Bas Van Bavel
Biographic Data
| ID | 1187980 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bas Van Bavel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bas |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Bavel |
| SIGNATURE | VAN BAVEL B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8686-0279 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Understanding sustainable cooperation
Societies need cooperation that is sustainable. We argue that understanding the mechanisms of sustainable cooperation requires a connection between current analyses of individual interactions and their institutional contexts, and studies of long-term patterns of cooperation at the societal level. We propose a focus on where institutional level arrangements connect with individual level decision making, namely where people interact in families, co…
Back to the future
Economic history has built a solid scientific foundation over the past decades but runs a risk of becoming marginalized. This paper suggests various ways to enhance its academic and societal relevance. It proposes taking pressing societal issues as clear starting points and using history as a 'laboratory' to address them. To effectively do so, a sharper focus on the social and environmental contexts of economic development would be needed. This m…
Wealth inequality in pre‐industrial Europe
A host of studies on wealth inequality in pre‐industrial Europe has recently been published. Out of these, a narrative emerges of rising inequality in a context of emerging markets and growing state taxation, punctuated by calamities. By surveying the available material, this article highlights an element that is less systematically discussed in this literature: the role of associational organizations. They developed less regressive forms of taxa…
Historical effects of shocks on inequality
Inequality of wealth and its associated power has varied greatly over human history. It is often thought that the main levelers of inequality were natural disasters such as epidemics or earthquakes, and social turmoil such as wars and revolutions. Here we critically review evidence of the effects of such events on inequality from medieval times till the present. We show that in spite of the marked differences in character and direct impact of the…
Disasters and History
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but…
Open societies before market economies
It is often assumed that the market economy and the open society reinforce each other and have risen together. Even those who are more skeptical about their long-run compatibility will usually agree that the rise of the two was part of a process of modernization, starting in early modern England and unfolding in the modern West. This article builds on the latest historical research to reject this assumption. It shows that several market economies…
Climate and society in long‐term perspective
Recent advances in paleoclimatology and the growing digital availability of large historical datasets on human activity have created new opportunities to investigate long‐term interactions between climate and society. However, noncritical use of historical datasets can create pitfalls, resulting in misleading findings that may become entrenched as accepted knowledge. We demonstrate pitfalls in the content, use and interpretation of historical dat…
Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards
van Bavel, B., D. R. Curtis, and T. Soens. 2018. Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards: a historical analysis. Ecology and Society 23(4):30. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10491-230430
Mills, cranes, and the great divergence
This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the causes of the great divergence by comparing the use of expensive labour‐saving capital goods—water‐mills, windmills, and cranes—in medieval western Europe and the Middle East. Using novel ways of measuring, we find that whereas the use of these goods increased in Europe, in the Middle East their prevalence decreased, or they were not used at all. We investigate several possible explanations an…
The Invisible Hand
The Invisible Hand' offers a radical departure from the conventional wisdom of economists and economic historians, by showing that 'factor markets' and the economies dominated by them - the market economies - are not modern, but have existed at various times in the past. This work analyses three major, pre-industrial examples of successful market economies in western Eurasia: Iraq in the early Middle Ages, Italy in the high Middle Ages, and the L…
History and the Social Sciences
Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record …
How important were formalized charity and social spending before the rise of the welfare state? A long-run analysis of selected westernEuropean cases, 1400-1850
Poor relief in the pre-industrial period is a much-investigated topic, but we still lack an idea of its quantitative importance and development, especially in a comparative perspective. This article estimates the magnitude of the various kinds of formalized relief for three present-day countries (Italy,England, and theNetherlands) in the very long run (1400-1850). The results show that in this period a substantial share ofGDP, up to 3 per cent, c…
New Perspectives on Factor Markets and Ancient Middle Eastern Economies
The conventional view of markets for land, labour, and capital as a modern, Western phenomenon is questionable. Factor markets did indeed exist in Iraq, and even thrived, in various parts of its pre-modern history, including the period around 2000 bce , the “long” sixth century (c. 620-480 bce ), and the eighth and ninth centuries ce . By employing the long-term approach used in this issue of jesho and by placing the organization of these markets…
Factor Markets in Early Islamic Iraq, c. 600-1100 AD
This paper reconstructs the organization and development of factor markets in early medieval Iraq. It shows that from the late Sasanian period on, and accelerating in the early Islamic period, there was a relatively unrestricted functioning of markets for goods, labour, and capital. This stimulated market exchange, associated with growing monetization of the economy, especially in the towns, but also in the countryside, even though coercion remai…
