North, Douglass C.’s works on institutions and economic growth has been highly influential. See for example his Institutions: Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1990). In a broader sweep, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson highlight the importance of inclusive, non-extractive institutions in the making of prosperity, but also point out the persistence of institutions that make economies fail rather than succeed. See Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (Crown Publishers, 2012).

A detailed and well-researched case that explores, among other things, the importance of modern institutions is de Vries, J. and van der Woude, A., The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Zanden, Jan Luiten van and Prak, Maarten, Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800 (Princeton University Press, 2022).

There is an ongoing debate about the relationship between democracy and development, see for example Acemoglu, D. et al., ‘Democracy does cause growth’, Journal of Political Economy 127(1) (2019), 47–100, and Colagrossi, M., Rossignoli, D. and Maggioni, M. A., ‘Does democracy cause growth? A meta-analysis (of 2000 regressions)’, European Journal of Political Economy 61 (2020), 101824.

Studies of socialist central planning include Aldcroft, D. H. and Morewood, S., Economic Change in Eastern Europe (Routledge, 1995) and Berend, I., Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 1996), aptly summarized in Chapter 4 of Berend’s An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006). There is a remarkable and insightful novel about the difficulties in getting a planned economy working by Spufford, Francis called Red Plenty (Faber and Faber, 2010).

Medieval trading contracts have been analysed in an innovative way by Greif, Avner in a number of journal articles and in Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2006). For an analysis in Greif’s spirit see Gonzalez de Lara, Y., ‘The secret of Venetian success: a public-order, reputation-based institution’, European Review of Economic History 12(3) (2008), 247–85.

Domar, E. developed a simple theory of serfdom in his ‘The causes of slavery and serfdom, a hypothesis’, Journal of Economic History 30(1) (1970), 18–32. On the open field system, see McCloskey, D., ‘English open fields as behaviour towards risk’, Research in Economic History 1 (1976), 124–70.

Modern firms are often vertically integrated, in that they do not only produce a commodity for final consumption but also some of the intermediary inputs. Coase, R. argued that it was related to the fact that there are transaction costs involved in market exchange which could be evaded if production of the input was internalized into the firm. See ‘The nature of the firm’, Economica 4(16) (1937), 386–405.

On co-operatives, see for example Henriksen, I., ‘Avoiding lock-in: co-operative creameries in Denmark, 1882–1903’, European Review of Economic History 3(1) (1999), 57–78 and McLaughlin, E. and Sharp, P., ‘Competition between organisational forms in Danish and Irish dairying around the turn of the twentieth century’, Business History 63(2) (2021), 314–41.

An excellent introductory business history textbook is Amatori, F. and Colli, A., Business History: Complexities and Comparisons (Routledge, 2013). The role of railroads for the emergence of big business is mostly associated with the work of Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., see for example ‘The railroads: pioneers in modern corporate management’, Business History Review 39(1) (1965), 16–40 and The Visible Hand (Harvard University Press, 1993). For the emergence of multinationals until today, see the work of Jones, Geoffrey, for example Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty First Century (Oxford University Press, 2005).