Most recent papers:

• Infant mortality decline in rural and urban Bavaria: fertility, economic transformation, infant care, and inequality in Bavaria and Munich, 1825–1910†.
  John C. Brown, Timothy W. Guinnane.
  The Economic History Review. September 17, 2017
  During most of the nineteenth century, Bavaria was notorious for infant mortality rates that were among the highest in Europe. After 1870, infant mortality in Bavaria began a sustained decline. This decline, which was impressive in urban areas, was even more dramatic in Bavaria's capital, Munich. From a peak of 40 deaths per 100 births in the 1860s, infant mortality had fallen two‐thirds by 1914. This article examines the causes of infant mortality in rural and urban districts of Bavaria from 1880 to 1910 and in Munich from 1825 up to shortly before the First World War. In rural Bavaria, structural change in agriculture lowered infant mortality, even as stark differences in infant survival driven by income gaps and deficient infant care remained. In urban areas, high fertility was strongly associated with high infant mortality. Individual‐level data from Munich reveal that infant care, fertility, and incomes mattered. Even prior to industrialization, occupational status influenced infant survival. Munich's growth into a leading industrial centre after 1875 apparently widened the gap between rich and poor. Families at the top of the occupational distribution and couples able to acquire real property saw the steepest declines in infant mortality. The poorest one‐third without property saw little improvement.

  September 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12573   open full text
• Mills, cranes, and the great divergence: the use of immovable capital goods in western Europe and the Middle East, ninth to sixteenth centuries.
  Bas Van Bavel, Eltjo Buringh, Jessica Dijkman.
  The Economic History Review. September 06, 2017
  This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the causes of the great divergence by comparing the use of expensive labour‐saving capital goods—water‐mills, windmills, and cranes—in medieval western Europe and the Middle East. Using novel ways of measuring, we find that whereas the use of these goods increased in Europe, in the Middle East their prevalence decreased, or they were not used at all. We investigate several possible explanations and reject most of them, including religion, geography, technological knowledge, and disparities in wages and cost of capital. Our analysis shows that differences in lordship systems and the security of property rights best explain the patterns found.

  September 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12571   open full text
• Illegal quays: Elizabethan customs reforms and suppression of the coastal trade of Christchurch, Hampshire.
  Stephen Gadd.
  The Economic History Review. August 22, 2017
  This article considers deficiencies in the designation and reassessment of Legal Quays (those authorized for foreign trade), and the detrimental impact of these and other Elizabethan customs reforms from the perspective of Christchurch, a small coastal town then in Hampshire. Throttling the flow of merchandise through such places drove trade, and consequently economic growth, to those other places that enjoyed a convenient Legal Quay. In places without such quays, regulation and the farming of customs caused (and also facilitated) the suppression not only of international trade but also of domestic maritime trade. Though otherwise encouraged by Crown policy, entrepreneurial endeavour in Christchurch was stifled by customs regulation, in particular by the logistical burden introduced with remote record‐keeping for coastal trade in the port books. The town seemed unable to break free of Southampton's controlling influence in order to realize its own apparent economic potential.

  August 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12570   open full text
• Reconstruction of money supply over the long run: the case of England, 1270–1870.
  Nuno Palma.
  The Economic History Review. August 02, 2017
  This article provides a time series of coin and money supply estimates for six hundred years of English history. Two main estimation methods are proposed. The first (the direct method) is used to measure the value of government‐provided, legal‐tender coin supply only. Two varieties of the direct method are proposed. Additionally, an indirect method is proposed which relies on a combination of information about nominal GDP with an assumption regarding the evolution of velocity in time, and which can be used to calculate coin supply and M2. Both methods rely on benchmark values known for certain years, but no particular benchmark is determinant for the results. The new methodologies set out here may serve as a blueprint for a similar reconstruction of coin and money supply series for other economies for which analogous data are available.

  August 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12534   open full text
• Colonization and education: exploring the legacy of local elites in Korea.
  Ji Yeon Hong, Christopher Paik.
  The Economic History Review. August 01, 2017
  In this article we examine the impact of pre‐colonial educated elites and colonization on modernization. Using the case of Joseon, as Korea was known before being colonized by Japan in 1910, we investigate how the civil exam system and scholarly traditions, as well as the provision of public schools under Japanese colonial rule, influenced levels of literacy in the colony. We introduce novel data from Joseon's historical court examination archives, colonial education records, and censuses dating back to 1930. Our findings suggest that the spread of Korean literacy during the early colonial period was strongly correlated with the historical presence of civil exam passers from the Joseon Dynasty. Regions with a greater presence of educated elites later had higher numbers of Korean teachers, as well as more private schools established as alternatives to the colonial public schools.

  August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12538   open full text
• Geography, policy, or productivity? Regional trade in five South American countries, 1910–50.
  Marc Badia‐Miró, Anna Carreras‐Marín, Christopher M. Meissner.
  The Economic History Review. August 01, 2017
  Regional trade in South America since independence has long been much smaller than would be expected if geography were the only constraint on trade. Several potential explanations exist, including low technological and demand complementarities; low productivity; and high natural and policy barriers to trade. Focusing on the latter explanations, policy makers have long advocated a South American/Southern Cone Free Trade Area—proposed as early as 1889. Would reductions in trade costs have been sufficient to raise trade significantly, or was trade low for other reasons? We study bilateral trade between 1910 and 1950, when large external shocks altered global supply and demand. These shocks help us show that intra‐regional trade could have been boosted by reductions in trade costs. Trade among Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru could have benefited from more benign trade policies or better infrastructure. Regional trade in textiles, which took off from the 1930s, supports our argument that trade improved when trade costs fell.

  August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12539   open full text
• Modelling regional imbalances in English plebeian migration to late eighteenth‐century London†.
  Adam Crymble, Adam Dennett, Tim Hitchcock.
  The Economic History Review. July 27, 2017
  Using a substantial set of vagrancy removal records for Middlesex (1777–86) giving details of the place of origin of some 11,500 individuals, and analysing these records using a five‐variable gravity model of migration, this article addresses a simple question: from which parts of England did London draw its lower‐class migrants in the late eighteenth century? It concludes, first, that industrializing areas of the north emerged as a competitor for potential migrants—contributing relatively fewer migrants than predicted by the model. Rising wage rates in these areas appear to explain this phenomenon. Second, it argues that migration from urban centres in the west midlands and parts of the West Country, including Bristol, Birmingham, and Worcester, was substantially higher than predicted, and that this is largely explained by falling wage rates and the evolution of an increasingly efficient travel network. Third, for the counties within about 130 kilometres of the capital, this article suggests that migration followed the pattern described in the current literature, with London drawing large numbers of local women in particular. It also argues that these short‐distance migrants came from a uniquely wide number of parishes, suggesting a direct rural‐to‐urban path.

  July 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12569   open full text
• Road transport productivity in the sixteenth‐century Low Countries: the case of Brabant, 1450–1650†.
  Bart Ballaux, Bruno Blondé.
  The Economic History Review. June 22, 2017
  Though there is a consensus that transport plays a central role in economic development, for the period before the eighteenth century there is a lack of strategic information for assessing the importance of road transport productivity changes in economic development. Transport prices in particular are crucial missing pieces of the puzzle. Sources rarely reveal information that meets the standards of reliable price history. However, it is possible to create a reliable transport price series on the basis of the transport of millstones to ducal mills in Brabant. Assessing the impact of the ‘transport productivity changes’ that can be inferred from this transport price series is a hazardous exercise. Moreover, as Masschaele has observed, land transport prices closely match general agricultural price trends. Land transport was essentially an agricultural service, determined both by cost (especially horse provender) and income effects. Transport price inflation was not demand‐led. However, while transport did not impede urbanization and economic growth, conversely, in sixteenth‐century Brabant—a highly urbanized region that experienced considerable growth in the volume of land transport—no significant land transport productivity gains were achieved.

  June 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12536   open full text
• Growth or stagnation? Farming in England, 1200–1800.
  Gregory Clark.
  The Economic History Review. June 22, 2017
  Estimates of English income in Broadberry et al.’s British economic growth, 1270–1870 are founded upon a fourfold growth of farm output, and output per farm worker, over this interval. This article shows, using four separate tests, that farm output growth must have been much more limited. The tests are, first, whether in 1300 there was enough work at harvest to employ all the labour force; second, whether the value of output per worker in agriculture was greater than the annual earnings of workers; third, whether the implied relative outputs per acre of arable versus pasture were reasonable; and fourth, whether a much shorter medieval work year was possible. An alternative index of farm output consistent with the labour supply, wages, and farm rents is derived. This shows much less growth during the period 1270–1800. Overall economic growth in England during these years must consequently have been far less than Broadberry et al. estimate.

  June 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12528   open full text
• Shakeout in the early commercial airframe industry†.
  Taylor Jaworski, Andrew Smyth.
  The Economic History Review. June 19, 2017
  The commercial airframe industry in the US experienced a shakeout from the early 1930s into the post‐Second World War period. Unlike shakeouts in automobiles, tyres, or televisions, the commercial airframe industry's early life cycle was affected by external factors, particularly government demand. Using newly digitized data on all planes introduced in the commercial market between 1926 and 1965, we find that commercial airframe manufacturers with bomber contracts during the Second World War were more likely to have postwar market share than firms without such contracts, controlling for plane characteristics and other forms of government contracting. We attribute the effect of bomber contracts to advantages in R&D learning capacity acquired by firms with military airframe contracts. Despite low (or zero) initial presence in the commercial market, these learning capacity advantages allowed such firms to survive the early period of the shakeout, and later to thrive.

  June 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12430   open full text
• The expanding Empire and spatial distribution of economic activity: the case of Japan's colonization of Korea during the prewar period.
  Kentaro Nakajima, Tetsuji Okazaki.
  The Economic History Review. June 09, 2017
  In 1910, Japan annexed Korea and integrated it into the Empire of Japan. According to its policy of assimilating colonies, the Japanese government intended to remove the tariffs between Japan and Korea, an aim which had almost been realized by 1923. The removal of the tariff barrier was supposed to improve market access between Japan and Korea. This article explores the implications of this event, focusing on the spatial distribution of economic activity in Japan. The regression results suggest that the integration of the Korean market increased population growth rates more in the regions close to the former border between Japan and Korea than in the other regions. Furthermore, after integration, the regions close to Korea that specialized in the fabric industry, whose products were the primary goods exported from Japan to Korea, experienced more population growth than other regions close to Korea did. These results suggest that market accessibility was indeed a determinant of the spatial distribution of economic activity. Our findings also indicate that the economic effect of colonization on the mainland was spatially heterogeneous and that a spatial viewpoint of the history of imperialism is important.

  June 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12535   open full text
• Managing financial constraints: undercapitalization and underwriting capacity in Spanish fire insurance†.
  Pablo Gutiérrez González, Lars‐Fredrik Andersson.
  The Economic History Review. June 05, 2017
  Reinsurance is a vital financial device for enhancing underwriting capacity, ceding risks, and mitigating financial distress. By supplying financial resources and services, reinsurance can facilitate growth and expansion in the insurance business. Focusing on the insurance sector in the emerging Spanish economy and using a novel dataset on fire insurance companies, this article examines the role of fire insurance in the national capital formation, the importance of reinsurance as a vehicle for expanding the country's domestic underwriting capacity, and how the import of capital impacted on the balance of payment, from the introduction of the first comprehensive legislation regarding insurance in 1908 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936. Considering the situation of undercapitalization, the singularities of the insurance market, and the changes in regulatory schemes, we find that foreign reinsurance became a key financial vehicle for increasing underwriting capacity in Spain. We also show the struggle of an emerging market to find ways to keep the balance of current accounts and raise capital when financial infrastructure was underdeveloped. The diffusion of reinsurance networks from the core of industrial western countries towards emerging economies was one of the mechanisms for financial modernization on a global scale.

  June 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12529   open full text
• Anglo‐American trade costs during the first era of globalization: the contribution of a bilateral tariff series†.
  Brian D. Varian.
  The Economic History Review. May 22, 2017
  Previous scholarship has suggested that British trade was generally unaffected by foreign tariffs during the period from 1870 to 1913. This article focuses specifically on Anglo‐American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole intertemporal determinant of Anglo‐American trade costs. However, the determinacy of tariffs for Anglo‐American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which this article reconstructs. The article concludes by claiming that Anglo‐American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth‐century Britain.

  May 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12486   open full text
• ‘Real’ wages? Contractors, workers, and pay in London building trades, 1650–1800†.
  Judy Z. Stephenson.
  The Economic History Review. May 13, 2017
  Existing series suggest wages in London were higher than in other European cities from 1650 to 1800. This article presents new evidence from the construction sites that supplied the underlying wage data, and uncovers the contractual and organizational context in which they were recorded. Institutional records of wages were profoundly affected by structural changes in the seventeenth century, particularly the emergence of large‐scale building contractors. The actual wages paid to London building workers were substantially below current estimates.

  May 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12491   open full text
• ‘Because family and friends got easily weary of taking care’: a new perspective on the specialization in the elderly care sector in early modern Holland†.
  Anita Boele, Tine De Moor.
  The Economic History Review. May 13, 2017
  This article investigates the causes of the remarkable growth in and specialization of elderly care institutions in the Netherlands during the early modern period, and relates these developments to a number of major changes in the household formation process, which had both a direct and an indirect impact on the need for elderly care in general and on the relationships between the elderly and next of kin (partners, children, and other family members). Some specific features of the specialization in care, such as the care provisions for couples, point towards an underlying change in these relationships, which may have resulted from a combination of factors such as neolocality, high marriage ages for both men and women, and, related to this, the small spousal age gap and large numbers of singles. In the typical nuclear household society of early modern Holland, even when children lived close enough and were financially capable to provide help, parents often still relied on extra‐familial elderly care provisions. This article also argues that this practice was embedded in a persistent moral culture accentuating independence, agency, self‐help, investment in the younger generation, and community, instead of putting family responsibilities first.

  May 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12489   open full text
• Rebuttal to Barnes and Guinnane.
  Simon Szreter.
  The Economic History Review. May 05, 2017
  Barnes and Guinnane's ‘Rejoinder’ repeats their previous argument that the professional model of fertility decline produces statistical results which they see as impressive. They continue to ignore the evidence presented in part II of Fertility, class and gender, summarized in my reply to their original article, that the design of the model is both conceptually flawed and methodologically incoherent. It is reaffirmed that therefore its statistical results should be treated with all due scepticism in terms of their historical significance and capacity to inform us about the relationship between changing reproductive behaviour and the complexities of social class relations. Alternative approaches, liberated from the simplifying limitations of the professional model, are required to advance our understanding of the relationship between fertility change and social class.

  May 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12420   open full text
• Multinational business and host countries in times of crisis: Courtaulds, Glanzstoff, and Italy in the interwar period .
  Valerio Cerretano.
  The Economic History Review. May 02, 2017
  Despite the considerable attention granted to the history of international business, we still have a limited knowledge of the historical impact of multinationals on host economies. This article presents the case of the giant Italian rayon firm Snia Viscosa which was acquired by its direct rivals, Courtaulds in the UK and the German firm Glanzstoff, in 1927. Italian deflation which underpinned the return of the country to the gold standard between 1925 and 1927 and the parlous financial conditions of Snia Viscosa proved incentives in what seemed to be a fire sale investment. This investment mitigated the credit crunch and allowed Snia Viscosa to have access to foreign rayon expertise. Evidence suggests that the regime and economic nationalism exerted some pressure on foreign interests and were instrumental in the abandonment of plans intended to reduce Italian rayon output dramatically. One contribution of this article is its use of business history to illustrate how recessions can reshape foreign direct investment flows and the tensions that may arise between domestic business interests and foreign stakeholders during recessions. In addition, the history of Snia Viscosa shows the importance of foreign interests and multinationals in the long‐term industrialization of Italy.

  May 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12469   open full text
• From the substance to the shadow: the role of the court in Japanese labour markets.
  Masaki Nakabayashi.
  The Economic History Review. April 27, 2017
  Modern contract law generally does not allow property rights or similar claims to be made against employees. This undermines a claim on the return on the employer's investments in recruiting and training a worker, making them vulnerable to possible infringement from a bystander. Accordingly, employers’ investment in recruiting and training might become deficient. Therefore, protecting an employer's investment, balanced against the mobility of the labour market for better employer/employee matches, has emerged as an issue during the transition towards a market‐based economy. This article explores how the Japanese state court in its early period addressed this issue in the tight labour market of the silk‐reeling industry, which was the leading industry at that time. Initially, the court directly protected the interests of employers whose employees were poached, at the expense of workers’ mobility. Then, it seemed to govern transactions between employers indirectly as a shadow off‐the‐equilibrium path. Thus, an employer whose employee was poached and an employer who carried out the poaching would privately negotiate to settle the dispute, using a possible suit as a threat against the poacher. An examination of the suits that were actually filed supports this hypothesis. This indirect governance facilitated labour market mobility with some protection of the original employer's claim.

  April 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12432   open full text
• Quakers, coercion, and pre‐modern growth: why Friends’ formal institutions for contract enforcement did not matter for early modern trade expansion.
  Esther Sahle.
  The Economic History Review. April 27, 2017
  During the late seventeenth century, Atlantic trade grew dramatically. The New Institutional Economists attribute this to institutional developments. During this period, Quakers emerged as the region's most prominent trading community. Some historians explain this achievement as the result of the competitive advantage that Quakers gained from their formal institutions for contract enforcement. This article studies the London Quaker community to show that, in fact, they only began to police the conduct of business regularly after 1750, as part of a wider effort to promote the Society's reputation. Formal institutional advantages cannot explain the Quakers’ early trading success.

  April 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12485   open full text
• The liquidity of the London capital markets, 1825–70†.
  Gareth Campbell, John D. Turner, Qing Ye.
  The Economic History Review. April 27, 2017
  This article examines the liquidity of the London capital markets in the decades following the liberalization of UK incorporation law. Using comprehensive stock and bond data, we calculate a measure of market liquidity for the period 1825–70. We find that stock market liquidity trended upwards but bond market liquidity did not increase over the sample period. Stock market liquidity during our sample period was partially influenced by the bond market, rather than fluctuations in economic output. In our analysis of the cross‐sectional determinants of individual stock liquidity, we find that firm size and the number of issued shares were important determinants of liquidity.  Finally, we find little evidence of an illiquidity premium, which is consistent with the view that investors did not price liquidity in this nascent market.

