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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]

Eric Williams placed the Caribbean centre stage in discussions of Britain's industrial revolution and historians are increasingly persuaded by his intuition that the Atlantic trading system, underpinned by enslaved labour, played a major role. Early critics focused discussion on the profits of the slave trade but his thesis was broader, and more sophisticated, than they acknowledged. It left room for linkages of many kinds and it is now time to take a broader look at the connections between the rise of merchant capitalism, in which slavery played a central role, and British economic growth. This study looks at one small, fast‐growing industry, wrought copper, largely through the lens of William Forbes, a London smith. Quantitative data from output and trade records are combined with Forbes's business records to show how the demands of sugar cultivation, a particularly concentrated form of agro‐industrial activity, stimulated the development of a supply network which chained thousands of workers in Cornwall, South Wales, Bristol, and London to enslaved labour in the fields and factories of the Caribbean. Market opportunities allowed Forbes to amass great wealth but also directed investment, innovation, and the accumulation of skills that shaped Britain's particular path to industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new perspective on the emergence of machinery in the cotton spinning trade during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It does so by examining the interplay between economic, political, and national interests within the early Hanoverian state. Changes in trading relationships between textile producers across the three kingdoms of England/Wales, Ireland, and Scotland created escalating supply-side problems, which, by the 1760s, would precipitate a quest for solutions based on new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late Victorian Britain was very important in the development of British dominance in light consumer goods industries, such as fermented liquors and spirits; detergents and perfumery; bicycles and other carriages; paper, stationery, and bookbinding; and games of all kinds and sports goods. Firms developed technology-based innovations and marketing-based innovations, creating abnormal peaks of trademark registrations in certain industries. This article investigates those peaks and shows that factors usually pointed out as explaining British economic decline in heavy industries did not impact on the development of light consumer goods industries, and on the contrary encouraged their fast growth during this period. Trademark registrations are shown to provide new insights into the debate on British relative decline, when combined with other industry and firm-level data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland. Some of them are "The Religious Census of Sussex 1851," edited by J.A. Vickers; "The Robert Hall Diaries, 1947-53," edited by A. Cairncross; "The Catholic Question in Ireland and England, 1798-1882: The Papers of Denys Scully," by B. MacDermot; "The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733-64," by J.E. Tierney; "Returns of Papists, 1767," by E.S. Worrall; "The Rabbit and the Medieval East Anglian Economy," by M. Bailey; "A History of Laxton: England's Last Open-Field Village," by J.V. Beckett; "Transhumance Economy, Setting and Settlement in Highland," by A. Bil; "The Empty Fields: The Agricultural Strike of 1914," by R. Brazier; "Towards an Agricultural Geography of Medieval England," by B.M.S Campbell; "The Cost of Capital and Medieval Agriculture Technique," by G. Clark; "British Agricultural Policy, 1912-36: A Study in Conservative Politics," A.F. Cooper; "Harvests of Charge: The Royal Agricultural Society of England, 1838-1988," by N.P.W. Goddard.

The article examines the central statistics of estimates of the British economic growth between 1700 and 1831. In calculating national accounts for the period 1700 to 1831 data on industrial output are relatively abundant. From customs and excise records N.F.R. Crafts draws on evidence about the production of cotton, linen, silk, beer, leather, soap, candles, and paper. Alongside these he places separate industry studies for wool, building, iron, copper, and coal. Historians have long turned to customs and excise data to estimate the size of specific industries. On the face of it, the eighteenth-century state's success in raising large revenues by these means might appear to confirm the reliability of the records which have been utilized. Certainly, many historians have supposed as much, taking amounts passing before the eyes of the customs and excise men as reasonably accurate indicators of the scale of trade and industry. Data for the output of non-excised industries are often even less reliable. For many industries only highly fragmentary statistics are available, usually for particular products in particular places.

This article provides information on various published papers related to economic and social changes in Great Britain since 1850. The concept of social control--essentially middle-class manipulation of the masses for the sake of social stability--that leapt abruptly to prominence in the late 1970s lies behind much of the work produced in 1984. Pat Thane looks at the question from the point of view of the recipient in her article, "The Working Class and State 'Welfare' in Britain, 1880-1914," and demonstrates that the working classes were not enthusiastic about welfare proposals from the state. Accepting the difficulty of discovering attitudes, she finds, through an examination of the records of several agencies, widespread suspicion of Liberal politics as a threat to working class independence. Further support from a different kind of article is brought by Victor Bailey in "In Darkest England and the Way Out: The Salvation Army, Social Reform and the Labour Movement, 1855-1910." This brings out the parallels between religious evangelism and socialism as moralizing agencies appealing to self-respect and working for social reform.

