Project MUSE®: Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/769
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2019) through current issueLatest Articles: Capitalism: A Journal of History and EconomicsTWOProject MUSE®Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics2576-64062576-6392Latest articles in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Learning from the Other Side
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963189
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We hear a lot about interdisciplinarity and its supposed virtues. We hear less about how to make it work on an everyday basis. What follows are some ruminations from two scholars who spent many years working together in an interdisciplinary economic history program.1 Given the many academic disciplines and subdisciplines that exist, "interdisciplinary" can imply a multitude of combinations. We focus on what might be the broadest divide relevant to this journal: economic history as done by economists in economics departments, and economic history as done by historians in history departments. The two parent disciplines span a large intellectual gulf, one of the largest possible. Sometimes discussions of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/769/image/coversmallLearning from the Other Side2025-06-20text/htmlen-USLearning from the Other Side2025-06-202025TWOProject MUSE®270282026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-20The Problems with Labor Force Participation as a Measure of Women's Work
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963190
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The labor force participation rate, which is the number of workers who are employed or looking for work divided by the adult population, is a popular measure of women's work. While the measure was developed by economists for current labor markets, economic historians have embraced it too, estimating participation rates over at least four centuries. Claudia Goldin measures US women's labor force participation over the twentieth century, and Dora Costa presents rates for nineteenth-century Europe as well.1 Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries, and Jacob Weisdorf estimate the participation rate of married English women from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.2 Ariadne Schmidt and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk examine
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/769/image/coversmallThe Problems with Labor Force Participation as a Measure of Women's Work2025-06-20text/htmlen-USThe Problems with Labor Force Participation as a Measure of Women's Work2025-06-202025TWOProject MUSE®1662722026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-20A French Nabob and the Imperial Twilight of Cross-Cultural Trade in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963191
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Even by the frenzied standards of speculation under Napoleon III, the French merchant François Bravay (1817–1874) led a scandalous economic life.1 A tinsmith in the small southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, he established himself in Alexandria, Egypt, where he acquired an enormous fortune in the 1850s. Back in France, his wealth enabled him to become a national celebrity and a member of parliament from 1864 to 1869. Yet he was soon embroiled in various business and legal disputes, in both France and Egypt. By 1870, he had lost most of his fortune, and in 1875, the Paris Tribunal de Commerce posthumously declared him bankrupt. Gustave Flaubert, the master of literary realism, considered using Bravay's career
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/769/image/coversmallA French Nabob and the Imperial Twilight of Cross-Cultural Trade in Nineteenth-Century Egypt2025-06-20text/htmlen-USA French Nabob and the Imperial Twilight of Cross-Cultural Trade in Nineteenth-Century Egypt2025-06-202025TWOProject MUSE®1715902026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-20Sample-Selection Bias
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963192
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All historians rely on materials inherited from the past. That inheritance takes many forms, from archaeological sites to government-created documents to records produced by businesses and persons. Perhaps the most important skill for any historian reflects the broad problem of "source criticism." To learn about the past, we must ask probing questions about the evidence it left us.One form of source criticism asks whether the material we have represents some broader universe. The key terms here are "population," which means every possible unit, and "sample," the units available for inquiry. Populations, by definition, exist; what the historical record leaves to us is most often a subset of the population, a sample.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/769/image/coversmallSample-Selection Bias2025-06-20text/htmlen-USSample-Selection Bias2025-06-202025TWOProject MUSE®1339742026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-20Retelling the Transformation of the International Economic Order from Within: The Life and Death of Bureaucratic Charisma at the OECD (1955–1985)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963193
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Renowned both for the technicality and rationality of the debates that take place within them, economic bureaucracies—a fortiori international ones such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the World Bank—appear to leave little room for charismatic-type legitimacy as typified by Max Weber. By distinguishing it from rational-legal legitimacy, and by associating bureaucratization with the impersonalization of social relations, Weber seems to have led some of his readers to overlook the nonstandard bureaucrats. These people in positions of power, to whom extraordinary or exemplary attributes are ascribed, Weber refers to oxymoronically as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/769/image/coversmallRetelling the Transformation of the International Economic Order from Within: The Life and Death of Bureaucratic Charisma at the OECD (1955–1985)2025-06-20text/htmlen-USRetelling the Transformation of the International Economic Order from Within: The Life and Death of Bureaucratic Charisma at the OECD (1955–1985)2025-06-202025TWOProject MUSE®2308592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-20All in the Family: Sex, Social Capital, and the French Intellectual Elites
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963194
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Nobody who knows anything about France is unaware of the special nature of the French intellectual elite: they make up a very small world whose members in the professoriate and the ranks of publishing have, until recently, nearly all been graduates of a tiny number of murderously selective grandes écoles.1 Students in these schools are typically children of the urban, and especially Parisian, bourgeoisie, the offspring of well-to-do intellectuals and professionals, but their ranks have always included lower-class strivers thrown up by the meritocracy who must work hard and fast at acquiring the cultural codes that come naturally to their peers. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a provincial postal worker's son whose
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/769/image/coversmallAll in the Family: Sex, Social Capital, and the French Intellectual Elites2025-06-20text/htmlen-USAll in the Family: Sex, Social Capital, and the French Intellectual Elites2025-06-202025TWOProject MUSE®766042026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-20Making Money Modern: Keynesianism and the Search for Noninflationary Growth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963195
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We are all keynesians, famously. When instability hits and we are exposed to the full force of uncertainty, we all want our government bailout. But there is more at play here than simple hypocrisy. For most of us, the system of thought that Keynes's writings expressed is what philosophers like to call an "unsurpassable horizon" of how we perceive the economic world—there's no obvious outside to the Keynesian worldview. We readily understand that the dynamic maelstrom of economic life produces problems that are difficult for the actors involved to solve in real time. And so we look to government and experts, people who have some distance from the action, to step in and adjust the rules of the game. Without such
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/769/image/coversmallMaking Money Modern: Keynesianism and the Search for Noninflationary Growth2025-06-20text/htmlen-USMaking Money Modern: Keynesianism and the Search for Noninflationary Growth2025-06-202025TWOProject MUSE®1029102026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-20