  April 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12530   open full text
• Retail revolution and the village shop, c. 1660–1860.
  Jon Stobart, Lucy Bailey.
  The Economic History Review. April 24, 2017
  Village shops have been largely overlooked in the recent literature on British retailing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which has sought to redefine the parameters and timing of retail transformation. While urban shops have been explored in detail, often in ways that highlight their role in a parallel transformation in consumption patterns, little attempt has been made to look inside village shops or examine the character and practices of rural retailers. This article addresses this lacuna and offers fresh insights into the shifting position of village shops in these broader economic, business, and social changes. Taking a long view of the period c. 1660–1860, it draws on a wide range of sources to examine the stock sold and the degree of specialization exhibited by village shops, and the changing trading practices of village shopkeepers, including the provision of credit, the pricing of goods, and marketing activities. In doing so, the article highlights both long‐term continuities and important innovations of the type that also characterize urban shops, and argues that village shops, while central to rural social and economic networks, were also intimately bound into broader retail systems.

  April 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12531   open full text
• The rise and demise of gedik markets in Istanbul, 1750–1860†.
  Seven Ağir.
  The Economic History Review. April 24, 2017
  Using new evidence uncovered from Istanbul court records, this paper shows that Ottoman markets were capable of spontaneous financial innovation before the introduction of modern financial instruments. At the same time, however, it demonstrates that the impact and sustainability of these innovations depended on the underlying political equilibrium. Gediks—entitlements to usufruct rights over the factors of production used in urban commercial and industrial activity—gradually transformed into liquid assets during the late eighteenth century. This transformation was enabled by the coercive power of Janissary‐infiltrated guilds in response to the financial needs of small‐ and medium‐scale actors operating within the confines of the domestic economy. The entry barriers, which enabled gedik markets to exist in the first place, also limited their use for growth‐promoting purposes and thus set them apart from similar financial instruments that emerged in the West. Gedik markets disappeared as the Janissary–guild coalition declined and better financial instruments emerged during the mid‐nineteenth century.

  April 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12492   open full text
• The economic geography of race in the New World: Brazil, 1500–2000†.
  Justin R. Bucciferro.
  The Economic History Review. April 24, 2017
  Race is a fundamental aspect of historical inequality and institutions, yet it is at times overlooked within the literature on comparative development in the Americas. This article investigates the nature of staple production in Brazil and attendant changes in the racial composition of 20 modern states from its discovery by the Portuguese to the present. The Indigenous population was surpassed by that of African descent in the north‐east, south‐east, and north, respectively, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; not until decades after the abolition of slavery did people of European heritage come to constitute a majority. These transitions were guided by the relative productivity, natural increase, and price of Native and African slaves, contingent on the extent of natural resource wealth (mineral deposits or land suitable for growing cash crops) and supply of free labour. In those areas where slavery was most profitable, a 1 per cent increase in the relative cost of Native labour raised the proportion of people of African ancestry by up to 2 per cent, depending on the measures of slave prices and racial classifications considered. This relationship is robust to changes in output prices or the populace of European descent, and alternative scenarios of aboriginal population decline.

  April 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12483   open full text
• Trends in morbidity: national statistics on sickness claims among the working population in Sweden, 1892–1954.
  Helene Castenbrandt.
  The Economic History Review. April 18, 2017
  In this article national statistics from Swedish sickness funds are analysed from 1892 to 1954. The study is intended to provide better knowledge of changes in sickness claims, and to contribute to the discussion of morbidity trends. National statistics on sickness benefits are available from 1892, and are studied until the introduction of mandatory health insurance in 1955. Membership of Swedish sickness funds increased more than tenfold between 1900 and 1950. Just a small portion of members were women in 1900; however, women constituted the majority of members by 1941. There was a gender difference in morbidity, but this variation was not consistent over time. Before 1935 men had more but shorter sickness episodes; however, after 1935 women had significantly higher sickness rates. The law in 1931 meant that the recruitment of members was widened and compensation for longer periods of illness was made possible. The continuous increase in sick days can be partly explained by legislative changes; however, the increase in the period 1910–32 cannot. The study thereby highlights the importance of incorporating legislative changes into the interpretation. This increased understanding of trends in sick leave provides a sound basis for extending the study to the analysis of individual‐level data.

  April 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12468   open full text
• Shortages and the informal economy in the Soviet republics, 1965–89.
  Byung‐Yeon Kim, Yoshisada Shida.
  The Economic History Review. April 12, 2017
  This study measures the informal economy and shortages of consumer goods in the Soviet republics from 1965 to 1989 to estimate the relationships between these two variables. Using estimation methods, including a fixed‐effect model and the instrumental variable approach, we find that the informal economy and shortages reinforced each other. Results indicate that the Soviet central planning system was difficult to sustain. Substantial heterogeneities across the Soviet republics exist not only in the extent of the informal economy and shortages, but also in the associations between the two variables.

  April 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12431   open full text
• The impact of ‘stop‐go’ demand management policy on Britain's consumer durables industries, 1952–65.
  Peter M. Scott, James T. Walker.
  The Economic History Review. April 12, 2017
  This article examines the impacts of British government ‘stop‐go’ policy on domestic sales of consumer durables over the period 1952–65, via hire purchase restrictions and punitive Purchase Tax rates. Our analysis includes a general review of contemporary evidence regarding the impacts of these measures, a more detailed study of the television sector, and time‐series econometric analysis for both televisions and a representative high‐ticket labour‐saving consumer durable: washing machines. We find that the restrictions had devastating impacts on Britain's consumer durables industries, preventing firms from fully exploiting economies of scale, reducing output growth and international competitiveness, and eroding industrial relations. Government officials were aware of these problems, but considered them a price worth paying to facilitate moves towards sterling convertibility and the re‐establishment of the City as a leading financial and trading centre.

  April 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12470   open full text
• The market turn: from social democracy to market liberalism.
  Avner Offer.
  The Economic History Review. April 12, 2017
  Social democracy and market liberalism provide different solutions to the same problem: how to provide for life‐cycle dependency. Social democracy makes lateral transfers from producers to dependents by means of progressive taxation. Market liberalism uses financial markets to transfer financial entitlement over time. Social democracy came up against the upper limits of public expenditure in the 1970s. The ‘market turn’ from social democracy to market liberalism was enabled by liberalized credit in the 1980s. Much of this was absorbed into homeownership, which attracted majorities of households (and voters) in the developed world. Early movers did well, but eventually easy credit drove house prices beyond the reach of younger cohorts. Debt service diminished effective demand, which instigated financial instability. Both social democracy and market liberalism are currently in crisis.

  April 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12537   open full text
• Lewis revisited: tropical polities competing on the world market, 1830–1938.
  Giovanni Federico, Antonio Tena‐Junguito.
  The Economic History Review. April 06, 2017
  Since the seminal work by W. A. Lewis, exports of primary products have been deemed the main or sole source of growth in tropical countries before the Great Depression. However, this conventional wisdom relies on very limited evidence. This article analyses the growth of exports with a constant market share analysis for 84 tropical polities. Exports grew a lot, but less than total trade, while relative prices of tropical products remained roughly constant. We thus tentatively infer that the decline in the tropical shares of world trade reflects an insufficient demand for tropical products. Asia dealt well with these headwinds throughout the whole period, while African polities blossomed after the First World War. The loser was (South) America, and most notably the Caribbean former slave colonies, especially before 1870.

  April 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12467   open full text
• Patterns of infant mortality in rural England and Wales, 1850–1910†.
  Paul Atkinson, Brian Francis, Ian Gregory, Catherine Porter.
  The Economic History Review. April 06, 2017
  The study of nineteenth‐century infant mortality in Britain has neglected the rural dimension to a surprising degree. This article maps the change in infant mortality rate (IMR) between the 1850s and the 1900s at registration district (RD) level. Latent trajectory analysis, a longitudinal model‐based clustering method, is used to identify the clusters into which rural RDs fell, based on their IMR trajectories. Relationships between IMR and population density, fertility, female tuberculosis mortality, female illiteracy, male agricultural wages, and distance from London are examined in a longitudinal study. The tuberculosis (maternal health), illiteracy (education), and distance variables had the most effect. IMR responded most strongly to improving health and education in the east, less in the central area, and least in the north and west. The eastern zone's higher‐than‐average mid‐century infant mortality therefore declined faster than the national average. A central and southern zone had slightly lower IMR in mid‐century but did not keep up with the rate of decline in the east. The peripheral north and west had the lowest mid‐century rates but their decline was overtaken by the other zones. The interpretation of these findings and their relevance to the wider study of infant mortality are discussed.

  April 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12488   open full text
• Risk, success, and failure: female entrepreneurship in late Victorian and Edwardian England.
  Jennifer Aston, Paolo Martino.
  The Economic History Review. March 30, 2017
  This article analyses female entrepreneurship in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Traditional views on female entrepreneurship in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century England point towards a decline in the number and relevance of women as business owners in comparison to the eighteenth century, and their retreat into a ‘separate sphere’ away from the world of trade and production. Recent studies, however, have deeply challenged this view, suggesting that women still played an important role as entrepreneurs during industrialization and beyond. Nevertheless, a number of questions remain unanswered with regard to the features of female entrepreneurship during these phases of British history, and issues such as scale of operation, attitude to risk, credit structure, and managerial styles are still widely debated. Using original sources, this article provides a novel view on these issues, analysing female entrepreneurship from the perspective of bankruptcy. Analysing statistics on women's bankruptcy derived from Board of Trade reports, as well as a sample of archival cases, this article argues that overall female business owners traded in ways similar to their male counterparts in terms of business size, risk‐taking, and, eventually, success.

  March 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12481   open full text
• Individual investors and local bias in the UK, 1870–1935.
  Janette Rutterford, Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, Carry Lieshout.
  The Economic History Review. March 30, 2017
  This article examines the long‐run evolution of local bias by UK investors between the 1870s and the 1930s. It uses a large sample of nearly 30,000 shareholders based on 197 sets of share records, a large and representative database of the investor population across sectors and time. It investigates the structure and the evolution of local investment preference between shareholders and the companies in which they invested, as measured by the distance between where they lived and corporate headquarters. The study offers evidence of strong initial local investment preference, which declined over time for non‐Londoners, but remained strong for Londoners until the 1930s. Local investment preference of security holders was related to the size of the board of directors and, for wealthy investors, was related to the age of the firm. For large firms, local networks between investors and directors appear stronger when director shareholdings and voting rights were important. This study supports the analytical hypothesis of local informal trust networks between investors and directors as a means to overcome informational asymmetries and weak legal protection, and provides evidence that local preference was a means to curb insider opportunism and private benefits of control.

  March 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12482   open full text
• Cooperating in time of crisis: war, commons, and inequality in Renaissance Lombardy.
  Matteo Di Tullio.
  The Economic History Review. March 29, 2017
  This article addresses the question of how exogenous shocks led to economic redistribution at a local rural community level in the pre‐industrial period, and how inequality can be limited (or not) by institutions and endogenous social structures within the community itself. This article presents a micro‐analytical study conducted mainly on unpublished sources, focusing on a boundary area (the Geradadda) disputed by Milan and Venice during the long period of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) in a broad European perspective. To understand the impact of wars, the management of local commons and communal assets is analysed in the more general context of the management of local finances. This research shows how local communities organized cooperative behaviours for the defence of local resources, developing innovative credit systems and encouraging a process of redistribution. Before other important factors—such as the distribution of wealth or of local political and social power—cooperation between social groups and the role played by elites were the keystones to limiting the increase in inequality.

  March 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12490   open full text
• Long‐term trends in economic inequality: the case of the Florentine state, c. 1300–1800.
  Guido Alfani, Francesco Ammannati.
  The Economic History Review. March 16, 2017
  This article provides an overview of economic inequality, particularly of wealth, in the Florentine state (Tuscany) from the early fourteenth to the late eighteenth century. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and this is only the second‐ever attempt at covering such a long period. Consistent with recent research conducted on other European areas, during the early modern period we find clear indications of a tendency for economic inequality to grow continually, a finding that for Tuscany cannot be explained as the consequence of economic growth. Furthermore, the exceptionally old sources we use allow us to demonstrate that a phase of declining inequality, lasting about one century, was triggered by the Black Death from 1348 to 1349. This finding challenges earlier scholarship and significantly alters our understanding of the economic consequences of the Black Death.

  March 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12471   open full text
• Innovation and upheaval: early growth in Greek capital market listings and IPOs from 1880 to the Second World War in the Athens Stock Exchange†.
  Stavros Thomadakis, Dimitrios Gounopoulos, Christos Nounis, Michalis Riginos.
  The Economic History Review. March 10, 2017
  The establishment and growth of the Greek stock market were coincident with development episodes, financial upheavals, and geographic expansions of the country's economy over the period 1880–1940. This article explores the growth of the Athens Stock Exchange through new listings and initial public offerings (IPOs) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We examine changes in exchange governance and listing requirements. On a theme not addressed before, we find that simple listings were far more numerous than actual IPOs. IPOs in Greece remained unregulated throughout the period. Their under‐pricing became pronounced in the later parts of the period, especially the 1920s. The study presents data on ‘quasi‐IPOs’ (that is, capital increases shortly after listing) and shows that they offer a more accurate assessment of the demand for the financing of listing firms in an emerging market. Robust evidence is presented to show that as the Exchange developed it also underwent a change in character, becoming more oriented to the domestic market and catering to smaller firms in domestic manufacturing in the post‐First World War era that marked the end of early globalization.

  March 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12381   open full text
• Inter‐communal institutions in medieval trade.
  Mika Kallioinen.
  The Economic History Review. March 08, 2017
  This article examines the institutional structure of medieval overseas trade to explain why trade thrived even in the absence of the state. The literature has dealt mainly with intra‐coalition or intra‐community relations. However, the literature does not answer the question of how institutions could be created that could support interaction between a large number of distant communities and between merchants who did not necessarily know one another. This article presents such an institution that prevailed in the Baltic Sea region in the late middle ages, referred to here as the inter‐communal conciliation mechanism. In case of a dispute, conciliation took place between town councils, rather than the merchants involved in the dispute, thus combining individual liability and communal enforcement. Exploration of the documents reveals a task‐specific regularity of behaviour, which was the general practice among merchants to turn to the council of their own community when they had problems in a foreign town, instead of being obliged to solve disputes by themselves. This institution provided a permanent, centralized, and relatively impartial enforcement mechanism to respond to breaches. It was therefore well adapted to large, at least partially anonymous markets, such as the Baltic Sea region, with dozens of towns and thousands of merchants.

  March 08, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12472   open full text
• What moved share prices in the nineteenth‐century London stock market?†.
  Gareth Campbell, William Quinn, John D. Turner, Qing Ye.
  The Economic History Review. March 08, 2017
  Using a new weekly blue‐chip index, this article investigates the causes of stock price movements on the London market between 1823 and 1870. We find that economic fundamentals explain about 15 per cent of weekly and 34 per cent of monthly variation in share prices. Contemporary press reporting from the London Stock Exchange is used to ascertain what market participants thought was causing the largest movements on the market. The vast majority of large movements were attributed by the press to geopolitical, monetary, railway‐sector, and financial‐crisis news. Investigating the stock price changes on an independent list of events reaffirms these findings, suggesting that the most important specific events that moved markets were wars involving European powers.

  March 08, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12429   open full text
• Power politics and princely debts: why Germany's common currency failed, 1549–56†.
  Oliver Volckart.
  The Economic History Review. March 07, 2017
  Using new sources, this article examines how in the years around 1550 Charles V and the imperial estates came close to creating a common currency for the Holy Roman Empire. The article analyses whose interests prevailed in the negotiations and how, despite the resistance of some important actors, the Imperial diet of 1551 was able to unanimously agree on the currency bill. It also analyses why the common currency still failed: This was the case because of the desire of many princes to ease the repayment of their debts by establishing a bimetallic currency, and even more importantly because of Charles V's attempt to weaken the Elector of Saxony by undervaluing the taler. In this, Charles exploited the diet's implicit ex‐ante agreement with him to set the rates at which old money was allowed to continue in circulation. His manipulations provoked resistance, raised the costs of implementing the common currency, and caused its failure.

  March 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12421   open full text
• Gender, life cycle, and family ‘strategies’ among the poor: the Barcelona workhouse, 1762–1805.
  Montserrat Carbonell‐Esteller, Julie Marfany.
  The Economic History Review. March 05, 2017
  Poor relief has received less attention from historians of southern Europe compared with northern Europe. This article seeks to challenge the frequent assumption that the strength of family ties in southern Europe mitigated the need for welfare provision. It provides new data for men and boys entering the Barcelona workhouse in the period 1780–1803, and compares these with data from an earlier study of women and girls who entered the same institution over the period 1762–1805. We establish the characteristics of those who sought relief in terms of age, place of origin, marital status, and occupation. We use the information on reasons for entry and exit to ascertain family circumstances. We show that there were significant differences between males and females in terms of why they entered and left, and length of stay, particularly among the elderly. The bulk of the population of the workhouse, however, was comprised of children and adolescents. For this group, entry into the workhouse represented not just a temporary solution to life cycle poverty and periodic unemployment, but also a longer‐term strategy aimed at smoothing entry into the labour market.

  March 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12425   open full text
• Farmers at the heart of the ‘human capital revolution’? Decomposing the numeracy increase in early modern Europe†.
  Franziska Tollnek, Joerg Baten.
  The Economic History Review. March 05, 2017
  Did the early development of skills and numerical abilities occur primarily in urban centres and among the elite groups of society? This study assesses the human capital of different occupational groups in the early modern period and partially confirms this finding: skilled and professional groups had higher levels of numeracy and literacy than persons in unskilled occupations. However, there was another large group that developed substantial human capital and represented around one‐third of the total population: farmers. By analysing numeracy and literacy evidence from six countries in Europe and Latin America, we argue that farmers contributed significantly to the formation of human capital and, consequently, to modern economic growth.

