The Wealth of a Nation : Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism

How the development of legal and financial institutions transformed Britain into the world’s first capitalist countryModern capitalism emerged in England in the eighteenth century and ushered in the Industrial Revolution, though scholars have long debated why.Some attribute the causes to technological change while others point to the Protestant ethic, liberal ideas, and cultural change.The Wealth of a Nation reveals the crucial developments in legal and financial institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that help to explain this dramatic transformation. Offering new perspectives on the early history of capitalism, Geoffrey Hodgson describes how, for the emerging British economy, pressures from without were as important as evolution from within.He shows how intensive military conflicts overseas forced the state to undertake major financial, administrative, legal, and political reforms.The resulting institutional changes not only bolstered the British war machine-they fos