Search

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]

The decision in 1847 to cut Treasury spending on public relief efforts during the Irish famine is generally attributed by economic historians to the pervasive influence of 'laissez-faire' ideas on the Whig government of Lord John Russell. This article draws on the papers of political leaders and contemporary financial information to argue that economic reasons were the trigger for the change in policy. Robert Peel and Charles Wood's macroeconomic policies of the 1840s, including the gold standard, the Bank Charter Act, and corn law repeal, left the Whigs unable to borrow to finance relief efforts in Ireland without panicking markets. The scaling back of public assistance programmes that resulted from this-and which increased mortality at the height of the Irish famine-was the unintended result of Peel and Wood's economic policies, in the context of the Whig government's parliamentary weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on effects of wealth and fiscal policy in the economic history of the interwar period. This paper has been concerned with the measurement of the importance of the fiscal stimulus provided by the government deficit during, and following, the slump of the early 1930s. It can be concluded that adjusting for changes in the real value of financial wealth makes little difference to the aggregate demand effects of the government budget. This is not because the sums involved are trivial--they are in fact extremely large--but simply because the consumption elasticities with respect to financial assets are small. An additional conclusion is that fiscal policy was broadly neutral during the early years of the depression but became expansionary after 1934/5. Since recovery was already under way by this date fiscal policy cannot be seen as a causal factor in either the slump itself or the subsequent recovery. Whether the recovery would have been as strong, or been maintained as well, without an accompanying fiscal stimulus is an interesting question for future research.

The article presents information on several articles and books relating to economics, sociology and forestry. The article provides information on major journals that published articles on rural life more or less regularly. Every year the Congress national des Sode'te's savantes includes many papers on rural history, subsequently published in its transactions. Those for the 89th and 90th congresses, held in Lyons in 1964 and in Nice in 1965, have appeared; those for the 91st congress, held at Rennes in 1966, are still awaited. In 1967, there have been two articles on economic thought which, significantly, were written by foreigners and deal with the second half of the eighteenth century. One of them is a contemporary text by Chydenius, who was a Swedish forerunner of Adam Smith. Some articles on social history touch on the interests of the economic historian, including Albert Soboul's on "Description et mesure en histoire sociale." As always, some French historians have published work on foreign history.

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.

The tonnage of shipping entering and leaving Ireland grew rapidly from the late eighteenth century until the mid-1870s, after which there was a distinct slowdown. The mid-nineteenth century was notable for a five-fold increase in shipping per capita, an indicator of the Irish economy’s increasing commercialization. The slowdown after 1870 would have been even greater without the industrial dynamism of Belfast, Ireland’s leading port from the 1880s. The early and rapid introduction of steamships from the 1820s made possible large-scale exports of live animals and fresh eggs, products that would account for 60 per cent of agricultural exports and a quarter of total exports by 1910. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews periodical literature in economic history published in 1993. The period of Anglo-Saxon settlement is represented by one study this year. The author of the study examines the Kentish evidence of 18 known cemeteries, five settlements, and various casual finds to argue that fertile soils and good communications made the Derwent valley a particularly attractive area for Saxon colonization between the fifth and the seventh centuries. Of all the texts relating to village society in the late Saxon period the "Rectitudines singularum personarum," and the "Gerefa," are surely the best known. The "Rectitudines" is a more businesslike document, apparently designed to set standards for the internal management of an estate in south-western England in the mid tenth century or earlier. Current rethinking of the processes of long-term economic development is carried further in a few papers with direct relevance to the medieval period. The extent to which higher standards of living in the later middle ages fed into cultural enrichment is well illustrated in a number of papers relating to parishes and guilds.

The article focuses on the emergence of the disciplines of economics and economic history in England. The disagreement between economists Alfred Marshall and Ven. William Cunningham is not unfamiliar to economic historians, but they have tended to view it either as a personal squabble or as a local offshoot of the more famous Methodenstreit which began in Germany a decade or so earlier. Cunningham's charge was that Marshall had instead squeezed and bruised the facts into whatever laws would maximize the apparent area of applicability of his own brand of economics. In this attempt to turn economics into a universal science, he had instead theorized himself out of the capacity to offer opinions on the issues of the day other than as a private layman. Economics, as Cunningham saw it, was there to criticize particular legislation, and any principles developed for this end must be consonant with the particular needs and aims and ambitions of the nation in which the legislation is carried out. Thus economists should be collecting empirical data as a means to giving advice appropriate to its time and place.