This article provides information on various published papers related to economic and social changes in Great Britain from 1500 to 1700. The yield of 1984 saw some recovery from the dearth of the previous year. There is still a lack of articles in economic history, which suggests a prolonged deviation of the course of the discipline towards social issues. Agricultural history, upon which there was little to report in 1985, has been better served in 1984, although much of the work is of a particular, local, and often specialized character. Michael Reed's article, "Enclosure in North Buckinghamshire, 1500-1750," stresses the importance of preparliamentary enclosure in a typical midland landscape and draws one's attention especially to the volume of enclosure by voluntary agreement. Changes in English agrarian society between 1500 and 1700 are examined in depth only for parts of the north. The article by R.W. Hoyle, "Lords, Tenants and Tenant Right in the Sixteenth Century: Four Studies," analyses the structure of four manors of north Yorkshire, England and shows that the regime of customary tenant right was flexible so far as the lord's options in managing his estates were concerned.

This article provides information on various published papers related to economic and social changes in Great Britain during the late Middle Ages. The historians have expanded the picture of the economy and society in this era, after the tumultuous changes of the eleventh century, in 1986 researchers probe at the very foundations of the existing historical framework. Colin Richmond in his paper, "The Pastons Revisited: Marriage and the Family in Fifteenth-Century England," throws considerable light on the nature of the marital bond, stressing the importance of economic and political considerations in its formulation but allowing a major role for the uncertainties inherent in a very personal human relationship. If social historians have thus considerably expanded the knowledge of aristocratic family life, in 1986 economic historians have not been found wanting in presenting a clearer picture of the rural economy within which the aristocratic family operated. In a number of papers the basic forms of production organization come under consideration.

This article presents comments of the author on the paper "Trends in Real Wages, 1750-1850," by M.W. Flinn on real wages in Great Britain from 1750-1850 that was published in a 1974 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." The first issue must be the applicability of the London-based price series. The tenor of Flinn's remarks is that while none of the available series meets the requirements of the ideal index, retail prices must move in sympathy with wholesale prices and one may doubt the possibility of marked variations in regional price movements. In any case, he contends, the quite remarkable degree of agreement of the several indexes inspires confidence in generalizing not only about the direction but also about the extent of price changes, particularly over the period 1790-1850. However, a number of questions may be raised here. The first involves Flinn's method of analysis. Rightly anxious to avoid the dangers of arguing about long-run trends in terms of movements to and from short-run peaks, he is aware that the choice of dates is a crucial one. Thus, for the volatile period from 1790 to the mid-1820's, he selects the following: 1788/92 (five-year average); 1809/15 (omitting the peak years 1812 and 1813 = an average of five years taken over a seven-year period); and 1820/6 (seven-year period).

This article presents an input-output table for England and Wales for the year 1688 which is based on the extensive dataset compiled by Gregory King in the 1690s, together with other contemporary and modern material relating to the end of the seventeenth century. As well as showing the inter-relationships between the different parts of the economy, the data in the table can be used to compute national income and the shares of different sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and services in total value added. Further, the approach used to compile the table provides a way to subject King's data to as much independent assessment as is possible given alternative sources of information. Sensitivity analysis is used to assess the impact on national income and sector shares of alternative estimates of the grain harvest, metal manufacture, and service sector output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Glorious Revolution has been linked with Britain's economic development in the eighteenth century. This article argues that it contributed to the early transport revolution. First, it shows that the regulatory environment became more favourable for undertakers, with their rights being better protected. Second, it shows that investment in improving roads and rivers increased substantially in the mid-1690s shortly after the Glorious Revolution. Regression analysis and structural breaks tests confirm that there was a change in investment even after controlling for other determinants of investment. The results have implications for debates on the role of political change in British economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on sources and methods used to construct a new index of average monetary earnings during the period from 1880 to 1913 in Great Britain. The two national indices of money wages normally used for this period, which the article extensively refers to, are those published by A.L. Bowley in 1937 and by G.H. Wood in 1909. In 1910, in the first edition of what is today a largely forgotten textbook on elementary statistics, Bowley published a general index number of average wages based on the individual industry series which he and Wood had compiled. Bowley was unable to take account of the vital information about earnings per shift in coal mining in 1914 which was collected for the 1919 Sankey Commission. Without an appropriate benchmark, such as that provided by the 1914 data, it is effectively impossible to translate the movements in piece-rates, based on the sliding scales, into an accurate estimate of earnings. For precisely this reason Bowley had himself criticized the available statistics on this important industry as "hopelessly inadequate." Shortly after he wrote this, the data from the Sankey Commission and the earlier 1886 census were used by one of his former pupils to construct the first reliable estimates of movements in earnings for coal mining. Also, his reliance on the Ministry of Labour indices to cover the last years of the prewar period is unsatisfactory.

