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Examines the rhythms of production in the Montgolfier paper mill, one of the largest in eighteenth-century France. View of historians on early industrial work; What Montgolfier output registers reveal.

Assesses the performance of the economy in the River Plate area in Argentina from the 1820s to the 1860s. Expansion of the rural economy; Micro- and macroeconomic consequences of inflationary financing; Contemporary financial and monetary circumstances; Buenos Aires' implementation of a 40-year process of dealing with inconvertible paper money.

Lists several abstracts of papers presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the Economic History Association. Papers on the Black death and the medieval economy; Papers on property rights and the distribution of wealth and welfare; Papers on economic history and the consumer; Papers on institutions of governance and economic growth; Abstracts of papers on the financial prehistory of the United States.

Presents a summary of papers which where presented to the annual general meeting of the Economic History Association. Development of the nineteenth-century water law; Identification of the cultivation practices and cropping patterns in Gujarat's Kaira district during the nineteenth century; Explanation of high crop yields during the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century in Ireland.

Abstracts are presented for multiple papers presented at the 2011 annual meeting of the Economic History Association including "Why Didn't Canada Have a Banking Crisis in 2008?" by Michael Bordo, Angela Redish and Hugh Rockoff, "When, Where, and Why? Early Industrialization in the Poor Periphery, 1870-1940," by Jeffrey G. Williamson, and "God and Risk: The Role of Religiosity in Rural Banking in Early-Twentieth-Century Netherlands," by Christopher L. Colvin.

A series of abstracts are given from papers presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Economic History Association, including "Biological Welfare Change and Variation in Mid- to Late-Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania: Evidence From the Stature of the Pennsylvania National Guard," by Timothy Cuff, "Land Abundance and Economic Institutions: Egba Land and Slavery, 1830-1914," by James Fenske, and "The Emergence of Wage Discrimination in U.S. Manufacturing," by Joyce Burnette.

This article presents several research papers related to banks and asset markets during war and depression. "The Great Banks' Depression: Deposit Withdrawals in the German Crisis of 1931," uses monthly balance-sheet data of all major German credit banks, and further analyze deposit withdrawals and bank failures in the German banking and currency crisis of 1931. "International Financial Crisis Contagion in the Interwar Period," examines international financial markets and the links between them using a newly hand-collected data set for more than 300 company stocks, encompassing weekly equity-market observations for 13 countries.

Presents abstracts of the papers presented at the 2000 Economic History Association meeting. `Sources of African-American Economic Progress in the Labor Market in the Twentieth Century,' by James Heckman and Petra Todd; `Race and Home Ownership: A Century's View,' by William Collins and Robert Margo; `The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,' by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson.

The article presents abstracts of research related to economic history. These include "Ecological Frontiers on the Grasslands of Kansas: Changes in Farm Scale and Crop Diversity," "Institutional Innovation and the Creation of Liquid Financial Markets: The Case of the American Over-the-Counter Market," and "Geographic and Regulatory Frontiers in Commercial Banking: Private Banking in the United States, Scotland and Germany in Early Industrialization."

The article presents abstracts of research in economic history, including "Original Sin, Good Housekeeping and Empire: The Relation Between Currency Risk and Default Risk," "Clio and the Economics of International Currencies" and "How Much Did the U.S. Government Value its Troops' Lives in World War II?: Evidence From Dollar-Fatality Tradeoffs in Land Battles."

Presents an abstract of a research paper entitled `Secrecy, Firm-Specific Human Capital, and Enforceable Debt Contracts in Ancien Regime Taxation,' by Gregory La Blanc, presented at the annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

Presents an abstract of the paper `Lessons for the United States and the European Community for the Integration of High- and Low-Income Economies,' by Cletus C. Coughlin and David Wheelock, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

Presents an abstract of the paper `Sugar, Strategy, Sovereignty: Toward a Political Economy of the Overthrow and Annexation of Hawaii,' by Christopher Grandy and Sumner J. La Croix, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