The article discusses the use of counterfactual argument in analyzing economic history. Since it is the purpose of this paper to show that the role of counterfactual argument in historical explanation is limited in a much more fundamental way than economist J.D. Gould showed, it is essential to establish at the outset the limits of its application that he has acknowledged. From the following summary it appears that he sees its application as limited to those historical problems which are "unique", not unduly "open", and from which "strong" counterfactual inferences can be drawn. In Gould's view it is "likely that if historical problems exist which are particularly apt for counterfactual treatment they will be found amongst events which are in some important sense unique, but not unduly open. That is to say, that where the events in question can be regarded as specific instances of classes of events, the operation of which is felt to be governed by some covering law, and are therefore non-unique, the "direct", traditional approach has advantages over the counterfactual one.

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]

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 focuses on British productivity performance from 1950 to 1979. The article also explores the microeconomics of manufacturing productivity outcomes in terms of exploring the incentive structures that informed investment and, particularly, innovation decisions by firms and the policy stance of successive governments. The distinctive features of the papers include their use of economic theory and their quantitative approach to testing hypotheses. Two caveats need to be made to the suggestion that British trade performance gives no cause for concern. First, given that innovation and human capital formation are positive influences on manufactured exports, Great Britain's dramatic loss of world market share can be seen as a diagnostic of weaknesses in domestic manufacturing. Second, as is well known, the UK had a strong tendency for exports to grow more slowly than imports at a constant real exchange rate. Over time this was corrected by periodic devaluations. The implication was that the terms of trade moved less favorably than was the case for strong trade performers such as Germany. Adjusting real gross domestic product growth for terms of trade effects adds about 0.5 per cent per year to the gap in real income growth between Great Britain and Germany during 1950-73.

The article evaluates several papers related to economic history and economic structure in the year 500-1700. They include "The Woodland of Troutbeck and its Exploitation to 1800," by M. A. Parsons, "A City Revolution: The Remodelling of the London Livery Companies in the 1680s," by M. Knights, "Some Mill Building Work at Kendal 1581-1600," by B. Tyson, "The Experience of the Sixteenth-Century English Voyages to Guinea," by P. E. H. Hair, and "The Restoration Crisis and the Launching of Pennsylvania 1679-1681," by M. K. Geiter.

The article evaluates several papers related to economic history and economic structure in the early middle ages, 1350-1500. They include "Matching Supply to Demand: Crop Production and Disposal by English Demesnes in the Century of the Black Death," by B. M. S. Campbell, "Landowners and Their Estates in the Forest of Arden in the Fifteenth Century," by A. Watkins, "Share and Share Alike: Some Partitions of Medieval Manors," by A. E. B. Owen, and "Mercury Through Four Centuries 1130s-c.1500," by A. F. Sutton.

The article presents a paper which is about the odd story of economist Adam Smith's posthumous decline and rise. The story of Smith's revolutionary renown was well known to many of the great nineteenth-century economic scholars, and it is consistent with recent historical scholarship on Smith's political ideas. The disjunction of economic and political freedom was the necessary condition, in the 1790s, for the transformation in Smith's own reputation. The decisive issue of policy, in England as in France, was the connection between food and economic freedom. Smith's renown as a cold enemy of the poor has been justified, for almost two centuries, by reference to his presumed general principles of scarcity and famine. Smith's support for free trade in corn was of great importance to his nineteenth-century renown as an enemy of the poor. But his own argument is that free trade will prevent famine and palliate scarcity. Smith's real sentiments were obscured by Smith himself, and by his friends and followers after his death. But they amounted, during his lifetime, to a cluster of beliefs which was coherent, quite conventional, and distinctively influenced by French ideas.

This article discusses various issues related to the economic effects of the Civil War on British landed society. Modern studies of seventeenth-century landed society have too often divided the century at the Civil War. There are those that concentrate on the problems of rising and falling gentry in an attempt to unearth economic and social divisions in the body politic before 1640. Others examine the role of the Civil War as a generator of various legal and financial developments that encouraged the consolidation and expansion of large landed estates and underpinned aristocratic social and political dominance in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The division is increased by the differing approaches of scholars to the two halves of the century. The view that the period 1640-60 was one in which large amounts of property were redistributed at immediate and lasting cost to those on the losing side has been decisively revised, but studies of the Civil War have concentrated exclusively on the twin themes of Royalist landowners and their problems and the government's use of Royal and confiscated lands to pay creditors and bolster its finances.

