The dictatorial Dominion of New England (1686–1689) saw the rise and fall of the first operational bank scheme in America. Both events resulted from the appointed rulers' attempts to personally profit from real estate, subject to an absolutist constitution imposed by England. The first, local ruler led a nominally private land bank. The subsequent, foreign ruler invalidated all land titles and thus killed the bank. This unusual case study exemplifies an extension of Mancur Olson's model of stationary and roving bandits, and demonstrates how economic development can be affected in different ways by different types of dictators.

Robert W. Fogel was a visionary economic historian, generous mentor, and eternal optimist whose works and lectures have informed and incited for more than half a century and whose writings will continue to do so for decades to come. He died on June 11, 2013 in his eighty-sixth year. He had co-taught a graduate course at the University of Chicago that quarter and in the weeks before he died he was planning his fall 2013 teaching. “I've often told my students I'm not retiring. You're going to have to carry me out in a wooden box. I'm having too much fun,” he remarked to a recent class.

This is an ambitious, stimulating, and well-written book. Haim Ofek is concerned with the origin of the human propensity “to truck, barter, and exchange,” as Adam Smith put it. The author notes that while many animals engage in forms of nepotistic exchange (behavior that can be accounted for by the Hamilton kin-selection mechanism), humans are the only species to engage systematically in exchange with nonkin conspecifics. Rather than viewing these behaviors as cultural artifacts reflective of generations of development after the onset of the Neolithic revolution, Ofek seeks to situate their origin much earlier, in the two-million-year Pleistocene era; indeed, he views exchange, in conjunction with climactic stabilization, as a sufficient condition for—the cause, rather than a consequence of—the Neolithic revolution.

Ann Capling's book deals with Australia's role in the design of the global trade system, from the post-1945 negotiations over the (aborted) International Trade Organization (ITO), up to the 1999 meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. She draws primarily on Australian sources, such as memoranda, reminiscences, and interviews with Australian participants in the negotiation process. The story has not been told before in such detail, and the book will become a standard work on how Australia conducted its international economic diplomacy during the second half of the twentieth century.

This paper investigates the evolution of gender equality in Sweden during a phase characterized by industrialization, urbanization, and demographic transition. To this end, we build a database with quantitative indicators to construct a spatial Historical Gender Gap Index. We find that after a period of stagnation, Sweden made significant progress in closing the gender gap from the 1940s onward to reach the high level of gender equality that it is now famous for. The empirical exploration of the relationship between gender equality and economic development reveals that regions displaying higher gender equality performed economically better than less gender-equal regions.

This article examines barriers that impeded the accumulation of land by African Americans in the postbellum South with a new data set of real estate transactions from 1880 Tennessee. We find that rates of purchase by African Americans differed little between plantation and non-plantation regions. We also find that parcels sold in plantation regions were relatively small, suggesting that African American accumulation of land was not hindered by plantation owners refusing to subdivide their properties. Additionally, we find blacks paid more than whites per acre of quality-constant land, although literacy at least partially mitigated the racial price discrimination.

Secure property rights are usually considered to be essential for sustained economic development. In England, it is debated whether property rights have been secure since the medieval period or if they were only established after the Glorious Revolution. In this context, the paper examines the Court of Wards, which from 1540 to 1646 administered the Crown’s right to take custody of children and their lands when these were held by feudal-military tenures. The paper shows that wardship was a common occurrence, its exactions arbitrary but often heavy, and that it reduced the value of lands held by these tenures.