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This article paper is concerned with the similarity of the growth performance of the British economy during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties and with the usefulness of the "new-old" industry dichotomy in illuminating the trends of the inter-war period. The inter-war years emerge as a period of growth almost as rapid as any of comparable length in British measured history. The exact rating of the performance naturally varies slightly with the growth criterion adopted and the termini used for the other periods; the simplest way to establish the validity of the conclusion and at the same time leave it open to the reader's judgment is to draw in the inter-war trends on the Matthews graph. The similarity of the growth performance in the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties is largely maintained even when activity is divided into Goods production and Service production. Services get their unity partly from their physical intangibility as final products, partly from supposed differences in income demand elasticities or productivity improvement possibilities, partly, and increasingly, from the statistical difficulties of arriving at satisfactory real output series.

The article comments on the paper "An Economic Theory of the Growth of the Western World," by professors Douglas C. North and Robert Paul Thomas. The paper is related to European economic growth. The theory proposed by North and Thomas relies heavily upon three components. The first is a model for cyclical fluctuations in the pre-industrial economic life of Europe. This model defines the relative changes in the cost of land and labor as changes in population alter the ratio between the two. It incorporates the relative elasticities which have been found in the supply and demand curves for foodstuffs as opposed to those for raw materials and industrial products. North and Thomas then elaborate this last observation into the second major element of their model, a "theory of institutional change." The shifts in factor proportions so heightened the possibilities of profit from production for the market that they exceeded the costs of the institutional innovations needed to change the organization of production and distribution of income. The result was the steady introduction of "secondary" institutional changes such as enclosures, joint-stock companies, government support of certain guilds, and regulation of quality.

This article presents a list of papers related to economic history of Europe. Some of the papers are: "An early Garolingian Mint in the Low Gountries: Bona-Tiel," by M. Metcalf; "Financial Intermediaries and Economic Development, the Belgian Case," by R.J. Morrison; "Middeleeuwse sociale structuren. Enkele kanttekeningen,"by J. Mertems; "Dutch Theology, Trade and War: 1590-1610," by C. Bangs; and others.

The article presents a discussion on the periodical literatures of 1969. Some of the literatures include: "The Explanation of English Regional Differences," by G.C. Homans, "Economic Growth in England Before the Industrial Revolution: Some Methodological Issues," by R.M. Hartwell and "Size and Structure of the Household in England Over Three Centuries," by Peter Laslett. Homan contends, a narrowly economic explanation to see regional social differences in terms of technical and geographical differences and leads to generalizations for which the evidence is inadequate, though it maybe less so in the Middle Ages than in the sixteenth century. The vexed question of the extent of aggregate economic growth in pre-industrial England is brought into the open again in a challenging paper by Hartwell. Surveying the current position, he reminds that despite the accumulating knowledge, ambiguity and uncertainty still reign. He concludes with a plea for greater definition of the problems to be investigated, and for more concern with ways of making the results of inquiries comparable.

The article measures the effect of public finance during the period 1793-1815 on the rate and direction of Great Britain's economic development. It explores the country's involvement in war during the period. One aspect of the war which has intermittently attracted economists" attention from the time of the "bullionist" controversy is the effect of the expedients that were adopted in the field of public finance. The article describes the sources of data which economic historian can use to be able to fairly measure the effect of the country's finance on the rate and direction of economic growth. An analysis on the economic indicators during the period is presented.

The article presents information on several articles on economic history published in various journals. Some of the articles are "Of Plymouth Plantation As A Mercantile Epic," by J. Griffith, published in the "Arizona Quarterly"; "The Planters of Colonial Maryland," by A.C. Land, published in the "Maryland Historical Magazine"; "Trade, Distribution, and Economic Growth in Colonial America," by J.F. Shepherd and G.M. Walton, published in the "Journal of Economic History"; "The Demographic History of Colonial New England," by D.S. Smith, published in the "Journal of Economic History."

Discusses the competence of businessmen in England from 1860-1914. Notion of adverse social attitudes towards entrepreneurship as a major factor causing retardation in economic development; Overview of the social structure of pre-industrial revolution England; Improvements in the educational standards of the nobility and gentry.

The purpose of this article is to examine whether hallage duties on cloth trade can provide an approximate statistical commentary on the course of economic change in England. In this article, attention is devoted to the question of whether any branch of the London cloth trade was in fact exempt from the statutory market requirements. Circumstantial evidence suggests that hallage receipts are sensitive to the more extreme fluctuations of trade; but in the light of all the difficulties analyzed above, it seems unlikely that a percentage measure of the yield fluctuation would supply a reasonably accurate measure of the actual trade fluctuation. The hallage receipts provide a remarkably continuous chronology of at least the major trade fluctuations in the London cloth markets; and behind these fluctuations, major trends of growth in the level of activity are discernible, although quite obviously, given all the problems discussed above, the precise points of trend changes are difficult to identify. As such, these receipts supply important new evidence, which confirms, by and large, previous views of the course of change in the seventeenth-century English economy.

The article focuses on statistics of coal output in southwest Lancashire, England during 1590-1799. No one doubts the central role of coal in the Industrial Revolution, but statistics of coal output before the mid-nineteenth century are meager on both the national and the coalfield scales. Moreover, that those which do exist contain potentially serious flaws is admitted by their authors and by those who have subsequently used them. No comparable body of coalfield estimates exists for the eighteenth century. Regional statistics could not be used to corroborate or refute national estimates. It has not yet been demonstrated that there was an English economy rather than a collection of self-contained or trading regions within England by the end of the eighteenth century, and even if a cohesive national economy did exist regional rates of economic growth would differ. In such a situation national aggregate data are of chimerical value, and regional statistics are more useful for testing hypotheses about the role of coal production in the Industrial Revolution.