On 31 December 1985, Singapore left the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), turning against the ‘New International Information Order’ demanded by UNESCO at that time. In October 2007, after 22 years of absence, Singapore rejoined UNESCO, looking for an intensification of cultural and scientific exchange. Taking this example of reviving co-operation between Singapore and UNESCO, this paper assesses the concept of ‘creative industries’ as a boundary concept that allows for increased co-operation between players with generally opposing knowledge concepts — as manifested in their respective knowledge and cultural politics. The paper starts with a conceptual discussion on the crossing of boundaries. This is followed by an assessment of first, UNESCO's and second, Singapore's gradual repositioning towards culture. While UNESCO turned from distinctly separating ‘culture’ and ‘market’ in the 1970s and 1980s to an increased openness for profit-oriented conceptualisations of culture today, Singapore identified the economic potential of culture, creativity and the arts, and therefore the need to foster these as part of its development into a knowledge-based economy. The underlying differences in interests and the orientation of content, expressed by the traditionally opposing conceptualisations of knowledge and culture, are still valid today, yet the concept of ‘creative industries’, adopted by both sides, seems to offer a common meeting ground. It acts clearly as a bridge, and hence a boundary concept, allowing for an intensification of mutual co-operation. This is discussed in the final part of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the Rwandan case to address some of the challenges and pitfalls in defining pro-poor strategies. The paper first looks at the danger of a purely growth-led development focus (as in Rwanda's first PRSP), and evaluates the extent to which the agricultural sector has been a pro-poor growth engine. It then studies Rwanda's current rural policies, which aim to modernise and 'professionalise' the rural sector. There is a high risk that these rural policy measures will be at the expense of the large mass of small-scale peasants. This paper stresses that the real challenge to transform the rural sector into a true pro-poor growth engine will be to value and incorporate the capacity and potential of small-scale 'non-professional' peasants into the core strategies for rural development. The lessons drawn from the Rwandan case should inspire policy makers and international donors worldwide to shift their focus away from a purely output-led logic towards distribution-oriented rural development policies. In other words, the challenge is to reconcile efficiency in creating economic growth with equity, and perhaps, to put equity first. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the paper by Martha Bailey published within the journal which focuses on the most important trends in the U.S. economy over the twentieth century. He provides an overview stating that African American women who have moved from south to north will show up in northern cities with less experience than whites or black nonimigrants. He comments that the paper also used differences across states in early legal access to contraceptives to explain how women's labor force participation changed and how those changes affected inequality among men.

This paper examines the growth of the British commercial communities in the Straits Settlements in the first half of the nineteenth century. It describes how they emerged as a coherent commercial and political interest group, separate from the Indian empire, with their own network of allies and commercial partners in Britain. As such, the Straits merchants emerged as a significant political lobby in their own right. It contends that in the process, they revived earlier notions of Southeast Asia as a discrete geographical region, in which political and ethnic diversity was bridged by the flourishing of maritime commercial networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the trajectories of handicraft cloth production in three major sub-regions of Jiangsu Province in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast to traditional focus on the bankruptcy of rural handicrafts in the face of competition from the modern industry, it argues that the fate of handicrafts depended on the specific characteristics of each sub-regional economy. Thus in Song-Tai, handicraft weaving declined as labour was drawn off into modern industry. In Tong-Hai the availability of machine-spun yarn in the market enabled the development of a commercialised handicraft weaving sector. Finally, in Xu-Huai-Hai machine-spun yarn enabled the inhabitants to substitute their own subsistence handicraft production for cloth purchased from elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses developments at the journal during his tenure as its editor. He comments on the role of the journal's employees, such as Jeremy Atack, Sue Isaac and Sabrina Boschetti, in establishing a system that allows authors to submit articles to the journal through the Internet. He comments on the inclusion of the journal's articles in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database and suggests that the journal is seeking manuscripts by political scientists and articles focusing on economic historical theories and global history. He comments on the acceptance rate of submitted manuscripts and the amount of time it takes for articles to be approved for publication in the journal.

