General Economic History (Cosimo Classics, Economics)

Considered one of the founders of modern sociology, German sociologist and historian MAX WEBER (1864-1920) long studied the impact of religion on culture--is most famous work is 1905's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism--but he was also renowned as a thinker on economic issues.

Here, in this classic collection of lectures first published in English in 1927 and translated by American economist Frank Hyneman Knight (1885-1972), Weber brings his keen and lively sociological eye to the history of commerce, money, and industrial endeavor, discussing:

* agricultural organization and the problem of agrarian communism * the house community and the clan * the evolution of the family as conditioned by economic factors * the condition of the peasants before the entrance of capitalism * capitalistic development of the manor * stages in the development of industry and mining * the origin of the European guilds * the factory and its forerunners * forms of organization of transportation and commerce * money and monetary history * the meaning of modern capitalism * the first great speculative crisis * citizenship as an economic concept * the evolution of the capitalistic spirit * and much more...