Presents the author's opinions on articles related to the economic and social history of Great Britain during the period 1500-1700, which have been published in various periodicals. Views on the industrial and financial history of England; Discussion on the foreign trade of Great Britain; Views on social planning; Discussion on the economic conditions in Great Britain.

This article provides information on various published papers related to economic and social changes in Great Britain from 1700 to 1850. J.V. Beckett's article, "The Peasant in England: A Case of Terminological Confusion," is a useful preliminary warning that contemporaries would have understood the term to include landless agricultural labor. The small landholder was, however, far more widespread, even after 1800, than is usually believed. Mick Reed, a historian, argues that if the census figures are reworked and the extent of commons and sub-letting acknowledged, small-holders can be seen to have played a crucial role in mediating economic and class relations in farming communities through noncommercial reciprocal relationships, their responsibilities to the poor, and their support for the protests of wage laborers. In his article, "The Peasantry of Nineteenth-century England." Reed contributes to the debate about agrarian protest and social control models. He maintains that conflict extended beyond protest incidents into the day-to-day relationships between farmers and their servants and was a phenomenon of both open and closed parishes.

The article presents some revisions in respect of industrial output growth from 1700 to 1831 in Great Britain and of agricultural output growth after 1760 and, more importantly, integrates the revisions of various authors to reveal their implications for the description of macroeconomic growth during the classic industrialization phase. During the industrial revolution era, growth was substantially slower during the years 1780-1831 than is believed by conventional wisdom. The best guesses for the growth rates of real national product are 1.32 per cent per year for 1780-1801 and 1.97 per cent for 1801-31, rather than the 2.06 per cent and 3.06 per cent respectively. The economy did not reach a sustained rate of growth of 2 per cent per year until the 1820s. The economy did not experience a take-off in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. The pace of growth quickened at that time, but not dramatically so. The investment ratio rose by about 1 per cent of national income and total factor productivity growth rose by about 0.15 per cent per year compared with 1700 to 1760.

The article analyzes the capital market, the shipping industry and the imperial connection in Great Britain in the late 19th century. Much debate among imperial historians centres on economist Ronald Robinson's idea that the relation between an imperial power and its colonies rests upon a changing series of bargains arrived at between metropolitan and colonial elites. Robinson suggested that stages in colonial constitutional advance, in particular the granting of responsible government and independence, are best understood as bargains arrived at between imperial policy-makers, concerned to secure evident metropolitan economic interests, and colonists whose fortunes were tied in various ways to the vitality of essentially commercial economies. Opinions vary as to the value of Robinson's model. Some hold that forms of collaboration are inseparable from all imperial expansion, that the idea of collaboration is a truism, and that Robinson's formulation is too vague for analytical purposes. Others stress the ambiguities of collaboration and resistance, which like imperialism, often seem to be words unfit for historians.

The article focuses on the relevance of coalmining in the history of the industrial revolution in Great Britain from 1750 to 1850. There has never been any doubt about the central importance of coalmining in the history of the British industrial revolution. Both the geography and the technology of the new industries, and indeed of industrial Britain as a whole in that period, were clearly influenced by coal and possibly even dominated by it. In coalmining were to be found some of the earliest examples of capital concentration, advanced company organization, and cartellized marketing. In the critical century 1750-1850 the output of coal increased by about a factor often, while productivity per man increased very little, if at all. Consequently, the input, the flow of resources and particularly of labour into the industry, represents one of the strongest growth elements in the economy. Its timing and location must be among the key variables in any detailed study of the industrialization process in Britain.