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are sensitive issues in relations between donor agencies and recipient governments, especially in a time when the responsibility for implementing aid activities is shifting towards recipients. This paper deplores that, so far, donors and recipients have adopted an overly technocratic approach to M&E, largely disregarding broader institutional and systemic issues. Using case study material from Rwanda, we illustrate that assessments regarding the quality of a country's M&E efforts may differ sharply depending upon one's perspective. At the core of the matter is 'the denial of politics', one of the most serious flaws in the new aid paradigm promoted in the OECD's 2005 'Paris Declaration'. We argue that while a narrowly defined technocratic vision of M&E may seem 'politically neutral', in fact it may jeopardise M&E's functions of 'accountability' and 'feedback'. This can eventually undermine the effective implementation of some of the key principles of the 'new aid approach'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sierra Leone has recently emerged from a long period of political instability and civil war, and is ranked among the world's poorest countries. Thousands of displaced people are in the process of returning to their villages to rebuild their mainly farming-based livelihoods, and many are growing food crops for the first time in a decade. With pressure on food production increasing in rural areas, the inland valley swamps have been identified by the government as a vital resource for sustaining rural livelihoods and achieving food security through the production of rice and other commodities. However, previous government policies directed at enhanced wetland production have largely failed to achieve their goals, and have been criticised for neglecting the institutional challenges of development. Drawing on recent fieldwork carried out in two rural communities in the Eastern Province, this paper considers how institutional arrangements function in Sierra Leone's swamp wetlands, and explores how stresses associated with a post-conflict environment are shaping land-use decisions and mediating access to resources in new ways. The findings of the enquiry have implications for Sierra Leone's recently adopted commitment to decentralisation, a move that has, in theory, seen the state strengthen its position at the local level, and will allegedly create new spaces for increased interaction between state agencies, traditional leaders and communities. Two institutional challenges are examined - access to land and access to labour - that must be addressed if decentralised reforms to resource management are to be effective for wetland rice production. The analysis concludes by considering one recent initiative at the forefront of efforts to decentralise the Ministry of Agriculture, the 'Agricultural Business Unit' (ABU) initiative, to elucidate some of the challenges faced in post-conflict wetland rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on "The Journal of Economic History." It is informed that new submissions declined in 2005-2006 from a peak of 135 the previous year and a two-year average of 132 articles. In the year 2006 the journal received 125 new submissions. A list of authors who have contributed with their papers in the journal is also presented.

This article focuses on the 2004 Economic History Association Meetings. Some of the meetings are: War Will Get You There; Credit and Wealth Unterdenlinden; Civil Action; Bombs, Germs and Invaders; Managing Political Uncertainty; Institutions of Unequal Pay; Growth and Conflict; Economic History Society Annual Conference Call for Academic Papers.

Reviews three articles that revealed three important causes of the growth of government in the 20th-century. Paper by Ben Baack and Edward Ray that seeks the origins of the American military-industrial complex; Paper by Colin Forster that demonstrates how well-intentioned reform, aimed at helping a particular group, actually harmed that group; Paper by Hugh Rockoff that is concerned with the origins and effects of the Federal Budget Act of 1921.

Describes the economic policy in Pennsylvania during the 18th-century. Types of economic policy in Pennsylvania; Critical period for explicit policy; Impact of the introduction of paper money.

Discusses papers about textile industries in Europe. Paper by Albion Urdank that examined entrepreneurial failure in woolen trade in Gloucestershire, England; Paper by John Lyons that deals with the cotton industry of Lancashire and northeast Cheshire in England; Leonard Rosenband's paper that deals with a French paper mill.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the economic history of the Southern States.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on communications deregulation as a national political issue in the U.S. from 1839 to 1851.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the evolution of the revenue farms in France since the 1660s.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the history of protectionism since 1870.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on international trade in Venice, Italy from 1303 to 1351.

Presents abstracts of some research papers presented at the 2000 Economic History Association conference. `Arrested Development: Credit, Society, and Growth in a Transitional Economy: Yucatan, Mexico, 1850-1905,' by Juliette Levy; `The Impact of Industrial Segregation on Black Workers: A Study of Pennsylvania, 1916-1950,' by Ryan S. Johnson; `The Relationship Between Economic Growth and Volatility: A Twentieth-Century Perspective,' by Siddharth Chandra.

The back matter of the June 2011 issue is presented, issuing calls for papers for the 2012 annual conference of the Economic History Society and advertising for academic publications by the Cambridge University Press.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on private investments and government subsidies in the cotton trade in Texas.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the political economy of the Soviet Union for the early 1980s.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper comparing the effect of the economy on the health of industrial workers in the U.S. and Great Britain in the late 19th century.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on estimates of investment in Iceland's agricultural industry from 1900 to 1945.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the effect of U.S. silver mining on Spain's economy from 1501 to 1650.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the unification of the financial services industry after the monetary unification in Italy from 1862 to 1913.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the impact of the 1929 economic depression on the progress of technological innovations in the U.S.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the political economy of information at the border between Canada and the U.S. from 1783 to 1812.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on John Law's system of public and private finance in France between 1716 and 1720.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on taxation in Palestine, Syria and Jordan in the 16th century.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the relationship between economic development and geographic factors in 1492.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on rural-urban migration and socioeconomic mobility in England from 1851 to 1881.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the relationship between legal and economic development in Maine from 1700 to 1860.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the history of institutional foundations of impersonal exchange in Medieval Europe.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the public ownership of the U.S. waterworks from 1897 to 1915.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on the human capital interpretation of the economic history of the Jews.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on a historical institutional analysis of the role of the state in trade in Venice, Italy.