Presents a bibliography of articles related to Scottish economic history between 1963 and 1970, published in the August 1971 issue of the journal 'The Economic History Review.'

Although the First World War was ultimately decided in the west, historians have emphasized the importance of the often 'forgotten' Eastern Front in understanding its complex evolution. This article examines the perception of contemporary foreign exchange traders concerning the relative importance of the Eastern Front over time. Using a newly compiled dataset on prisoners of war and on soldiers killed and wounded, we show that traders were concerned with casualties on both fronts, recognizing the significance of the two‐front war in the early war years. From the autumn of 1916 onwards, traders seemed to believe the key to winning the war lay in the west only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In 1910, Japan annexed Korea and integrated it into the Empire of Japan. According to its policy of assimilating colonies, the Japanese government intended to remove the tariffs between Japan and Korea, an aim which had almost been realized by 1923. The removal of the tariff barrier was supposed to improve market access between Japan and Korea. This article explores the implications of this event, focusing on the spatial distribution of economic activity in Japan. The regression results suggest that the integration of the Korean market increased population growth rates more in the regions close to the former border between Japan and Korea than in the other regions. Furthermore, after integration, the regions close to Korea that specialized in the fabric industry, whose products were the primary goods exported from Japan to Korea, experienced more population growth than other regions close to Korea did. These results suggest that market accessibility was indeed a determinant of the spatial distribution of economic activity. Our findings also indicate that the economic effect of colonization on the mainland was spatially heterogeneous and that a spatial viewpoint of the history of imperialism is important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of economic inequality, particularly of wealth, in the Florentine state (Tuscany) from the early fourteenth to the late eighteenth century. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and this is only the second-ever attempt at covering such a long period. Consistent with recent research conducted on other European areas, during the early modern period we find clear indications of a tendency for economic inequality to grow continually, a finding that for Tuscany cannot be explained as the consequence of economic growth. Furthermore, the exceptionally old sources we use allow us to demonstrate that a phase of declining inequality, lasting about one century, was triggered by the Black Death from 1348 to 1349. This finding challenges earlier scholarship and significantly alters our understanding of the economic consequences of the Black Death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many dependency theorists as well as economic historians have contended that nineteenth-century imperial policies and economic globalization de-industrialized the global 'periphery'. European metropoles extracted raw materials and tropical commodities from their overseas territories, and in turn indigenous consumers bought their industrial products, textiles in particular. This article investigates three of the assumptions of Ricardian trade theory that are often behind the de-industrialization narrative. In this article it is argued that, at least for colonial Java's textile industry, these assumptions should be reconsidered. Adverse trade policies imposed by the Dutch and a prolonged terms-of-trade boom in favour of primary commodities make colonial Java a unique case for exploring the merits of the de-industrialization thesis. Here it is demonstrated that Javanese households resourcefully responded to changing market circumstances, in the first place by flexible allocation of female labour. Moreover, indigenous textile producers specialized in certain niches that catered for local demand. Because of these factors, local textile production in Java appears to have been much more resilient than most of the historical literature suggests. These findings not only shed new light on the social and economic history of colonial Indonesia, but also contribute to the recent literature on alternative, labour-intensive paths of industrialization in the non-western world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fifteenth century rebates to the fifteenth and tenth form a large body of evidence which has rarely been used to assess economic change. They were set by local commissioners who employed their knowledge of the conditions within their counties. In many cases the commissioners can be demonstrated to have applied the reductions in a thoughtful and proportionate manner, often revealing local economic conditions. There is considerable variation in their application between counties and their use is greatly enhanced when compared with other sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major gap in our understanding of the medieval economy concerns interest rates, especially relating to commercial credit. Although direct evidence about interest rates is scattered and anecdotal, there is much more surviving information about exchange rates. Since both contemporaries and historians have suggested that exchange and rechange transactions could be used to disguise the charging of interest in order to circumvent the usury prohibition, it should be possible to back out implied interest rates from exchange rates. The analysis presented in this article is based on a new dataset of medieval exchange rates collected from commercial correspondence in the archive of Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato, c. 1383-1411. It demonstrates that the time value of money was consistently incorporated into market exchange rates. Moreover, these implicit interest rates are broadly comparable to those received from other types of commercial loan and investment. Although on average profitable, the return on any individual exchange and rechange transaction did involve a degree of uncertainty that may have justified their non-usurious nature. However, there were also practical reasons why medieval merchants may have used foreign exchange transactions as a means of extending credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between guilds and information asymmetries using a large database of quality disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that a high-quality urban textile industry was able to solve externalities using a range of ex ante and ex post monitoring mechanisms based on private market relationships and fair sanctions which effectively reduced adverse