This article comments on a paper by Donald A. McCloskey, which argued that the British economy of the late 19th century was growing as permitted by the growth of its resources and the effective exploitation of available technology. He argued that significantly higher income growth could not have been obtained by a higher investment rate and that growth was constrained by inelasticities on the supply side. Instead of seeing the period as one of entrepreneurial failure he painted a picture of an economy not stagnating but growing as rapidly as permitted by the growth of its resources and the effective exploitation of the available technology. McCloskey's reinterpretation of the late nineteenth century should be rejected even on the basis of his own model. It is shown using this model that a higher domestic investment rate, entailing a higher capital-to-labor ratio, would have permitted a large increase in consumption per head. An investment rate similar to that of Germany would have given a 25 percent increase in consumption per head in 1911.

This article investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the British interwar economy. The first type of evidence examined is qualitative. The historical record shows that contemporaries regularly reported the incidence and consequences of major uncertainty shocks. The second type of evidence analysed is quantitative. Based on a new index of economic policy uncertainty constructed from newspapers and vector autoregressions, the results suggest that uncertainty was an important source of economic fluctuations in Britain between the wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on published research related to economic and social changes in Great Britain during the early Middle Ages. Nowhere are these changes in research orientation more apparent than in studies of the early middle ages where wide-ranging investigations have produced a series of papers on rustic estates and their inhabitants, towns, industrial activity, and monetary-fiscal systems, each providing clear and incisive insights into the nature of the institutions within these sectors of the economy. Numerically predominant amongst these studies are those concerning the Anglo-Saxon estate. It was also sufficiently resilient to withstand continual changes in ownership. In the article, "Concubinage in Anglo-Saxon England" writer Margaret Ross suggests that the Church's attack on this early Anglo-Saxon institution was part of a general strategy aimed at increasing its land holdings. If the Church was successful in acquiring land by such means in the early Saxon period, however, it was, as others show, singularly incapable of holding on to it, particularly in the period of the Danish invasions.

This article presents response of the author to the comments made by scholar T.R. Gourvish on the paper "Trends in Real Wages, 1750-1850," that was published in a 1974 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." He raises questions in two main areas one related to statistical method, the other concerned with the coverage of data. The first turns out to be rather disappointing. Gourvish's log linear trend lines rather more sophisticated than the author's simple arithmetic percentages in the event come comfortingly close to my figures. In his table, for the period 1788/92-1809/15 he selects four of the seven indexes employed in the table deduced by the author, to show, by his method, rates of rise of between 72 and 84 per cent. The same four indexes, by the author's cruder method, yielded a band from 65 to 74 per cent. For the first deflationary period 1809/15-1820/26, the band of falling prices for the three indexes selected by Gourvish ranged from 31 to 35 per cent, while his method yielded a band between 37 and 39 per cent. This is a rather steeper fall, though not radically steeper; but since a principal conclusion of the article was to point to the significance for real wages of the post-1813 price fall, this difference, in so far as the one measure is better than the other, tends to strengthen the author's case.

