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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the tensions inherent in the 'speeding up' of methods of manufacturing paper by hand in Europe. Earlier in 1732, a dynamic administrator hoping to revive the fortunes of the small-paper maker centre near Clermont-Ferrand in France, facilitated the placing of an exceptional order by a Parishian printer. The contract was not large enough, but the high quality required for the luxury edition of the works of a great scholar offered a unique chance for paper makers to display their skills and renew their links with the capital's profitable markets. The mill owners, readily set to work, but they also immediatedly and repeatedly asked their protector to find an outlet for the paper that would inevitably remain after the best realms had left for Paris. The claim was legitimate not only because these paper makers were in need for assistance, but it was impossible for anyone engaged in that business to limit production to the finest paper only. Papers of different qualities inevitably accumulated on their sorting tables.

The article describes the colonial monetary standard in Massachusetts in the 1600s. It discusses the establishment of a commodity standard in 1640 and the official prices of commodities in Massachusetts during the 1600s. The article details the development of the paper-money standard in 1690. It comments on the topics covered by most recent studies of the monetary system of the American colonies. The establishment of a mint in Boston in 1652 is reported. By 1737 the price of silver had risen. In 1750, the Massachusetts Assembly restored specie payments. The article also considers the objections to the continuation of paper-money issues.

From its foundation as a private corporation in 1694, the Bank of England extended large amounts of credit to support the British private economy and to support an increasingly centralised British state. The Bank helped the British state reach a position of geopolitical and economic hegemony in the international economic order. In this paper, we deploy recalibrated financial data to analyse an evolving trajectory of connections between the British economy, the state, and the Bank of England. We show how these connections contributed to form an effective and efficient fiscal–naval state and promote the development of a system of financial intermediation for the economy. This symbiotic relationship became stronger after 1793. The evidence that we consider here shows that although the Bank was nominally a private institution and profits were paid to its shareholders, it was playing a public role well before Bagehot's doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I show inter alia that, by one barely known but official measure, imports of goods into the United Kingdom towards the end of the Second World War were more than twice the best‐known measure. The lower measure is that found in the historical British national accounts and in the Bank of England's A millennium of macroeconomic data. That invaluable compendium in fact has both these measures, and indeed another one also, but this is not clear, and there is no proper explanation of the differences between these series. The differences matter. What I will show to be the most obvious, though not the only legitimate, measure of wartime goods imports suggests that real imports were higher at the end of the war than in the 1930s, and higher as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP). By contrast the national accounts figures show an absolute real‐terms fall, and a larger still fall as a proportion of GDP. This really mattered in an economy already exceptional for its high imports. In this paper I clarify the nature of the different measures of imports and how they have resulted in a radically different understanding of the British war effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to a growing literature on state capacity with reference to the early modern Asian empires. The historiography of these states, and especially the Mughal empire of South Asia, has moved away from an image of unrestrained despotism towards that of a constrained state, but has yet to explore fully what these constraints were and what the state did to overcome them. Using a new dataset on conflicts in Mughal South Asia, and an analytical model, the paper shows how forgiving rebel leaders was used as a strategic tool to secure stability, in a setting where high information costs made intermediaries indispensable to the state. The paper also offers some comparison between Asian empires on the role of intermediaries in shaping state constraint and fiscal policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the classic question of legal origins: whether laws originating from common or civil law traditions are more effective in promoting governance rules with stronger shareholder and investor protection. But corporate governance cannot be easily disentangled from other sources that can influence firm outcomes. This paper disentangles these effects by assembling a new dataset of corporations in Egypt between 1887 and 1914. Egypt had an unusual system of incorporation. The main legal system was a close French transplant but entrepreneurs – Europeans and Egyptians alike – had the option of incorporating under any European law. This practice allowed extraordinary legal flexibility in choice of law, governance provisions, and board composition. The new findings show that companies incorporated under British law provided weaker shareholder protection than companies incorporated under French laws, especially in giving weaker voting rights to minority shareholders, preventing oversight over directors' borrowing powers, and limiting director rotation. These rules mattered for firm performance. Corporations with weaker investor protection had higher failure risk, were less profitable, and had lower firm value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the issue of the Lend-Lease declaration in Great Britain on September 10, 1941. There were two closely linked factors which caused the dramatic reduction in Britain's overseas trade. First, large sections of Britain's manufacturing industry had to be converted to war production, thus reducing the capacity for manufactured exports. By June 1944, 33 percent of Britain's labor force was engaged in war duties and a further 22 percent was in the armed forces. Secondly, America supplied Britain with food, raw materials, industrial and military equipment, without cash payments, under Lend-Lease. The responsibility for Lend-Lease in the early days was delegated to Harry Hopkins, the person in charge for Lend-Lease, though the official head of the agency in charge of Lend-Lease was nominally General J.H. Burns. Despite Hopkins's renowned energy and drive, Lend-Lease supplies to Britain during 1941 only played a marginal role in the war effort. There was an unavoidable time lag between the inception of Lend-Lease and the American economy's ability to produce the goods.