selection and information asymmetries. Instead, when guilds did use their quality regulations, the effect of the guild on information asymmetries and the industry as a whole was generally negative, by providing mechanisms that could be manipulated by entrenched interest groups for rent-seeking purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a case study approach to the question of how entrepreneurs developed and used networks to support trade during the American Revolutionary War (American War of Independence). Using the business letter books of Daniel Eccleston of Lancaster, covering January 1780 to December 1781, the article shows how he used trust-building activities and developed open networks in Britain and the West Indies in order to build, sustain, maintain, and diversify his commercial activities to reduce risk and develop new opportunities. Eccleston's letters illustrate a competitive market in which entrepreneurs helped drive the industrial revolution through stimulating demand and encouraging trade. They show that mutual trust was the foundation of strong networks, and that networks were significant in underpinning entrepreneurial success through allowing the mitigation of business risk and offering the opportunity for diversification supported by the network. The article makes use of the work of Casson, Pearson and Richardson, and Wilson and Pop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on historical welfare development in Sub-Saharan Africa has uncovered long-term trends in standards of living. How the majority of rural dwellers fared, however, remains largely elusive. This study develops a new approach to reconstruct rural living standards in a historical context. It builds upon a well-established real wage literature, but moves beyond it to capture rural realities, employing sub-national rural survey, census, and price data. The approach is applied to a case study of colonial and early post-colonial Uganda (1915-70). The case study yields a number of findings. While the expanding smallholder-based cash crop sector established itself as the backbone of Uganda's colonial economy, farm characteristics remained largely stagnant after the initial adoption of cash crops. Smallholders maintained living standards well above subsistence level, and while the profitability of cash crops was low, their cultivation provided a reliable source of cash income. Around the time of decolonization, unskilled wages rose rapidly while farm incomes lagged behind. As a result, an urban-rural income reversal took place. The study also reveals considerable differences within Uganda. Smallholders in Uganda's banana regions required fewer labour inputs to maintain a farm income than their grain-farming counterparts, creating opportunities for additional income generation and livelihood diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the decades prior to the Civil War, Spain experienced a rapid process of urbanization, which was accompanied by the demographic transition and sizeable rural-urban migrations. This article investigates how urban housing markets reacted to these far-reaching changes, which increased demand for dwellings. To this end, this study employs a new hedonic index of real housing prices and constructs a cross-regional panel dataset of rents and housing price fundamentals. This new evidence indicates that rents were not a significant financial burden on low-income families and, hence, housing was affordable for the working classes. The article also shows that families' access to new homes was facilitated by a sizeable growth in the housing supply. Substantial investments in urban infrastructure and the institutional framework enabled the construction of new homes at affordable prices. Our results suggest that housing problems were not as pervasive during the urban transition as the literature often seems to claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization across the Roman Empire created a demand for building materials on an unprecedented scale. Quarrying was largely conducted by municipalities, institutions, or landed aristocrats, who owned or inherited the valuable land from which stone was extracted. By using principles of economics as a guide, and with greater coordination between theory and written and archaeological sources, this article examines the decision-making processes involved in opening a quarry. Theories of economic rationality, resource economics, and statistical methods are helpful for understanding the prices for marble recorded in Diocletian's Edict, Roman jurists' writings about exploitation on private land, and newly discovered quarries in the region of Aphrodisias, Turkey. Here it is argued that the exchange of local building stone took place in a competitive market where landowners actively tried to improve their financial situation, but did so at considerable risk. At Aphrodisias, examples of failed attempts exist alongside long-running and successful enterprises. Entrepreneurs there did not extract a homogeneous set of resources, but chose to target marbles with inconsistent physical properties at increasing distances from the city in response to greater demand and rising prices. Roman jurists, primarily interested in protecting property value, made landowners calculate whether potential profits earned from sales outweighed the degradation of land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in the ways in which, and the values according to which, economic activity is undertaken. For instance, mutual ownership has been identified as one means of helping to 'redeem' capitalism. This article engages with such issues by examining aspects of the behaviour of consumer cooperative societies in Scotland from the 1870s to the 1960s. It starts by discussing whether cooperatives represent a means of conceptualizing and undertaking economic activity that provides an alternative to the paradigm of investor-led (neo)liberal capitalism. From this, and an outline history of consumer cooperatives in Scotland, it identifies two variables-dividend on purchases and funds for education-as proxies for the values underpinning cooperatives' economic behaviour. Analysis of these variables indicates the existence of distinct cultures of cooperation, notably in the Glasgow and Edinburgh areas. The article concludes by offering two 'lessons from history' for those interested in alternative economic networks. The first is that cooperation can, and has, conceptualized and sustained an alternative to the dominant (neo)liberal economic paradigm. The second is that the scaling-up of such voluntaristic economic thought and behaviour is unlikely to present a macro-level challenge to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the eleventh century and mid-thirteenth century a Sterling Area evolved in the British Isles, with a common currency based