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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 presents a list of reference materials and papers on economics, agriculture, business and finance which were published in various journals. Some of the papers in the list include, "Gino Luzzatto," by various authors, published in the journal "Muova Rivista Storica, XLIX," are two issues dedicated to the memory of Gino Luzzatto, recalling his scholarly work and his high standing as a man and a teacher, "Ricordo di Yves Renouard," by F. Melis, published in the journal "Economia e Storia, XII," "Yves Renouard, uno storico amico dell' Italia," by A. Sapori, published in the journal "Mouva Rivista Storica, XLIX," is a commemoration and a bibliography of Yves Renouard, "I beni comunali e Forganizzazione del villaggio neli' Italia superiore fino al Mille," by G.P. Bognetti, published in the journal "Rivista Storica Italiana, LXXVII," describes the institutions of the early Middle Ages on lands of collective property and the passage to lands of communal property in the eleventh century.

This article examines the business and politics of British decolonization in the 20th century. Historians are increasingly interested in the role of British business in the ending of the British empire. A succession of books, articles and theses based on an interrogation of a newly available business and government papers has examined the business-government relations during the decolonization of particular territories. In surveying the subject literature of business, government and decolonization, this article synthesizes a set of currently disparate case studies and provides the general assessment of the roles of British entrepreneurs, firms and commerical associations in the process of retreat from empire. In so doing, it is possible to scrutinize paradigms which have postulated a close relationship between British businesses and British governments during the end of empire. Neo-marxist, neo-colonial analyses view decolonization as a premptive strategy in which British governments, serving the interest of metropolitan capitalism, cynically anticipated and outmaneouvred colonial radicalism by prematuredly transfering political sovereignty to 'moderate' nationalists.

This article discusses trade, empire, and the fiscal context of imperial business in Great Britain during decolonization. By the mid-1950s, official interest in the activities of British business in relation to sterling area balance of payments had waned. By this time the failure of many high-profile colonial development projects such as the notorious and ill-conceived Tanganyikan groundnuts scheme had combined with the falling value of colonial earnings on world markets to reduce the importance of colonial development to Britain's balance of payments. By then, hopes of intensified economic integration had also foundered in the face of reluctance on the part of other Commonwealth governments to extend the imperial preference system established at Ottawa in 1932, as well as a refusal by a majority in the Conservative Party to flout the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in pursuit of extended preferences. Simultaneously, Britain's own trading interests were shifting away from the empire-Commonwealth towards the advanced economies in Europe, and although Britain initially chose to remain outside the new European Economic Community, the importance increasingly attached to European trade was signalled with the agreement of Plan G in 1956, leading three years later to the formation of the European Free Trade Area.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an example of private transnational governance in the first decades after the Second World War: the Council of European Industrial Federations (CEIF), created in 1949 by the peak-level trade associations in western Europe. Based on this case, the article takes issue with two predominant views in the current literature: a view that sees the European integration process, at least in its early stages, as driven largely by nation-states and political agendas; and another view, widespread among business and economic historians, that contacts between business associations at that time served the main purpose of re-establishing international cartels. The CEIF actually performed a wide variety of functions: it represented organized business at international events and in organizations, acted as a multilateral arena for the exchange of information and for building trust among the businesspeople of various European countries, and, from 1958 onwards, helped bridge the divide between those inside and those outside the Common Market. On occasions, for example, in the case of export incentives, it even managed to forge a consensus for policy action when national governments were unable to agree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author makes a point-by-point comments on a critique by Julia A. Smith of his study on businessmen and land ownership in the late nineteenth century Britain. He first commented on Smith's reluctance to see the "Dictionary of business biography" as a collection of business biographies that can stand as a credible source for investigation patterns of wealth and land holding when combined with other data. He also pointed out that he and Smith used different samples which led to Smith's detection of a larger proportion of businessmen landowners.

The article comments on entrepreneurship in Great Britain during the late Victorian period. In using the total factor productivity index to analyse late-Victorian entrepreneurship, two propositions are confronted. The first is that the late-Victorian economy was characterized by perfectly competitive product and factor markets and by an efficient allocation of resources. The second is that the measured residual derives from the effects of the activities of entrepreneurs. The purpose of what has gone before has been to show that at the theoretical level, whether approached from theories of entrepreneurship or from the body of neoclassical theory, these two propositions are contradictory. The competitive equilibrium assumption necessary to justify using factor shares as the relevant partial elasticities creates a world in which entrepreneurs of whatever variety have no function and indeed cannot exist. It follows that whatever is measured by the residual, and it has already been pointed to its rag-bag nature, entrepreneurship is excluded by the assumptions which are made in order to generate it.