  March 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12382   open full text
• The timing and pattern of real wage divergence in pre‐industrial Europe: evidence from Germany, c. 1500–1850.
  Ulrich Pfister.
  The Economic History Review. February 25, 2017
  This study uses price information relating to 12 towns and wage information from 18 towns to develop a real wage index for unskilled urban labourers in Germany during the three‐and‐a‐half centuries preceding the onset of rapid industrialization. Combining the new series with information from other parts of Europe establishes two stages of real wage divergence during the seventeenth to nineteenth century. The first occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century when real wages in centres of trade and finance located on the rim of the North Sea rose far above the level prevailing in their hinterland. The second stage unfolded from the second quarter of the eighteenth century when the real wage in south England, northern and central Italy, and Germany began to diverge; Germany followed a middle path between the other two countries. The second commercial revolution, which improved business techniques and promoted Smithian growth, goes a long way towards accounting for this development.

  February 25, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12419   open full text
• Pieces of eight, pieces of eight: seamen's earnings and the venture economy of early modern seafaring†.
  Richard J. Blakemore.
  The Economic History Review. February 23, 2017
  Historians have generally argued that between the medieval period and the eighteenth century seafarers transformed from collaborative adventurers with a share in their vessel to the first international wage‐earning proletariat. This interpretation has drawn upon relatively limited statistical analysis of mariners’ wages, and underestimates the variety of seafarers’ remuneration and economic activities besides wages themselves. This article undertakes a more sustained analysis of seventeenth‐century wage data drawn from the papers of the English High Court of Admiralty, and uses the same evidence to examine other forms of income, both customary payments as part of shipping, and small‐scale trade. Seafarers of all ranks carried their own commodities on all shipping routes, offering an opportunity to increase their income considerably. This evidence confirms that the maritime labour market was hierarchical, and that very often seafarers were poor labourers facing economic insecurity of many kinds. However, it refines the previous interpretation by emphasizing the presence of skilled workers even among the lower levels of this labour market, and by introducing a new dimension to mariners’ economic agency: they were not simply wage‐workers, but also independent participants in a venture economy.

  February 23, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12428   open full text
• Challenging the de‐industrialization thesis: gender and indigenous textile production in Java under Dutch colonial rule, c. 1830–1920.
  Elise Nederveen Meerkerk.
  The Economic History Review. February 06, 2017
  Many dependency theorists as well as economic historians have contended that nineteenth‐century imperial policies and economic globalization de‐industrialized the global ‘periphery’. European metropoles extracted raw materials and tropical commodities from their overseas territories, and in turn indigenous consumers bought their industrial products, textiles in particular. This article investigates three of the assumptions of Ricardian trade theory that are often behind the de‐industrialization narrative. In this article it is argued that, at least for colonial Java's textile industry, these assumptions should be reconsidered. Adverse trade policies imposed by the Dutch and a prolonged terms‐of‐trade boom in favour of primary commodities make colonial Java a unique case for exploring the merits of the de‐industrialization thesis. Here it is demonstrated that Javanese households resourcefully responded to changing market circumstances, in the first place by flexible allocation of female labour. Moreover, indigenous textile producers specialized in certain niches that catered for local demand. Because of these factors, local textile production in Java appears to have been much more resilient than most of the historical literature suggests. These findings not only shed new light on the social and economic history of colonial Indonesia, but also contribute to the recent literature on alternative, labour‐intensive paths of industrialization in the non‐western world.

  February 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12424   open full text
• Integration between the London and New York Stock Exchanges, 1825–1925.
  Gareth Campbell, Meeghan Rogers.
  The Economic History Review. February 06, 2017
  In this article the integration between the London and New York Stock Exchanges is analysed during the era when they were still developing as asset markets. The domestic securities on both exchanges showed little sustained integration, even when controlling for the different characteristics of stocks, which implies that the pricing of securities in the US and UK was still being driven by local factors. These results place a limit on the view that the pre‐First World War period was the first era of globalization in terms of capital markets. However, there was considerable integration between New York and those listings on London that operated internationally. This suggests that the listing of foreign securities may be one of the primary mechanisms driving asset market integration.

  February 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12423   open full text
• From orphan to artisan: apprenticeship careers and contract enforcement in The Netherlands before and after the guild abolition.
  Ruben Schalk.
  The Economic History Review. December 18, 2016
  Employing novel data on over 400 apprenticed orphaned boys from the Dutch cities of Leiden and Utrecht, this article explores the functioning of apprenticeship during and after the guilds. Although the mobility of apprentices was high and contracts were uncertain, no complaints arose from masters or guilds. Wages paid to these apprentices demonstrate that their labour made a gradually increasing contribution to the workshop from the start of their term. This enticed masters to take on apprentices and removed the need for contract enforcement. After the guilds were abolished, the number of apprenticed orphans in the crafts grew, suggesting that guilds previously hampered access to training. Additional data collected for regular (non‐orphan) apprentices corroborates these findings.

  December 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12422   open full text
• Shareholder rights and share capital: the effect of the 1901 Russian Corporation Reform, 1890–1905.
  Amanda G. Gregg.
  The Economic History Review. December 15, 2016
  During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, western European countries introduced general incorporation and additional flexible enterprise forms, but the Russian Empire left its concession system of incorporation in place. The Empire's only major corporation reform, the 1901 law, strengthened minority shareholder rights and removed bankers from boards of directors for certain corporations. The reform offers a rare opportunity to examine the financial effects of improving corporations’ principal–agent relationships through regulation, because the reform did not affect all corporations equally. Corporations affected by the reform had smaller total share capital, fewer shares, and higher par values for shares as observed in 1905. The new regulations may have increased the cost of having shareholders and hence disciplined corporations’ founders to be more conservative in raising capital by issuing stock. Removing bankers from boards of directors may have removed an important source of firms’ founding capital, though corporations could easily evade this provision. The results also show that, although the commercial code treated all corporations equally, there were two major groups of Russian corporations that behaved differently, and, despite the fact that corporate charters could grant individual exceptions to the commercial code, a revision in the commercial code changed corporations’ behaviour.

  December 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12417   open full text
• Did closures do any good? Labour productivity, mine dynamics, and rationalization in interwar Ruhr coal mining.
  Tobias A. Jopp.
  The Economic History Review. December 15, 2016
  Throughout the late 1920s, German coal mining saw an exceptional surge in labour productivity, led by the performance of the Ruhr coal mines. It is commonly accepted in the relevant literature that the economy‐wide ‘rationalization boom’ explains that pattern. This study tests the related hypothesis that ‘negative rationalization’, in the form of a massive wave of mine closures over the period 1924–9, played a significant role in stimulating aggregate labour productivity in the Ruhr coal district. Using an original dataset for the totality of Ruhr coal mines, the causes of productivity change over the broader period 1913–38 are identified, using the decomposition method of Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan. Results suggest that labour productivity was driven largely by improvements at individual mines, attributable to the intensified mechanization of underground operations. In sharp contrast, turnover effects were marginal, overall, compared to the effects stemming from the producer dynamics among surviving mines. Thus, the practical productivity implications of mine closures during the rationalization boom are negligible and overrated in the literature. These findings indicate the necessity of testing the relative importance of ‘negative rationalization’ in the form of plant closures in other branches of the Weimar economy.

  December 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12383   open full text
• Sharecropping was sometimes efficient: sharecropping with compensation for improvements in European viticulture†.
  Samuel Garrido.
  The Economic History Review. November 28, 2016
  There is no consensus among specialists in agricultural contracts over whether the long‐term inefficiencies that classical economists attributed to sharecropping actually exist. This article maintains that they do exist and are partly caused by the fact that sharecropping is hardly compatible with the tenant being compensated for improvements, viticulture being the main historical exception. In line with recent contributions to the sharecropping literature, the article contends that the widely held belief among scholars of agricultural contracts that sharecropping was very frequent in Europe's vineyards is incorrect. However, it also provides evidence of an issue whose importance has gone largely unnoticed: prior to the twentieth century, many of the European vineyards worked by sharecroppers had been created by the sharecroppers themselves, through contracts which entitled them to compensation. Those contracts abounded while viticulture depended basically on two inputs, land and labour. When viticulture became a heavy consumer of capital, they were rapidly abandoned, but not in Catalonia, with a paradoxical result: the Catalan rabassa morta contract, which for centuries had made it possible to eliminate both the long‐ and short‐term inefficiencies of sharecropping, ended up becoming an obstacle to overcoming the short‐term inefficiencies. The article discusses why that happened.

  November 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12386   open full text
• Housing affordability during the urban transition in Spain.
  Juan Carmona, Markus Lampe, Joan Rosés.
  The Economic History Review. November 25, 2016
  During the decades prior to the Civil War, Spain experienced a rapid process of urbanization, which was accompanied by the demographic transition and sizeable rural–urban migrations. This article investigates how urban housing markets reacted to these far‐reaching changes, which increased demand for dwellings. To this end, this study employs a new hedonic index of real housing prices and constructs a cross‐regional panel dataset of rents and housing price fundamentals. This new evidence indicates that rents were not a significant financial burden on low‐income families and, hence, housing was affordable for the working classes. The article also shows that families’ access to new homes was facilitated by a sizeable growth in the housing supply. Substantial investments in urban infrastructure and the institutional framework enabled the construction of new homes at affordable prices. Our results suggest that housing problems were not as pervasive during the urban transition as the literature often seems to claim.

  November 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12418   open full text
• Children's growth in an adaptive framework: explaining the growth patterns of American slaves and other historical populations.
  Eric B. Schneider.
  The Economic History Review. November 25, 2016
  This article presents a new adaptive framework for understanding children's growth in the past. Drawing upon the recent work on adaptive responses in relation to growth, it presents prenatal and postnatal adaptive mechanisms that affect the growth patterns of children. The most novel adaptive response to the historical literature is the prenatal predictive adaptive response where the metabolism and growth trajectory of a child is programmed to match predicted conditions later in life. Having discussed the framework in detail, a reinterpretation of the growth pattern of American slaves is then suggested. It seems likely that a mismatch between relatively good conditions in utero and absolutely appalling conditions in infancy and early childhood led slave children to become extremely stunted by the age of three or four. However, after this age, slave children experienced catch‐up growth because their immune systems had become more developed and because their diet improved tremendously and hookworm exposure was reduced. Thus, it seems that American slave children may have experienced substantial catch‐up growth because they were prenatally programmed for a higher metabolism and growth trajectory. The article concludes by setting out some stylized facts about children's growth in the past and pointing toward areas of future research.

  November 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12484   open full text
• The demand for residential domestic service in the London of 1901†.
  Quentin Outram.
  The Economic History Review. November 22, 2016
  This article concerns the effect of income and other variables on the demand for residential domestic service in London in 1901 and presents the first estimated model of the demand for residential service known to the author. It uses previously unexploited data consisting of the incomes and household details of some 500 civil servants. An extension of Becker's model of household production is set out and an ordered probit statistical model of servant demand is estimated. The results confirm the importance of income but also show that the demographic composition of the household was of significance. These results are interpreted in terms of age‐ and gender‐related differences in the supply of labour and the demand for market goods. The results are consistent with the view that middle‐class Edwardian households should be understood as sites of production as well as consumption. A comparison of the statistical results with contemporary recommendations in manuals of household management suggests that those recommendations were typically over‐optimistic. The article presents a ‘ready reckoner’ whereby household income may be estimated from the number of resident servants, but caution in its use is urged.

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12384   open full text
• The unpopularity of the hearth tax and the social geography of London in 1666.
  Andrew Wareham.
  The Economic History Review. November 20, 2016
  This article presents a new evaluation of the Restoration hearth tax and the social geography of London, first, by comparing the 1666 London hearth tax return with unpublished collectors’ accounts; second, by analysing the huge amount of extraneous data in these records on the social conditions in London; and third, by considering how different forms of tax avoidance and tax evasion operated on the streets of London. The article discusses wealth distribution by location and social status, and shows how privileged groups used diplomatic, ecclesiastical, and military rank to avoid the hearth tax, while ordinary householders turned to doorstep opposition, especially in the outer and poorer suburbs, in expressing their hostility towards the heath tax. The article demonstrates that in Metropolitan London the assessment and collection of the hearth tax depended not only upon the enforcement of the parliamentary legislation, but also upon negotiation and give‐and‐take between tax collectors and tax payers, sometimes in consultation with the Crown. As a result the hearth tax failed to fill the king's purse, was unpopular in the capital and in the country, and created onerous work for both auditors and hearth tax collectors, which contributed to the short life of the hearth tax (1662–89).

  November 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12376   open full text
• Mercantilism and bureaucratic modernization in early eighteenth‐century France.
  Jean Beuve, Eric Brousseau, Jérôme Sgard.
  The Economic History Review. November 15, 2016
  French mercantilism is generally associated with absolutist policy‐making subject to capture by rent‐seeking interests. This article investigates how the Bureau du Commerce, a small state agency in charge of commerce and the supply side, handed out rents and privileges to private entrepreneurs. We coded how the Bureau investigated and decided all 267 voluntary submissions received between 1724 and 1744. It is shown that the Bureau’s formal, rule‐based decision‐making process could actually differentiate between alternate policy aims and target them consistently over time, with more or less powerful sets of rents. From this, a hierarchy of revealed policy preferences is derived. First comes technical innovation and diffusion, then local economic development; import substitution is only in the third position, followed by consumers’ welfare. Lastly, and in contrast to a long line of authors, it is shown that the production of luxury goods was not a significant or valued objective.

  November 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12284   open full text
• Networks, trust, and risk mitigation during the American Revolutionary War: a case study.
  Carolyn Downs.
  The Economic History Review. November 09, 2016
  This article takes a case study approach to the question of how entrepreneurs developed and used networks to support trade during the American Revolutionary War (American War of Independence). Using the business letter books of Daniel Eccleston of Lancaster, covering January 1780 to December 1781, the article shows how he used trust‐building activities and developed open networks in Britain and the West Indies in order to build, sustain, maintain, and diversify his commercial activities to reduce risk and develop new opportunities. Eccleston's letters illustrate a competitive market in which entrepreneurs helped drive the industrial revolution through stimulating demand and encouraging trade. They show that mutual trust was the foundation of strong networks, and that networks were significant in underpinning entrepreneurial success through allowing the mitigation of business risk and offering the opportunity for diversification supported by the network. The article makes use of the work of Casson, Pearson and Richardson, and Wilson and Pop.

  November 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12385   open full text
• The agricultural revolution and the conditions of the rural poor, southern Sweden, 1750–1860.
  Martin Dribe, Mats Olsson, Patrick Svensson.
  The Economic History Review. October 06, 2016
  The social consequences of agrarian change have been widely debated. The traditional view of the lower classes becoming increasingly vulnerable due to the loss of access to resources has been met with the revisionist view that this change was counteracted by an increase in the volume and regularity of employment due to investments and new farming practices. This article address this issue by studying the agricultural revolution in southern Sweden using aggregate data at the parish level. New micro‐level data on actual harvest outcomes, supplemented by price data, make it possible to differentiate between the development of the local economy and exogenous price shocks. Our results indicate a clear mortality response to harvest fluctuations in general and to harvest failures in particular. The response differed greatly between farming regions, being strongest in the areas most dependent on grain production. The response also diminished during the agricultural revolution, indicating the increasing efficiency of the local economy. This indicates employment effects in line with the revisionist view. At the same time, vulnerability to fluctuations in prices of basic foodstuffs remained high until the second half of the nineteenth century and was also quite similar across farming regions.

  October 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12378   open full text
• Measuring rural welfare in colonial Africa: did Uganda's smallholders thrive?
  Michiel Haas.
  The Economic History Review. October 06, 2016
  Recent scholarship on historical welfare development in Sub‐Saharan Africa has uncovered long‐term trends in standards of living. How the majority of rural dwellers fared, however, remains largely elusive. This study develops a new approach to reconstruct rural living standards in a historical context. It builds upon a well‐established real wage literature, but moves beyond it to capture rural realities, employing sub‐national rural survey, census, and price data. The approach is applied to a case study of colonial and early post‐colonial Uganda (1915–70). The case study yields a number of findings. While the expanding smallholder‐based cash crop sector established itself as the backbone of Uganda's colonial economy, farm characteristics remained largely stagnant after the initial adoption of cash crops. Smallholders maintained living standards well above subsistence level, and while the profitability of cash crops was low, their cultivation provided a reliable source of cash income. Around the time of decolonization, unskilled wages rose rapidly while farm incomes lagged behind. As a result, an urban–rural income reversal took place. The study also reveals considerable differences within Uganda. Smallholders in Uganda's banana regions required fewer labour inputs to maintain a farm income than their grain‐farming counterparts, creating opportunities for additional income generation and livelihood diversification.

  October 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12377   open full text
• Tariff‐jumping foreign direct investment in protectionist era Ireland.
  Frank Barry, Linda Barry, Aisling Menton.
  The Economic History Review. October 06, 2016
  The Committee on Industrial Organisation was established in the early 1960s to evaluate the level of preparedness of Irish industry for the imminent dismantling of the country's protectionist trade barriers. The Committee's sectoral reports list the 900 or so manufacturing firms that it surveyed and that together accounted for more than half of Irish manufacturing employment. From a range of archival sources, this article identifies the nationality of ownership of most of these firms, alongside their date of establishment and level of employment in 1960. Industrial grants data are used to strip out export‐oriented businesses that began to arrive in the 1950s. This makes it possible to estimate the employment share and sectoral presence of tariff‐jumping foreign firms. The latter is analysed through the lens of modern perspectives on foreign direct investment. The article also enhances our understanding of the interest‐group politics of the trade liberalization process.

