FOREWORD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Profit, Penury, and the Impieties of Inequality? <\/a> INEQUALITIES<\/strong> This essay offers a critique of, and a set of alternative approaches to, the study of Roman economic well-being. It examines the calculations, methods, and assumptions used to estimate both gross domestic product and inequality, and how they fit into attempts at long-term cliometrics from Maddison to Piketty. The essay further asks what role the Roman world is asked to play in the two-thousand-year economic arcs laid out in these narratives, and what kind of Roman history this new cliometric work produces. I argue that these studies have been tacitly used to reanimate long-discarded macro and meta-historical teleologies of rise, decline, and \u201cnatural\u201d inequality, now narrated through economics. The essay concludes by offering some different approaches grounded in household-level data. Infinite Regress: Virginia School Neoliberalism and the Tax Revolt<\/a> This article examines the fortunes of American government in light of the work of James M. Buchanan, the Virginia school political economist whose thinking on constitutional revolution played a formative, if largely unrecognized, role in shaping the tax revolt. By looking backwards, to an earlier wave of constitutional tax and spending limits enacted in the American South during the Redemption era, and forwards, to the increasingly regressive nature of local government revenue generation in the wake of the tax revolt, this article shows that Virginia school neoliberalism is less an argument against taxation than an argument in favor of regressive forms of taxation that are rarely acknowledged as such\u2014user fees, fines, and flat-rate levies. The city of Ferguson, Missouri, which has become infamous for its exorbitant use of municipal ordinance violations and court fees to fund local services, is examined as a real-world experiment in Virginia school public finance. Our Lady of Mont Pelerin: The “Navarra School” of Catholic Neoliberalism<\/a> Religious doctrine and practice have been among the principal conduits for neoliberal ideas, policies, and subjectivities, and attention to them reveals the self-conscious dependence of free markets on intimate forms of unfreedom. Intellectual historians have recovered the shifting and overlapping neoliberal schools of Geneva and Freiburg, Virginia and Chicago, Vienna and Cologne. This article makes a case for adding a similarly heterogenous but nonetheless identifiable \u201cNavarra School\u201d to the roster of neoliberal networks. The neologism derives from the flagship university in Spain where members of the elite Catholic lay movement Opus Dei disseminated economic policy, business training, and religious practice. Measuring Colonial Extraction: The East India Company’s Rule and the Drain of Wealth (1757-1858)<\/a> This paper revisits the relationship between capitalism and colonialism by examining the case of British India under East India Company rule (1757-1858). The Marxist-nationalist historiography claims that colonialism generated a steady drain of wealth and that this drain was responsible for Indian famines, poverty, inequality, and economic retardation. I use the East India Company budgets to measure the extent of the wealth that was drained through three direct channels: oppressive land taxes, unproductive expenditures on the imperial army and civil administration, and the unrequited export of commodities from India to Britain. I conclude that available figures lend empirical support to the Marxist interpretation. There was a drain of wealth and its effects on the underdevelopment of former European colonies deserve further research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Intellectual Origins of Sudan\u2019s \u2018Decades of Solitude,\u2019 1989-2019<\/a> The three decades between 1989 and 2019, when the National Salvation regime of Islamists and the military ruled Sudan, are now frequently remembered by international and Sudanese policymakers, politicians, intellectuals, and business elites as \u201clost decades\u201d or \u201cdecades of solitude\u201d marked by poor policymaking, corruption, and international isolation. These standard accounts, as well as much of the scholarly literature, assume that ideas played very little role in the development of Sudan\u2019s political economy. Instead, most observers of Sudan\u2019s political economy assume its evolution between 1989 and 2019 was shaped by happenstance and competing interests that settled into brief moments of equilibrium. This dismissal of the role that ideas play in shaping the political economy of Sudan in particular, and that of African states in general, is not only a result of prejudice or historical myopia, but also the result of recent trends that privilege the analysis of material, class, or sectoral interests over ideas in scholarship on political economy. These explanations obscure the intellectual traditions that gave rise to the particular contours of the Sudanese economy between 1989 and 2019. This article argues that the idea of tamkeen, or economic consolidation, guided the economic policies put forth by the National Salvation regime between 1989 and 2019. To explicate tamkeen\u2014its origins and its meaning\u2014this article examines the writings of two Sudanese intellectuals: Fatima Babiker Mahmoud and Muhammad Abu al-Qasim Hajj Hamad. In publications from the 1980s, these two wrote extensively about the failures of the Sudanese developmental state in the 1960s. In their critique of this earlier Sudanese state, we discover the preconditions for the idea of tamkeen, which guided the political economy of Sudan during the so-called \u201cdecades of solitude.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n ESSAYS AND INTERTEXTS <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Economic History and Nationalism<\/a> In \u201cEconomic Theory and Nationalism,\u201d written in 1934, the economist Frank Knight identified two tendencies\u2014one towards gross inequality and the other towards new techniques of influence\u2014that appeared to be leading to fascism in liberal democracies. Knight\u2019s predictions were wrong in the 1930s. But his comments suggest interesting questions about economic history in a period of renewed nationalism, \u201cintolerable insecurity,\u201d and, in Knight\u2019s words, \u201ccontempt for truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Retrospective on Martin Luther\u2019s \u201cOn Trade and Usury\u201d for Our Times
<\/a>C.N. Biltoft<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Kuznets Went to Rome:Roman Economic Well-Being and the Reframing of Roman History<\/a>
Kim Bowes<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Melinda Cooper <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Bethany Moreton <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Pilar Nogues-Marco <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alden Young <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Emma Rothschild <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n