The article presents a list of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland. Some of the publications are--"Examination Roll of Arbroath," edited by F. Davidson, "Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History: 1770-1980," by A. Armstrong, "The Diffusion of Vetches in Medieval England," by B.M.S. Campbell, "Horses in Shakespeare's England," by A. Dent, "Countryside Planning in Practice the Scottish Experience," edited by P.H. Selman, "The Growth of the London Carrying Trade: 1681-1838," by D. Gerhold, "The British Iron Industry: 1700-1850," by J.R. Harris, "Business, Banking and Politics: The Case of British Steel, 1918-1939," by S. Tolliday" and others.

This article discusses the proliferation of markets in England between 1200 and 1349. Though the number of weekly markets licensed by the English crown between 1200 and 1349 is known to run into thousands, the evidence of the charter rolls, patent rolls, and close rolls has severe limitations. Probably most markets in this category were founded before the thirteenth century. The following six columns indicate the number of markets newly licensed in successive periods of 25 years between 1200 and 1349. Markets with an enrolled license are assumed to be new, for this purpose, where no earlier reference has been found. Of these seven categories of market the first is the most miscellaneous, and it inevitably includes some markets founded after 1200 whose correct dating would modify the figures in the succeeding columns. One reason for the increasing number of grants is that the king's right to license new markets became more effective. The law courts, in bringing anomalous cases before royal justices, encouraged respect for the distinction between what was a market and what was not.

This article discusses various issues related to the experience of traders in the Irish rural economy during the period ranging from 1880 to 1914. The final two decades of the nineteenth century heard increasing claims that the country population supported, bloated marketing and retailing sectors. Rural reformers, clustered chiefly around the agricultural co-operative movement, were particularly vigorous in denouncing the magnitude of the trading community. The troubled character of late nineteenth-century Irish agriculture requires an elaborate discussion. From roughly the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s farm-product prices slumped, tillage and dairying being particularly adversely affected. Again if one uses the numbers of paupers and of overseas emigrants as indicators of employment prospects in rural Ireland, this period emerges in a distinctly pessimistic light. An increase in the relative size of groups servicing the agricultural community is, on the face of it, an unlikely concomitant of rural crisis.

This article examines the effect of financial restraints in banks on the growth of firms in the cotton industry in Great Britain from 1790 to 1850. V.A.C. Gatrell's recent article "Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century," published in the journal "Economic History Review," draws attention to a neglected body of evidence which shows the predominance of small to middle firms and single-process firms in these sections of the industry in 1840. The statistics are evidently reliable. He argues that the technology of spinning and power-loom weaving offered no substantial incentives to growth beyond a modest size, and suggests that entrepreneurs of the period believed in the advantages of moderation in enterprise rather than economies of scale. The argument of the present article is that the solution to the problem of stunted growth lies in the relations between manufacturers and merchants and the financial environment in which they struggled for markets. A large and constantly changing body of entrepreneurs, trying to sell increasing quantities to more distant and dispersed markets, was serviced by a financial system whose members were characteristically inexperienced, insecure, and unprepared to meet the unprecedented developments in industry and overseas markets.

The article discusses personal wealth of the business community in seventeenth-century England. The business community in the seventeenth century is not easy to define: such contemporaries as economist C. Molloy tied themselves in knots trying to categorize merchant and retailer, and the complexity of economist George Unwin's work stems largely from the material. The term "merchant" was conventionally reserved for overseas traders, the term "tradesman" for skilled craftsman, and the term "retailer" for those who resold the goods of others. In fact, however, the distinction between wholesaler and retailer, producer and distributor, and even clothier, retailer, and farmer was vague. The decline of specialization along the lines of the medieval guilds makes it difficult to classify the business community in this period by commodity, area and function, even in London. The occupations stated in wills and inventories relate more to status and skill than to economic function. The distinction between tradesman and merchant was economic rather than functional, a question of wealth and volume of business rather than type of trade.