  October 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12329   open full text
• Rejoinder to Szreter.
  Geoffrey Barnes, Timothy W. Guinnane.
  The Economic History Review. September 27, 2016
  Simon Szreter's recent article replies to an earlier article we published in this journal, showing that central statistical results in his book Fertility, class and gender are seriously flawed. Szreter's reply asserts that a revised classification scheme and the use of weights provide results that support his original arguments. In this rejoinder we demonstrate that the revised scheme makes little difference. Our article did in fact use weights, and the use of weights with the revised scheme makes little difference. We argue that the weights used by Szreter are inappropriate in any case.

  September 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12341   open full text
• Information asymmetries and craft guilds in pre‐modern markets: evidence from Italian proto‐industry.
  Andrea Caracausi.
  The Economic History Review. September 27, 2016
  This article analyses the relationship between guilds and information asymmetries using a large database of quality disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that a high‐quality urban textile industry was able to solve externalities using a range of ex ante and ex post monitoring mechanisms based on private market relationships and fair sanctions which effectively reduced adverse selection and information asymmetries. Instead, when guilds did use their quality regulations, the effect of the guild on information asymmetries and the industry as a whole was generally negative, by providing mechanisms that could be manipulated by entrenched interest groups for rent‐seeking purposes.

  September 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12380   open full text
• Patterns of economic change in the south‐west during the fifteenth century: evidence from the reductions to the fifteenths and tenths.
  Mark Forrest.
  The Economic History Review. September 27, 2016
  The fifteenth century rebates to the fifteenth and tenth form a large body of evidence which has rarely been used to assess economic change. They were set by local commissioners who employed their knowledge of the conditions within their counties. In many cases the commissioners can be demonstrated to have applied the reductions in a thoughtful and proportionate manner, often revealing local economic conditions. There is considerable variation in their application between counties and their use is greatly enhanced when compared with other sources.

  September 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12373   open full text
• Debt dilution in 1920s America: lighting the fuse of a mortgage crisis.
  Natacha Postel‐Vinay.
  The Economic History Review. September 14, 2016
  The idea that real estate could have contributed to banking crises during the Great Depression has been downplayed due to the conservatism of mortgage contracts at the time. For instance, loan‐to‐value ratios often did not exceed 50 per cent. Using newly discovered archival documents and data from 1934, this article uncovers a darker side of 1920s US mortgage lending: the so‐called ‘second mortgage system’. As borrowers often could not make a 50 per cent down payment, a majority of them took second mortgages at usurious rates. As theory predicts, debt dilution, even in the presence of seniority rules, can be highly detrimental to both junior and senior lenders. The probability of default on first mortgages was likely to increase, and commercial banks were more likely to foreclose. Through foreclosure they would still be able to retrieve 50 per cent of the property value, but often after a protracted foreclosure process. This would have put further strain on banks during liquidity crises. This article is thus a timely reminder that second mortgages, or ‘piggyback loans’ as they are called today, can be hazardous to lenders and borrowers alike. It provides further empirical evidence that debt dilution can be detrimental to credit.

  September 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12342   open full text
• How the German crisis of 1931 swept across Europe: a comparative view from Stockholm†.
  Tobias Straumann, Peter Kugler, Florian Weber.
  The Economic History Review. September 05, 2016
  According to conventional wisdom, the fall of the Swedish currency in September 1931 was caused by the sterling crisis. This article shows that the road towards devaluation began earlier and that financial linkages with Germany proved to be more important than Sweden's economic and monetary relations with Great Britain. It all started in late 1929 when the Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger gave a loan to the German government in exchange for the match monopoly, thus tying his business ventures to Germany's solvency. In addition, a part of this loan was financed by large US dollar credits from the two largest Swedish banks that, in turn, accumulated a sizeable foreign short‐term deficit. When in June 1931 the German fiscal crisis began to escalate, international investors ceased to consider Sweden a safe haven because they knew about the linkages between the German government, Kreuger, and the Swedish banking system. This downgrading, in combination with the foreign short‐term deficit of the banking sector, proved lethal for the reserve position of the Swedish central bank, once the international liquidity crisis in mid‐July 1931 erupted. The sterling crisis only put the final nail in the coffin.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12334   open full text
• Cambium non est mutuum: exchange and interest rates in medieval Europe.
  Adrian R. Bell, Chris Brooks, Tony K. Moore.
  The Economic History Review. August 04, 2016
  A major gap in our understanding of the medieval economy concerns interest rates, especially relating to commercial credit. Although direct evidence about interest rates is scattered and anecdotal, there is much more surviving information about exchange rates. Since both contemporaries and historians have suggested that exchange and rechange transactions could be used to disguise the charging of interest in order to circumvent the usury prohibition, it should be possible to back out implied interest rates from exchange rates. The analysis presented in this article is based on a new dataset of medieval exchange rates collected from commercial correspondence in the archive of Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato, c. 1383–1411. It demonstrates that the time value of money was consistently incorporated into market exchange rates. Moreover, these implicit interest rates are broadly comparable to those received from other types of commercial loan and investment. Although on average profitable, the return on any individual exchange and rechange transaction did involve a degree of uncertainty that may have justified their non‐usurious nature. However, there were also practical reasons why medieval merchants may have used foreign exchange transactions as a means of extending credit.

  August 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12374   open full text
• Extracting economics from Roman marble quarries†.
  Leah E. Long.
  The Economic History Review. August 02, 2016
  Urbanization across the Roman Empire created a demand for building materials on an unprecedented scale. Quarrying was largely conducted by municipalities, institutions, or landed aristocrats, who owned or inherited the valuable land from which stone was extracted. By using principles of economics as a guide, and with greater coordination between theory and written and archaeological sources, this article examines the decision‐making processes involved in opening a quarry. Theories of economic rationality, resource economics, and statistical methods are helpful for understanding the prices for marble recorded in Diocletian's Edict, Roman jurists’ writings about exploitation on private land, and newly discovered quarries in the region of Aphrodisias, Turkey. Here it is argued that the exchange of local building stone took place in a competitive market where landowners actively tried to improve their financial situation, but did so at considerable risk. At Aphrodisias, examples of failed attempts exist alongside long‐running and successful enterprises. Entrepreneurs there did not extract a homogeneous set of resources, but chose to target marbles with inconsistent physical properties at increasing distances from the city in response to greater demand and rising prices. Roman jurists, primarily interested in protecting property value, made landowners calculate whether potential profits earned from sales outweighed the degradation of land.

  August 02, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12375   open full text
• War and socialism: why eastern Europe fell behind between 1950 and 1989†.
  Tamás Vonyó.
  The Economic History Review. July 31, 2016
  This article reconsiders the relative growth performance of centrally planned economies in the broader context of postwar growth in Europe. It reports a new dataset of revised estimates for investment rates in eastern European countries between 1950 and 1989. Complemented with data on other growth determinants, this evidence is used to re‐evaluate the socialist growth record in a conditional convergence framework with a panel of 24 European countries. After controlling for relative backwardness, investment rates, and improvements in human capital, the findings show that centrally planned economies underperformed due to their relative inefficiency only after the postwar golden age. In the 1950s and 1960s, eastern Europe was falling behind mainly due to relatively low levels of investment and weak reconstruction dynamics. Both are explained, in part, by the lack of labour‐supply flexibility that, in turn, resulted from the comparatively much larger negative impact of the war on population growth in eastern Europe.

  July 31, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12336   open full text
• Britain as a debtor: Indian sterling balances, 1940–53.
  Marcelo Paiva Abreu.
  The Economic History Review. July 31, 2016
  The British war effort in the Second World War depended on US Lend‐Lease and the accumulation of sterling balances by other countries, including the Empire. By the end of the war outstanding balances were equivalent to 60 per cent of British net receipts under Lend‐Lease. Of the total sterling balances, about a third was accumulated by India. This article seeks to evaluate the costs incurred by India in the reduction of balances after the war. The accumulation of balances and their use to repatriate India's sterling debt is described. British efforts to convince India to accept a partial cancellation of the balances are analysed, singling out the crucial role of Keynes. The negotiations after independence are detailed, including releases, transfers to Pakistan, settlement of pensions, purchase of military stores, and gold sales. The possible contribution of British divestment to reduce outstanding balances is assessed. The Indian case is compared with those of other holders, such as Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, and Egypt. The links between the accumulation of sterling balances and inflation are considered. In the end there was a significant reduction in the purchasing power of sterling balances, but not for the reasons anticipated by London.

  July 31, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12372   open full text
• Women of an uncertain age: quantifying human capital accumulation in rural Ireland in the nineteenth century†.
  Matthias Blum, Christopher L. Colvin, Laura McAtackney, Eoin McLaughlin.
  The Economic History Review. June 29, 2016
  Geary and Stark find that Ireland's post‐Famine per capita GDP converged with British levels, and that this convergence was largely due to total factor productivity growth rather than mass emigration. In this article, new long‐run measurements of human capital accumulation in Ireland are devised in order to facilitate a better assessment of sources of this productivity growth, including the relative contribution of men and women. This is done by exploiting the frequency at which age data heap at round ages, widely interpreted as an indicator of a population's basic numeracy skills. Because Földvári, van Leeuwen, and van Leeuwen‐Li find that gender‐specific trends in this measure derived from census returns are biased by who is reporting and recording the age information, any computed numeracy trends are corrected using data from prison and workhouse registers, sources in which women ostensibly self‐reported their age. The findings show that rural Irish women born early in the nineteenth century had substantially lower levels of human capital than uncorrected census data would otherwise suggest. These results are large in magnitude and thus economically significant. The speed at which women converged is consistent with Geary and Stark's interpretation of Irish economic history; Ireland probably graduated to Europe's club of advanced economies thanks in part to rapid advances in female human capital.

  June 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12333   open full text
• Conditional crisis? Ecological challenges and conditions of growth during the agricultural revolution in southern Sweden, c. 1700–1900†.
  Magnus Bohman.
  The Economic History Review. June 29, 2016
  Was there an agro‐ecological crisis in Europe which preceded and contributed to pushing forward the agricultural revolution? This article presents a new theoretical and empirical approach to this controversial perspective on agricultural transformation and relates to an ongoing debate on conditions of growth in pre‐industrial societies. The results demonstrate that there were indeed indicators of a crisis, which grew stronger during the eighteenth century and culminated in the early nineteenth century. The crisis was, however, not general, but was rather restricted to areas that stand out due to poor natural conditions for agriculture. In other words, the crisis was conditional. Furthermore, the findings show that the crisis could push forward changes that were important for enabling agricultural transformation and growth. However, both the emergence and reversal of the crisis were connected to new opportunities opened up by market development. Enough differences were found between different types of regions to suggest that there were many development paths within the agricultural transformation process, and that they were not necessarily linear.

  June 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12335   open full text
• The great divergence and the economics of printing†.
  Luis Angeles.
  The Economic History Review. June 24, 2016
  While China's invention of printing took place several centuries ahead of Europe's, it was in Europe where the more advanced printing technology of movable type took hold and where book production reached far higher levels. This article explores the extent to which China's complex logographic writing system explains these different outcomes. Using an economic analysis, I show how China's preference for block printing technology over movable type can be justified as the rational choice of commercial producers. In addition to this, model simulations also predict that movable type would be used in China under some specific circumstances which closely match the historical record. On the other hand, the use of block printing would not have led to larger printing costs in China, and as such should not be regarded as the reason behind China's modest level of book production when compared to Europe's.

  June 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12337   open full text
• Response to ‘Duplications’ by Drelichman and Voth.
  Carlos álvarez‐Nogal, Christophe P. Chamley.
  The Economic History Review. June 20, 2016
  In this response, we demonstrate that Mauricio Drelichman and Hans‐Joachim Voth, in their 2015 Economic History Review note ‘Duplication without constraints: Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley's analysis of debt policy under Philip II’, provide a misconceived and inaccurate account of our argument about the finances of Philip II in ‘Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers’ (Economic History Review, 2014). Here, we summarize our position in the context of the current literature and provide a few comments on data gathering.

  June 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12339   open full text
• Direct finance in the Dutch Golden Age†.
  Oscar Gelderblom, Joost Jonker, Clemens Kool.
  The Economic History Review. June 20, 2016
  This article analyses private credit operations in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century to explain the absence of deposit banks. The financial system was highly segmented and a combination of declining business margins and narrow interest rate spreads cut the scope for deposit taking. Moreover, merchants had easy access to credit in the form of short‐term loans which could be easily rolled over, or replaced at will. This technique worked well because a market developed providing key functions to control risk and price loans accordingly.

  June 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12285   open full text
• Building an alternative economic network? Consumer cooperation in Scotland from the 1870s to the 1960s†.
  D. C. H. Watts.
  The Economic History Review. June 03, 2016
  There is growing interest in the ways in which, and the values according to which, economic activity is undertaken. For instance, mutual ownership has been identified as one means of helping to ‘redeem’ capitalism. This article engages with such issues by examining aspects of the behaviour of consumer cooperative societies in Scotland from the 1870s to the 1960s. It starts by discussing whether cooperatives represent a means of conceptualizing and undertaking economic activity that provides an alternative to the paradigm of investor‐led (neo)liberal capitalism. From this, and an outline history of consumer cooperatives in Scotland, it identifies two variables—dividend on purchases and funds for education—as proxies for the values underpinning cooperatives’ economic behaviour. Analysis of these variables indicates the existence of distinct cultures of cooperation, notably in the Glasgow and Edinburgh areas. The article concludes by offering two ‘lessons from history’ for those interested in alternative economic networks. The first is that cooperation can, and has, conceptualized and sustained an alternative to the dominant (neo)liberal economic paradigm. The second is that the scaling‐up of such voluntaristic economic thought and behaviour is unlikely to present a macro‐level challenge to it.

  June 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12340   open full text
• Product quality or market regulation? Explaining the slow growth of Europe's wine cooperatives, 1880–1980.
  Eva Fernández, James Simpson.
  The Economic History Review. June 01, 2016
  Wine cooperatives were relatively scarce in Europe before the Second World War, but by the 1980s accounted for more than half of all wines made in France, Italy, and Spain, the three major producer countries. Unlike Danish dairy cooperatives, whose success before the First World War was linked to their ability to improve product quality and compete in high‐value niche markets, wine cooperatives are often associated with the production of large volumes of low‐quality products. This article argues that the initial slow diffusion of wine cooperatives was caused by the difficulties of improving quality due to environmental conditions in European vineyards (‘terroir’) and measurement problems, rather than institutional shortcomings. Cooperatives only became widespread when the state found them a useful instrument to regulate markets, especially after 1950. The problems associated with poor wine quality were never resolved, and cooperatives have become increasingly uncompetitive in the market place, especially following the major decline in per capita consumption and shift towards premium wines from the 1980s.

  June 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12338   open full text
• Migrants’ self‐selection in the early stages of modern economic growth, Spain (1880–1930).
  Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia, Santiago Miguel Salanova.
  The Economic History Review. June 01, 2016
  Drawing on a large database from the register of inhabitants of Madrid, this article confirms that the literacy levels of internal migrants moving to the Spanish capital city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were higher than that of those who remained in their provinces of origin. This article also explores the different factors influencing the nature and intensity of the selection process. The empirical exercise stresses that the stock of previous migration was a fundamental factor in allowing less literate individuals to join the migration process as well. Interestingly, distance to Madrid hardly affected the profile of male migrants, but it was a strong influence on female migration, although its importance diminished over time. Lastly, the results presented here show that other internal destinations were attracting different types of migrants, often resulting in negative self‐selection.

  June 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12332   open full text
• The trans‐Atlantic slave trade and local political fragmentation in Africa.
  Nonso Obikili.
  The Economic History Review. June 01, 2016
  This article examines the possibility that the trans‐Atlantic slave trade influenced the political institutions of villages and towns in precolonial Africa. Using anthropological data, it shows that villages and towns of ethnic groups with higher slave exports were more politically fragmented during the precolonial era. Instrumental variables are used to show that the relationship is causal. It is argued that this fragmentation is important for relative economic development because it still influences political institutions today. This argument is supported by the use of more contemporary data to show that in contemporary Nigeria and Tanzania, areas with higher levels of precolonial political fragmentation have a higher incidence of bribery.

  June 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12328   open full text
• Long‐term trends in economic inequality: lessons from colonial Botswana, 1921–74.
  Jutta Bolt, Ellen Hillbom.
  The Economic History Review. May 25, 2016
  This article contributes to the growing literature on colonial legacies influencing long‐term development. It focuses on Botswana, a case where the post‐independence diamond‐led economy has been considered an economic success story, despite its high levels of inequality. Here it is argued that this pathway of rapid resource‐driven growth combined with increasing socio‐economic inequality had already started during the time of the colonial cattle economy, and that this older case is equally relevant for understanding long‐term growth‐inequality trends in Botswana and other natural‐resource‐dependent economies. Six social tables, covering the period 1921 to 1974, are constructed using colonial archives, government statistics, and anthropological records. Based on the social tables, income inequality is estimated in the colonial and early post‐independence eras, capturing both the formal and informal sectors of the economy. The article demonstrates how the creation of a cattle export sector in the 1930s brought new opportunities to access export incomes, and how this led to a polarization in cattle holdings and increasing income inequalities. Further, with the expansion of colonial administration, government wages forged ahead, increasing income inequality and causing a growing income divide between public and private formal employment.

  May 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12326   open full text
• The first Sterling Area†.
  Martin Allen.
  The Economic History Review. May 04, 2016
  Between the eleventh century and mid‐thirteenth century a Sterling Area evolved in the British Isles, with a common currency based upon the English silver penny and equivalents of it produced in Scotland and Ireland. This Sterling Area began to contract in the second half of the fourteenth century, when reductions in the bullion content of Scottish coins ended the equivalence of the English and Scottish currencies, and in the fifteenth century Ireland developed its own coinage. Estimates of the currency of the Sterling Area are provided, taking the chronology of its growth and contraction into account. Estimates of the sterling currency are not estimates of the currency of England, and they cannot be combined with data relating exclusively to England in economic modelling, without qualification. Per capita currency estimates and values of coin hoards and single coin finds are at a high level around 1400, falling in the second half of the fifteenth century, indicating that the European ‘bullion famine’ of the 1390s to c. 1415 had less effect on the currency than the second late medieval bullion crisis, from the 1430s to the 1460s.

