What is Environmental History?
Reading time: 12 minutes Origins Environmental history is a rather new discipline that came into...
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Tag: Economics
The Origins of the Commons in Britain
Reading time: 8 minutes
Walking around any British town or village today, it’s difficult to imagine that land might not once have been private. But this was not always the case – for centuries, landless people could access common lands and forests. There they could gather firewood, graze livestock, or grow small crops.
From micro to macro, Andrew Leigh’s accessible history covers the economic essentials
Reading time: 6 minutes
Andrew Leigh’s The Shortest History of Economics is the latest in a series of such histories, mostly focused on particular countries.
It begins with a striking mini-history of household lighting, focusing on the amount of labour required to produce the light now given off by a standard lightbulb: 58 hours for a wood fire, five hours for a candle based on animal fat, a few minutes for an early electric lightbulb, and less than one second for a modern light-emitting diode.
“The Best Show That Was Ever Staged”: Charles Ponzi’s Scheme
Reading time: 7 minutes
Having gambled away his life savings on the passage over, Italian immigrant Charles Ponzi arrived in America with next to nothing in his pocket. As he would later recount, “I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me.”
Shipwrecks of the Manila Galleons
Reading time: 8 minutes
Huge ships filled with canons, gold, porcelain, silk, and other riches from Asia, the Manila Galleons were the key vessels in transporting rare goods from Asia across the Pacific Ocean to Spanish holdings in Mexico. From there, the cargo could easily be sailed across the Atlantic to Spain and Europe.
A Continent’s Currency: 20 years of the Euro
Reading time: 6 minutes
The central unit of money for much of Europe, the EURO first entered circulation on January 1, 2002.
pride, these cultural emblems can indeed be an emotional declaration of nationalistic pride. A country’s currency is then no less another unique symbol, a “Made in…” concretization of the nation’s economic prosperity and in many cases independence from colonial rule.