The organisation of markets as a key factor in the rise of Holland from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century
Although the importance of New Institutional Economics and the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development and the early growth of markets are widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess more directly the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets. This paper uses empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland to illuminate some of the factors behind the development of t…
Manors and markets. Economy and society in the Low Countries (500-1600)
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
The medieval Low Countries as a testing ground for new ideas on economic and social development. A reply from the author of Manors and markets
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Markets for Land, Labor, and Capital in Northern Italy and the Low Countries, Twelfth to Seventeenth Centuries
Comparative analysis of the markets for land, labor, and capital in north-central Italy and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period reveals that urbanization in itself was not the crucial variable in the quality and effect of developing factor markets. More important was the counterweight offered in this process by territorial lords and rural interests to the influence of urban elites. Without this counterweight, urb…
Social relations
The development of leasehold in northwestern Europe, c. 1200 – 1600
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The institutional organization of land markets
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The organization and rise of land and lease markets in northwestern Europe and Italy, c. 1000–1800
In the course of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, in Western Europe, ways of transferring and redistributing land outside the market were replaced by market transactions. This, however, was by no means a general and unilinear process, but one that displays strong regional differences and temporal discontinuities. This article aims to gain more insight in the factors underlying these differences, by reconstructing and analysing the in…
The Transition in the Low Countries
This article deals with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The use of these terms is no longer self-evident, perhaps because of their ideological charge. Instead, most historians now prefer to use such vague notions as ‘modernization’ and ‘rationalization’, often without being more specific. We also hear of ‘the transition from the medieval to the early modern society’, as if this transition involved no more than crossing a chronologica…
Rural wage labour in the sixteenth-century Low Countries
The rise of wage labour in the countryside forms a fundamental element in the transition to a modern, capitalist economy and society. Hard data on this development, however, are scarce. Here, the importance of wage labour around the middle of the sixteenth century is reconstructed for three regions in the Low Countries. This reconstruction shows not only a high importance of wage labour, between a quarter to almost 60 per cent of rural labour inp…
Disasters and History
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but…
Wealth inequality in pre‐industrial Europe
A host of studies on wealth inequality in pre‐industrial Europe has recently been published. Out of these, a narrative emerges of rising inequality in a context of emerging markets and growing state taxation, punctuated by calamities. By surveying the available material, this article highlights an element that is less systematically discussed in this literature: the role of associational organizations. They developed less regressive forms of taxa…
How important were formalized charity and social spending before the rise of the welfare state? A long-run analysis of selected westernEuropean cases, 1400-1850
Poor relief in the pre-industrial period is a much-investigated topic, but we still lack an idea of its quantitative importance and development, especially in a comparative perspective. This article estimates the magnitude of the various kinds of formalized relief for three present-day countries (Italy,England, and theNetherlands) in the very long run (1400-1850). The results show that in this period a substantial share ofGDP, up to 3 per cent, c…
People and land
Population developments in the western European countryside not only show strong fluctuations during the later Middle Ages, but they also exhibit sharp regional differences. By investigating and comparing developments in three parts of the Low Countries this study tries to shed more light on the causes underlying these regional diversities. In this connection, particular attention will be paid to differences in the social distribution of landowne…
The organization and rise of land and lease markets in northwestern Europe and Italy, c. 1000–1800
In the course of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, in Western Europe, ways of transferring and redistributing land outside the market were replaced by market transactions. This, however, was by no means a general and unilinear process, but one that displays strong regional differences and temporal discontinuities. This article aims to gain more insight in the factors underlying these differences, by reconstructing and analysing the in…
Land, Lease and Agriculture
LAND, LEASE AND AGRICULTURE: THE TRANSITION OF THE RURAL ECONOMY IN THE DUTCH RIVER AREA FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Get access Bas J. P. van Bavel Bas J. P. van Bavel University of Amsterdam Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 172, Issue 1, August 2001, Pages 3–43, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/172.1.3 Published: 01 …
Open societies before market economies
It is often assumed that the market economy and the open society reinforce each other and have risen together. Even those who are more skeptical about their long-run compatibility will usually agree that the rise of the two was part of a process of modernization, starting in early modern England and unfolding in the modern West. This article builds on the latest historical research to reject this assumption. It shows that several market economies…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards
van Bavel, B., D. R. Curtis, and T. Soens. 2018. Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards: a historical analysis. Ecology and Society 23(4):30. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10491-230430
Mills, cranes, and the great divergence
This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the causes of the great divergence by comparing the use of expensive labour‐saving capital goods—water‐mills, windmills, and cranes—in medieval western Europe and the Middle East. Using novel ways of measuring, we find that whereas the use of these goods increased in Europe, in the Middle East their prevalence decreased, or they were not used at all. We investigate several possible explanations an…
Factor Markets in Early Islamic Iraq, c. 600-1100 AD
This paper reconstructs the organization and development of factor markets in early medieval Iraq. It shows that from the late Sasanian period on, and accelerating in the early Islamic period, there was a relatively unrestricted functioning of markets for goods, labour, and capital. This stimulated market exchange, associated with growing monetization of the economy, especially in the towns, but also in the countryside, even though coercion remai…
Markets for Land, Labor, and Capital in Northern Italy and the Low Countries, Twelfth to Seventeenth Centuries
Comparative analysis of the markets for land, labor, and capital in north-central Italy and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period reveals that urbanization in itself was not the crucial variable in the quality and effect of developing factor markets. More important was the counterweight offered in this process by territorial lords and rural interests to the influence of urban elites. Without this counterweight, urb…
The institutional organization of land markets
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Transition in the Low Countries
This article deals with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The use of these terms is no longer self-evident, perhaps because of their ideological charge. Instead, most historians now prefer to use such vague notions as ‘modernization’ and ‘rationalization’, often without being more specific. We also hear of ‘the transition from the medieval to the early modern society’, as if this transition involved no more than crossing a chronologica…
Rural wage labour in the sixteenth-century Low Countries
The rise of wage labour in the countryside forms a fundamental element in the transition to a modern, capitalist economy and society. Hard data on this development, however, are scarce. Here, the importance of wage labour around the middle of the sixteenth century is reconstructed for three regions in the Low Countries. This reconstruction shows not only a high importance of wage labour, between a quarter to almost 60 per cent of rural labour inp…
Land, Lease and Agriculture
LAND, LEASE AND AGRICULTURE: THE TRANSITION OF THE RURAL ECONOMY IN THE DUTCH RIVER AREA FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Get access Bas J. P. van Bavel Bas J. P. van Bavel University of Amsterdam Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 172, Issue 1, August 2001, Pages 3–43, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/172.1.3 Published: 01 …
People and land
Population developments in the western European countryside not only show strong fluctuations during the later Middle Ages, but they also exhibit sharp regional differences. By investigating and comparing developments in three parts of the Low Countries this study tries to shed more light on the causes underlying these regional diversities. In this connection, particular attention will be paid to differences in the social distribution of landowne…
Early Proto-Industrialization in the Low Countries ? The Importance and Nature of Market-Oriented Non-Agricultural Activities on the Countryside in Flanders and Holland, c. 1250-1570
Next to the local craftsmen and the non-agrarian activities that families undertook for their own use or local consumption, which had always existed in the countryside, in some places rural industries aimed at non-local markets developed as early as in the late 14th century. In some parts of the Low Countries, these early stages of rural industry gained a considerable importance during the late medieval period. In most regions in Western-Europe, …
The jump‐start of the Holland economy during the late‐medieval crisis, c.1350–c.1500 1
By c .1500 the Holland economy had already acquired modern traits, as witnessed by the occupational structure and the urbanization rate. This article tries to explain the remarkable development of the Holland economy between 1350 and 1500, linking it to the specific occupation history of the region in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The combination of high wages in this frontier economy with increasing difficulties in arable agriculture as …
Rural wage labour in the sixteenth-century Low Countries
The rise of wage labour in the countryside forms a fundamental element in the transition to a modern, capitalist economy and society. Hard data on this development, however, are scarce. Here, the importance of wage labour around the middle of the sixteenth century is reconstructed for three regions in the Low Countries. This reconstruction shows not only a high importance of wage labour, between a quarter to almost 60 per cent of rural labour inp…
The Transition in the Low Countries
This article deals with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The use of these terms is no longer self-evident, perhaps because of their ideological charge. Instead, most historians now prefer to use such vague notions as ‘modernization’ and ‘rationalization’, often without being more specific. We also hear of ‘the transition from the medieval to the early modern society’, as if this transition involved no more than crossing a chronologica…
The institutional organization of land markets
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The organization and rise of land and lease markets in northwestern Europe and Italy, c. 1000–1800