The paper provides a detailed analysis of excess mortality during the 'Spanish Flu' in a developing German economy and the effect of poverty and air pollution on pandemic mortality. The empirical analysis is based on a difference‐in‐differences approach using annual all‐cause mortality statistics at the parish level in the Kingdom of Württemberg. The paper complements the existing literature on urban pandemic severity with comprehensive evidence from mostly rural parishes. The results show that middle‐ and high‐income parishes had a significantly lower increase in mortality rates than low‐income parishes. Moreover, the mortality rate during the 1918 influenza pandemic was significantly higher in highly polluted parishes compared with least polluted parishes. Furthermore, the paper provides a detailed description of mortality statistics in Württemberg and new excess mortality rate estimates for Germany and its states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper qualitatively and quantitatively examines the development of the sovereign debt market in Prewar China under different governments. During the Beijing Era (1912–26), accompanied by the establishment of necessary financial institutions, the sovereign debt market emerged to meet fiscal needs. Surprisingly, the Nationalist government, in power from 1927, successfully cultivated a robust market characterized by its expanding size and liquidity. Setting itself apart from its predecessors, the government established credibility as a borrower in two key ways. Firstly, it demonstrated unwavering commitment to debt service by settling previous debts and offering well‐structured new ones, even during challenging times. Furthermore, the government escrowed fiscal revenue, pledged for debt repayments, to a semi‐independent committee of private bankers on behalf of debtholders, enhancing public confidence. Secondly, the government showcased its ability to secure tax revenues for debt repayments. However, starting from 1931/2, the debt market experienced a decline due to the government's compromised ability to pay resulting from external wars and shifting political priorities that weakened its commitment to debt repayments. Empirical evidence confirms the market's responsiveness to regime shifts and policy changes. This paper sheds light on how a nascent autocratic government can successfully borrow from the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the history of contractual choice in coffee plantations of São Paulo, Brazil. It focuses on the consolidation of non‐captive labour markets in the early phases of the transition from slavery in the country, particularly in the 1840s–50s. Vis‐à‐vis the alternatives of fixed rents and fixed payments per time worked or piece rates, the paper examines the rationale for the adoption of sharecropping arrangements with European bonded labourers. New archival evidence suggests that sharecropping had no obvious productivity advantage over alternative labour–rental arrangements in this period, and that the adoption of sharecropping arrangements resulted from the positional advantage of its first proposers, who influenced later choices of contractual design. A credit‐labour tie‐up long outlived the original sharecropping arrangements, in turn allowing for the immigration of poor and credit‐constrained Europeans, paving the way to insert Brazil into the circuits of mass migration without promoting institutional reforms to attract non‐bonded immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the Xingke Tiben, this paper assesses the long‐run economic development of China, by constructing a new estimate of male occupational structure during 1734–1898 by sector, sub‐sector pattern, and region. After assessing the source's biases, using this new empirical basis, this paper demonstrates that the national male occupational structure was nearly identical in 1761–70, 1821–30, and 1881–90, suggesting a long‐lasting structural stasis of the national