In this important volume, Joost Hengstmengel examines the doctrine of divine providence and how it served as explanation and justification in economic debates in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries throughout Western Europe. The author discusses five different areas in which God was associated with the economy: international trade, division of labour, value and price, self-interest, and poverty and inequality. Ultimately, it is shown that theological ideas continued to influence economic thought beyond the Medieval period, and that the science of economics as we know it today has theological origins. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in the history of economic thought, the history of theology, philosophy and intellectual history.

Business Ethics and Catholic Social Thought provides a new and wide-ranging account of these two ostensibly divergent fields. Focusing on the agency of the business person and the interests of firms, this volume outlines fundamental issues confronting moral leaders and corporations committed to responsible business practices.

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace explores the complex intersection between the geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. By examining the religiously motivated markets and marketplace practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, Scotland, and Wales, the volume presents religious praxis as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the social and economic markets. Within the volume, the authors address first spiritual markets and marketplaces, discussing the intersection of Puritan and Protestant Ethics with the market economy. The second part addresses material marketplaces, including the marriage market, commercial trade markets, and the post-Reformation Catholic black market. In the third part of the volume, the chapters focus specifically on publication markets and books, including manuscripts and commonplace books, as well as printed volumes and pamphlets. Finally, the volume concludes with an examination of the literary marketplace, with analyses of plays and poems which engage with and depict both spiritual and material markets. Taken as a whole, this collection posits that the "modern" conception of a division between religion and the socioeconomic marketplace was a largely fictional construct, and the chapters demonstrate the depth to which both were integrated in early modern life.

Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. Distinguished scholar Amos Funkenstein explores the metaphysical foundations of modern science and shows how, by the 1600s, theological and scientific thinking had become almost one. Major figures like Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and others developed an unprecedented secular theology whose debt to medieval and scholastic thought shaped the trajectory of the scientific revolution. The book ends with Funkenstein’s influential analysis of the seventeenth century’s “unprecedented fusion” of scientific and religious language. Featuring a new foreword, Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pathbreaking and classic work that remains a fundamental resource for historians and philosophers of science.

A delightful as well as educational read. It should be a set text for anyone interested in trade policy - The Economist.

How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge? How did description come to seem separable from theory in the precursors of economics and the social sciences? Mary Poovey explores these questions in A History of the Modern Fact, ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for generating useful facts, and how belief—whether figured as credit, credibility, or credulity—remained essential to the production of knowledge. Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern social and economic knowledge possible, A History of the Modern Fact provides important contributions to the history of political thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary and cultural criticism.