1. See, e.g., Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chap. 1.

2. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 5.

3. F. J. Fisher, “The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Dark Ages of English Economic History,” Economica n.s. 24 (1957): 2–3.

4. See, e.g., Robert W. Fogel, “The Reunification of Economic History with Economic Theory,” American Economic Review 55 (1965): 92–98; Robert W. Fogel, “The Limits of Quantitative Methods in History,” AHR 80 (1975): 329–50.

5. See David Landes, “On Avoiding Babel,” Journal of Economic History 38 (1978): 3–12, esp. p. 7.

6. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), pp. 27–29.

7. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 7.

8. Steven Ozment, ed., Three Behaim Boys Growing Up in Early Modern Germany: A Chronicle of Their Lives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. xii.

9. I have discussed these ideas more fully in David Harris Sacks, “The Hedgehog and the Fox Revisited,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (1985): 267–80.

10. David Harris Sacks, “Trade, Society and Politics in Bristol, Circa 1500–Circa 1640,” 3 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1977; revised as Trade, Society and Politics in Bristol, 1500–1640, 2 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985).