economy, allowing for fluctuations between benchmark dates. Within agriculture, substantial regional differences in labour organisation are revealed. Three distinct models are found: the Northern Regions model features a high usage of wage labour, the Yangtze Valley model presents a high level of tenancy development, and the Southern Regions model displays the highest share of landowners. All three models saw increasing use of wage labour in 1761–1890 and shrinking landownership in 1821–90. At the regional level, the long‐run estimate for Lower Yangtze suggests that the region as a whole stagnated throughout the entire period, but the overall structural stasis hides dynamic, contrasting long‐run economic change between the region's core and peripheral areas. Comparative analysis with England further suggests that the timing of the Great Divergence between China and England took place before 1734, even in the context of the regional difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines mortality patterns in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, from 1859 to 1940. It produces important new insights into Mediterranean urban historical demography and is the first comprehensive study of urban mortality in Greece, utilising the largest and one of the longest time series at the individual level yet calculated from civil registration and census data. Abridged life tables were constructed for the first time for a Greek urban settlement, enabling the calculation of age‐specific mortality rates and life expectancies. Hermoupolis experienced much higher mortality levels than the national average. The findings suggest that early childhood mortality started to decline rapidly from the late nineteenth century onwards, with declines in early adulthood and infancy following. The paper reinforces and confirms our limited knowledge about the timing of the mortality transition in Greece. It proposes that an urban penalty was clearly operating in the country even during the early twentieth century. Finally, this paper suggests that a combination of factors was responsible for the mortality decline in Hermoupolis, including wider access to water, which even when it was not clean enough to drink, nevertheless enabled improvements in personal hygiene among the residents of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on an article written by Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright in which the records of most of Lancashire, England's textile machinery makers from 1878 to 1920 were used to document investment in alternative spinning technologies in Lancashire prior to World War I. Saxonhouse and Wright argued that in prewar Lancashire, organizational structure did not constrain the diffusion of ring spinning. The availability of ring-frames that could spin yarn on paper tubes made it unnecessary to incur the heavy expenses of shipping ring yarn on wooden bobbins. With their focus confined to the constraint imposed by wooden bobbins, both the writers failed to explore a related, but more profound problem: the ring-frame was not cost-effective in spinning shuttle-ready weft for Lancashire's looms. Indeed, from the 1880s well into the interwar period, Lancashire's textile engineers devoted considerable inventive effort to the development of a ring-spinning machine that, like the mule, could spin shuttle-ready weft on the bare spindle, but without commercial success. In contrast to weft spinning, ring-frames were often used for warp spinning in specialized coarse and medium spinning mills in prewar Lancashire. Given the available evidence, it is reasonable to conclude that in cases where ring spinning would have been adopted anyway, a firm may well have opted to use paper tubes instead of wooden bobbins.

An introduction is presented which discusses various reports within the journal on topics including India's economic history, slave labour on the cotton plantations in the southern U.S., and the role of trade in British industrialisation.

