ABSTRACT
Three factors caused levels of income and rates of Smithian growth to vary: first, opportunities to capture scale economies in industry (e.g. protoindustry) and distribution (e.g. fairs), which were a function of the state’s capacity to overcome feudal decentralised rent-seeking in, and cartelization of, the ‘public’ transactional sphere (the ‘market’); second, differences in macro-economic stability, that is, in the frequency and intensity of warfare, which Chapter 7 showed was the main cause of market disintegration; third, technological progress or innovation, which was a function of market size.