upon the English silver penny and equivalents of it produced in Scotland and Ireland. This Sterling Area began to contract in the second half of the fourteenth century, when reductions in the bullion content of Scottish coins ended the equivalence of the English and Scottish currencies, and in the fifteenth century Ireland developed its own coinage. Estimates of the currency of the Sterling Area are provided, taking the chronology of its growth and contraction into account. Estimates of the sterling currency are not estimates of the currency of England, and they cannot be combined with data relating exclusively to England in economic modelling, without qualification. Per capita currency estimates and values of coin hoards and single coin finds are at a high level around 1400, falling in the second half of the fifteenth century, indicating that the European 'bullion famine' of the 1390s to c. 1415 had less effect on the currency than the second late medieval bullion crisis, from the 1430s to the 1460s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to conventional wisdom, the fall of the Swedish currency in September 1931 was caused by the sterling crisis. This article shows that the road towards devaluation began earlier and that financial linkages with Germany proved to be more important than Sweden's economic and monetary relations with Great Britain. It all started in late 1929 when the Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger gave a loan to the German government in exchange for the match monopoly, thus tying his business ventures to Germany's solvency. In addition, a part of this loan was financed by large US dollar credits from the two largest Swedish banks that, in turn, accumulated a sizeable foreign short-term deficit. When in June 1931 the German fiscal crisis began to escalate, international investors ceased to consider Sweden a safe haven because they knew about the linkages between the German government, Kreuger, and the Swedish banking system. This downgrading, in combination with the foreign short-term deficit of the banking sector, proved lethal for the reserve position of the Swedish central bank, once the international liquidity crisis in mid-July 1931 erupted. The sterling crisis only put the final nail in the coffin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the relative growth performance of centrally planned economies in the broader context of postwar growth in Europe. It reports a new dataset of revised estimates for investment rates in eastern European countries between 1950 and 1989. Complemented with data on other growth determinants, this evidence is used to re-evaluate the socialist growth record in a conditional convergence framework with a panel of 24 European countries. After controlling for relative backwardness, investment rates, and improvements in human capital, the findings show that centrally planned economies underperformed due to their relative inefficiency only after the postwar golden age. In the 1950s and 1960s, eastern Europe was falling behind mainly due to relatively low levels of investment and weak reconstruction dynamics. Both are explained, in part, by the lack of labour-supply flexibility that, in turn, resulted from the comparatively much larger negative impact of the war on population growth in eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While China's invention of printing took place several centuries ahead of Europe's, it was in Europe where the more advanced printing technology of movable type took hold and where book production reached far higher levels. This article explores the extent to which China's complex logographic writing system explains these different outcomes. Using an economic analysis, I show how China's preference for block printing technology over movable type can be justified as the rational choice of commercial producers. In addition to this, model simulations also predict that movable type would be used in China under some specific circumstances which closely match the historical record. On the other hand, the use of block printing would not have led to larger printing costs in China, and as such should not be regarded as the reason behind China's modest level of book production when compared to Europe's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wine cooperatives were relatively scarce in Europe before the Second World War, but by the 1980s accounted for more than half of all wines made in France, Italy, and Spain, the three major producer countries. Unlike Danish dairy cooperatives, whose success before the First World War was linked to their ability to improve product quality and compete in high-value niche markets, wine cooperatives are often associated with the production of large volumes of low-quality products. This article argues that the initial slow diffusion of wine cooperatives was caused by the difficulties of improving quality due to environmental conditions in European vineyards ('terroir') and measurement problems, rather than institutional shortcomings. Cooperatives only became widespread when the state found them a useful instrument to regulate markets, especially after 1950. The problems associated with poor wine quality were never resolved, and cooperatives have become increasingly uncompetitive in the market place, especially following the major decline in per capita consumption and shift towards premium wines from the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communal property rights have long symbolized the apparent backwardness of rural Russian society in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on newly compiled data and qualitative sources, this article summarizes the institutions and practices of rural property rights in late Imperial Russia and shows that there was substantially more heterogeneity in what constituted peasant property rights than is commonly assumed. Archival and documentary accounts suggest that the emblematic practice of repartitioning communal land occurred relatively infrequently and, when undertaken, was generally managed in low-cost ways. Econometric evidence from Moscow province implies that repartitions were driven more by concerns over the distribution of associated tax burdens than the desire to reallocate productive assets. Along with an analysis of cross-sectional data on property rights and grain yields from European Russia, these findings suggest a weaker causal link between communal land practices and agricultural productivity than is typically asserted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carlos Álvarez- Nogal and Christophe Chamley recently published an article in the Economic History Review on ' Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers'. In this note, we show that several claims in their article are very similar to earlier research results, published or circulated long before Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley's original submission, by ourselves and other scholars (section I). These results are repeated without attribution or even mention of the earlier work. In addition, we show that what Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley present as new quantitative insights are actually replications of earlier results of ours (section II). Finally, Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley misrepresent our contributions, as well as those of several other scholars (section III). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Railways were one of the main engines of the Latin American trade boom before 1914. Railway construction often required financial support from local governments, which depended on their fiscal capacity. However, since the main government revenues were trade-related, this generated a two-way feedback between government revenues and railways, with a potential for multiple equilibria. The empirical tests in this article support the hypothesis of such a positive two-way relationship. The main implication of our analysis is that the build-up of state capacity was a necessary condition for railway expansion and also, to a large extent, for export expansion in Latin America during the first globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of foreign exchange reserves has recently attracted attention from both policy-makers and historians. Historical research has focussed on the nineteenth century and the interwar period, with less attention to the strategies of smaller countries in the final transition from sterling to the dollar in the post-1945 period. This article examines the evolution of reserve currency policy from the perspective of Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s and early 1970s. As in the 1930s, economic uncertainty and a shift in global economic power prompted changes in reserves strategy. Patterns of trade and debt and falling confidence in British economic policy prompted a move away from sterling, but the timing and extent of this transition were affected by the fragility of the sterling exchange rate, lack of alternative assets, and continued dependence on the London capital market. The choices for Australia and New Zealand were thus constrained, but they were able to leverage their position as holders of sterling to engage in agreements that provided an exchange rate guarantee for their sterling holdings and continued access to the London capital market. This mitigated the effect of the final global transition from sterling to the dollar while protecting their interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late nineteenth-century Danish agricultural revolution saw the modernization and growth of the dairy industry. Denmark rapidly caught up with the leading economies, and Danish dairying led the world in terms of productivity. Uniquely in a world perspective, high quality micro-level data exist documenting this episode. These allow the use of the tool of modern agricultural economists, stochastic frontier analysis, to estimate production functions for milk and thus find the determinants of these productivity and efficiency advances. This article identifies the contribution of modernization through specific new technologies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enthusiasm of British portfolio investors for US industry in the late 1880s has been seen as evidence of the liberalism of the London Stock Exchange and the conservatism of the New York Stock Exchange. Based on a study of Anglo- American brewing issues on the London market between 1888 and 1892, in this article it is argued that such an interpretation cannot be sustained. For these issues, securing access to the London market proved more demanding than accounts of its liberalism would lead us to expect: in fact, Anglo- American brewing companies submitted to strictures from London that were more constraining than those of the New York market. Promoters accepted London's constraints to take advantage of the high valuations assigned to Anglo- American brewing securities there, which reflected the city's success in building demand based on financial machinery that did not exist in New York. That machinery included underwriting syndicates, accounting standards, and the London Stock Exchange's listing rules, although, from this perspective, it was the rigour of the exchange's rules that was important. Still, vetting securities for quotation was not the same as for investment, as the disappointing performance of the Anglo- American brewing securities soon revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corruption by office holders in eighteenth-century British institutions, from state to local level, played an instrumental role in the emergence of modern bureaucracy, and the development of accountable, professionalized systems of administration. Due to the similarities between the institutional culture of eighteenth-century Britain and those within many contemporary developing societies, social scientists have also sought to draw lessons from Britain's historical experience of corruption. Yet little is known about the extent, impact, and causes of corruption by eighteenth-century office holders. This article presents the first detailed research into the topic. It utilises the rich administrative and financial records associated with the institution charged with funding and undertaking the maintenance of London Bridge-the Bridge House-to conduct a systematic qualitative and quantitative study of corruption by office holders. The article identifies an ingrained culture of corruption amongst Bridge House officers, and provides quantitative evidence of the substantial impact corruption had on the organization's finances. However, contrary to existing studies on corruption, this article concludes that, although extensive and significant, corruption did not perform a functional role in the context of this institution. The article also provides a methodology and comparator for future studies into this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using ownership and control data for 890 firm-years, this article examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern-day standards. However, this does not necessarily mean that there was a modern-style separation of ownership from control in Victorian Britain. One major implication of our findings is that diffuse ownership was present in the UK much earlier than previously thought, and given that it occurred in an era with weak shareholder protection law, it somewhat undermines the influential law and finance hypothesis. We also find that diffuse ownership is correlated with large boards, a London head office, non-linear voting rights, and shares traded on multiple markets. [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]