Using historical data for the 1700–1914 period, this paper analyses the nature and direction of technical change in Britain. The evidence in this paper indicates that, over this long period, labour‐saving technology adoption was a major response to changes in relative factor prices, thus supporting the hypothesis that 'induced innovation' was a major driver of technical change during the British industrial revolution. Labour saving was made possible and sustained by capital‐augmenting and energy‐augmenting technical change coupled with continuous capital accumulation and abundant energy supplies. This process placed the British economy on a higher capital–labour ratio equilibrium, and was the primary force driving sustained productivity growth, which further raised wages and living standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the relationship between land revenue systems and returns to agricultural labour in colonial India. I provide the first district‐level comparative estimates of agricultural labour returns relative to average income, on the basis of wage/income ratios for 1916. I then use those estimates to analyse the impact of the land revenue systems established by the British colonial authorities. Results show that districts with a larger proportion of non‐landlord land revenue systems presented higher relative wages, closer to the average income. This effect was mainly driven by differences in land concentration connected to the type of landownership introduced by land revenue systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss the basis of the illegal slave trade between Africa and Cuba, measuring its volume and profit during the first half of the nineteenth century. Due to its illegal nature, the sources for exploring this trade were systematically destroyed, but we have been able to locate the accountancy of 17 expeditions that gives us a comprehensive understanding of the profits, margins, and risks. The basis to understanding this business was the murderous use of enslaved persons in the sugar mills, which forced a continuous repositioning through an illegal, although tolerated by the Spanish authorities, business. We demonstrate that from an economic point of view, the slave trade after illegalization was highly profitable, as the financial return of successful expeditions was near 100 per cent of the invested capital in less than a year. The risk of capture by the British authorities, associated with its illegal nature, was only high during the initial moments, and became steadily lower afterwards. In terms of volume, the trade of a half million enslaved persons illegally smuggled into Cuba produced what was probably the island's most important market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the contribution of enslaved workers to output and growth in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century is a crucial building block to better understand the contours of nineteenth‐century US economic history, and more generally, the connection between slavery and capitalism. Existing estimates only present a partial picture and are potentially problematic. In this paper, we use data on enslaved person valuations to calculate the contribution made by enslaved workers to regional and national gross national product (GNP) in 1839 and 1859 and to the growth in per capita output in the 20 years before the Civil War. We find that in the United States, enslaved workers were responsible for somewhere between 12.49 per cent and 18.0 per cent of the increase in output per capita between 1839 and 1859. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By relying on the number of (surviving) boys per hundred girls observed in the population censuses as a cumulative measure of differential mortality during birth, infancy, and childhood, this paper shows that average Italian child sex ratios (aged 0–4) were abnormally high between 1861 and 1921. Our estimations indicate that unexplained excess female mortality resulted in around 2–3 per cent of 'missing girls' during this period. Likewise, by constructing a new dataset on child sex ratios at the provincial level during the same period, this article shows that child sex ratios tended to be higher in Southern Italy, a geographical cleavage that became stronger as time went by. Crucially, the results reported here cannot be explained by registration issues because (1) the analysis holds if we focus on the sex ratios of older children (aged 5–9) and (2) these patterns are also clearly visible using death registers. Unexplained excess female mortality early in life disappeared from the 1920s onwards, thus suggesting that either discriminatory practices gradually vanished and/or that they no longer translated into higher mortality rates due to enhanced living standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The London Assurance Company (LA), which incorporated during the bubble of 1720, experienced more dramatic price movements in its shares than the South Sea Company. This paper examines how incorporating during the bubble affected its long run performance. We show that the bubble in the Company's share price was partly attributable to changes in market structure during the share issuance process. As a result of the bubble, the Company's original subscribers, who had been curated for expertise and political connections, overwhelmingly exited during 1720 and were replaced by unsuccessful speculators. Analysis of LA shareholder behaviour up to 1737 suggests that this loss of shareholder expertise had detrimental consequences for the Company's performance. These results demonstrate how a bubble in the shares of a newly created company can lead to an exodus of value‐adding investors, damaging the company's long‐term prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European settler colonies are often thought to have been characterised by a continued expansion of the landed frontier, which impacted the distribution of wealth across their settler populations. Hampered by a lack of data, few studies have been able to study this in depth. How does settlement timing affect wealth and wealth accumulation when frontier expansion is not a smooth, continuous process? Was it the case that pioneers reaped greater economic