This article examines the economic institution utilized during the eleventh century to facilitate complex trade characterized by asymmetric information and limited legal contract enforceability. The geniza documents are employed to present the "coalition," an economic institution based upon a reputation mechanism utilized by Mediterranean traders to confront the organizational problem associated with the exchange relations between merchants and their overseas agents. The theoretical framework explains many trade-related phenomena, especially why traders utilized specific forms of business association, and indicates the interrelations between social and economic institutions.

There is a new book for sale, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy : Lessons from Medieval Trade, from Cambridge University Press, which builds on the article linked here.

Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders

A central question in the social sciences and history is therefore why societies evolve along distinct trajectories of institutional development and why some societies fail to adopt the institutions of those that are more economically successful.

This book draws upon detailed historical studies to motivate, illustrate, and present a new perspective—comparative and historical institutional analysis—that goes a long way toward advancing institutional analysis in general and addressing this question.

Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade

This may be of interest to readers of Jared Diamond's "Collapse".

Archaeologists cheered when Waldo Wilcox's vast spread was deeded to the state of Utah, believing that it holds keys to a tribe that flourished 1,000 years ago - and then mysteriously vanished.

Secrets of the Range Creek Ranch

Though much has been written about the Civil War itself, little has been written about the spy war that went on within.

Each side still used age-old intelligence techniques, such as code-breaking, deception, and covert surveillance. However, into this modern war came two innovations that would endure as tools of espionage: wiretapping and overhead reconnaissance.

What follows is a look at some of the highlights of how the North and the South gathered and used their information, the important missions, and the personalities. From this special view, the focus is not on the battlefield, but on a battle of wits.

Intelligence in the Civil War

Modern urban terrorism began in Algiers, and one result of that development was France's creation of a monstrous, chaotic, military apparatus of torture to use any means necessary to dismantle the terrorist cells. Did torture succeed in Algiers because the paras were dealing with a small population in a cordoned-off area?

One wonders.

Morgan doesn't offer any real answers, but he does eventually reckon with his own act of torture -- and the ripple effects on a culture and a military that practice torture. "The Algerian experience did not enrich me," he writes. "It diminished me." This memoir is a prose map of the ruin of war, a love song for a ruined city and a damaged people, and an anthem to youth, sex and vigor.

War enriches no one. But Morgan's fine book will.

The Front Lines of Fear

What follows are excerpts from Paul Pillar's essay, "Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq", which appears in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs. I originally posted about this article on Friday.

What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.

Congress, not the administration, asked for the now-infamous October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, although few members of Congress actually read it. (According to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material, no more than six senators and only a handful of House members got beyond the five-page executive summary.)

In the shadowy world of international terrorism, almost anyone can be "linked" to almost anyone else if enough effort is made to find evidence of casual contacts, the mentioning of names in the same breath, or indications of common travels or experiences. Even the most minimal and circumstantial data can be adduced as evidence of a "relationship," ignoring the important question of whether a given regime actually supports a given terrorist group and the fact that relationships can be competitive or distrustful rather than cooperative.

I made a similar comment in 2004.

Although distance from policymakers may be needed for objectivity, closeness is needed for influence.

The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the American public.

The former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia explains how the pre-war situation with Iraq went so wrong.

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq - Paul R. Pillar

The films are arranged chronologically. Date and location are provided for each film. He really liked the classics, but his taste in new releases was questionable, often steering toward popularity rather than quality.

Here's a sampler:

