Europe and the emergence of the market economy

This chapter addresses the literature referred to in the previous chapter as ‘Eurocentrism’. The most important name within this tradition is surely Douglass North (e.g., North and Thomas 1973; North 1981; 1990; 2005), but I will cast the net a little more broadly. Instead of limiting the chapter to a specific author, I will summarize and discuss what I regard as the main current in the economic literature on the rise of Europe: institutional theories about the emergence of the modern market economy.