In the course of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, in Western Europe, ways of transferring and redistributing land outside the market were replaced by market transactions. This, however, was by no means a general and unilinear process, but one that displays strong regional differences and temporal discontinuities. This article aims to gain more insight in the factors underlying these differences, by reconstructing and analysing the in…
The development of leasehold in northwestern Europe, c. 1200 – 1600
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Social relations
Manors and markets. Economy and society in the Low Countries (500-1600)
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
The medieval Low Countries as a testing ground for new ideas on economic and social development. A reply from the author of Manors and markets
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Markets for Land, Labor, and Capital in Northern Italy and the Low Countries, Twelfth to Seventeenth Centuries
Comparative analysis of the markets for land, labor, and capital in north-central Italy and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period reveals that urbanization in itself was not the crucial variable in the quality and effect of developing factor markets. More important was the counterweight offered in this process by territorial lords and rural interests to the influence of urban elites. Without this counterweight, urb…
The organisation of markets as a key factor in the rise of Holland from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century
Although the importance of New Institutional Economics and the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development and the early growth of markets are widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess more directly the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets. This paper uses empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland to illuminate some of the factors behind the development of t…
New Perspectives on Factor Markets and Ancient Middle Eastern Economies
The conventional view of markets for land, labour, and capital as a modern, Western phenomenon is questionable. Factor markets did indeed exist in Iraq, and even thrived, in various parts of its pre-modern history, including the period around 2000 bce , the “long” sixth century (c. 620-480 bce ), and the eighth and ninth centuries ce . By employing the long-term approach used in this issue of jesho and by placing the organization of these markets…
Factor Markets in Early Islamic Iraq, c. 600-1100 AD
This paper reconstructs the organization and development of factor markets in early medieval Iraq. It shows that from the late Sasanian period on, and accelerating in the early Islamic period, there was a relatively unrestricted functioning of markets for goods, labour, and capital. This stimulated market exchange, associated with growing monetization of the economy, especially in the towns, but also in the countryside, even though coercion remai…
The Invisible Hand
The Invisible Hand' offers a radical departure from the conventional wisdom of economists and economic historians, by showing that 'factor markets' and the economies dominated by them - the market economies - are not modern, but have existed at various times in the past. This work analyses three major, pre-industrial examples of successful market economies in western Eurasia: Iraq in the early Middle Ages, Italy in the high Middle Ages, and the L…
History and the Social Sciences
Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record …
How important were formalized charity and social spending before the rise of the welfare state? A long-run analysis of selected westernEuropean cases, 1400-1850
Poor relief in the pre-industrial period is a much-investigated topic, but we still lack an idea of its quantitative importance and development, especially in a comparative perspective. This article estimates the magnitude of the various kinds of formalized relief for three present-day countries (Italy,England, and theNetherlands) in the very long run (1400-1850). The results show that in this period a substantial share ofGDP, up to 3 per cent, c…
Mills, cranes, and the great divergence
This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the causes of the great divergence by comparing the use of expensive labour‐saving capital goods—water‐mills, windmills, and cranes—in medieval western Europe and the Middle East. Using novel ways of measuring, we find that whereas the use of these goods increased in Europe, in the Middle East their prevalence decreased, or they were not used at all. We investigate several possible explanations an…
Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards
van Bavel, B., D. R. Curtis, and T. Soens. 2018. Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards: a historical analysis. Ecology and Society 23(4):30. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10491-230430
Climate and society in long‐term perspective
Recent advances in paleoclimatology and the growing digital availability of large historical datasets on human activity have created new opportunities to investigate long‐term interactions between climate and society. However, noncritical use of historical datasets can create pitfalls, resulting in misleading findings that may become entrenched as accepted knowledge. We demonstrate pitfalls in the content, use and interpretation of historical dat…
Disasters and History
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but…
Open societies before market economies
It is often assumed that the market economy and the open society reinforce each other and have risen together. Even those who are more skeptical about their long-run compatibility will usually agree that the rise of the two was part of a process of modernization, starting in early modern England and unfolding in the modern West. This article builds on the latest historical research to reject this assumption. It shows that several market economies…
Political science (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (18 works) · Geography (14 works) · Economy (12 works) · Archaeology (10 works) · Market economy (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Economic geography (7 works) · History (7 works)