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In this article, Maryland's non-legal-tender paper money emissions between 1765 and 1775 are reconstructed to determine quantities outstanding and redemption dates, providing a substantial correction to the literature. Over 80 per cent of this paper money's current market value was expected real asset present value and under 20 per cent was liquidity premium. It was primarily a real barter asset and not a fiat currency. The liquidity premium was positively related to the amount of paper money per capita in circulation. This paper money traded below face value due to time-discounting, rather than depreciation. Past scholars have simply confused depreciation with time-discounting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the political economic consequences of the disappearance of the Spanish silver peso standard in Spanish America, the longest monetary union that ever existed. With the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808, the fiscal and political structure of the empire imploded and most colonies became independent. Regional competition for revenues exacerbated budget shortfalls driven by military expenditure. Local elites established in former colonial Treasury districts started highly diverse monetary experiments to procure funds. Those in control of mint houses started minting their own coins or debased existing silver currency. Elsewhere, inconvertible paper currency was also created to meet budget deficits. As a result, the most valuable feature of the Spanish American silver peso, its quality standard, was broken and the standard that had organized the early modern international economy for more than 300 years ceased to exist altogether. In Spanish America, as diverse monies co-existed within a formerly highly integrated economic space, a widespread Gresham's law effect exacerbated the conflict among local and regional elites. This fostered the political fragmentation of colonial Spanish America into an increasing number of political and monetary sovereign entities during the nineteenth century. [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]

Abstract: Using new evidence uncovered from Istanbul court records, this paper shows that Ottoman markets were capable of spontaneous financial innovation before the introduction of modern financial instruments. At the same time, however, it demonstrates that the impact and sustainability of these innovations depended on the underlying political equilibrium. Gediks—entitlements to usufruct rights over the factors of production used in urban commercial and industrial activity—gradually transformed into liquid assets during the late eighteenth century. This transformation was enabled by the coercive power of Janissary‐infiltrated guilds in response to the financial needs of small‐ and medium‐scale actors operating within the confines of the domestic economy. The entry barriers, which enabled gedik markets to exist in the first place, also limited their use for growth‐promoting purposes and thus set them apart from similar financial instruments that emerged in the West. Gedik markets disappeared as the Janissary–guild coalition declined and better financial instruments emerged during the mid‐nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have generally argued that between the medieval period and the eighteenth century seafarers transformed from collaborative adventurers with a share in their vessel to the first international wage-earning proletariat. This interpretation has drawn upon relatively limited statistical analysis of mariners' wages, and underestimates the variety of seafarers' remuneration and economic activities besides wages themselves. This article undertakes a more sustained analysis of seventeenth-century wage data drawn from the papers of the English High Court of Admiralty, and uses the same evidence to examine other forms of income, both customary payments as part of shipping, and small-scale trade. Seafarers of all ranks carried their own commodities on all shipping routes, offering an opportunity to increase their income considerably. This evidence confirms that the maritime labour market was hierarchical, and that very often seafarers were poor labourers facing economic insecurity of many kinds. However, it refines the previous interpretation by emphasizing the presence of skilled workers even among the lower levels of this labour market, and by introducing a new dimension to mariners' economic agency: they were not simply wage-workers, but also independent participants in a venture economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response, we demonstrate that Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth, in their 2015 Economic History Review note 'Duplication without constraints: Álvarez-Nogal and Chamley's analysis of debt policy under Philip II', provide a misconceived and inaccurate account of our argument about the finances of Philip II in 'Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers' ( Economic History Review, 2014). Here, we summarize our position in the context of the current literature and provide a few comments on data gathering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While consumption has moved to centre stage in accounts of Britain's industrialization, evidence on the mass transformation of homes and expenditure on novelty is hard to reconcile with the poor living standards experienced by many working people. Part of the conundrum arises from the limitations of available probate evidence, but the motivational drivers behind raised consumption can also be questioned. Was it changed tastes or falling prices because of improved technology which prompted the purchase of new goods? Utilizing evidence from an alternative source, property stolen through housebreaking and burglary as reported in the Old Bailey Papers and Proceedings for 1750-1821, we identify those goods that were commonly stolen as the fashion icons of their day, trace such goods back to their original owners, thus linking ownership and status, and through analysis over time show how consumption evolved. This analysis incorporates the influence of price and real incomes on ownership, allowing the influence of price and fashion on consumption patterns to be identified separately. The findings show that, in addition to price and income effects, fashion had a strong influence, but this was not just emulation; differentiation too was evident. The evidence points to a complex interplay between desires and differentiation, aspiration and affordability, in determining the goods that people possessed. [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]