  May 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12330   open full text
• Interpreting business partnerships in late Victorian Britain†.
  Robert J. Bennett.
  The Economic History Review. May 04, 2016
  This article gives the first large‐scale assessment of business partnerships in England and Wales using business records within the population census for 1881. It seeks to understand the variety of ways that ‘partnership’ was used: explicit partnership, ‘de facto’ partnership, ‘joint’ activity, and asset ownership together. The article confirms that partnerships were chiefly between two people. Complexity and transaction costs largely precluded larger size and squeezed the partnership into a ‘middle ground’ between the sole proprietor and the corporation. The main size contrast was between farms with small employee numbers, and larger non‐farm business partnerships. Generally differences in the gender of business owners have greater salience than sectors. Few female business partnerships employed more than four people (mean 3.4), while male partnerships ranged up to several thousand employees (mean 33.6), and 18.6 for mixed gender. While many women were involved in businesses, their opportunities remained restricted, and most were in partnership with male partners. Family structures were important, with three‐quarters of all identifiable partnerships having some form of family relationship, with a strong preponderance of single women in female‐only partnerships, married men in male‐only partnerships, and widows in mixed gender businesses.

  May 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12327   open full text
• London creditors and the fifteenth‐century depression.
  Matthew Frank Stevens.
  The Economic History Review. April 01, 2016
  Evidence of debts owed to Londoners, and contested before the royal Court of Common Pleas, allows an examination of the role of London creditors in the English depression of the fifteenth century and a reassessment of its causes. In this article, four main issues are examined. What is the nature of the Court of Common Pleas evidence (section I)? What were the three main forms of credit offered by Londoners—unsecured cash loans, sales of goods on credit, and written instruments called bonds (section II)? What is yielded by decadal analysis of Londoners’ extension of credit in the fifteenth century—making direct comparisons with Nightingale's published Statute Merchant and Staple data (section III)? What defines, in modern economic terms, the claim of so‐called ‘monetarist’ historians that credit was actively withdrawn during the depression, and how is this verified by the actions of London creditors (section IV)? It is concluded that the records of the Court of Common Pleas provide the detailed evidence monetarist historians have previously lacked both to prove that Londoners actively withdrew credit during the fifteenth century and to demonstrate that they employed pure equilibrium credit rationing in order to do so.

  April 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12282   open full text
• Establishing statistical foundations of a chronology for the great divergence: a survey and critique of the primary sources for the construction of relative wage levels for Ming–Qing China.
  Kent Deng, Patrick O'Brien.
  The Economic History Review. March 10, 2016
  This article is a survey and critique of recent endeavours to establish statistical foundations for a chronology for the great divergence based upon trends and levels in relative wages. Our reading of the bibliography in Chinese labour history, together with a preliminary investigation into other primary sources, suggests that the Kuznetsian paradigm for empirical economics may not be viable for the construction of analytical narratives for the Chinese and other premodern imperial economies in South and West Asia. Nevertheless, two datasets currently in print will continue to be quoted to lend support to numerically grounded speculations for levels and trends in real wages and welfare for the families of wage‐dependent urban workers in China over the eighteenth century. Statistical evidence for the Ming and Qing dynasties calibrated for the purposes of comparing real wage levels for wage‐dependent labour between China and western Europe can, however, be placed on a spectrum for accuracy and inferential analysis that runs from ‘unfounded guess work’ to ‘plausible conjectures’. The unwelcome contention of this article is that the data published and potentially available for China (and probably for India and the Ottoman Empire) stand close to the unfounded guess work end of that spectrum. Meanwhile, and as a speculative conclusion, we offer a conjecture that the ‘real wages’ for Qing China's tiny proletariat, whose income included high proportions of wages in kind, have remained as elusive as they were when the real wage debate began a decade ago.

  March 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12281   open full text
• Periodic recoinage as a monetary tax: conditions for the rise and fall of the bracteate economy.
  Roger Svensson.
  The Economic History Review. March 10, 2016
  Scholars in the fields of archaeology and numismatics have long been familiar with the phenomenon of periodic recoinage (renovatio monetae), which dominated monetary taxation in medieval Europe for almost 200 years. However, this form of monetary taxation is seldom, if ever, discussed in the literature of economics or economic history. No economic theory has ever been proposed to explain periodic recoinage. The present study aims to make up for this absence. It examines the qualities that typically differentiate regions with periodic recoinage from those with other monetary systems and analyses how periodic recoinage was monitored and enforced. The principal example of frequently renewed coins is uni‐faced bracteates, which were often subject to annual or even biannual recoinages. Although bracteates were not the cause of periodic recoinage, their features facilitated frequent renewals. The study discusses the economic consequences of periodic recoinage and links the breakdown of this monetary system with the end of bracteates’ role as the principal coin in the fourteenth century.

  March 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12283   open full text
• Inheritance taxation in Sweden, 1885–2004: the role of ideology, family firms, and tax avoidance.
  Magnus Henrekson, Daniel Waldenström.
  The Economic History Review. February 22, 2016
  This article studies the evolution of Swedish inheritance taxation since the late nineteenth century to its abolition in 2004. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, the annual effective inheritance tax rates are computed for different sizes of bequests and asset types, accounting for all relevant exemptions, deductions, and valuation discounts. Second, an attempt is made to explain changes in inheritance taxation over time. Ideology appears to be the main driver of the sharp tax increases of the 1930s to the 1960s. Wartime economies with higher pressures on the people induced politicians to raise inheritance taxes on the wealthy, primarily during the First World War. Increased opportunities for tax planning for the wealthy are also documented, most notably a series of tax cuts on inherited family firms in the 1970s. This rise in avoidance opportunities for the rich, while middle‐class heirs faced growing inheritance tax rates, undermined the legitimacy of the tax and led to its repeal.

  February 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12280   open full text
• Non‐legal‐tender paper money: the structure and performance of Maryland's bills of credit, 1767–75.
  James Celia, Farley Grubb.
  The Economic History Review. February 18, 2016
  In this article, Maryland's non‐legal‐tender paper money emissions between 1765 and 1775 are reconstructed to determine quantities outstanding and redemption dates, providing a substantial correction to the literature. Over 80 per cent of this paper money's current market value was expected real asset present value and under 20 per cent was liquidity premium. It was primarily a real barter asset and not a fiat currency. The liquidity premium was positively related to the amount of paper money per capita in circulation. This paper money traded below face value due to time‐discounting, rather than depreciation. Past scholars have simply confused depreciation with time‐discounting.

  February 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12278   open full text
• After us, the deluge: German miners’ experience with pay‐as‐you‐go pensions and the intergenerational contract before the great inflation.
  Tobias A. Jopp.
  The Economic History Review. February 09, 2016
  Many public pension insurance schemes today use the pay‐as‐you‐go financing mechanism. This mechanism is vulnerable to an ageing population, which puts pressure on the intergenerational contract implicit in these schemes and raises the question as to how they might be eroded. This is not a new problem, and to put it into historical perspective, this article studies the intergenerational contract that formed the core of the Prussian miners’ invalidity insurance in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century (1861–1920). With the so‐called Knappschaften, miners relied on what was probably the most comprehensive and advanced occupational pension system existing in Germany around the time when Bismarckian social insurance was established. Financed via the pay‐as‐you‐go mechanism, the miners’ pension funds faced stress from their ageing memberships early on, and this potentially undermined their ability to maintain intergenerationally fair pensions. In order to examine whether or not the intergenerational contract among German miners showed signs of erosion, we look at the Knappschaftens’ profitability, as measured by actual and promised internal rates of return. This article shows that the intergenerational contract indeed weakened over time unless miners’ funds were large and continued to grow, and that a pension reform in 1906 served to stabilize generosity.

  February 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12276   open full text
• The maintenance of bastard children in London, 1790–1834.
  Samantha Williams.
  The Economic History Review. January 22, 2016
  This article examines the dynamics of the maintenance of illegitimate children in London during the protracted ‘crisis’ of the old poor law between the 1790s and the 1830s. This was a period of rapidly rising illegitimacy as well as national, and metropolitan, poor law expenditure. The affiliation system offered parish officials a parallel system by which poor rates could be deflated, but analysis of the 1834 Town Queries reveals that metropolitan parishes could be particularly poor at recovering the costs of chargeable bastards from putative fathers. The article interrogates in detail the workings of the affiliation system in Southwark and Lambeth in terms of the proportion of fathers (and mothers) who paid maintenance for their children, either in lump sums or in weekly allowances, plus the associated costs of childbirth and legal fees, the range of weekly sums, which could be higher than previously thought, and the duration for which they were paid, which could be surprisingly long. The article reveals a complex system, variable at the parochial and regional level, as was the wider old poor law.

  January 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12279   open full text
• Can public policies lower religiosity? Evidence from school choice in France, 1878–1902.
  Raphaël Franck, Noel D. Johnson.
  The Economic History Review. January 22, 2016
  This study analyses the effects of public policies on religiosity by focusing on the enrolment of pupils in French Catholic primary schools between 1878 and 1902. During this period, the government increased public spending and made school attendance free and mandatory until the age of 13. The empirical analysis presented here suggests that greater public spending had no substantial effect on the enrolment in Catholic schools. By contrast, mandatory schooling laws had a negative, but quantitatively limited, impact. The overall resilience of Catholic schooling is traced to the political divide created by the 1789 French Revolution.

  January 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12277   open full text
• South Africa in the Australian mirror: per capita real GDP in the Cape Colony, Natal, Victoria, and New South Wales, 1861–1909.
  Gary B. Magee, Lorraine Greyling, Grietjie Verhoef.
  The Economic History Review. January 18, 2016
  This article compares the real GDP per capita of the Cape Colony and Natal between 1861 and 1909 with that of Australia's two most developed colonies, Victoria and New South Wales. Estimates of European and non‐European GDP per capita for both South African colonies are also provided. Together, this information allows for the first time an evaluation of the growth performance of these important parts of the South African economy in the colonial era. The article concludes that South African performance in this period was stronger than often assumed and that by the beginning of the twentieth century European South Africans, now more fully integrated into a British World economy, operated at a level of GDP per capita that matched and in some places may have exceeded that of Australians. Non‐European South Africans, however, did not share in these same advances.

  January 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12125   open full text
• Ready to stop: socioeconomic status and the fertility transition in Stockholm, 1878–1926.
  Joseph Molitoris, Martin Dribe.
  The Economic History Review. January 11, 2016
  The western fertility decline is arguably the most significant demographic change to have occurred in the past 200 years, yet its causes and processes are still shrouded in ambiguity due to a lack of individual‐level longitudinal data. A growing body of research has helped improve our understanding of the decline's causes by examining the development of socioeconomic differences in fertility using historical micro‐data, but these have largely only considered rural areas where fertility was generally slower to decline. This article contributes to the literature by utilizing individual‐level data from the Roteman Database for Stockholm, Sweden between 1878 and 1926 to examine the association of socioeconomic status and fertility and the adoption of stopping behaviour during the city's transition. Using piecewise constant hazard models and logistic regression, we find that a clear class pattern arises in which the elite were early practitioners of fertility control, followed by the working classes. As the transition unfolded, socioeconomic differences in stopping behaviour disappeared and overall fertility differentials were also minimized, both of them being consistent with patterns observed in rural populations. The implications of these findings for major explanations of the decline are discussed in the concluding section.

  January 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12275   open full text
• Laissez‐faire, the Irish famine, and British financial crisis.
  Charles Read.
  The Economic History Review. December 03, 2015
  The decision in 1847 to cut Treasury spending on public relief efforts during the Irish famine is generally attributed by economic historians to the pervasive influence of ‘laissez‐faire’ ideas on the Whig government of Lord John Russell. This article draws on the papers of political leaders and contemporary financial information to argue that economic reasons were the trigger for the change in policy. Robert Peel and Charles Wood's macroeconomic policies of the 1840s, including the gold standard, the Bank Charter Act, and corn law repeal, left the Whigs unable to borrow to finance relief efforts in Ireland without panicking markets. The scaling back of public assistance programmes that resulted from this—and which increased mortality at the height of the Irish famine—was the unintended result of Peel and Wood's economic policies, in the context of the Whig government's parliamentary weakness.

  December 03, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12274   open full text
• The Danish agricultural revolution in an energy perspective: a case of development with few domestic energy sources.
  Sofia Teives Henriques, Paul Sharp.
  The Economic History Review. December 03, 2015
  This article examines the case of Denmark—a country which historically had next to no domestic energy resources—for which new historical energy accounts are presented for the years 1800–1913. It demonstrates that Denmark's take‐off at the end of the nineteenth century was relatively energy dependent. This is related to Denmark's well‐known agricultural transformation and development through the dairy industry, and thus the article complements the literature which argues that expensive energy hindered industrialization, by arguing that similar obstacles would have precluded other countries from a more agriculture‐based growth. The Danish cooperative creameries, which spread throughout the country over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, were dependent on coal. Although Denmark had next to no domestic coal deposits, this article demonstrates that Danish geography allowed cheap availability throughout the country through imports. On top of this it emphasizes that another important source of energy was imported feed for cows.

  December 03, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12236   open full text
• The decline of an aristocratic stud: the stud of Edward Lord Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, at Welbeck (Nottinghamshire), 1717–29.
  Peter Edwards.
  The Economic History Review. December 03, 2015
  In 1716 Edward Lord Harley took possession of one the country's most iconic studs when his wife, Henrietta, inherited Welbeck Abbey (Nottinghamshire) on the death of her mother. At the time, the stud, made famous by her great grandfather, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, was in temporary eclipse and run down. He resolved to restore its fortunes. However, beset by debts and with other expensive interests to distract him, including the purchase of books and manuscripts, he allowed the stud to decay, winding it up just over a decade later. With careful management and sound, timely investment, Harley could have restored its fortunes. However, he hoped to re‐establish the stud ‘on the cheap’, utilizing the top class stallions and mares he had at his disposal to produce first‐rate foals, from which he would select the best as replacements. Sadly, too few of the foals came up to expectations. In vain, his agent advised him to retire the ageing mares and invest in suitable replacements. His failure to do so soon impacted on the quality and the number of horses produced. Inevitably, he failed, providing contemporaries and historians alike with an object lesson on how not to run a ‘top‐end’ stud.

  December 03, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12273   open full text
• The mother of all sudden stops: capital flows and reversals in Europe, 1919–32.
  Olivier Accominotti, Barry Eichengreen.
  The Economic History Review. October 14, 2015
  New data documenting European bond issues in major financial centres from 1919 to 1932 show that conditions in international capital markets and not just in borrowing countries are important for explaining the surge and reversal in capital flows. In particular, the sharp increase in stock market volatility in the major financial centres at the end of the 1920s figured importantly in the decline in foreign lending. This article draws parallels with Europe after 2008.

  October 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12128   open full text
• Going multilateral? Financial markets' access and the League of Nations loans, 1923–8.
  Juan H. Flores Zendejas, Yann Decorzant.
  The Economic History Review. October 12, 2015
  Why are international financial institutions important? This article reassesses the role of the loans issued with the support of the League of Nations. These long‐term loans constituted the financial basis of the League's strategy to restore the productive basis of countries in central and eastern Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. In this article, it is argued that the League's loans accomplished the task for which they were conceived because they allowed countries in financial distress to access capital markets. The League adopted an innovative system of funds management and monitoring that ensured the compliance of borrowing countries with its programmes. Empirical evidence is provided to show that financial markets had a positive view of the League's role as an external, multilateral agent, solving the credibility problem of borrowing countries and allowing them to engage in economic and institutional reforms. This success was achieved despite the League's own lack of lending resources. It is also demonstrated that this multilateral solution performed better than the bilateral arrangements adopted by other governments in eastern Europe because of its lower borrowing and transaction costs.

  October 12, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12126   open full text
• Pestilence, poverty, and provision: re‐evaluating the role of the popolani in early modern Venice.
  Ioanna Iordanou.
  The Economic History Review. October 12, 2015
  The labouring classes of early modern Venice, the popolani, made up nearly 90 per cent of the city's population. To this point the relevant historiography has focused almost exclusively on their professional and civic role. It is the core contention of this article that the contribution of the popolani to the Venetian economy and society far exceeded their documented professional and civic function. Using as a case study the homogeneous group of the shipbuilders and sailors of Venice and drawing on newly discovered primary sources from the Venetian State Archives, this article shows the distinct contributions of the popolani to the city's economy and society through their charity to those in need. This took the form of sizeable dotal and charitable donations within and beyond the family. In one of the first attempts to explore the philanthropy of the Venetian workforce, this article challenges the existing scholarly view that charity was the sole responsibility of the government and the nobility in early modern Venice. It further shows that marriage was not merely a financial union for the popolani; it was a sanctuary for lasting companionship. Ultimately, the article offers a fresh vista onto the socio‐economic role of the popolani in early modern Venice.

  October 12, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12131   open full text
• Interlopers and disorderly brethren at the Stade Mart: commercial regulations and practices amongst the Merchant Adventurers of England in the late Elizabethan period.
  Thomas Leng.
  The Economic History Review. October 12, 2015
  This article examines the role of merchant companies in structuring overseas trade in early modern Europe by considering the commerce of the Merchant Adventurers of England, the ‘regulated’ Company which monopolized the cloth export trade to Germany and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the Company's trade to its German ‘mart’ town of Stade at the close of the sixteenth century through a detailed case study of the trade of one particular merchant, John Quarles. Using correspondence between Quarles and his factors overseas, it considers how membership of this regulated trading company impacted on the practice of its members, both through its formal regulatory regime and the informal pressures that came with corporate affiliation. However, corporate privileges also created ‘shadow economies’ inhabited by the excluded, those castigated by companies as ‘interlopers’. The article considers the connections between interlopers and those ‘disorderly brethren’ of the company who were prepared to violate corporate regulations in pursuit of opportunities. It shows how the regulatory regimes of merchant companies were shaped by the changing practices of members and non‐members as they responded to the structural changes facing European trade in the early modern period.