benefits from locating their farms on superior land, or would they be disadvantaged compared with later arrivals owing to limited infrastructure or greater risk of conflict with indigenous populations? In this paper, we use a unique dataset that allows us to analyse the link between time of arrival and wealth accumulation in a colonial agrarian frontier society: the Graaff‐Reinet district in South Africa's Cape Colony between 1786 and 1850. We find that those who arrived early located their farms in the more climatologically suitable areas of the district and utilised their superior lands to accumulate wealth more quickly than latecomers. However, owing to institutional changes that favoured later British arrivals, we also show that the existence of an early‐arrival premium did not mean persistence in land ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the scanty and inadequate studies on Serbia's growth performance before the First World War, this paper presents production‐side GDP estimates for Serbia for six years between 1867 and 1910. It probes into the growth dynamics, assessing convergence with the more developed countries of north‐western Europe, as well as progress towards achieving modern economic growth. Although the economy showed some dynamism in terms of overall GDP, per capita GDP in pre‐First World War Serbia grew by only 0.28 per cent per annum, as much of the overall GDP growth was eroded by rapid population growth. Far from converging with north‐western Europe, Serbia continued to fall behind. Sluggish structural transformation and slow income per capita growth suggest that Serbia's transition to modern economic growth was in its infancy. Growth in the dominant agricultural sector was extensive, driven by expanding arable land and population growth. Land was affordable and easy to obtain; hence, peasants invested little in new technologies. Meanwhile, the modern industrial and service sectors were below a threshold that could sustain rapid growth. Nevertheless, this study also highlights the rapid expansion of a small modern sector and export diversification that reflected emergent 'green shoots' in 1905–10. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We know the policy of quarantining plague victims and their families together within their households entailed considerable costs and controversy in early modern Europe. Less clear is the extent to which the authorities implemented the policy in the face of this. This paper presents a novel approach to the measurement of enforcement which relies on linking deceased individuals listed in parish registers into household groups and then measuring changes in within‐household mortality between parishes and epidemics. This provides a more complete assessment of the scale of implementation than would be possible using documentary sources alone. Measuring within‐household mortality allows us to understand patterns of quarantine enforcement in settlements across early modern Europe. Here the focus is restricted to three epidemics that occurred in Bristol – one of England's most populous and prosperous cities. The analysis reveals household quarantine was enforced in 1603–4 with unprecedented vigour. The effects of quarantine are particularly pronounced in the affluent parishes where elite residence was highest. Greater evidence for enforcement is explained by greater elite oversight and control, as well as their desire to protect their own households. The scale of the impact is shocking. Household quarantine could double within household mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of sentiment in the US economy from 1920 to 1934 using digitised articles from The Wall Street Journal. We derive a monthly sentiment index and use a 10‐variable vector error correction model to identify sentiment shocks that are orthogonal to fundamentals. We show the timing and strength of these shocks and their resultant effects on the economy using historical decompositions. Intermittent impacts of up to 15 per cent on industrial production, 10 per cent on the S&P 500 and bank loans, and 37 basis points for the credit risk spread suggest a large role for sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the role of Richard Hopkins, secretary of the Treasury of Great Britain in applying Keynesian economics in the employment policy of the British government from 1929 to 1945. During this period, official attitudes to employment policy changed to a degree which economist John Maynard Keynes regarded as revolutionary. In 1944, on the other hand, the government issued a White Paper accepting responsibility for the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war, and stated its belief that in the past the power of public expenditure, skillfully applied, to check the onset of a depression has been underestimated. Moreover, whereas down to 1940 the budget had been concerned only with cash accounting for central government revenue and expenditure. The 1941 budget, with its accompanying White Paper on national income and expenditure, introduced a national accounting analytical framework which Keynes described as a revolution in public finance. Aggregate demand management was first adopted to deal with wartime inflation.

The article deals with the implementation of the rule by the Advisory Council on Public Records under the provisions of the Public Records Act of 1967 in Great Britain. Most contemporary historians saw the First World War as a historical watershed from which time onwards the activity and potential role of governments in influencing British economic and social development were much enhanced. As a result, particular areas of historical research, such as diplomatic history and historical studies of social and economic policy, were given enormous stimulus. For all historians access to records is essential. New records are almost always welcome and any restriction on access to information is generally deplored or regretted. In the initial euphoria at the release of so much new material comparatively little attention was paid to the status of the public records as research evidence. In 1970, however, doyen of British interwar historians, the late G. L. Mowat, referred to a part of the new material with characteristic shrewdness.

