Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development. Bringing together economics, the history of science and technology, and models of cultural evolution, Mokyr demonstrates that culture—the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior—was a deciding factor in societal transformations. Mokyr looks at the period 1500–1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive "market for ideas" and a willingness to investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the “Republic of Letters” freely circulated and distributed ideas and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explain how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not China, despite similar levels of technology and intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders. In contrast, China’s version of the Enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite. Combining ideas from economics and cultural evolution, A Culture of Growth provides startling reasons for why the foundations of our modern economy were laid in the mere two centuries between Columbus and Newton.

Far from displaying a uniform pattern of integration, the European Union varies significantly across policy areas, institutional development and individual countries. Why do some policies such as the Single Market attract non-EU member states, while some member states choose to opt out of other EU policies? In answering these questions, this innovative new text provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the study of European integration. The authors introduce the most important theories of European integration and apply these to the trajectories of key EU policy areas – including the single market, monetary policy, foreign and security policy, and justice and home affairs. Arguing that no single theory offers a completely convincing explanation of integration and differentiation in the EU, the authors put forward a new analytical perspective for describing and explaining the institutions and policies of the EU and their development over time. Written by a team of prominent scholars in the field, this thought-provoking book provides a new synthesis of integration theory and an original way of thinking about what the EU is and how it works.

This Special Issue of Arts investigates the use of digital methods in the study of art markets and their histories. As historical and contemporary data is rapidly becoming more available, and digital technologies are becoming integral to research in the humanities and social sciences, we sought to bring together contributions that reflect on the different strategies that art market scholars employ to navigate and negotiate digital techniques and resources. The essays in this issue cover a wide range of topics and research questions. Taken together, the essays offer a reflection on what takes to research art markets, which includes addressing difficult topics such as the nature of the research questions and the data available to us, and the conceptual aspects of art markets, in order to define and operationalize variables and to interpret visual and statistical patterns for scholarship. In our view, this discussion is enriched when also taking into account how to use shared or interoperable ontologies and vocabularies to define concepts and relationships that facilitate the use and exchange of linked (open) data for cultural heritage and historical research.

In 2013, the World Bank Group announced two goals that would guide its operations worldwide. First is the eradication of chronic extreme poverty bringing the number of extremely poor people, defined as those living on less than 1.25 purchasing power parity (PPP)†“adjusted dollars a day, to less than 3 percent of the world’s population by 2030.The second is the boosting of shared prosperity, defined as promoting the growth of per capita real income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country. In 2015, United Nations member nations agreed in New York to a set of post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first and foremost of which is the eradication of extreme poverty everywhere, in all its forms. Both the language and the spirit of the SDG objective reflect the growing acceptance of the idea that poverty is a multidimensional concept that reflects multiple deprivations in various aspects of well-being. That said, there is much less agreement on the best ways in which those deprivations should be measured, and on whether or how information on them should be aggregated. Monitoring Global Poverty: Report of the Commission on Global Poverty advises the World Bank on the measurement and monitoring of global poverty in two areas: What should be the interpretation of the definition of extreme poverty, set in 2015 in PPP-adjusted dollars a day per person? What choices should the Bank make regarding complementary monetary and nonmonetary poverty measures to be tracked and made available to policy makers? The World Bank plays an important role in shaping the global debate on combating poverty, and the indicators and data that the Bank collates and makes available shape opinion and actual policies in client countries, and, to a certain extent, in all countries. How we answer the above questions can therefore have a major influence on the global economy.

After 9/11, which triggered a global debate on public diplomacy, 'PD' has become an issue in most countries. This book joins the debate. Experts from different countries and from a variety of fields analyze the theory and practice of public diplomacy. They also evaluate how public diplomacy can be successfully used to support foreign policy.