  October 12, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12132   open full text
• Duplication without constraints: Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley's analysis of debt policy under Philip II.
  Mauricio Drelichman, Hans‐Joachim Voth.
  The Economic History Review. October 12, 2015
  Carlos Álvarez‐Nogal and Christophe Chamley recently published an article in the Economic History Review on ‘Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers’. In this note, we show that several claims in their article are very similar to earlier research results, published or circulated long before Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley's original submission, by ourselves and other scholars (section I). These results are repeated without attribution or even mention of the earlier work. In addition, we show that what Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley present as new quantitative insights are actually replications of earlier results of ours (section II). Finally, Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley misrepresent our contributions, as well as those of several other scholars (section III).

  October 12, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12166   open full text
• Standards, learning, and growth in Britain, 1901–2009.
  Christopher Spencer, Paul Temple.
  The Economic History Review. October 07, 2015
  This article considers the model of voluntary, consensus based standardization as developed through the British Standards Institution (BSI) and its contribution to learning and productivity growth. It discusses the significant role played by professional engineers in the model's introduction, its extension at home, and its imitation overseas. It is argued that by 1931 the BSI catalogue of standards represented a considerable stock of codified knowledge whose growth reflected underlying aggregate technological opportunities, assisting in their transformation into technological advance. To help validate this claim, a measure of the size of the BSI catalogue of standards is incorporated into an econometric model of aggregate productivity growth in Britain. Findings show that the growth of the standards catalogue is associated with a substantial proportion of labour productivity growth over the period 1931–2009. Estimates relating to the short‐run dynamics involved are consistent with the idea that there are causal linkages running from standards to growth. When interpreting these findings, it is argued that the overall weight of historical evidence points to standardization—coordinated through the BSI—as providing an important path of learning for the British economy over the period considered.

  October 07, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12129   open full text
• Communal property rights and land redistributions in Late Tsarist Russia.
  Steven Nafziger.
  The Economic History Review. October 06, 2015
  Communal property rights have long symbolized the apparent backwardness of rural Russian society in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on newly compiled data and qualitative sources, this article summarizes the institutions and practices of rural property rights in late Imperial Russia and shows that there was substantially more heterogeneity in what constituted peasant property rights than is commonly assumed. Archival and documentary accounts suggest that the emblematic practice of repartitioning communal land occurred relatively infrequently and, when undertaken, was generally managed in low‐cost ways. Econometric evidence from Moscow province implies that repartitions were driven more by concerns over the distribution of associated tax burdens than the desire to reallocate productive assets. Along with an analysis of cross‐sectional data on property rights and grain yields from European Russia, these findings suggest a weaker causal link between communal land practices and agricultural productivity than is typically asserted.

  October 06, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12167   open full text
• The last visitation of the plague in Sweden: the case of Bräkne‐Hoby in 1710–11.
  Roger Schofield.
  The Economic History Review. September 16, 2015
  In an earlier study of the plague in Colyton, Devon, the household distribution of deaths was studied to see whether this provided a method of identifying the causative disease. In this article, a known epidemic of plague in the Swedish parish of Bräkne‐Hoby was studied as a means of testing out the generality of the household distribution of deaths. It was discovered that, in this case, the very heavy mortality was due to two radically different means of spreading the disease, initially the classic bubonic one through the rat flea, and latterly, and somewhat surprisingly, the pneumonic one, through the infection of the inhabitants by their own friends and neighbours.

  September 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12097   open full text
• Economic freedom in the long run: evidence from OECD countries (1850–2007).
  Leandro Prados De La Escosura.
  The Economic History Review. September 15, 2015
  This article presents historical indices for the main dimensions of economic freedom and an aggregate index for the developed countries of today, specifically pre‐1994 OECD members. Economic liberty expanded over the last century‐and‐a‐half, reaching more than two‐thirds of its possible maximum. However, its evolution has been far from linear. After a substantial improvement from the mid‐nineteenth century, the First World War brought a major setback. The postwar recovery up to 1929 was followed by a dramatic decline in the 1930s. Significant progress took place during the 1950s but fell short of the pre‐First World War peak. After a period of stagnation, steady expansion since the early 1980s has resulted in the highest levels of economic liberty of the last two centuries. Each of the main dimensions of economic freedom exhibited a distinctive trend and its contribution to the aggregate index varied over time. Overall, improved property rights provided the main contribution to the long‐run advancement of economic liberty.

  September 15, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12130   open full text
• Decomposing income inequality in a backward pre‐industrial economy: Old Castile (Spain) in the middle of the eighteenth century.
  Esteban A. Nicolini, Fernando Ramos Palencia.
  The Economic History Review. September 10, 2015
  Research on economic inequality in early modern Europe is complicated by the lack of appropriate data for reconstructing income or wealth distributions. This article presents a study of income inequality in mid‐eighteenth‐century Old Castile (Spain) using the Ensenada Cadastre, a census conducted between 1749 and 1759. The article describes the information provided by this census and then discusses its advantages and disadvantages for reconstructing income profiles and calculating income inequality. This is followed by analysis of a dataset derived from the Cadastre that consists of more than 4,000 observations from Palencia (a province in northern Spain) and contains information on sources of household income, each household head's main occupation, residence location, and other household characteristics. Demographic data from this census is used to weight observations in the sample and thereby minimize selection bias. Findings show that inequality in eighteenth‐century Spain was probably substantial despite its relative backwardness; that the relationship between inequality and per capita income was not clear‐cut and was probably influenced by measurement of the higher incomes; and that although income inequality was largely driven by uneven land distribution, labour income also contributed to overall inequality—especially in urban centres.

  September 10, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12122   open full text
• Wages, prices, and technology in early Catalan industrialization.
  Julio Martínez‐Galarraga, Marc Prat.
  The Economic History Review. August 27, 2015
  Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British industrial revolution. The roots of this process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became integrated into international trade, and a successful printed calico industry concentrated in the city of Barcelona. Although the factory system was largely adopted by the cotton industry in the 1840s, the diffusion of the spinning jenny in Catalonia had occurred earlier, in the 1790s. In line with Allen, this article explores whether relative factor prices played a role in the widespread adoption of the spinning jenny in Catalonia. First, series of real wages in Barcelona are supplied for the period 1500–1808. Second, the prices of labour and capital are compared and the potential profitability of the adoption of the spinning jenny is analysed. Findings show that although Catalonia was not a high wage economy in the way that Britain was in the second half of the eighteenth century, evidence from the cotton spinning sector confirms the relevance of relative factor prices in the adoption of new technology. Within the booming cotton sector after the 1780s, high wages created strong incentives for the adoption of the labour‐saving spinning jenny.

  August 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12127   open full text
• Wedding trousseaus and cloth consumption in Catalonia around 1300.
  Lluís To Figueras.
  The Economic History Review. July 15, 2015
  Between 1230 and 1315 a large amount of Flemish and northern French cloth reached the market of Vic, a medium‐sized Catalan town to the north of Barcelona. Descriptions of cloth from a sample of over 1,000 wedding trousseaus reveal that common people were quite familiar with a wide selection of fabrics from manufacturing centres such as Bruges, Saint‐Omer, Arras, and Châlons, and by the end of the thirteenth century Saint‐Denis, Paris, Ypres, and Narbonne. Northern cloth had travelled over 1,000 kilometres before it reached the market stalls of Vic, reflecting the efficiency of commercial networks in bringing commodities across Europe at a reasonable transportation cost. Marriage contracts from this period specify the identity of the most frequent purchasers of these fabrics, and the identity of the women that would wear them, tailored as capes or tunics. Northern cloth was purchased by all social groups, not just the wealthy elite: even peasant households used such fabrics for their daughters' dresses. All in all, wedding trousseaus provide exceptional evidence of how commercialized both the urban and rural populations had become by the end of the thirteenth century in a society eager to buy imported commodities.

  July 15, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12123   open full text
• Location, location, location? Analysing property rents in medieval Gloucester.
  Catherine Casson, Mark Casson.
  The Economic History Review. July 14, 2015
  Although medieval rentals have been extensively studied, few scholars have used them to analyse variations in the rents paid on individual properties within a town. It has been claimed that medieval rents did not reflect economic values or market forces, but were set according to social and political rather than economic criteria, and remained ossified at customary levels. This article uses hedonic regression methods to test whether property rents in medieval Gloucester were influenced by classic economic factors such as the location and use of a property. It investigates both ordinary commercial rents and burgage rents (landgable), and explores the relationship between the two. It also examines spatial autocorrelation. It finds significant relationships between ordinary rents and property characteristics that are similar to those found in modern studies. The findings are consistent with the view that, in late medieval Gloucester at least, ordinary rents were strongly influenced by classical economic factors working through the urban property market. The findings also suggest that burgage rents reflected economic factors, even though they remained fixed over time.

  July 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12117   open full text
• Occupational structure in the Czech lands under the second serfdom.
  Alexander Klein, Sheilagh Ogilvie.
  The Economic History Review. June 29, 2015
  This article presents an analysis of occupational structure, a key component of the ‘Little Divergence’, in an eastern‐central European economy under the second serfdom, using data on 6,983 Bohemian villages in 1654. Non‐agricultural activity was lower than in western Europe, but varied positively with village size, pastoral agriculture, sub‐peasant strata, Jews, freemen, female headship, and mills, and negatively with arable agriculture and towns. It showed a curvilinear relationship with the ‘second serfdom’, as proxied by landlord presence on village holdings. Landlord presence in serf villages also reversed the positive effects of female headship and mills on non‐agricultural activities. Under the second serfdom, landlords encouraged serf activities from which they could extract rents, while stifling others which threatened manorial interests.

  June 29, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ehr.12118   open full text
• Trademarks and British dominance in consumer goods, 1876–1914.
  Teresa Da Silva Lopes, Paulo Guimaraes.
  The Economic History Review. May 12, 2014
  Late Victorian Britain was very important in the development of British dominance in light consumer goods industries, such as fermented liquors and spirits; detergents and perfumery; bicycles and other carriages; paper, stationery, and bookbinding; and games of all kinds and sports goods. Firms developed technology‐based innovations and marketing‐based innovations, creating abnormal peaks of trademark registrations in certain industries. This article investigates those peaks and shows that factors usually pointed out as explaining British economic decline in heavy industries did not impact on the development of light consumer goods industries, and on the contrary encouraged their fast growth during this period. Trademark registrations are shown to provide new insights into the debate on British relative decline, when combined with other industry and firm‐level data.

  May 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12039   open full text
• Writing history backwards or sideways: towards a consensus on African population, 1850–2010.
  Ewout Frankema, Morten Jerven.
  The Economic History Review. May 12, 2014
  This article aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent‐wide dataset on African population extending into the pre‐1950 era. We investigate the reliability and the validity of the current population databases with the aim of working towards a consensus on the long‐term series of African total population with a reliable 1950 benchmark. The cases of Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana are explored to show the uneven coverage of census taking in colonial and post‐colonial Africa and to demonstrate the need for an upward adjustment of the conventional 1950 benchmark. In addition, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Manning's approach of projecting population growth estimates backwards in time by adopting the available Indian census data as African ‘default growth rates’, and we propose an alternative approach by incorporating the demographic experiences of tropical land‐abundant countries in South‐East Asia.

  May 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12041   open full text
• External debt and commitment mechanisms: Danish borrowing in Holland, 1763–1825.
  Christiaan Bochove.
  The Economic History Review. May 12, 2014
  External borrowing constituted an important part of sovereign finances in early modern Europe. As payments could not be enforced through third parties, sovereigns had to convince lenders of their commitment to service their loans. Although the literature has dealt with this problem extensively, little is known about what supported lending in early modern Europe. This article therefore asks whether and how commitment mechanisms identified in the sovereign borrowing literature made external borrowing safer in early modern Europe. It attempts to answer this question by analysing the loans that a small and peripheral state (Denmark) issued in Europe's foremost international investment hub (eighteenth‐century Holland). Primary sources demonstrate that Denmark inspired confidence in investors and serviced its loans well; a new dataset with securities prices reveals yields to maturity in accordance with this. Economic spillovers (domestic economic damage) and reputation (loss of access to external loans) are identified as the mechanisms that kept the Danish sovereigns committed to honouring their debts. The Danish case shows, however, that these commitment mechanisms could only be adopted after the growth and integration of northern Europe's economies. This suggests that commitment mechanisms are not as universally applicable as the literature often seems to claim.

  May 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12050   open full text
• Prices and real wages in seventeenth‐century Madrid.
  J. I. Andrés Ucendo, R. Lanza García.
  The Economic History Review. April 10, 2014
  This article focuses on the evolution of real wages earned by building labourers and craftsmen in Madrid during the seventeenth century. After a substantial rise brought about by the arrival of the Court in 1561, real wages experienced a remarkable fall from 1621–30 onwards. Our thesis is that the fiscal and monetary policies pursued by the Crown to fund its ambitious imperial policy exerted a clear influence on this decline. The currency manipulations of the low‐value petty coin (maravedí) drove serious losses in the real wages of building labourers and craftsmen between 1621 and 1680. In the years around 1665 the real wages of both groups had fallen below the levels of 1561–1600, and the indirect taxes levied by the Crown and the town council contributed to keeping real wages stagnant at around the low levels of 1665–80 between 1681 and 1700. Although this issue merits further research, it seems unlikely that building labourers and craftsmen could have offset the decline in their real wages through an increase in the number of hours worked or a rise in the number of work days.

  April 10, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12047   open full text
• The rise and fall of sterling in Liberia, 1847–1943.
  Leigh A. Gardner.
  The Economic History Review. March 28, 2014
  Recent research on exchange rate regime choice in developing countries has revealed that a range of factors, from weak fiscal institutions to high costs of borrowing in their own currencies, limits the range of options available to these countries. This article uses the case of Liberia to illustrate that new states in Africa during the gold standard era faced similar limitations, even in the absence of formal colonial rule. The rapid depreciation of the Liberian dollar in the nineteenth century led to the adoption of sterling as a medium of exchange and store of value. This initially made it easier for Liberia to service its sterling‐denominated debt and for Liberians to purchase imports from Britain. However, as economic relations with the US deepened during the twentieth century, instability in the pound–dollar exchange rate created serious dislocations in the Liberian economy, ultimately leading to the official adoption of the US dollar in 1943. The story of Liberia illustrates the long‐standing challenges of globalization for peripheral economies and suggests the need for a reassessment of the origins and impact of colonial monetary regimes.

  March 28, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12042   open full text
• Greasing the wheels of rural transformation? Margarine and the competition for the British butter market.
  Markus Lampe, Paul Sharp.
  The Economic History Review. March 28, 2014
  This article considers an example of the impact of a new good on producers of close substitutes: the invention of margarine and its rapid introduction into the British market from the mid‐1870s. This presented a challenge to the traditional suppliers of that market, butter producers from different European countries. We argue that the capacity to react quickly to the appearance of this cheap substitute by improving quality and establishing product differentiation was critical for the fortunes of butter producers. This is illustrated by a discussion of the different reactions to margarine and quality upgrading in Ireland, Denmark, and the Netherlands. A statistical analysis using monthly data for Britain from 1881–7 confirms that margarine had a greater impact on the price of poor quality butter than that of high quality butter, presumably because it was a stronger substitute.

  March 28, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12046   open full text
• The Maddison Project: collaborative research on historical national accounts.
  Jutta Bolt, Jan Luiten Zanden.
  The Economic History Review. March 11, 2014
  The Maddison Project, initiated in March 2010 by a group of close colleagues of Angus Maddison, aims to develop an effective system of cooperation between scholars to continue Maddison's work on measuring economic performance in the world economy. This article is a first product of the project. Its goal is to explain the aims and approach of the project, and, as a first result of this ‘collaboratory’, to inventory recent research on historical national accounts. We also briefly discuss some of the problems related to these historical statistics and we extend and where necessary revise the estimates published by Maddison in his latest overviews. Most new work relates to the period before 1820; it leads to a reassessment of levels of GDP per capita in western Europe in the early modern period, and to a confirmation of Maddison's previous estimates of Asian levels of real income.

  March 11, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12032   open full text
• British government and popular understanding of inflation in the mid‐1970s.
  Jim Tomlinson.
  The Economic History Review. March 11, 2014
  In Britain in the 1970s inflation rose to historically unprecedented peace‐time levels, and became the central issue of economic policy‐making. We know a great deal about the elite policy debates on the significance of this inflation, and the arguments about how to reduce it, but we know far less about how inflation was understood by the population at large, and how those understandings were shaped. This article explores the evidence on popular understanding, especially analysing the material gathered by the Counter‐Inflation Publicity Unit, created in the summer of 1975. Along with other evidence, this material is used to explore how far the Labour government's economic propaganda can be said to have influenced popular opinion on both the significance and causes of inflation. The evidence supports the argument that the belief that trade unions were the main culprit for inflation was reinforced and entrenched by this propaganda, with important unintended consequences for the arguments about policy that followed the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978/9.

  March 11, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12038   open full text
• ‘Such unjustificable practices’?: Irish trade, settlement, and society in France, 1688–1715.
  Siobhan Talbott.
  The Economic History Review. February 25, 2014
  This article explores Irish migration, settlement, and commerce in the Atlantic coast ports of France in the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 and the Jacobite uprising of 1715. Drawing on extensive archival material and using current methodologies, this study suggests that the composition of society was vital in the development of international associations. This is particularly pertinent in a period characterized by warfare, religious fervour, and the rise of Jacobitism. Common allegiance to Catholicism and support for the Stuart dynasty in both Ireland and France provided a framework conducive to international cooperation, but the Irish who settled in France held both Catholic and Reformed beliefs, and were not necessarily products of the Jacobite movement. Migration and integration, and commercial practices and successes, were not determined solely by religious or political affiliation, but were influenced by the composition of society and the support and acceptance received by immigrants and traders therein. Through an analysis of the Franco‐Irish case study, it is concluded here that the social context of mercantile activity was just as responsible as the political or religious climate in governing the development of international commercial relationships in this period.

