This chapter reviews recent advances in addressing the identification of the effects of sanctions on cross-country and country-level studies. It argues that, given the difficulties in assessing causal relationships in cross-national data, country-level case studies can serve as a useful and informative complement to cross-national regression studies. However, case studies pose a set of additional potential empirical pitfalls that can also obfuscate rather than clarify the identification of causal mechanisms at work, so they should be treated as a complement rather than a substitute to cross-national research. As an example, the chapter discusses the impact of sanctions on Venezuela and shows how they contributed to the country’s economic collapse through their impact on oil production, public sector revenues, and imports of essential goods. These findings are consistent with those of the broader cross-national literature, which identifies constraints on an economy’s trade and financial links as a key channel for the impact of sanctions.

Economic growth in France was effective in the eighteenth century; it was linked to that of agriculture, proto-industry and international markets. As in Russia and partly in Britain, it was a labor-intensive path of growth. Sugar also played an important role in the Caribbean, probably more so than in Britain because of the limitations of the domestic market in France. Consequently, the Revolution and the loss of Saint Domingue and other colonies had a devastating effect on France, at least until the mid nineteenth century, when finance and the Second Industrial Revolution, along with luxury goods, helped to revive the economy.

This introduction begins by explaining the role of consumers and consumption in both pre-industrial and modern economies, with particular emphasis on the decisive role of the peasantry. The book is framed within a paradigm shift that recognises medieval peasants as key agents of social and economic change. This chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of the connection between consumption, material culture, and living standards in scholarship, identifying gaps and unanswered questions that this book seeks to address. It also highlights the significance of food-related possessions in the material culture of ordinary people, the region under analysis (the Kingdom of Valencia), and the sources under examination (probate inventories, public auction records, and others). The introduction concludes with a general outline of the book’s four parts and presents the central argument: that peasant decision-making as consumers during the later Middle Ages had a positive impact on the overall economic development of a leading Mediterranean polity – thus revealing the power of peasant consumers.

This conclusion summarises the main findings of this research and highlights its contributions to existing narratives and debates on the development of consumption, material culture, and living standards in European scholarship. The Valencian experience is placed within an international framework to examine the relationship between the late medieval and early modern ‘consumer revolutions’, between consumption and economic growth, and between the economic and the extra-economic driving forces of consumption. It is argued that late medieval consumer societies emerged not as a Malthusian inevitability caused by the Black Death, but as a result of social agency. The improvement of material culture was a deliberate choice to enhance living conditions, driven by existing preferences and aspirations. This silent demand, once met, had lasting effects. The spending power of peasants with higher disposable incomes sustained industries producing mass-consumption goods. The demand from ordinary people was a crucial economic force, stressing the transformative power of peasant consumers.

This chapter looks at the industrial state and the ways in which state strategies for managing the economy through industrial policy, tax and regulation have a significant bearing on sustainability transitions. It explores the purpose of the state in industrial society and what implications this has for the prospects of industrial transformation for sustainability, including the potential for shifts in the developmental state that has thus far been deployed to promote conventional economic growth. The final section of the chapter on transforming the industrial state explores the idea that the very dynamism, uncertainty, volatility and ostensibly competitive nature of global capitalism which currently drives unsustainability can also lead to openings for transformation and revival, creative construction following ‘creative destruction’ and the reconfiguring of alternatives.

The last chapter is the Conclusion. After a brief overview of the book’s key themes, topics, and arguments, the chapter places India in a comparative perspective and asks the following questions. How analogous are political and economic trends in India when compared to similar countries? How do India’s achievements and shortcomings discussed in the book stand up against some other comparable countries?

Chapter 7 analyzes changes in India’s important foreign relations, focusing on the post-Cold War period. The chapter argues that India’s approach to the world changed significantly in the post-1990 period, but has since then been marked mainly by incremental changes.

Chapter 2 discusses how India’s rulers have used state power to promote economic development, both growth and its distribution. While India’s growth record is relatively impressive, it is also the case that this growth has not been accompanied by the creation of well-paying jobs, and economic inequality in India has increased sharply.