This article discusses the profitability of sugar planting in the British West Indies from 1650 through 1834. First, colonists went there, when they went of their own accord, in order to make money, and it is worth asking how well they succeeded. Then there is the problem of the effect of the plantations upon the mother country. The British West Indies were developed and held under the navigation laws, and these laws gave them a virtual monopoly of the British market for the products of tropical agriculture. Review. The subject of profitability is important for the history of the plantations during the seventy years before the abolition of slavery in 1834. The rate of profit is the ratio between net income and a stock of capital, and a means of estimating these is required. Income is the balance of receipts and expenses, net of capital appreciation or depreciation; sometimes this is stated in planters' papers but more usually people must make the estimates themselves. The rum was usually sold locally to meet the Island Expenses, and for information on these the Island Account is necessary.

The existing studies usually find that technical change was very important in constraining the economic growth of the Soviet Union. While these studies have been successful in quantifying the extent of technical change, they have been less successful in quantifying its nature. This paper moves a step closer to probing the essence of Soviet efficiency by splitting the aggregate technical change into its subcomponents – namely, capital and labour efficiency. I find that the Soviet Union registered strong labour efficiency gains during most of the postwar period, converging towards the labour efficiency level of the global frontier – the US. Labour efficiency growth did decrease over time, but labour efficiency was not a primary cause of Soviet growth retardation. That retardation was instead caused by a decline in capital efficiency. At a disaggregated level, I find that the decrease in capital efficiency was driven by structures. I hypothesize that labour shortages and an inadequate investment policy resulted in a large stock of unfinished, and hence idle, structures, distorting Soviet economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the origins of German banks' risk‐taking in the years preceding the 1931 crisis. The 1920s were marked by a large and prolonged increase in capital flows into Germany, chiefly from the United States and the United Kingdom. This coincided, at the individual bank level, with a rise in leverage and a fall in liquidity. We examine possible connections between the two phenomena. Our analysis is based on a combination of historiographical work and statistical modelling based on a newly hand‐collected bimonthly dataset on German reporting banks from 1925 to 1935. Bank by bank we examine the effects of foreign inflows on decisions related to leverage, lending, and liquidity. The Dawes Plan of 1924 and the relative absence of a too‐big‐to‐fail (TBTF) environment allow us to mitigate endogeneity concerns. We suggest that while capital inflows did not seem to impact banks' liquidity decisions, their impact on leverage was non‐negligeable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a new interpretation of Brazil's independence that relates the process of political emancipation to the Portuguese empire's fiscal crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We discuss the origins and impact of the fiscal crisis that followed the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal in 1807 and the transfer of the government to Rio de Janeiro. Quantitative evidence shows that expenditures with the palace and the army in Brazil were higher than those discussed in the previous literature. Moreover, the government was only able to finance itself by increasing loans via paper money issuances from the Bank of Brazil. Real wages show that the inflationary policy in the 1810s led to a rapid decline in living standards, fuelling dissatisfaction with the government. Our findings are consistent with views expressed in contemporary official correspondence and parliamentary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the impact of collectivization on patricide in China during the Cultural Revolution. From 1955 to 1957, nearly 96 per cent of farmers were organized into communes. Consequently, fathers lost control over family wealth. We propose that this shift decreased fathers' bargaining power over their adult sons, which might increase family conflicts. On the basis of a novel dataset, we find that the speed of collectivization significantly increased patricide, and the result is robust by employing ruggedness to instrumenting for the speed of collectivization. Our study extends the literature on intra‐household bargaining from couples to intergenerational relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before 1948, approximately one‐third of the United Kingdom (UK)'s hospital beds were located in voluntary hospitals, many of which continued to benefit from the funds generated by their historic endowments. When the National Health Service (NHS) was created, the vast majority of these hospitals were taken over by the State. This paper examines the neglected question of what happened to these endowments and the role which charity continued to play in the funding of NHS hospitals more generally. It makes an explicit attempt to examine the development of hospital services in each of the UK's constituent nations and shows how the treatment of endowments and the role of charity differed between them. It also highlights the continuing importance of arguments over the 'boundaries' between 'essential' and 'non‐essential' forms of health service expenditure, and between the roles of the statutory and voluntary sectors more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so‐called