This paper traces the evolution of the international market for wheat, from an emerging market structure after the repeal of the corn laws to a mature market characterized by efficient arbitrage after the introduction of the transatlantic telegraph and the growth of trade. Efficiency is documented using traditional price gap accounting as well as error correction modelling. Markets which traded directly with each other as well as markets which did not trade with each other were integrated. The traditional bilateral focus in market integration studies has been extended to a multivariate approach, which generates new insights into the pattern of diffusion of price shocks in the international economy. Shocks in the major importing nation, Britain, dominated in the emerging market phase, while shocks in the major exporting economy, the United States, dominated international price movements at the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the prevailing view among economic historians that tea and coffee were luxury articles of consumption prior to the nineteenth century. It reviews an array of available evidence, including national trade statistics and probate inventory studies. In particular, it examines the surprisingly wide social and economic diffusion of tea and coffee drinking among Amsterdam citizens of lower to middling economic status during the period of that city's ascendency and subsequent decline at the centre of global trade networks. Using the distribution of tea and coffee wares of both local and exotic manufacture across households of the artisanal and labouring classes, it seeks to map both the economic reach of the East Indian trade into the poorer parts of the city, as well as to locate the cultural meanings associated with the consumption of these new goods. New data to address this issue have been derived from a substantial collection of after-death inventories drawn up on the estates of middling and poor Amsterdam citizens in the middle decades of the eighteenth century by the Regents of the Municipal Orphanage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century saw the virtual elimination of famine across most of the globe, but also witnessed some of the worst famines ever recorded. The causes usually given for these twentieth-century famines differ from those given for earlier famines, which tend to be more often blamed on harvest failures per se than on human agency. This paper reassesses two of the last century's most notorious famines, the Chinese Great Leap Famine of 1959–61 and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–4, in the light of these rival perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a newly expanded set of 41 social tables from premodern societies, this article tries to identify the factors associated with the level of inequality and the inequality extraction ratio (how close to the maximum inequality the elites have pushed actual inequality). Strong evidence is found to show that elites in colonies were more extractive, and that more densely populated and less urbanized countries exhibited lower extraction ratios. Several possibilities are proposed, linking high population density to low inequality and to low elite extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Despite the considerable attention granted to the history of international business, we still have a limited knowledge of the historical impact of multinationals on host economies. This article presents the case of the giant Italian rayon firm Snia Viscosa which was acquired by its direct rivals, Courtaulds in the UK and the German firm Glanzstoff, in 1927. Italian deflation which underpinned the return of the country to the gold standard between 1925 and 1927 and the parlous financial conditions of Snia Viscosa proved incentives in what seemed to be a fire sale investment. This investment mitigated the credit crunch and allowed Snia Viscosa to have access to foreign rayon expertise. Evidence suggests that the regime and economic nationalism exerted some pressure on foreign interests and were instrumental in the abandonment of plans intended to reduce Italian rayon output dramatically. One contribution of this article is its use of business history to illustrate how recessions can reshape foreign direct investment flows and the tensions that may arise between domestic business interests and foreign stakeholders during recessions. In addition, the history of Snia Viscosa shows the importance of foreign interests and multinationals in the long‐term industrialization of Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the social and political history of the European town of Basel, Switzerland. The town was famed for its paper manufacture and its printers, and its university had been founded in 1460. The site of Basel was almost unique, the first permanent bridge over the Rhine was built there in 1225. This created a nodal point for traffic from the regions on either side of the Alps. Basel was not spared by the Black Death which afflicted so much of Europe but, soon after the great pestilence of 1349, Basel was struck by a catastrophe which may have been still more severe. In the political context, Basel was of some importance, perhaps rather too much so for the taste of the urban population affected by this. Underlying Basel's political position was its economic and financial importance, something which was to continue well into the future. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was still the largest town in Switzerland, and later still much of the development of the modern Swiss economy was financed from there.

