The idea that the Song experienced an economic (or monetary, financial, commercial) “revolution” has gained broad currency in the historiography. One key development was the monetization of the economy, including the introduction of paper currency, used along with various kinds of metal currencies for all kinds of commercial transactions and even tax payments. The role of the state was crucial, both in providing infrastructure for transportation and distribution networks and in implementing policies that supported merchant entrepreneurs and promoted the development of agriculture through the introduction of new technologies and new crops. Farmers specialized in the production of certain commodities, and ceramics, textiles, and other goods were also produced for the marketplace. Both urban and rural markets proliferated, and new kinds of merchant enterprises accompanied this commercial growth. The expansion of shipbuilding and advances in both shipbuilding and navigational technology supported the growth of maritime trade. Commercial relations with Japan and Korea in particular also fostered cultural connections: the transmission of religion, books, and other cultural commodities went along with silks, foodstuffs, metals, and aromatics. Despite ongoing political and military conflicts between them, overland border trade continued between Song and its northern nomadic neighbors to supply essential and luxury goods.

This chapter probes the borders of the public supervisory jurisdiction by looking at a parallel private law supervisory jurisdiction under which the courts judicially review decisions by "domestic tribunals". This comparative exercise gives pause for reflection on the deeper conceptual and normative foundations of judicial review, especially for questions of amenability to review. In the modern administrative state, many apparently "public" functions are performed by private, profit-oriented or charitable bodies and the review of these bodies has been an important testing ground in which theories of judicial review have been formulated and defended. Stopping short of suggesting a grand, unified theory of all the supervisory jurisdictions, I argue that an appreciation of the deep, structural parallels helps us to understand the common law roots of judicial review and that office could provide some intellectual resources to advance the province of administrative law judicial review in a principled fashion.

This chapter summarises the argument of the book. It has examined the EU’s competition regime and its application in times of crises. In each of these cases, the relaxation of the rules has been shown not to have assisted in solving the crises, and has exacerbated the effects of some crises. Further, as has been shown, the rules themselves do not provide an insurmountable barrier to the solution of ongoing crises (e.g. those associated with environmental and sustainability concerns). Rather, the problem is the need for competition authorities to provide additional guidance and to work with stakeholders in designing and implementing solutions. The work shows that its main lesson – that the introduction of further monopolisation into markets does not solve crises – has been established.

Monopolies constituted one of the main ways to control the economy from the Ottoman Empire to republican Turkey. Monopolies, which predominantly functioned as a mechanism to provide revenue for the state before the modern era, have gained new functions such as structuring property relations by commercializing the economy and generating revenues for modernization and state-building. Ottoman historians examined smuggling in the Ottoman Empire. What is less known is the smuggling during the early republic. The new Turkish state embarked on radical modernization and state-making projects and financed them with monopoly revenues as well as taxes. This chapter examines the responses of low-income consumers, producers and traders to monopolies and monopoly-like state control of tobacco, cigarette, salt, alcoholic beverages, textiles, sugar and forests through smuggling during the first two decades of the Republic. It argues that most actions labeled as “smuggling” were economic survival methods and were the continuation of practices with a very long pedigree because this is how people coped with the high prices of monopoly products, taxes and profit margins. The chapter shows that this informal economy restricted the republican state’s extractive capacity.

This chapter examines several elements of Grotius’s teachings on the laws governing promises, contracts, and treaties, as expounded in his De jure belli acpacis. Grotius distinguished between promises and contracts. A promise to transfer a property right is binding when the promisor expressed his intention with an external sign, and the promisee has accepted the promise. As the binding effect is based on the free will of the promisor, the so-called vices of the will (duress, fraud etc.) can invalidate the agreement.