Two references come immediately to mind  on this. On property rights and
economic growth in the market economy there is the recent book by Douglass
North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, _Violence and Social Orders: A
conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history_ (Cambridge
U. Press, 2009). The opening sentence of their book begins "the task of
the social sciences is to explain the performance characteristics of
societies through time..."

An older article that acknowledges that economic history has in the past
been concerned with "dissecting the forms of justice and injustice in
economic life"  as well as more recent concerns with "the quantity of
material goods and of people" is Frederic Lane, "Economic Consequences of
Organized Violence" _The Journal of Economic History_ Vol. 18, no.4,
December, 1958, pp. 401-417.

David Mitch