Since the seminal work by W. A. Lewis, exports of primary products have been deemed the main or sole source of growth in tropical countries before the Great Depression. However, this conventional wisdom relies on very limited evidence. This article analyses the growth of exports with a constant market share analysis for 84 tropical polities. Exports grew a lot, but less than total trade, while relative prices of tropical products remained roughly constant. We thus tentatively infer that the decline in the tropical shares of world trade reflects an insufficient demand for tropical products. Asia dealt well with these headwinds throughout the whole period, while African polities blossomed after the First World War. The loser was (South) America, and most notably the Caribbean former slave colonies, especially before 1870. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Committee on Industrial Organisation was established in the early 1960s to evaluate the level of preparedness of Irish industry for the imminent dismantling of the country's protectionist trade barriers. The Committee's sectoral reports list the 900 or so manufacturing firms that it surveyed and that together accounted for more than half of Irish manufacturing employment. From a range of archival sources, this article identifies the nationality of ownership of most of these firms, alongside their date of establishment and level of employment in 1960. Industrial grants data are used to strip out export-oriented businesses that began to arrive in the 1950s. This makes it possible to estimate the employment share and sectoral presence of tariff-jumping foreign firms. The latter is analysed through the lens of modern perspectives on foreign direct investment. The article also enhances our understanding of the interest-group politics of the trade liberalization process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses demographic change in Southeast Asia's main cities during and soon after the Second World War Japanese occupation. We argue that two main patterns of population movements are evident. In food-deficit areas, a search for food security typically led to large net inflows to main urban centres. By contrast, an urban exodus dominated in food surplus regions because the chief risk was to personal safety, especially from Japanese and Allied bombing. Black markets were ubiquitous, and essential to sustaining livelihoods in cities with food-deficit hinterlands. In Rangoon and Manila, wartime population fluctuations were enormous. Famines in Java and northern Indochina severely impacted Jakarta and Hanoi through inflows of people from rural areas. In most countries, the war's aftermath of refugees, revolution, and political disruption generated major rural-urban population relocations. Turmoil in the 1940s had the permanent consequences of augmenting the primacy of Southeast Asia's main cities and promoting squatter settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on exchange rate regime choice in developing countries has revealed that a range of factors, from weak fiscal institutions to high costs of borrowing in their own currencies, limits the range of options available to these countries. This article uses the case of Liberia to illustrate that new states in Africa during the gold standard era faced similar limitations, even in the absence of formal colonial rule. The rapid depreciation of the Liberian dollar in the nineteenth century led to the adoption of sterling as a medium of exchange and store of value. This initially made it easier for Liberia to service its sterling-denominated debt and for Liberians to purchase imports from Britain. However, as economic relations with the US deepened during the twentieth century, instability in the pound-dollar exchange rate created serious dislocations in the Liberian economy, ultimately leading to the official adoption of the US dollar in 1943. The story of Liberia illustrates the long-standing challenges of globalization for peripheral economies and suggests the need for a reassessment of the origins and impact of colonial monetary regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this article we develop new tools to survey the development of lending-of-last-resort operations in the mid-nineteenth century. One finding is that free lending and extensive liquidity support against good collateral developed gradually after 1847, and was already a fact of life before Bagehot published Lombard Street. Another is that the extension of the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort function went along with a reduction of its exposure to default risks, in contrast with accounts that have associated lending of last resort with moral hazard. Finally, we provide a new interpretation of the 'high rates' advocated by Bagehot. We suggest they were meant to prevent banks from free-riding on the safety offered by the central bank, and were aimed at forcing them to keep lending during crises so as to maintain a critical degree of liquidity in the money market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on commodity market integration has boomed in the last 15 years, and a sort of consensus is slowly emerging, at least with regard to trends in the last two centuries. This article argues that this consensus is fragile because the research is haunted by serious methodological shortcomings. The results are not really comparable because authors use a bewildering array of statistical techniques, without bothering too much about their assumptions and, more generally, about the theoretical foundations of their work. Market integration is a multi-faceted process and available techniques can be classified according to the issues they are suitable to tackle. In other words, the methodological choices, together with the available data, have steered the research towards a quite narrow set of issues. Thus we know much less than we suppose. The final section sketches out a research agenda beyond pure measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors respond to an article entitled "Financial market analysis can go mad (in the search for irrational behaviour during the South Sea Bubble)," by Gary S. Shea, which appears in the current issue of "Economic History Review." They feel that Shea's essay offers three main criticisms of their previously published work regarding the South Sea Bubble. They address the legal opinions regarding the status of subscription receipts, the accuracy of trading data posted after the stock crashed, and issues associated with counterparty risk.