This article responds to Robert C. Allen's reply to my new wage evidence for London, 1650–1800. The day rates Allen relies upon are not 'wages', and the evidence clearly points to a large difference between existing estimates and actual wages earned. His use of the piece rate in understanding earnings is significant, but cannot support a 'high wage' thesis. International comparisons that take new evidence into account do not show English wages to be any higher than elsewhere in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the transmission of UK and global shocks to the Irish economy over the period 1922–79, using annual data for consumer prices and real GDP in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. UK aggregate demand and supply shocks have large and significant effects on Irish CPI, but smaller effects on Irish real GDP. A historical decomposition indicates that UK aggregate supply and demand shocks played a more important role than domestic shocks in the evolution of Irish CPI. In contrast, the evolution of Irish real GDP is driven more by idiosyncratic domestic shocks than by UK shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses one under‐studied aspect of Charles I's finances during his Personal Rule: the licensing of tobacco retailers. While it was ultimately a failed project, the tobacco retail licence project was fiscally successful before the transformative events of the 1640s triggered its demise. The project enabled tobacco retail licensees to establish commercial outlets for the marketing of tobacco throughout England and Wales, and cooperation with pre‐existing officeholders contributed to the apprehension of unlicensed retailers. Ultimately, the geographic breadth of tobacco licences translated into much‐needed royal revenue which, when added to other projects and patents, contributed to the king's financial survival. The evidence presented here suggests that we may want to rethink some of our assumptions for how the process of state formation worked and that earlier seventeenth‐century 'prototypes' of taxation were more fiscally successful than previously recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foundation of the East India Company coincided with a dramatic expansion of England's overseas activities brought about through new trading, colonial, and exploratory ventures. This period has received considerable attention in relation to the development of the British Empire, but little is known about how merchants and other commercial actors invested in and contributed to these organizations. Using a newly developed dataset of membership and investment in overseas activities, this article reconstructs the individual portfolios of East India Company members in 1599, 1613, and 1624. This analysis reveals that investors took advantage of opportunities across the globe, and diverse portfolios were common. The implications of this are two‐fold. First, this article makes clear that our current understanding of the East India Company as closely connected with the Levant Company is not sustained with evidence from investment patterns. Second, the interests of London's commercial community suggest new avenues for understanding the early British Empire as a tightly connected, globally focused set of institutions, people, and networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a summary of research in economic history in Great Britain that appeared in various periodicals in 2016. The research is broken down into chronological sections, 400-1100, 1100-1500, 1500-1700, 1700-1850, 1850-1945, and since 1945, with a summary and list of articles for each time period.

Evidence of debts owed to Londoners, and contested before the royal Court of Common Pleas, allows an examination of the role of London creditors in the English depression of the fifteenth century and a reassessment of its causes. In this article, four main issues are examined. What is the nature of the Court of Common Pleas evidence (section I)? What were the three main forms of credit offered by Londoners-unsecured cash loans, sales of goods on credit, and written instruments called bonds (section II)? What is yielded by decadal analysis of Londoners' extension of credit in the fifteenth century-making direct comparisons with Nightingale's published Statute Merchant and Staple data (section III)? What defines, in modern economic terms, the claim of so-called 'monetarist' historians that credit was actively withdrawn during the depression, and how is this verified by the actions of London creditors (section IV)? It is concluded that the records of the Court of Common Pleas provide the detailed evidence monetarist historians have previously lacked both to prove that Londoners actively withdrew credit during the fifteenth century and to demonstrate that they employed pure equilibrium credit rationing in order to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leslie Hannah argues, among other things, that the series on par value of UK‐listed equities that I presented in an article published in the Economic History Review in 2015 is deeply flawed. Although I would quibble with some of Hannah's points, his main conclusion is correct: many of the series in 'Bloody foreigners!' are, in fact, flawed and require substantial revision. In this note, I explain the source of the errors and the steps I have taken to correct them in the preparation of subsequent work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of growth and inequality in the great and little divergence trajectories on both sides of Eurasia. A social table constructed for Tokugawa Japan in the 1840s is compared with two cases with high levels of inequality, Stuart England and Mughal India, and the subsequent changes in the three countries are traced to the modern era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Japanese pattern in the early modern period can be characterized by comparatively modest growth with a relatively egalitarian distribution of income between the social classes, but the pattern changed during the subsequent half-century to one with an increased tempo of growth and a substantial rise in the level of income inequality. The implications of this finding are discussed in terms of the concept of Smithian growth and are placed in the comparative context of the divergence debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to Humphries's critique of Allen's assessment of the high wage economy of eighteenth-century Britain and its importance for explaining the industrial revolution. New evidence is presented to show that women and children participated in the high wage economy. It is also shown that the high wage economy provides a good explanation of why the industrial revolution happened in the eighteenth century by showing that increases of women's wages around 1700 greatly increased the profitability of using spinning machinery. The relationship between the high wage economy of the eighteenth century and the inequality and poverty in Britain in the nineteenth century is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the Geary- Stark method for distributing known GDP totals across regions with a variation suggested by Crafts. Tests of the Geary- Stark method confirm that it generates accurate estimates of regional GDP. There are practical and conceptual problems with Crafts' extension, and it is not tested nor is it testable. New estimates of regional GDP for the period 1861 to 1911 contradict Crafts's suggestion of rising regional inequality. Purchasing power parity adjustments do not alter this trend. The new estimates confirm Ireland's post- Famine catch-up. The great bulk of Irish labour productivity growth can be accounted for by an upward shifting production function, though it can be argued that that portion of growth that represents catch-up may be attributable to labour force decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The article reviews several periodical articles published in 2012 including "Four Windows on Early Britain," by M. Carver, published in "Haskins Society Journal," "Poverty and its relief in late medieval England," by C. Dyer, published in "Past and Present," and "Death and the Maiden," by J.M. Bennett, published in the "Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies."

