The Rivista di Storia Economica (RSE) invites submissions for a special issue on the topic "KNOWLEDGE DIFFUSION AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN ECONOMIC GROWTH". Guest editors for the special issue are Francesco Cinnirella (University of Bergamo) and Paul Sharp (University of Southern Denmark).

After the three meetings in 2017, 2018, and 2019, the investigation into The forms of trade regulations in medieval and modern Europe continues with a fourth and final international conference on the spatial dimension of professional regulations. While Europe, in a broad sense, has been chosen as a starting point, papers could also consider other cultural areas or colonial experiences. As a reminder, regulations are viewed as a process, from the making of the rules to their implementation, without being restricted either to the written and stabilised forms of the statutes or to organisations of a corporative nature: royal or local orders, judicial precedents, or unwritten customs could also be part of the normative framework of trades, just as non-institutional groups could regulate themselves through the manufacture or sale of a particular product.

The diffusion and spatial concentration of these different types of regulations in medieval and early modern societies can thus be investigated on various scales: from the much discussed area of influence of local trade associations to the norms that apply to larger territories or networks, such as the legislations on prices and wages adopted by several kingdoms after the end of the 13th century, the Hanseatic Leagues, the inspection of factories, journeymen’s associations, and so on.

Tobacco was one of the most important globally traded commodities from the 17th century through to the present day, and yet it has received relatively little attention in the historiography of modern empires in comparison to other commodities, such as sugar or cotton. As a result, recent approaches to rewriting the history of European imperialism from a more global perspective have hardly been problematized with regard to the peculiarities of tobacco history. Nowadays, studies no longer understand empire as a rigid relationship between metropole and colonies, but take the dynamics of actors within an empire as seriously as the networks and global processes that crossed imperial borders, or indeed lay beyond them. The conference starts from this assumption. We ask to what extent the history of tobacco allows new insights into the tension between the imperial integration of a metropole and its colonies, and the global entanglement of places and peoples within and beyond empires. Changing regimes of consumption, knowledge, myth-making, trade, and work, are central fields of recent commodity studies, and deserve particular attention. To this end, we aim to apply insights from economic and cultural history, but also from political, social, psychological, and environmental history. While Western overseas empires have tended to attract most attention, we welcome contributions on all countries and all empires.

Since the 1980s that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has specialised in interventions in developing countries. But that was not the typical situation in the previous 40 years of existence of the organisation. From 1945 to the 1980s the IMF signed Stand-by arrangements with both developing and developed countries and conducted sometimes quite large adjustment programmes in the latter (such as those in Italy and the UK in 1977). Those interventions were much lighter in terms of conditionality than what became common after the 1980s: their main purpose was to give quick support to countries facing balance of payments crises in order to help them keep the par value of their exchange rates within the context of the Bretton Woods system. 

Due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the Organising Committee of the 40th Conference of APHES has decided to move it to an online format. The dates of 9 and 10 July 2021 remain the same, as well as the theme. The new deadline for proposals is now 14 December 2020. Paper and panel proposals already submitted may be considered for the new format if the proponents who have made them wish to. If not, they can be replaced by new proposals.

In this special issue, we invite new empirical and theoretical contributions in order to understand the status of gender perspectives within ongoing economic historical research in the Nordic region and elsewhere. What is the status of gender research and how is gender and intersectional theory used in the field – and with what results? Which new theoretical understandings have been introduced? Is research with a gender approach challenging or even changing the discipline of economic history? In addition, how do these perspectives contribute to the larger field of gender studies?