Here's Robert Margo's excellent and interesting critical review of North, Wallis, & Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. For anyone contributing to the broader NWW research agenda, Margo's review is essential. It highlights the strengths and weaknesses of NWW, particularly in contrast to Acemoglu & Robinson.

After I read it I thought that "Violence" was the book North ultimately had in mind when he was working on Understanding the Process of Economic Change. It's an appropriate follow-up to the last forty years of North's work.

In particular, it sets the stage for empirical research exploring their implicit and explicit theoretical linkages. I'm working on a project with Chris Coyne in which we're going to explore NWW's "doorstep conditions" for transition into an open-access order in the context of Reconstruction-era violence in Memphis. In particular, the 1866 Memphis riot shows how the transition from limited-access to open-access can be anything but smooth.