Discusses aspects of Richard Henry Tawney's influence as a scholar and a thinker in the light of what we know of him as a man. Educational qualification of Tawney; Views of Tawney on the way to establish an acquisitive society based on competition, individualism and the divine right of self-aggrandizement; Paradoxical features of Tawney's outlook regarding economic progress of East and West.

The article focuses on the commercial development of Ancona, Italy between 1479 and 1551. The description of the changes that occurred in the commerce of Ancona is divided into three main periods. A base period, 1479-84, is first described and is then compared with two periods of the first half of the sixteenth century, 1500-27 and 1541-51. The first of these two latter periods is one of fairly rapid development whilst the second is one of consolidation of the earlier changes. Although overall there was very considerable commercial development in the city, this development seems to have had remarkably little effect on the basic economy of the city. Commercial development did not lead as it did elsewhere to much industrial and agricultural change, but was rather superimposed on an existing framework which probably remained similar in its outlines throughout. Ancona's contribution to trade outside the Adriatic consisted almost entirely of the dispatch of two or three ships each year to the eastern Mediterranean principally to Constantinople or Alexandria.

The purpose of this article is to argue that the view is a product of deductive theorizing, conveniently suited to a general discussion of the rapid economic development of Japan, but hardly supportable when a closer examination is made of the behavior, decisions, and motivations of the leading Meiji entrepreneurs. To show that the "community-centered" entrepreneurs are a product of deductive theorizing, two closely connected points must be made. The first is that the practice of emphasizing the class origin of Meiji entrepreneurs is continued in order to support the current view of "community-centered" entrepreneurs, though it hinders rather than aids the understanding of the entrepreneurial function performed during the crucial years of Japan's economic transformation. The second is that the Meiji entrepreneurs are often revealed as unabashed profit-maximizers, regardless of their class origin, when one examines their deeds rather than their public utterances, and the results rather than the reasons given in the autobiographies for their business decisions.

The object of this article is to demonstrate that economic analysis used in conjunction with the data employed by researcher R.B. Sheridan yields the conclusion that the possession of the British West Indies actually had the effect of retarding the growth of Great Britain. Sheridan contends that the West Indies in general, and Jamaica in particular, yielded an economic surplus, which contributed in no small way to the growth of the metropolitan economy. In the course of his argument, Sheridan constructs an estimate of the wealth of Jamaica during the 1770's and expands it to include all the British West India sugar colonies. Sheridan's argument contains two types of error that, when corrected, vitiate his conclusion. One type of error, an error of measurement, occurs both in his attempt to measure the wealth of Jamaica and in his acceptance of an estimate of income generated by this wealth. The more serious mistake, however, is an analytical error. Sheridan implicitly considers the extensive growth of the sugar colonies as a measure of their contribution to the economic growth of the mother country.

The purpose of article is to bring together available distributions before and after the Industrial Revolution in an attempt to make those data that are available more meaningful within the context of a long period of economic growth. It is difficult to measure the extent of improvement of various social and economic groups during the Industrial Revolution. There seems to be a growing body of evidence showing that lower-income segments shared in economic growth. However, the idea still prevails that a dynamic industrial group developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which made the rich richer even if the poor did not become poorer. The consequence of such a movement would mean that relative inequality among all income groups would increase. There is a degree of silence about the British experience, even though income tax distributions exist for various income years since 1801. This stems from the fact that from 1803 to 1910 there were no comprehensive definitions of income. Distributions were available only for Schedule D income, that is, income from trade or business, the professions, and some miscellaneous items including small interest payments.

The article compares the responses of handloom weavers to Chartism in Great Britain. The response of the working classes to the Chartist Movement of the 1830's and 1840's has perhaps too often been seen in the light of revolt against economic distress. It has been assumed that poorly paid and ill-fed workers, struggling under the pressure of the new industrial capitalists or, in the handwork trades, against the competition of machinery, saw in Chartism the opportunity to improve their economic condition and therefore gave it their wholehearted support. To a large extent this is undoubtedly true, since there is considerable correlation, during the relevant period, between economic distress and radical activity. Certainly individual Chartists and neo-Chartists encouraged their listeners at public meetings by suggesting that the attainment of the "People's Charter" would revolutionize the existing society and ensure that the labouring man obtained his due. But this is not the whole story, for many groups in dire economic distress ignored the movement.

This article discusses the role of transport dues collected in the woollen textile area of the West Riding of Yorkshire, England as valuable indices of economic growth and a subtle indication of speculative investment between 1775 and 1820. First, it details the construction of five main roads by the merchants and manufacturers in the West Riding's chief woollen cloth centers during a national outburst of turnpike construction between 1739 and 1743. The article also discusses controversies regarding the finances of the turnpike roads. It provides a sample data of toll leases on the main turnpike roads around Leeds from 1772 to 1820. Finally, it provides a summary of the movements of the trade cycle within the West Riding.

The article provides information on the causes of the industrial revolution in medieval England. It also presents information on the consequences of the industrial revolution and the problem of determining the reason for the occurrence of the revolution. The twentieth century has been remarkable for historical productivity, for the increasing quantity and range of source materials available, for the growing sophistication of techniques, and for the large-scale growth in numbers of professional economic historians, with their own societies, journals, university departments and degrees, but there still is relative ignorance about many major problems of the industrial revolution, and in lieu of detailed investigation into their solutions, inevitably much speculation. On any historical accounting, the industrial revolution is one of the great discontinuities of history; it would not be implausible indeed, to claim that it has been the greatest. Economic history has always been concerned largely with the documentation, description and explanation of what the economists call economic growth, and with so much empirical and theoretical literature on growth by the economists now available, some historians are turning towards the economists for guidance.