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British labour market experienced an influx of female clerical workers. Employers argued that female employment increased opportunities for men to advance; however, most male clerks regarded this expansion of the labour supply as a threat to their pay and status. This article examines the effects of female employment on male clerks using data from Williams Deacon's Bank covering a period 25 years prior to and 25 years subsequent to the initial employment of women. It is shown that, within position, women were substitutes for younger men, but not for senior men. In addition, the employment of women in routine positions allowed the bank to expand its branch network, creating new higher-level positions, which were almost always filled by men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A body of nearly 2,000 English finds of individual coins minted c. 973-1100 is surveyed as evidence for the scale and form of the monetary economy. A long-term view indicates that this was a period of expansion in coin use, although growth in this area remained limited compared to the later middle ages, or even the eighth century. Within the eleventh century single-finds suggest more specific developments, including a decline in coin use after the Norman Conquest, and substantial short-term fluctuations related to various economic and monetary factors. Comparison with estimates of coin production suggests a general trend for more of mints' output to enter domestic circulation after c. 1030/40, though this need not solely reflect an increase in monetization. These chronological changes are compared with the pattern of circulation within England. Overall, the kingdom enjoyed a unified currency which did not see marked localization of coin circulation. Parts of northern England were less integrated with the south, but not so far as to suggest active exclusion of non-local coin. More striking was a general trend for both production and circulation to be concentrated in the east and the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the first broadly representative study for any early twentieth-century economy of the extent to which quoted company ownership was already divorced from managerial control. In the 337 largest, independent, UK companies in the Investor's year book (those with £1 million or more quoted share capital in 1911), the generality of public shareholders were a narrower group than today, but directors personally owned only 3.4 per cent of the shares. This indicates a lower level of personal ownership (and board voting control) in the largest securities market of the early twentieth century than in any of the world's major securities markets toward the end of that century. Berle, Means, Gordon, and others subsequently quantified the US's later and (on this dimension) less advanced managerial 'revolution'. Their evidence was widely misinterpreted: some erroneously concluded that the US pioneered this aspect of 'modernity' and that the 'divorce' of ownership from control, globally, was a new and continuing trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploiting hitherto unexamined London port book data, this article shows that during the last quarter of the seventeenth century the coastal metropolitan corn import trade was twice the size that historians relying on the work of Gras have assumed it to have been. More significantly, it demonstrates that Gras's failure to examine the capital's grain trade other than in terms of aggregate corn imports has disguised the nature and extent of its contribution to the development of the London economy. By the 1680s, the coastal trade comprised two distinct strands of roughly equal size: one providing food and drink for the London population, the other fuelling the overland trade of the capital. It is argued that the former was unnecessary for the provision of the city other than in barren years, but that the latter may have been indispensable for the development of the overland transport infrastructure of the metropolitan region at the height of the late seventeenth-century commercial revolution. Thanks largely to the agency of southern English mariners commanding large coasters, London's demand for fodder crops after the mid-1670s drew most of the coast stretching from Berwick to Whitehaven into the orbit of the metropolitan corn market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain had a unique wage and price structure in the eighteenth century, and that structure is a key to explaining the inventions of the industrial revolution. British wages were very high by international standards, and energy was very cheap. This configuration led British firms to invent technologies that substituted capital and energy for labour. High wages also increased the supply of technology by enabling British people to acquire education and training. Britain's wage and price structure was the result of the country's success in international trade, and that owed much to mercantilism and imperialism. When technology was first invented, it was only profitable to use it in Britain, but eventually it was improved enough that it became cost-effective abroad. When the 'tipping point' occurred, foreign countries adopted the technology in its most advanced form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions that promoted or restrained early modern economic growth were established, sustained, and often destroyed by states. Yet their economic history lacks either a fundamental theory or grounded narrative for state formation in the east or the west. This survey of a library of recent research in the conjoined histories of national taxation and finance deploys a stage theory and reciprocal comparisons to explain when, how, and why England's political elites constructed a fiscal constitution for an island state that provided the external security, internal order, and successful mercantilism to carry the economy to a plateau of possibilities for a precocious industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Britain's railways in the last part of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth has been widely studied, not least because it can throw light on the question of the causes of overall slowdown in industrial growth. This article is concerned with the detailed mechanics of measuring TFP growth and with the use of results to compare growth across different companies. The article disaggregates TFP growth between different activities performed by railway companies (provision of locomotive power, operation of carriages and wagons, provision of permanent way, and working of traffic), and it also develops detailed measures of capital stock and capital costs using disaggregate data on assets employed in each activity. These improvements to existing methodology reduce, rather than increase, existing estimates of TFP growth. Consequently the results confirm the previously observed conclusion that productivity growth was slow. They show that while there were significant increases in goods train operating efficiency in the first decade of the twentieth century, the additional resources that were employed meant that these increases were slow to translate into overall TFP growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid rise of England's colonial commerce in the late seventeenth century expanded the nation's resource base, stimulated efficiency improvements across the economy, and was important for long-term growth. However, close examination of the interests at play in England's Atlantic world does not support the Whiggish view that the Glorious Revolution played a benign role in this story. In the decades after the Restoration, the cases of the Royal African Company and the Spanish slave trade in Jamaica are used to show that the competition between Crown and Parliament for control of regulation constrained interest groups on either side in their efforts to capture the profits of empire. Stuart 'tyranny' was not able to damage growth and relatively competitive (and peaceful) conditions underpinned very rapid increases in colonial output and trade. The resolution of the rules of the Atlantic game in 1689 allowed a consolidated state better to manipulate and manage the imperial economy in its own interests. More secure rent-seeking enterprises and expensive wars damaged growth and European rivals began a process of catch-up. The Glorious Revolution was not sufficient to permanently halt economic development but it was sufficient to slow progress towards industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the later seventeenth century, material progress was first identified in England as a recent achievement with boundless future promise, and it was welcomed despite fears about the threats that it was perceived to present to national and personal well-being. The article investigates the roots of that confidence, and finds them in political economy and other intellectual developments that shaped interpretations of changing standards of living. The civic and moral ‘challenge of affluence’ was fully recognized but never resolved. Progress was accepted, and had to be defended in war-time, as the route to general happiness, ‘ease’, and plenty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article consists of a series of literature reviews summarizing research on the economic history of Great Britain during the year 2007. Common themes addressed in these essays include home economics, economic factors in the legal system and government, and the history of economic thought. The periodization of these pieces runs from 400-1100, 1100-1500, 1500-1700, 1700-1850, 1850-1945, and 1945-2007. The relationships between British economic history and developments in fields such as historical archaeology, the history of sport, and social history are considered.