New World in 1492, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards settled in Central and South America. This paper assesses the skill selectivity of Spanish migrants who went to Hispanic America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries for the first time. The age‐heaping method is employed to estimate numeracy levels as a proxy for human capital. With a database of 33 929 individual observations, the findings show that Spaniards who left the country to settle in the Spanish territories were positively self‐selected. Additionally, differences are observed in the human capital of those who chose to settle in Mexico, who had a higher level of numeracy, than those who chose Peru. These differences might be due to the viceroyalty structure and educational institutions that encouraged the emigration of people with greater human capital to Mexico. Finally, when the level of numeracy of Spaniards in Hispanic America is compared with the numeracy of the total population, emigrants still had higher levels of human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of the disruption of the Ottoman Empire on the integration of regional and colonial commodity markets in the Near East. Exploiting a novel dataset on commodity prices in Syria, Egypt, Turkey, France, and the United Kingdom covering the 1787–1939 period, it assesses the extent of price dispersion across markets before and after the end of the Ottoman Empire and investigates the causes behind the change in market integration. The results indicate that, while regional markets disintegrated during 1923–39, reflecting the anti‐global environment of the interwar era, colonial market linkages strengthened. The empirical findings also highlight that border effects, rather the rise of protection per se, were the main drivers behind the increase of regional price dispersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of consumption practices in Venice in the long eighteenth century through the combined use of post‐mortem inventories and household budgets. Although Italy experienced a period of relative decline between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, our findings suggest that Venetian households enjoyed a rich and vibrant material culture that was fully comparable with those of the most advanced European urban economies. However, although new products, practices, and fashions were adopted by Venetian society, the architecture of consumption did not undergo sudden and extreme changes; rather, consumption was gradually refined, following the path that it had begun during the Renaissance. We therefore argue that the Venetian economy did not experience a consumer revolution but, instead, consumer evolution. Moreover, this study shows that sophisticated consumption practices were not exclusive to the more dynamic economies of the continent but were widespread even in those regions that were victims of the Little Divergence. We thus suggest that the relationship between consumption development and economic development was not necessarily causal and that the diffusion of new consumption practices throughout society was a necessary, but insufficient, prerequisite for economic take‐off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an original dataset and theoretical framework, this paper offers a reinterpretation of the French wine international trade after external shocks during wine globalisation based on trade policy. To maintain its external position, particularly after the arrival of phylloxera in the 1860s, French authorities promoted the development of Algerian vineyards by complex discrimination in tariffs. We highlight a negative relationship between discrimination in tariff policy and market share for wine trade partners to the detriment of Spain, Italy, and Portugal and in favour of Algeria. By combining a counterfactual analysis and two theoretical models, we consider Algeria as a new competitor in an imperfect competition. Moreover, using data of wine quality at a disaggregated level, we reveal that the control of imports by France allowed the diversification of the range of exports and maximisation of profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of regional disparities within the present‐day borders of Turkey since 1913. Based on our estimates for 58 provinces, we find β‐convergence, an inverse U, and more recently, the beginnings of an N‐shaped pattern for value added per capita. We also find that regional disparities in Turkey exhibit a number of special features that do not easily fit the well‐studied pattern of the early industrializers. First, while per capita value added in other regions moved towards country averages, the differences between the East and the rest of the country persisted and even increased until recently. Second, spatial distribution of economic activity became more concentrated over time due to continued migration to the megacity of Istanbul. Third, we find that regional disparities in per capita value added in Turkey and other developing countries have been higher than those experienced by the early industrializers. These findings raise questions about the extent to which the regional disparities experiences of Turkey and other developing countries have been different than those of the early industrializers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the 1940s and 1970s, Spain used a variety of economic policies that hindered international trade. Because the mix of tariffs, quotas, administrative barriers, and exchange rate regimes varied greatly over time, the quantification of the effect of the various trade policies on international trade in this period is particularly elusive. In this paper, we use historical bilateral trade flows and a structural gravity model to quantify the evolution of Spain's border thickness, a summary measure of its