This book highlights the contribution of language standardization to the economic rise of the West between 1600 and 1860. Previous studies have been unable to explain why during this period almost all industrial innovation was confined to small areas around the main cultural centers of three Western states - Britain, France, and the United states. This book argues that Western Europe and its offshoots were the only Eurasian societies able to apply typography cheaply to their writing systems. The emergence in the West of large networks of people able to communicate in standardized languages made possible the breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution. Military byproducts of three "macro-innovations"- the steam engine, machine tools, and interchangeable parts - then constituted the West's toolbox for empire. The book will appeal to readers seeking to explain how the West attained its unprecedented advance over Asia in the nineteenth century, and why this lead has since proved temporary.

Can new information technologies explain the discontinuities in the history of the West? This innovative book presents evidence of an overall pattern generated by radical changes in media, arguing that the major social revolutions in the West have been preceded by innovations that drastically alter the relative importance of informational scale economies (the impact of production volume on unit cost) and network effects (the gain to each member of a network when a new agent joins). These factors establish the optimal structure of a society by determining whether decision-making is centralized, decentralized or instead distributed across multiple agents. Dudley contends that an innovation that alters the balance between scale economies and network effects initially has a dramatic result, blasting apart existing interpersonal networks; however later, out of the debris, a new society emerges. The latest of these innovations - the integrated circuit - is currently generating a wave of creative destruction that is spilling over into the rest of the world. To understand the rebirth that seems likely to follow, we must examine not the recent past but the Dark Ages of European history and the intervening centuries. With detailed case studies addressing the sources of innovation in information technology, along with a conceptual framework to explain their effects, this book will be of interest to students and teachers of Western economic and social history, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the social impact of innovation.

Kaum eine wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Disziplin hat in den vergangenen Jahren das Denken in der Okonomie so stark beeinflusst wie die moderne Institutionenokonomik. Dieses Buch beinhaltet gleichermassen Theorie und Empirie der Institutionenokonomik: Auf das Herausarbeiten bestimmter theoretischer Konstrukte folgt jeweils die Anwendung auf ein reales Beispiel mit vertiefenden Ubungsaufgaben und entsprechenden Losungen.