This article examines Ireland's relative position within the UK industrial sector in the early twentieth century, by critically evaluating the Irish component of the First UK Census of Production. Firstly, Ireland's employment, net output shares, and net output per person are compared to the UK results. Secondly, by supplementing and adjusting the census evidence, a new estimate of the size of the industrial workforce is constructed, which is then used to produce a new estimate of Irish industrial output. From this it is possible to estimate the contribution of industry to Irish GDP, which can then be compared to its contribution in other European economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimates are assembled for England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and for Britain and Ireland as a whole, of the numbers of religious houses, regular clergy, parishes, towns of more than 2,000 inhabitants, and townspeople, and the value of dutiable exports and volume of currency at the watershed date of c.1290. Absolute and relative levels of economic development are then compared. A range of possible population estimates are considered and corresponding set of per capita estimates thereby derived. The results highlight significant differences in the pattern of economic development between and within these four countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the nature and scale of dearth in the late 1640s, emphasizing the coincidence of economic distress with constitutional crisis. It reconsiders the parish register evidence for subsistence crisis; examines the responses of central and local government; analyses the role of popular agency, especially though petitioning campaigns, in prompting reluctant magistrates to regulate the grain markets along lines stipulated by the late Elizabethan and early Stuart dearth orders, which had not been proclaimed since 1630; and accordingly suggests that the late 1640s represents a missing link in the historiography of responses to harvest failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]