Emrah Gülsunar

I am an economic historian focusing on institutions, state and politics, and their relationships with (long-term) economic growth. In my research, I mainly focus on Britain, Europe and Turkey.

My doctoral thesis is about how Parliament and the state reacted to the structural transformation of the economy in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the assumption that this reaction was one of the primary reasons behind modern economic growth. In the thesis, I examine the transformation of the state, state policy on manufacturing, determinants of state capacity and foreign economic policy changes. To this end, I focus on the parliamentary legislation and debates by using statute books and other parliamentary history records in UK Parliament and Hansard archives as my historical sources. Two new databases are constructed from these sources by categorising acts and sittings and counting keywords in the texts, which are analysed using both quantitative and qualitative methods.