The Desolate Boedelskamer was an innovative institution. It introduced a new approach to insolvency. Rather than punishing the insolvent debtor, the Desolate Boedelskamer sought to raise him up. Even though it remained firmly embedded in the early modern mental world and its communal culture of governance, the Amsterdam Desolate Boedelskamer is a clear example of how professionalization and good governance were able to provide systemic trust in a world of growing complexity. This new institution was part of the moral economy of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and relied upon it to function, but it also helped to shape that moral economy. Through a careful balancing act of trust and power, this institution was able to support the proliferation of credit, granting numerous insolvents in seventeenth-century Amsterdam a true stay of execution. In this analytical conclusion, the impact and wider implications of the book's argument will be discussed in a broader context.

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city of innovations. Explosive economic growth and the expansion of overseas trade went hand in hand with a high level of religious tolerance. In this world of increasing complexity, legal and governmental innovations were essential in order to adapt the urban institutional landscape to the challenges posed by these great social, economic, and cultural changes. The topic of insolvency legislation, as a crucial junction of the fundamental contextuality of commercial law, is most suitable to shed new light on the precise circumstances under which the most striking and seminal developments in the rise of a modern commercial order took place. This introductory chapter explains how new empirical evidence from Amsterdam's legal archives can help understand how innovative governance and legal practices interacted with moral thought in order to produce a liberal, open-access insolvency regime.

The Conclusion reflects on the long-term trajectory of welfare in Europe, highlighting the substantial increases in living standards that have occurred over the past centuries. It considers how technological and institutional developments have enabled sustained economic growth, while also acknowledging the environmental and social challenges that have emerged, particularly in the context of climate change. The Epilogue discusses the potential for future crises, including economic and environmental shocks, and whether Europe’s economic system is resilient enough to manage these challenges. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of learning from historical experiences to address contemporary and future issues related to sustainability, inequality and economic development. By framing modern problems within the context of long-term economic history, the authors offer an optimistic yet cautious outlook on Europe’s ability to continue improving welfare in a sustainable manner.

Why do peat and peatlands matter in modern Russian history? The introduction highlights peatlands as a prominent feature of Russia’s physical environment and reflects on their forgotten role as providers of fuel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It discusses the invisibility of peat and peatlands in most existing historical narratives of the fossil fuel age and identifies peat as a lens to reflect upon Russia’s place within global histories of economic growth and associated resource-use. Situating the book at the intersection of modern Russian, energy, and environmental history, the introduction underscores why the planetary predicament makes the seemingly marginal history of peat extraction a topic of global significance.

Chapter 4 estimates the impact of another exogenous shock to incumbent capacity – changes in commodity prices. Brazil is one of the main producers of several commodities, such as coffee, bananas, oranges, and corn. Many municipal economies depend on rural agricultural production. Exploiting this diversified crop portfolio to build a municipal measure of changes in commodity prices, the chapter shows that commodity shocks have a strong impact on incumbency bias in rural municipalities. While negative commodity shocks deepen existing incumbency disadvantages, positive ones remove them. The results also indicate that commodity prices influence incumbency bias not by conditioning spending but through economic growth. This suggests that incumbency bias is partly driven by citizens’ informational limitations for discounting shocks. Brazilian mayoral elections demonstrate that offices with high policy scope but low capacity tend to experience an incumbency disadvantage, but that exogenous shocks to capacity can create heterogeneity in incumbency bias.

Chapter 6 pertains to the politics of regulatory redemption. Success in iPS research led to Japan’s regulatory reforms in 2013, which transformed the image of Japan’s regulation of regenerative medicine: from a cautious means of protecting patients and scientific quality, Japan’s regulation metamorphosed into a saviour of public health, an enabler of scientific achievements and clinical firsts, and a booster of the national economy. Exploring the performance of the regulatory reforms through the so-called All Japan System (the policy that symbolizes and champions these redemptive ideals), the Chapter illustrates how the political aims and ideas embodied in the new regulation support certain industries and sanctify particular clinical targets to gain a global competitive edge, as well as pursuing scientific, economic and public health goals. Prompted by competitive desire, these regulatory policies were designed to strengthen financial budgets, national economic growth and international competition, misrecognizing the structural alterations of Japan’s science community and the role of patients and their families who would have to co-finance it and play a role as experimental subjects.