810620, Camp David, For Your Eyes Only
810828, Camp David, The Postman Always Rings Twice
820122, Camp David, Adam's Rib
820123, Camp David, Grand Hotel
820319, Camp David, Das Boot
820613, Camp David, Notorious
820625, Camp David, Poltergeist
820627, Camp David, E.T.
820731, Camp David, Rocky III
820808, White House, Stagecoach
830602, Camp David, Return of the Jedi
830604, Camp David, War Games
830723, Camp David, North by Northwest
830805, Camp David, Some Like it Hot
830806, Camp David, Spellbound
831029, Camp David, Big Chill
831202, Camp David, Yentl
831203, Camp David, Terms of Endearment
840107, Camp David, To Be or Not To Be
840113, Camp David, Singing in the Rain
840225, Camp David, Witness for the Prosecution
840309, Camp David, Rear Window
840316, Camp David, Vertigo
840622, Camp David, Bedtime for Bonzo
840623, Camp David, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
840630, Camp David, Karate Kid
840714, Camp David, Ghostbusters
840907, Camp David, Red Dawn
850705, Camp David, Cocoon
850726, Camp David, Back to the Future
850914, Camp David, To Catch a Thief
860117, Camp David, Place in the Sun, A
860119, Camp David, Color Purple
860131, Camp David, Rocky IV
860301, Camp David, Iron Eagle
860510, Camp David, African Queen
860530, Camp David, Top Gun
860607, Camp David, Short Circuit
860613, Camp David, Karate Kid II
860621, Camp David, Ferris Bueller's Day Off
860712, Camp David, Magnificent Seven
861108, Camp David, Red River
861205, Camp David, Crocodile Dundee
861220, Camp David, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
870314, Camp David, Meet Me in St. Louis
870320, Camp David, Raising Arizona
870523, Camp David, Harry and the Hendersons
870530, Camp David, Maltese Falcon
870724, Camp David, Living Daylights, The
870725, Camp David, Roman Holiday
870912, Camp David, Ninotchka
870919, Camp David, My Life as a Dog
871003, Camp David, Princess Bride
871113, Camp David, It Happened one Night
871211, Camp David, Three Men and a Baby
880115, Camp David, Throw Momma from the Train
880122, Camp David, Moonstruck
880205, Camp David, Santa Fe Trail
880206, Camp David, Bad Day at Black Rock
880219, Camp David, Yankee Doodle Dandy
880220, Camp David, Treasure of Sierra Madre
880507, Camp David, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
880514, Camp David, Searchers
880610, Camp David, Crocodile Dundee II
880702, Camp David, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
880729, Camp David, Big
880918, White House, Yankee Doodle Dandy
880924, Camp David, Gorillas in the Mist
881209, Camp David, Destry Rides Again
881210, Camp David, North by Northwest

Films That President and Mrs. Reagan Viewed

From the Foreign Affairs review:

This is a pathbreaking study of how historically, Japanese personal networks, both vertical and horizontal, operated to establish powerful norms of beauty, propriety, and good manners, which in turn gave a distinctive dimension to Japanese political behavior. The powerful, and those aspiring to power, had to take seriously group participation in composing poems (haikai) according to rigorously defined standards; they had to display refinement in reacting to art and music, elegance in carrying out ordinary tasks such as pouring tea, and exact discipline in their dress and social manners. It is standard in most cultures to associate dignity with authority, but the Japanese carried the linkage of aesthetics and power well beyond mere dignity. Ikegami, a sociologist, traces the evolution of the various strands of Japanese aesthetic standards as they developed in the key cities where government officials and merchant leaders interacted. The result is a rich and detailed cultural history from medieval times to the Meiji period.

From the excerpt:

When networks based on aesthetic activities intersected the rapidly expanding social, political, and economic networks of the Tokugawa period, a set of unforeseen complex social and cultural dynamics emerged in Japanese society.

The rise of aesthetic Japan is not simply the story of elite intellectuals who created a national myth. Rather, it was the accumulative effect of largely unplanned actions of originally unrelated people who began to network with each other. They did this in order to search for ways of socializing with each other and, in doing so, to trespass feudal boundaries and limitations.

The central focus of this book is the fluid dynamics and unexpected consequences of what might be called “the Tokugawa network revolution.” As I see it, a critical moment of cultural history in any society occurs when communicative networks suddenly expand in scale, density, and complexity. The resulting patterns of communication influence both the form and the content of the discourse conveyed through the networks. The kinds of cultural resources that are available at the time of network expansion will determine the range of content in the resulting cultural identities of that society. Thus, the extension of a society’s communicative networks and the alteration of its cognitive maps are reciprocally influential.

Bonds of Civility

Though the political and intellectual history of mapmaking in the eighteenth century is well established, the details of its commercial revolution have until now been widely scattered. In The Commerce of Cartography, Mary Pedley presents a vivid picture of the costs and profits of the mapmaking industry in England and France, and reveals how the economics of map trade affected the content and appearance of the maps themselves.

Conceptualizing the relationship between economics and cartography, Pedley traces the process of mapmaking from compilation, production, and marketing to consumption, reception, and criticism. In detailing the rise of commercial cartography, Pedley explores qualitative issues of mapmaking as well. Why, for instance, did eighteenth-century ideals of aesthetics override the modern values of accuracy and detail? And what, to an eighteenth-century mind and eye, qualified as a good map?

A thorough and engaging study of the business of cartography during the Enlightenment, The Commerce of Cartography charts a new cartographic landscape and will prove invaluable to scholars of economic history, historical geography, and the history of publishing.

The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England