  February 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12025   open full text
• What explains slow sub‐Saharan African growth? Revisiting oil boom‐era investment and productivity in Nigeria's national accounts, 1976–85.
  Hanaan Marwah.
  The Economic History Review. February 25, 2014
  Scholars have struggled to understand the role of investment in the slow growth of post‐Independence sub‐Saharan Africa. Existing research has largely relied on national accounting data, which suggests low returns on investment in the region. This article uses data gathered during fieldwork to investigate the quality of the investment data in the national accounts of Nigeria, Africa's most populous economy. It proposes a new investment series which can be compared to those in Nigeria's national accounts for 1976–85. It provides an alternative view of investment and productivity during the country's crucial oil boom period, when Nigeria had significant funding available for investment but this investment did not result in long‐term economic growth. Data are drawn from construction surveys, publicly listed and privately held construction company financial records, and industry publications. The new series suggests that for many years of the oil boom, approximately two‐thirds of what was recorded as having been investment in Nigeria's national accounts was not investment at all. Much of this was ‘ghost construction’, projects paid for but never completed. This indicates that actual investment was far more productive than has previously been appreciated.

  February 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12040   open full text
• The battle for rubber in Benin.
  James Fenske.
  The Economic History Review. February 25, 2014
  Nigerian rubber exports expanded rapidly during the Second World War ‘battle for rubber’. This was achieved by overcoming obstacles to greater exploitation of both wild and planted rubber. This article outlines Nigeria's wartime experience, focusing on the Benin region that dominated smallholder production after the war. British policies initially restricted rubber planting. After Japan occupied South‐East Asia, Britain encouraged maximum production. Late in the war, officials struggled with the planting boom that had occurred. The war was a period of both continuity and change for Benin, and exposed the limited capacity of the colonial state.

  February 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12044   open full text
• Rothschilds' strategies in international non‐ferrous metals markets, 1830–1940.
  Miguel Á. López‐Morell, José M. O'kean.
  The Economic History Review. February 18, 2014
  The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies employed by the Rothschilds up to 1940 to gain control and limit competition in the international non‐ferrous metals markets. It examines how they opted for inelastic demand products of highly concentrated supply which lent themselves to market control (mercury, nickel, lead, and copper and sulphur) by taking administrative monopolies (mercury from the state‐owned Almadén mines in Spain) or by controlling the leading businesses of the respective markets (Le Nickel, Peñarroya, and Rio Tinto). The article also analyses how in some cases the family was able to gain worldwide monopolies, and how in other cases they promoted collusive oligopolies with the competition in any number of forms in their quest to maintain profitability and steer well clear of any competition.

  February 18, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12037   open full text
• Trust, religion, and cooperation in western agriculture, 1880–1930.
  Eva Fernández.
  The Economic History Review. January 09, 2014
  This article explores the role of culture in encouraging the diffusion of cooperation for the production and marketing of agricultural products, an organizational innovation that can be related to technical progress in the rural sector and higher living standards for farmers. The results of the zero‐inflated negative binomial (ZINB) pooled regressions show that trust and religion were significant determinants of the diffusion of cooperatives among farmers in western countries. Results of the logit portion of these regressions suggest that the density of production was positively related to cooperation and that cooperation decreased where higher inequality in land distribution predominated.

  January 09, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12027   open full text
• Estate management and institutional constraints in pre‐industrial England: the ecclesiastical estates of Durham, c. 1400–1640.
  A. T. Brown.
  The Economic History Review. December 24, 2013
  This article explores how far estate management and institutional constraints help to explain the transformations of rural society in England from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The monks of Durham Cathedral Priory and the bishops of Durham faced many of the same exogenous pressures in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but they responded differently to these challenges. By the seventeenth century all of the dean and chapter's lands were consolidated holdings on 21‐year leases, whereas a confused mixture of copyhold and leasehold land had developed on the bishops' estate. This had a significant impact upon the challenges and opportunities facing their tenants. Institutional constraints were often crucial factors in the transformation of the English countryside: these two neighbouring ecclesiastical estates faced broadly the same problems and yet the composition of their estates diverged significantly across this period, having a profound effect not only on levels of rent, but also on the tenure of holdings and ultimately their relative size; three of the most important factors in the formation of agrarian capitalism. This article also argues that how rural society adapted to the fifteenth‐century recession greatly affected the ability of their sixteenth‐century counterparts to respond to inflation.

  December 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12036   open full text
• The impact of drought in early fourteenth‐century England.
  David Stone.
  The Economic History Review. December 23, 2013
  Climatic change is currently viewed as one of the main causes of the so‐called crisis of the early fourteenth century. It is well established that England saw increased storminess and heavy rainfall in this period, but this article suggests that the impact of drought—which became a common feature of the English climate during the 1320s and early 1330s—has been overlooked. Based primarily on a detailed analysis of account rolls for over 60 of the best‐documented manors in this period, the article establishes that drought brought devastating harvest failure and caused severe outbreaks of a number of diseases, plausibly including enteric infections, malaria, and winter and spring fevers. As a result, mortality surged and population levels fell in communities in affected regions, which were mainly confined to the southern and eastern counties of England. The article concludes that such regional variation significantly affects our understanding of demographic, agricultural, and even fiscal trends in this period. Although we should not disregard the human factors influencing the impact of environmental shocks, England was plainly struck with indubitable force by extreme weather in this pivotal phase of the medieval economy.

  December 23, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12035   open full text
• Settler skills and colonial development: the Huguenot wine‐makers in eighteenth‐century Dutch South Africa.
  Johan Fourie, Dieter Fintel.
  The Economic History Review. December 23, 2013
  The institutional literature emphasizes local conditions in explaining divergent colonial development. We posit that this view can be enriched by an important supply‐side cause: the skills with which the settlers arrive. The Huguenots who arrived at the Cape Colony in 1688/9, we argue, possessed skills different from those of the incumbent farmers, and this enabled them to become more productive wine‐makers. We demonstrate this by showing that this difference is explained by none of the standard factors of production, nor by any institutional differences between the French and the Dutch. We observe that a group of Huguenot descendants from wine‐producing regions maintained their advantage in wine‐making at the Cape over several generations. This disparity cannot be satisfactorily explained as resulting from first‐mover advantage or social capital. Specialized skills gave the Huguenots from wine‐producing regions a sustained competitive advantage. Our results show that colonial institutions are shaped not only by whether immigrants settle or not, which legal system they adopt, or their language, religion, or beliefs, but by the set of skills, knowledge, and experience brought from their country of origin. As such, cross‐country comparisons may blur much of the detail when we analyse the effect that settlers have on the destination country.

  December 23, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12033   open full text
• Mechanization and the spatial distribution of industries in the German Empire, 1875 to 1907.
  Theresa Gutberlet.
  The Economic History Review. December 18, 2013
  The adoption of water, steam, and electric power transformed manufacturing in the nineteenth century. This article studies the relationship between this technological change and the spatial distribution of manufacturing industries in the German Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The adoption of steam powered machinery created incentives for manufacturers to form industry clusters near coal mining regions. Specifically, this article shows that a one standard deviation increase in the average size of steam power operations was associated with a rise in geographic concentration of one‐quarter of a standard deviation. In contrast, a one standard deviation increase in the size of water power operations was associated with a drop in geographic concentration of one‐sixth of a standard deviation. This is consistent with the constraint that water powered plants had to be located on a stream with a sufficient gradient and away from other water powered plants to avoid disruption from neighbouring gates and dams. Together the findings indicate that the transition from water to steam powered machinery contributed to the geographic concentration of manufacturing in the nineteenth century.

  December 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12028   open full text
• The selection bias in court records: settlement and trial in eighteenth‐century Ottoman Kastamonu.
  Metin M. Coşgel, Boğaç A. Ergene.
  The Economic History Review. October 14, 2013
  Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity to access information about the names, characteristics, and socio‐economic status of individuals and the laws, local customs, and legal institutions of societies. Although researchers have noted various limitations of these records, the problem of selection bias has not been systematically studied. Since litigants would probably settle disputes in which one side is likely to be a clear winner, the cases that go to trial are more likely to be the difficult and uncertain ones that comprise a non‐random subset of all disputes. This article presents a study of selection bias in Ottoman courts in the town of Kastamonu in northern Anatolia, from the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Disputes are categorized by type and the distribution of court participants is studied according to composition, gender, and socio‐religious status. A regression analysis is run to determine the factors affecting the likelihood of cases being tried in court. The results indicate that the cases that ended up in court were selected systematically. If the selection bias is ignored, research based on Ottoman court records may be seriously flawed in its ability to yield general conclusions.

  October 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12029   open full text
• Raiffeisenism abroad: why did German cooperative banking fail in Ireland but prosper in the Netherlands?
  Christopher L. Colvin, Eoin McLaughlin.
  The Economic History Review. October 14, 2013
  Why did imitations of Raiffeisen's rural cooperative savings and loans associations work well in some European countries, but fail in others? This article considers the example of Raiffeisenism in Ireland and in the Netherlands. Raiffeisen banks arrived in both places at the same time, but had drastically different fates. In Ireland they were almost wiped out by the early 1920s, while in the Netherlands they proved to be a long‐lasting institutional transplant. Raiffeisen banks were successful in the Netherlands because they operated in niche markets with few competitors, while rural financial markets in Ireland were unsegmented and populated by long‐established incumbents, leaving little room for new players, whatever their institutional advantages. Dutch Raiffeisen banks were largely self‐financing, closely integrated into the wider rural economy, and able to take advantage of economic and religious divisions in rural society. Their Irish counterparts were not.

  October 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12030   open full text
• A mirror of history: China's bond market, 1921–42.
  Chun‐Yu Ho, Dan Li.
  The Economic History Review. October 14, 2013
  This article provides a quantitative assessment of contemporary beliefs about historical events by econometrically identifying ‘break points’ in China's domestic bond market from 1921 to 1942. We find that these ‘break points’ usually coincided with the events highlighted by the Shanghai Newspaper—an influential daily newspaper produced during the time of the Republic of China. These events are also generally considered to be crucial by historians—for example, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the outbreak of the Second Sino‐Japanese War. However, some events to which historians attach great importance, such as the conflicts between Nationalists and Communists in the 1930s, were not reflected in the bond market and did not attract much media attention. Some events, such as the Sino‐Japanese ceasefire in Tanggu in 1933, were thought to be crucial by contemporaries, but have been downplayed by later observers.

  October 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12026   open full text
• Yeast or mushrooms? Productivity patterns across Swedish manufacturing industries, 1869–1912.
  Svante Prado.
  The Economic History Review. October 14, 2013
  This article applies Harberger's yeast versus mushrooms dichotomy to Swedish manufacturing industries in the four decades prior to the First World War. The evidence, broken down to cover five sub‐periods, points to a growth process resembling that of mushrooms more than that of yeast. In addition, it is argued that a yeast‐like (even) pattern of productivity growth rates invites one to search for a general purpose technology at work, whereas mushroom‐like progress leads one to dismiss the idea that a small number of technologies spilled over to a large number of manufacturing processes. The era under investigation coincides with the peak of the use of steam power and the infancy of electricity. The evidence makes it unlikely that steam in Sweden was a general purpose technology with the potential to affect the progress in productivity across industries in a yeast‐like fashion. The rampant spread of electricity may have contributed to the yeast‐like pattern in the last sub‐period preceding the First World War.

  October 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12018   open full text
• Living standards and mortality since the middle ages.
  Morgan Kelly, Cormac Ó Gráda.
  The Economic History Review. September 30, 2013
  Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid‐thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the nobility were strongly affected by living standards. Looking at a large sample of parishes after 1540, we find that the positive check had weakened considerably by 1650 even though living standards were static at best, but persisted in London for another century despite its higher wages. In both cases the disappearance of the positive check coincided with the introduction of systematic poor relief, suggesting that government action may have played a role in breaking the link between harvest failure and mass mortality.

  September 30, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12023   open full text
• Poor relief in Elizabethan English communities: an analysis of Collectors' accounts.
  Marjorie K. McIntosh.
  The Economic History Review. September 30, 2013
  This article analyses 30 accounts of income and expenditure left by Collectors for the Poor in Elizabethan England, before the period known as the old poor law. Collectors were appointed by parishes and incorporated boroughs in accordance with the poor laws of 1552 and 1563, but few of their fragile records survive. The accounts examined here document early use of compulsory rates to provide income, but several features of the distribution of relief differ from patterns common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adult male recipients outnumbered women in many of the parishes; children were frequently helped directly; and cities and towns assisted a smaller fraction of their total populations than did villages but awarded larger per capita payments. Accounts from the 10 villages and small towns analysed most fully show that Elizabethan Collectors were moving away from the late medieval practice of providing only occasional aid; increasingly they awarded regular payments to a selected subset of the local poor. Comparison with the early seventeenth century suggests that the poor laws of 1598 and 1601 contributed to a transition that was already underway but did not create a new system of relief.

  September 30, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12022   open full text
• A ‘blank cheque'? Portuguese Second World War sterling balances, 1940–73.
  Marcelo Paiva Abreu.
  The Economic History Review. September 03, 2013
  The British effort in the Second World War required massive external financing which depended on Lend‐Lease and the accumulation of sterling balances. Indebtedness in sterling balances corresponded to almost 38 per cent of this total at the end of the war. Portuguese sterling balances, although a small share of the total, were important because of pre‐emptive purchases, especially of wolfram, and because of the ‘gold clause’ which was to be applied to outstanding balances. Portugal's willingness to finance British purchases contrasts with the requirement of German payments in goods or cash for their purchases in Portugal. The settlement of Portuguese sterling balances in August 1945 was singular as it preceded the Anglo‐American settlement of December 1945 which had important consequences for sterling balance holders, as the US insisted that the US$3.75 billion loan should not be used to settle British war debts. Postwar settlement of British debt through a long‐term loan from Portugal to Britain contrasts with settlements that involved the sale of British assets. Salazar's concerns about the postwar international position of Portugal, the Portuguese Empire, and the survival of the Portuguese regime are relevant in explaining his pro‐British stance during and after the war.

  September 03, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12020   open full text
• De‐industrialization and re‐industrialization in the Middle East: reflections on the cotton industry in Egypt and in the Izmir region.
  Laura Panza.
  The Economic History Review. July 28, 2013
  This article presents an investigation of the process of decline and rebirth of textile manufacturing in two Middle Eastern regions, Egypt and the Izmir region, during the first wave of globalization (1850–1914). Through the application of the ‘Dutch disease’ model, it explores the linkages between terms of trade and industrialization. These are further related to the evolution of price transmission between domestic and global raw cotton markets. Findings indicate that different levels of market integration have contributed to diverging trajectories in industrial development in the two regions: while in Egypt the process of de‐industrialization was not reversed, in the Izmir region weaker international price transmission facilitated the creation of a nascent domestic textile industry. However, terms of trade patterns and relative price movements are only one of the causes that can explain the differences between the two regions.

  July 28, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12019   open full text
• Transatlantic steerage fares, British and Irish migration, and return migration, 1815–60.
  John Killick.
  The Economic History Review. July 12, 2013
  This article argues that the massive increase in transatlantic British and Irish emigration after 1840 was enabled by declining fares and ocean travel costs. New series of transatlantic steerage fares drawn from the unique Cope Line records at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) show westward fares fell rapidly from 1830. Adjusted for British and US manual wages, westward travel costs, including provisions, almost halved between 1847 and 1851–3, when Irish migration peaked. Hence although the Irish had to leave Ireland, they might not otherwise have gone so extensively to North America. Eastward travel costs also fell after 1830, encouraging an unexpectedly large return migration to Britain in the late1850s, and maybe earlier.

  July 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12014   open full text
• Taking firms to the stock market: IPOs and the importance of large banks in imperial Germany, 1896–1913.
  Sibylle H. Lehmann.
  The Economic History Review. July 12, 2013
  Large universal banks played a major role in Germany's industrialization because they provided loans to industry and thereby helped firms to overcome liquidity constraints. Previous research has also argued that they were equally important for the German stock market. This article provides quantitative and qualitative evidence that although the market for underwriters was dominated by a small oligopoly of six large banks, there was still perceptible competition, which kept fees and short‐run profits low. Another interesting finding presented here is the absence of a signalling effect to investors. Neither underpricing nor the one‐year performance was different for the IPOs issued by one of the Big Six. Thus, although the German IPO business was in the hands of a small oligopoly, investors did not benefit from the lack of competition. One explanation is that the quality of IPOs on the German stock market of the time was very good in general as a result of the competition between underwriters, but also as a result of the tight regulation of underwriting, which ensured the quality of all firms on the German stock market.

  July 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12016   open full text
• Wars are becoming less frequent: a response to Harrison and Wolf.
  Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Steve Pickering.
  The Economic History Review. June 20, 2013
  Harrison and Wolf claim that interstate ‘wars are becoming more frequent’. This is an alarming claim deserving serious attention. It is also a highly surprising claim, since recent conflict research tends to find the opposite: incidences of violent conflict are becoming less frequent. We argue that Harrison and Wolf's claim is incorrect. We show empirically that interstate wars are in fact becoming less frequent. Other data on tensions between states below war, such as the Interstate Crises Behavior data, also suggest a decline in conflict between states. We detail how Harrison and Wolf's analysis is misleading, highlighting how their findings primarily arise as a likely artefact of their uncritical use of the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) data, and explaining why MIDs cannot be interpreted as ‘wars’. Given that Harrison and Wolf's basic premise is wrong, and wars are not becoming more frequent, we should be sceptical of their conclusions. We briefly revisit their suggested explanations for why wars may become more frequent in light of what we know about long‐term trends in warfare and research on interstate war.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12002   open full text
• Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers.
  Carlos Álvarez‐Nogal, Christophe Chamley.
  The Economic History Review. May 22, 2013
  Under Philip II, Castile was the first country with a large nation‐wide domestic public debt. A new view of that fiscal system is presented that is potentially relevant for other fiscal systems in Europe before 1800. The credibility of the debt, mostly in perpetual redeemable annuities, was enhanced by decentralized funding through taxes administered by cities making up the Realm in the Cortes. The accumulation of short‐term debt depended on refinancing through long‐term debt. Financial crises in the short‐term debt occurred when the service of the long‐term debt reached the revenues of its servicing taxes. They were not caused by liquidity crises and were resolved after protracted negotiations in the Cortes by tax increases and interest rate reductions.

