Economic Governance and the Rise of European Capitalism, 1350-2000

Over the last five to six hundred years most European governments (kings, princes, councils, states) were actively involved in shaping the economic process, promoting capitalism and even actively supporting and encouraging economic growth and development. My paper will provide a short comparative synopsis of the main aspects of pre-industrial state intervention and then offer some new interpretations. A first section discusses methodological problems in our assessment of state intervention and the question in which ways states could make a positive contribution to the economic process at all. A second section looks at urbanisation and cities as foundational metric for economic development in historical perspective. The third section discusses the main menu of choices
of economic intervention in the age of capitalism’s ascendancy, 1300s-1850s. A
fourth section provides a short global comparison and conclusion. I argue that,
since the Renaissance the menu of state intervention was richer than usually
acknowledged and that, by a long history of trial-and-error since the last six or
seven centuries the European states and states-in-the-making got increasingly better at governing the economy, laying the foundations for modern capitalist development and modern economic growth.