the state and the indi­vid­ual in com­merce. Among them was the rec­og­niz­able, but con­sis­tent­ly under-esti­mat­ed Mon­tesquieu. But there were many oth­er, for­got­ten thinkers worth pay­ing atten­tion to.

17156. (David Leav­itt) The Lost Lan­guage of Cranes
17157. (Gov­ern­ment of Cana­da: Dept. of Finance) Notice of Ways and Means Motion to Implement 
. . . . . Cer­tain Pro­vi­sions of the Bud­get Tabled in Par­lia­ment on Jan­u­ary 27, 2009 and 
. . . . . Relat­ed Fis­cal Mea­sures / Avis de motion de voies et moyens por­tant exécution 
. . . . . de cer­taines dis­po­si­tions du bud­get déposé au Par­lement le 27 jan­vi­er 2009
. . . . . et met­tant en oeu­vre des mesures fis­cales con­nex­es [report]
17158. (Jack­ie Grom) Tur­tles Island-Hopped Their Way Across a Warm Arc­tic [arti­cle]
17159. (Sara Coel­ho) A Rich His­to­ry of Choco­late in North Amer­i­ca [arti­cle]
Read more »

This a very good study of the use of elec­tive pro­ce­dures in the Church from Late Antiq­ui­ty to the end of the Mid­dle Ages. The book min­i­mizes inter­pre­ta­tion and analy­sis in favour of pro­vid­ing hun­dreds of texts with ref­er­ences to elec­tion, and let­ting them speak for them­selves. The author chimes in when it is nec­es­sary to explain how a par­tic­u­lar word or con­cept might have a dif­fer­ent mean­ing in a medieval con­text, or a reli­gious con­text. Over­all inter­pre­ta­tion, and that very cau­tious, is saved for the end of the book. Two basic groups of doc­u­ments are cov­ered: those relat­ing to elec­tion with­in the Cler­gy, and those relat­ing to elec­tion with­in the monas­tic sys­tem. The monas­tic doc­u­ments are of greater inter­est to a his­to­ri­an of democ­ra­cy. Read more »

For a long time, the most read­er-friend­ly intro­duc­tion to the his­to­ry of ancient India (i.e. any­thing before the Gup­ta peri­od) has been the first vol­ume of Romi­la Tha­par’s His­to­ry of India. But that book was pub­lished back in 1966, and advances in archae­ol­o­gy and schol­ar­ship have out­dat­ed it. I would now rec­om­mend this book as a con­tem­po­rary sub­sti­tute. It’s a good place for some­one to start their read­ing on the sub­ject, though I sug­gest that they read it in con­junc­tion with Wikipedia entries on most of its main topics.

I have some prob­lems with Shar­ma’s work. He embraces some dubi­ous notions of “social evo­lu­tion”, he sees noth­ing of inter­est in the “trib­al” and non-Vedic or non-Dra­vid­i­an peo­ples of India except their inevitable con­ver­sion to “civ­i­liza­tion”, and he writes absolute­ly noth­ing about Indi­a’s inter­ac­tion with South­east Asia. This last stands in con­trast to his lengthy dis­cus­sions of Indi­an trade, polit­i­cal, and cul­tur­al inter­ac­tions with Cen­tral Asia, and even the Roman Empire. But impor­tant as these were, India nev­er export­ed much of its cul­ture to these areas, where­as in South­east Asia, Indi­an cul­ture was export­ed on a gigan­tic scale. Hin­du and Indo-Bud­dhist king­doms were set up in places as far as Viet­nam. Indi­a’s east­ward trade links were every bit, and per­haps more, impor­tant than its west­ward ones. Shar­ma hard­ly men­tions them. But despite these weak­ness­es, the book remains a good intro­duc­tion to a sub­ject with which every edu­cat­ed per­son in the world should have some basic familiarity.