  May 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12010   open full text
• Prices and production: agricultural supply response in fourteenth‐century England.
  Eric B. Schneider.
  The Economic History Review. May 22, 2013
  This article challenges the growing consensus in the literature that medieval manorial managers were price responsive in their production decisions. Using prices of and acreages planted with wheat, barley, and oats on manors held by the bishop of Winchester from 1325 to 1370, price elasticities of supply are estimated for each grain in aggregate and on each particular manor. Aggregate price elasticities of supply for wheat, barley, and oats were rarely statistically significant and when significant were very low compared with elasticities estimated for developing and developed countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The low levels of agricultural supply response in fourteenth‐century England suggest that commercialization was not as dominant in the medieval economy as has been argued. Thus, structural changes in the economy, such as the leasing of demesnes, the growth of wage labour, and the end of villeinage, may have been more important than price fluctuations in driving long‐run economic change after the Black Death. Likewise, a shift from low price responsiveness to higher price responsiveness could have been an important part of the capitalist transformation of agriculture in the early modern period.

  May 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12012   open full text
• Gregory King and the economic structure of early modern England: an input–output table for 1688.
  John Dodgson.
  The Economic History Review. April 23, 2013
  This article presents an input–output table for England and Wales for the year 1688 which is based on the extensive dataset compiled by Gregory King in the 1690s, together with other contemporary and modern material relating to the end of the seventeenth century. As well as showing the inter‐relationships between the different parts of the economy, the data in the table can be used to compute national income and the shares of different sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and services in total value added. Further, the approach used to compile the table provides a way to subject King's data to as much independent assessment as is possible given alternative sources of information. Sensitivity analysis is used to assess the impact on national income and sector shares of alternative estimates of the grain harvest, metal manufacture, and service sector output.

  April 23, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12006   open full text
• The credit relationship between Henry III and merchants of Douai and Ypres, 1247–70.
  Adrian R. Bell, Chris Brooks, Tony K. Moore.
  The Economic History Review. April 23, 2013
  This article looks at an important but neglected aspect of medieval sovereign debt, namely ‘accounts payable’ owed by the Crown to merchants and employees. It focuses on the unusually well‐documented relationship between Henry III, King of England between 1216 and 1272, and Flemish merchants from the towns of Douai and Ypres, who provided cloth on credit to the royal wardrobe. From the surviving royal documents, we reconstruct the credit advanced to the royal wardrobe by the merchants of Ypres and Douai for each year between 1247 and 1270, together with the king's repayment history. The interactions between the king and the merchants are then analysed. The insights from this analysis are applied to the historical data to explain the trading decisions made by the merchants during this period, as well as why the strategies of the Yprois sometimes differed from those of the Douaissiens.

  April 23, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12013   open full text
• New annual estimates of Swedish GDP, 1800–2010.
  Rodney Edvinsson.
  The Economic History Review. April 16, 2013
  Although the historical national accounts of Sweden are among the most detailed in the world, there is scope for improvement. This study revises previous historical estimates of Swedish GDP. Agricultural output is upgraded for the nineteenth century following recent research by Swedish agrarian historians on the underestimation of official statistics. Estimates of annual fluctuations before 1861 are significantly improved by using new sources on yield ratios of harvests. For manufacturing, home industries are added, in accordance with modern international guidelines (2008 SNA). The study concludes that early nineteenth‐century Sweden was not as poor relative to other West European countries as previously thought.

  April 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12004   open full text
• The cost of railroad regulation: the disintegration of American agricultural markets in the interwar period.
  Giovanni Federico, Paul Sharp.
  The Economic History Review. April 16, 2013
  This article investigates the costs of transport regulation using the example of agricultural markets in the US. Using a large database of prices by state of agricultural commodities, we find that dispersion fell for many commodities until the First World War. We demonstrate that this reflected changes in transport costs which in turn in the long run depended on productivity growth in railroads. The year 1920 marked a change in this relationship, however, and between the First and Second World Wars we find considerable disintegration of agricultural markets, ultimately as a consequence of the 1920 Transportation Act. We argue that this benefited railroad companies in the 1920s and workers in the 1930s, and we put forward an estimate of the welfare losses for the consumers of railroad services (that is, agricultural producers and final consumers).

  April 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12009   open full text
• The impact of female employment on male salaries and careers: evidence from the English banking industry, 1890–1941.
  Andrew Seltzer.
  The Economic History Review. April 16, 2013
  The late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century British labour market experienced an influx of female clerical workers. Employers argued that female employment increased opportunities for men to advance; however, most male clerks regarded this expansion of the labour supply as a threat to their pay and status. This article examines the effects of female employment on male clerks using data from Williams Deacon's Bank covering a period 25 years prior to and 25 years subsequent to the initial employment of women. It is shown that, within position, women were substitutes for younger men, but not for senior men. In addition, the employment of women in routine positions allowed the bank to expand its branch network, creating new higher‐level positions, which were almost always filled by men.

  April 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00678.x   open full text
• Machine tools and mass production in the armaments boom: Germany and the United States, 1929–44.
  Cristiano Andrea Ristuccia, Adam Tooze.
  The Economic History Review. March 04, 2013
  This article anatomizes the ‘productivity race’ between Nazi Germany and the US over the period from the Great Depression to the Second World War in the metalworking industry. We present novel data that allow us to account for both the quantity of installed machine tools and their technological type. Hitherto, comparison of productive technologies has been limited to case studies and well‐worn narratives about US mass production and European‐style flexible specialization. Our data show that the two countries in fact employed similar types of machines combined in different ratios. Furthermore, neither country was locked in a rigid technological paradigm. By 1945 Germany had converged on the US both in terms of capital‐intensity and the specific technologies employed. Capital investment made a greater contribution to output growth in Germany, whereas US growth was capital‐saving. Total factor productivity growth made a substantial contribution to the armaments boom in both countries. But it was US industry, spared the war's most disruptive effects, that was in a position to take fullest advantage of the opportunities for wartime productivity growth. This adds a new element to familiar explanations for Germany's rapid catch‐up after 1945.

  March 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00675.x   open full text
• Party politics, political economy, and economic development in early eighteenth‐century Britain.
  Christopher Dudley.
  The Economic History Review. February 28, 2013
  Economic growth and change in eighteenth‐century Britain, both the expansion of pre‐industrial commercial society and the industrial revolution itself, have been explored using a variety of approaches. This article highlights a relatively ignored aspect of the problem, arguing that the state, politics, and political economic ideology played a central role. In particular, the early eighteenth‐century political victory of a version of political economy associated with the Whig party, which centred on manufacturing and consumption, was a prerequisite for the economic developments later in the century. The article begins by describing a political economy of manufacturing and its rival, a political economy of re‐exporting associated with the Tory party. It then explains how and why a political economy of manufacturing became dominant, examining both political elites and ordinary voters and petitioners. The growth of manufacturing and consumption must be understood, therefore, as political as much as economic events.

  February 28, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12007   open full text
• Second World War spending and local economic activity in US counties, 1939–58.
  Price Fishback, Joseph A. Cullen.
  The Economic History Review. February 28, 2013
  Studies of the development of local economies often point to large‐scale Second World War military spending as a source of economic growth, even though spending declined sharply after demobilization. We examine the relationship between war spending per capita and the changes in economic activity in US counties between 1939 before the war and a period several years after the war. In the longer term counties receiving more war spending per capita during the war experienced greater population growth, but growth in per capita measures of economic activity showed little relationship with per capita war spending.

  February 28, 2013   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00677.x   open full text
• Competition in the Rhine delta: waterways, railways and ports, 1870–1913.
  Hein A. M. Klemann, Joep Schenk.
  The Economic History Review. January 16, 2013
  Rhine transport was not an absolute condition for German industrialization. Railways proved to be efficient, and in the 1840–1870 period were essential for the industrialization of the Ruhr area. The key questions addressed in this article are: why did inland navigation not disappear from the Rhine region (as it did elsewhere), even recovering after the 1870s? And why did it have an unassailable competitive advantage from the 1890s onwards? Political developments leading to the liberalization of Rhine shipping and the canalization of the river created the opportunity to increase the scale of shipping. This gave it competitive advantages when it came to bulk transport. This article uses new data on freight rates in the Rhine delta to demonstrate the course of Rhine competitiveness. Furthermore, it identifies the institutional conditions, and the technological and organizational improvements, that were the basis of this growing competitiveness. The conclusion is that the element of German international trade that went by the Rhine correlated with the cost of Rhine shipping when compared to that of railway transport. As a consequence of the recovery of Rhine shipping, the port of Rotterdam became stronger than its Belgian neighbour, Antwerp.

  January 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00679.x   open full text
• War, food rationing, and socioeconomic inequality in Germany during the First World War.
  Matthias Blum.
  The Economic History Review. January 16, 2013
  Germany experienced a devastating period during the First World War due to severely restricted import possibilities and a general shortage of foodstuffs. This study uses the heights of some 4,000 individuals who served during the Second World War to quantify biological living standards from the 1900s to the 1920s, and focuses primarily on socioeconomic inequality during this period. The results suggest that generally the upper social strata, measured by fathers' occupation, exhibited the tallest average height, followed by the middle and lower classes. These socioeconomic differences became more pronounced during the First World War when the rationing system provided a limited food supply. Wealthier individuals were able to purchase additional foodstuffs on black markets. Therefore, children from upper‐class families experienced only a small decline in average height compared to their counterparts from the middle and lower social strata.

  January 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00681.x   open full text
• Geographies of wealth: real estate and personal property ownership in England and Wales, 1870–1902.
  David r. Green, Alastair Owens.
  The Economic History Review. January 04, 2013
  This article explores the composition and geographies of individual wealth holding in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century. It draws on various forms of death duty records to determine the individual ownership of wealth including both personal property and real estate. By combining information on these different kinds of property, it is possible to explore how different strata of wealth holders accumulated specific forms of wealth at the time of their death. The article then examines how the composition of that wealth varied according to the wealth holder's location in the urban hierarchy and distance from London. It points out important geographical differences in both the scale and nature of wealth holding and raises questions about the implications of these findings.

  January 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12001   open full text
• Hand looms, power looms, and changing production organizations: the case of the Kiryū weaving district in early twentieth‐century Japan.
  Tomoko Hashino, Keijiro Otsuka.
  The Economic History Review. January 04, 2013
  The Kiryū silk weaving district, located 200 kilometres north of Tokyo, has been one of the most advanced silk weaving districts since the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). In the 1870s, it was a pioneer in the export of silk products from Japan and the leading producer of traditional Japanese kimono and obi (sash belts) for domestic markets. This study finds that the developmental process of the Kiryū district from 1895 to 1930 can be divided into at least two phases, that is, one of gradual growth based on an inter‐firm division of labour using hand looms and one of dynamic development based on the factory system using power looms. Weaving manufacturers‐cum‐contractors pioneered gradual growth by sub‐contracting with rural village out‐weavers and with a number of specialized, supporting firms in Kiryū town, and grew faster than factory production systems. New joint‐stock firms played the role of genuine entrepreneurs by introducing power looms, thereby realizing significant economies of scale. During this new phase, the weaving manufacturers‐cum‐contractors survived and also introduced new production systems.

  January 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00680.x   open full text
• The two sterling crises of 1964: a reply to Oliver.
  Scott Newton.
  The Economic History Review. January 04, 2013
  Oliver's Comment on my recent article challenges my argument that there were two sterling crises in the autumn of 1964. He argues that there was one only and that the Labour government mishandled it. Oliver has, however, reached these conclusions on the basis of a partial reading of the evidence and a failure to grasp how the changing international context imposed constraints on national economic sovereignty.

  January 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12000   open full text
• The first income tax, political arithmetic, and the measurement of economic growth.
  S. J. Thompson.
  The Economic History Review. December 07, 2012
  The imposition of the world's first modern income tax in 1799 prompted a revival of interest in national accounting. This article examines the extent to which William Pitt the Younger, who proposed the new tax, modelled his estimates of national wealth on those produced a century earlier by the pioneers in this field, Sir William Petty, Charles Davenant, and Gregory King. In addition, the calculations of Benjamin Bell and Henry Beeke, two of Pitt's contemporaries, are analysed in detail to highlight the fragility of these contemporary estimates of national income. This analysis has important implications for economic historians who have used this material to try to establish the structure and growth of national output. National accountants during the long eighteenth century were not, for the most part, concerned with structural change. Rather, their descriptions of economic structure should be understood as reflecting a particular set of a priori claims about what they deemed to be the proper mode and distribution of taxation.

  December 07, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00668.x   open full text
• Nutrition in the English agricultural labourer's household over the course of the long nineteenth century.
  Ian Gazeley, Sara Horrell.
  The Economic History Review. December 07, 2012
  The welfare of agricultural labourers has recently received renewed interest in both establishing living standards for a baseline group over the long term, and assessing the energy available for increased physical labour in the eighteenth century. Disagreement persists. This article examines a key aspect of agricultural labourers' families' welfare: nutrient consumption. We utilize datasets of the diets of agricultural labourers' households for 1787–96, 1835–46, 1863, 1893, and 1912, to analyse the availability of calories and 11 key nutrients. Self‐provisioned foodstuffs are incorporated and adjustments are made for beer consumption. Deficiency is computed against household needs. The results corroborate the general levels of calorie availability identified in agricultural production accounts for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and assess these as sufficient for productive agricultural labour. However, no improvement is found in the nutritional aspect of household welfare between 1787–96 and 1835–46, thus endorsing pessimistic views of living standards for this group over this time period. Gains were evident in the next half‐century, but these improvements were neither consistent nor dramatic and left a large minority of these households with nutrient deficiencies even in the twentieth century.

  December 07, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00672.x   open full text
• Measuring business cycles in the Russian Empire.
  Thomas C. Owen.
  The Economic History Review. December 05, 2012
  Newly available data on Russian commerce, industry, finance, incorporations, labour, and investment allow a fresh approach to two historical puzzles: the dating of cyclical peaks and troughs in Russia during the six decades before the First World War and the evaluation of theories advanced to explain the causes of these cycles. A diffusion index and a composite index establish the dates and amplitudes of seven complete cycles from 1855 to 1909 and part of an eighth, in 1910–13, interrupted by the First World War. The influence of wars and the Revolution of 1905 on the Russian cycle is clear. A comparison of diffusion indices for Russia and Germany reveals that Russian cycles occasionally diverged from the European pattern in the absence of war and revolution, notably during the industrial boom of the 1890s. The new findings give qualified support to the contention of several Soviet economists in the 1920s that this divergence resulted, at least in part, from the monetary stimulus of exports, primarily of grain.

  December 05, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00673.x   open full text
• Colonies, copper, and the market for inventive activity in England and Wales, 1680–1730.
  Nuala Zahedieh.
  The Economic History Review. December 05, 2012
  Between 1680 and 1730 the English and Welsh copper industry rose from the dead and by the mid‐eighteenth century it had become Europe's leading copper producer. The revival followed the extension of sugar cultivation in England's colonies and the creation of a strong new demand for copper, which was reflected in rising exports and rising prices. Buoyant demand created a favourable market for the inventive activity needed to cut costs in the native industry, which encouraged investment in a systematic programme of research and development and culminated in important breakthroughs in smelting and mining technologies which transformed the non‐ferrous metal industries. The story provides an insight into how the economic context shaped the way useful knowledge was produced and consumed. Colonial expansion not only provided England with additional resources overseas but also encouraged the reallocation of human and financial capital to make better use of slack resources at home. Empire and technical change intersected with positive consequences for economic growth.

  December 05, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00676.x   open full text
• Real inequality in the early modern Low Countries: the city of ’s‐Hertogenbosch, 1500–1660.
  Jord Hanus.
  The Economic History Review. November 30, 2012
  This article studies the welfare effects of economic growth in the early modern Low Countries. It applies the recently developed concept of ‘real inequality’ to a case study of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century ’s‐Hertogenbosch in the Southern Netherlands and demonstrates, by incorporating relative price movements, that specific (and in this case stagnant) nominal income inequality trajectories may disguise underlying shifts in real inequality that are influenced by socially biased relative prices. The analysis is then extended to include changes in demography and household size, which reveals a second important limitation in the study of long‐term economic inequality. In contrast to the stagnation and eventual decline in nominal inequality seen in ’s‐Hertogenbosch during the long sixteenth century (1500–1650), this broadened concept of ‘augmented’ real inequality in fact suggests the occurrence of a significant upturn during the first half of the sixteenth century. Furthermore, while nominal inequality had decreased, real inequality appears to have been higher by the middle of the seventeenth century than it had been around 1500. The study of global and/or long‐term inequality, in particular, would benefit greatly from a proper social, economic, and historical contextualization of these trends, not least in terms of the social biases in relative prices and household composition.

  November 30, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00674.x   open full text
• The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution.
  Jane Humphries.
  The Economic History Review. August 09, 2012
  The new meta‐narrative of the industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy and that this itself caused industrialization. Contemporary inventions, although derived from scientific discoveries shared with mainland Europe, could only be profitable in the context of Britain's factor prices. Therefore, important inventions were only developed in Britain where they enabled access to a growth path that transcended trajectories associated with more labour‐intensive production methods. The criticism presented here concerns perspective and methodology. The account of the high wage economy is misleading because it focuses on men and male wages, underestimates the relative caloric needs of women and children, and bases its view of living standards on an ahistorical and false household economy. A more accurate picture of the structure and functioning of working‐class households provides an alternative explanation of inventive and innovative activity in terms of the availability of cheap and amenable female and child labour and thereby offers a broader interpretation of the industrial revolution.

  August 09, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00663.x   open full text
• Contract enforcement in Russian serf society, 1750–18601.
  Tracy Dennison.
  The Economic History Review. July 11, 2012
  This article examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre‐emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata to engage in a wide variety of contractual transactions. However, this system had significant drawbacks in that the poorest serfs could not afford these services and no serf had recourse beyond his local estate.

  July 11, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2012.00661.x   open full text