barriers to international trade. We find that Spain's borders in the period 1948–75 were thicker than those of any other country in Western Europe, even after the liberalization of trade that started in 1959. These comparatively higher impediments to international trade implied substantial negative effects on consumer welfare. We estimate that accumulated welfare costs over the period 1948–75 exceed 20 per cent of a year's total consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a new chronology of the business cycle in the United Kingdom from 1700 on an annual basis and from 1920 on a quarterly basis to 2010. The new chronology points to several observations about the business cycle. First, the cycle has significantly increased in duration and amplitude over time. Second, contractions have become less frequent but are as persistent and costly as at other times in history. Third, the typical recession has been tick‐shaped with a short contraction and longer recovery. Finally, the major causes of downturns have been sectoral shocks, financial crises, and wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian Empire had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Using a variety of official statistical sources and qualitative evidence, this paper documents uniquely high infant mortality among ethnic Russians. In contrast, among other ethnic groups of the empire, infant mortality rates did not exceed those of the European countries by much. The evidence suggests that the explanation for the Russian infant mortality pattern was ethnic‐specific infant care practices, such as the early introduction of solid food, which increased the incidence of lethal gastrointestinal diseases. Our findings highlight the importance of traditional infant feeding practices in mortality in pre‐industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical research on the race between education and technology has focused on the West but barely touched upon 'the rest'. A new occupational wage database for 50 African and Asian economies allows us to compare long‐run patterns in skill premiums across the colonial and post‐colonial eras (c. 1870–2010). Our data reveal three major patterns. First, skilled labour was considerably more expensive in colonial Africa and Asia than in pre‐industrial Europe. Second, skill premiums were distinctly higher in Africa than in Asia. Third, in both regions, skill premiums fell dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, ultimately converging to levels long observed in the West. Our paper takes a first step to explain both the origins of the Africa–Asia gap and the drivers of global skill premium convergence, paying special attention to the colonial context that shaped demand, supply, and labour market institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings together some of the improvements to GDP estimates from the income side since the publication of Charles Feinstein's 1972 volume National income, expenditure and output of the United Kingdom, 1855–1965. Many of the improvements and refinements were made by Feinstein himself and this paper makes a start in bringing the different elements together, focusing chiefly on reconstructing the income‐based estimates for the period 1841–1920. The new data are then used to comment on several features of the late nineteenth‐century UK economy, considering both the trend and cyclical path of the economy. The new data, coupled with modern de‐trending methods, suggest that there was a long‐term slowing of the UK economy from the late nineteenth century, starting from the 1870s. To undertake the trend–cycle decomposition, we employ a wavelets methodology to describe the time–varying features of trends and cycles over this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What caused the recovery from the British Great Depression? A leading explanation – the 'expectations channel' – suggests that a shift in expected inflation lowered real interest rates and stimulated consumption and investment. However, few studies have measured, or tested the economic consequences of, inflation expectations. In this paper, we collect high‐frequency information from primary and secondary sources to measure expected inflation in the United Kingdom between the wars. A high‐frequency vector autoregression suggests that inflation expectations were an important source of the early stages of economic recovery in interwar Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Keynesian Revolution after the publication of the book "The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes," which deals with the employment policy of the government of Great Britain during the Second World War. Thus, it will be argued that great care must be taken in using the term "Keynesian", and that the rather contradictory proposals of the 1944 Employment Policy White Paper should not be seen as a faithful reflection of the furthest extent Keynes was prepared to go to preserve employment without inflation. General unemployment could be avoided by measures to control aggregate demand: open market operations; contracyclical public works; support to consumption through changes in hire-purchase terms, tax reduction, consumer credits, and extensions of the social services. During depressions, the budget would be imbalanced and the debt increased, but this could be counteracted by a capital levy or an annual wealth tax. Whatever the British Treasury may have thought about Keynesian employment policy in theory, the terms of reference of the Steering Committee required them to propose ways of controlling the various categories of aggregate demand. Since Keynes was not intimately involved in discussions of employment policy, he was not forced to resolve the inconsistencies in his thoughts on the budget nor to make a definite stand on policy in the third post-war phase.