17078. (David Liss) A Con­spir­a­cy of Paper
17079. (Dar­rell Marke­witz) [in blog Ham­mered Out Bits] Black­smithing Skills in the Viking Age 
. . . . . [arti­cle]
17080. (Lithi­um Cola) [in blog Dai­ly Kos] Hits and Miss­es 2008 [arti­cle]
17081. (Lithi­um Cola) [in blog Dai­ly Kos] Of ICBMs, Sesame Street, and Arro­gance [arti­cle]
17082. (Lebanon Dai­ly Star) Beirut Seems to Have Upper Hand Against Extrem­ists [arti­cle]
17083. (Juan Cole) [in blog Informed Com­ment] Top Ten Good News Sto­ries in the Muslim 
. . . . . World, 2008 {That Nobody Noticed} [arti­cle]
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Lucian seems to have been the Kurt Von­negut of the Roman World, pok­ing fun at philoso­phers and the clas­sics of Greek lit­er­a­ture with a cheer­ful cyn­i­cism. Though he was an Assyr­i­an from Mesopotamia, liv­ing in the sec­ond cen­tu­ry A.D., he wrote in Clas­si­cal Greek (the equiv­a­lent of some­one today writ­ing in Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish). His most famous work is the True His­to­ry, some­times list­ed as the first sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry, since it incor­po­rates a trip to the moon and the sun, and an inter­plan­e­tary war. But it’s real­ly a shag­gy-dog sto­ry intend­ed to spoof the creduli­ty of Homer and Herodotus. The nar­ra­tor repeat­ed­ly tells you some­thing absurd, then says he won’t tell you anoth­er, more absurd detail because you won’t believe him. It employs tech­niques of farce and bur­lesque lat­er per­fect­ed by Baron Mün­chausen and Mark Twain. Lucius the Ass, the attri­bu­tion of which is occa­sion­al­ly ques­tioned, is notice­ably dif­fer­ent in style, and con­tains pas­sages that are obvi­ous­ly intend­ed to be read as porn. The same sto­ry (the hero is trans­formed into a don­key: trou­ble fol­lows) was also told by Apuleius. It’s inter­est­ing in that it draws atten­tion to the suf­fer­ing of an ani­mal, some­thing to which most Roman writ­ers were obliv­i­ous. Most of the oth­er pieces are com­ic dia­logues in which the Gods are spoofed in all-too-human terms. Lucian seems to have con­sid­ered all reli­gion char­la­tanism, and did not have much good to say about philoso­phers, either. Chris­tians are sat­i­rized in The Death of Pere­gri­nus. The auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal My Dream reveals that a stone-mason’s son from a back­wa­ter part of the Empire could edu­cate him­self into a suc­cess. Lucian was able to set­tle down and write spoofs after a career as a lec­tur­er that took him across the Empire. A mod­ern read­er with a rou­tine expo­sure to Greek mythol­o­gy will get at least half of Lucian’s allu­sions, though not, of course, his puns. This anthol­o­gy con­tains less than half of his known works. Read more »

Steve Muhlberg­er’s site exposed me to the blog­ging of Juan Cole, who is a Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan his­to­ri­an spe­cial­iz­ing in con­tem­po­rary Mid­dle East­ern and South Asian stud­ies. He counts as one of the major his­to­ri­ans of, and pol­i­cy experts on the Mid­dles East. His blog, Informed Com­ment, is the best source of insight­ful com­ment and hard-to-find cru­cial infor­ma­tion in this field that I’ve seen, any­where. I rec­om­mend check­ing out this entry, since it exem­pli­fies his abil­i­ty to sort out the “big pic­ture” from a bliz­zard of data. I was not sur­prised to learn that Cole is an avid Sci­ence Fic­tion fan .…it seems that all today’s best his­to­ri­ans are.

This is an excel­lent, enter­tain­ing nov­el set in Eng­land in 1720, at the time of the “South Sea Bub­ble.” This was a finan­cial cri­sis caused by a com­plex stock mar­ket swin­dle, which was cooked up by an alliance of pri­vate and gov­ern­ment inter­ests. Read­ing the book today, now that we have wit­nessed the biggest armed rob­bery in human his­to­ry, in the form of the Wall Street bailouts, is a more piquant expe­ri­ence than it would have been if I had picked it up when it was pub­lished, eight years ago. [Last Novem­ber, I reviewed an inter­est­ing biog­ra­phy of John Law, the man at the heart of the finan­cial melt­down of France that occurred in the same year.] Read more »