The early twentieth century constituted the heyday of the 'breadwinner-homemaker' household, characterized by a high degree of intra-household functional specialization between paid and domestic work according to age, gender, and marital status. This article examines the links between formal workforce participation and access to resources for individualized discretionary spending in British working-class households during the late 1930s, via an analysis of household leisure expenditures. Leisure spending is particularly salient to intra-household resource allocation, as it constitutes one of the most highly prioritized areas of individualized expenditure, especially for young, single people. Using a database compiled from surviving returns to the Ministry of Labour's national 1937/8 working-class expenditure survey, we examine leisure participation rates for over 600 households, using a detailed set of commercial leisure activities together with other relevant variables. We find that the employment status of family members other than the male breadwinner was a key factor influencing their access to commercial leisure. Our analysis thus supports the view that the breadwinner-homemaker household was characterized by strong power imbalances that concentrated resources-especially for individualized expenditures-in the hands of those family members who engaged in paid labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that the fight against inequality played an important role in the rise of the welfare state. However, using social transfers as an indicator of redistribution and three alternative proxies for inequality-the top income shares, the ratio of the GDP per capita to the unskilled wage, and the share of non-family farms-this article shows that inequality did not favour the development of social policy between 1880 and 1930. On the contrary, social policy developed more easily in countries that were previously more egalitarian, suggesting that unequal societies were in a sort of inequality trap, where inequality itself was an obstacle to redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the emerging belief among early modern economic historians that sixteenth-century inflation was primarily caused by monetary factors. The Scottish case study reveals a strong relationship between coinage debasement and rising prices, a contention strengthened by the fact that the Scottish experience of inflation was high in European terms, and, in particular, stands at a considerable distance from the English pattern. This study includes the first scholarly examination of prices during the 1540s, and reveals that substantial inflation first emerged during this hitherto neglected decade. Prices plateaued during the 1550s, and rose consistently from 1560 to 1585. Meanwhile real wages declined during the 1540s and from 1560 onwards. This article is methodologically innovative in constructing two baskets of commodities, designed to represent the elite experience, alongside a more traditional basket based on a working household. These reveal the divergent experiences of the price rise within Scotland: rising prices hit the poor harder than the rich due to the high cost of domestic agricultural goods in the subsistence basket and the deflationary impact of wages and luxury goods upon the overall elite basket. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very little is known about the dynamics of pre-colonial markets in Africa. This article presents a new set of data series on the pre-colonial price of staple crops on the Gold Coast. Six hypotheses for the behaviour of market prices, found in the previous literature, are tested in this article. The results show conclusively that market prices did respond to shifts in demand and supply, for example, from climate-induced scarcity, or to external shocks such as war. It is argued that the markets studied seem to have functioned remarkably well, given the socio-economic and political context in which they were operating [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]