This study evaluates women's de jure and de facto land rights and their implications for household welfare in nineteenth‐century Bangkok. Women constituted a significant share of agricultural landowners holding government‐issued land deeds in central Siam (now Thailand)—a pattern that stands in contrast to both historical and contemporary developing economy contexts where the structure of land rights often favours men. The findings show, through both direct and indirect evidence, that women's de jure rights were upheld in practice. Women made significantly more agricultural investments than male or mixed‐gender owners, which supports the assertion that women perceived their land rights as secure under Siam's traditional usufruct land rights system. An assessment of land‐related court cases directly supports our claim, showing that women in Siam had access to legal representation and were protected when their land rights were challenged by investors and local elites in the context of high demand for both agricultural and urban land. Such secure land rights helped preserve women's livelihoods as agriculturists and household well‐being. We estimate that the median female‐owned orchard could support 10 adults annually, achieving a standard of living comparable to unskilled labourer households in Beijing and Milan during the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses a new dataset of 2,246 notarial deeds of house sales from one of the major cities of the Ottoman Empire, Edirne, covering the period from 1720 to 1814. It estimates real hedonic house prices and urban wealth inequality for the housing market. It shows that house size, proximity to the commercial centre, access to fresh water, and family ties were important determinants of relative house prices. These findings also apply to the different quartiles of the market, indicating limited market segmentation. It demonstrates that there was an increase in housing wealth inequality during the eighteenth century as house prices became more dispersed. The hedonic house price index provides evidence that inflation‐adjusted house prices declined substantially following the Russo‐Turkish war of 1768–74. The decline is mainly explained through demographic shocks induced by plague epidemics, natural disasters, and other population movements driven by wars, army mobilization, and political upheavals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about various articles related to the economic history of Great Britain since 1850. Economic history, one is often told, is losing its attraction to students. As it becomes more mathematical, a branch perhaps of applied economics, so it loses its adherents, while social history gains those who seek empathy with people in the past, and who disdain quantification as an abstraction from historical reality. In the article "Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain," published in the journal "Past and Present," W.D. Rubinstein shows that traditional generalizations about the rise of manufacturing wealth in the nineteenth century do not survive painstaking counting of probate valuations. These demonstrate that the holders of large wealth at death, other than landowners, had amassed their fortunes predominantly in commerce, finance, and transport, rather than in cotton, engineering, or steel. Rubinstein is clearly right to emphasize the importance of the tertiary sector as a wealth-creator. Even the apparent simplicity of landed wealth based on broad acres does not survive David Cannadine's "The Landowner As Millionaire: The Finances of the Dukes of Devonshire," published in the journal "Agriculture History Review."

This article presents information about several articles related to the economic history of Great Britain from 1700 to 1850. J. Mokyr's article "Demand vs. Supply in the Industrial Revolution," published in the Journal of Economic History," raised fundamental issues. It reexamined the Gilboy thesis of the role of demand in industrialization, attempting to quantify such effects as the impact of food prices and the pull of exports, and concluding that even population growth, if treated as a totally exogenous factor, can have contributed less than 10 percent of the growth of output. Industrial Revolution may thus be restored as a wave of gadgets, provided that their quantity, including the supply of effort, is added to the conventional assessment of their improving quality. It was welcome that there were more articles on industrial history in 1977, and several tackled the kinds of issue demanded by Mokyr's work. Primary industry fared less well in terms of quality, and one potentially useful article, C.A. Whatley's "The Introduction of the Newcomen Engine to Ayrshire," published in the "Industrial Archaeology Review," rather disappointed as an account both of coalfield development and technological change.

The article focuses on the essays included in the book "Population in History." It contains 27 contributions, nearly all by different authors; more than a third of these are on English demographic history, but France is also well represented, with others on Ireland, Scandinavia, Italy, Flanders, and North America. The methods of historical demography have recently been widened by the introduction of analysis based on the "reconstitution" of families from material contained in local records. In spite of considerable activity by demographic historians in the last decade, however, a state of impasse seems to have been reached in which existing techniques of historical demography no longer offer much hope of extending our understanding of the processes of demographic change in the pre-census period on the basis of the strictly limited supply of known statistical data. At last speculation based upon incomplete data is being replaced by reliable computations of all the essential variables in demographic change. This is, then, a very patchy book, a curious compound of scholarship and optimism, of real worth and questionable methodology.

If land is titled and transferable, it can be used as collateral against which money can be borrowed. The resulting increase in access to credit is usually expected to foster economic growth. This article focuses on a policy in colonial India that made land less available as collateral for debt. Using a panel dataset for Punjab districts from 1890 to 1910, the findings show that this reduced the availability of mortgage‐backed credit, but did not hurt proxies for economic development, such as acreage and cattle, at least in the short run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expanding sugar trade linking Portugal, Brazil, and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries required enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that overseas agents would act honestly and diligently. While the recent literature emphasizes that multiple mechanisms were substitutes in addressing this problem, this article highlights that merchants chose different mechanisms to govern distinct types of transactions and explains why. A reputational mechanism relying on social and economic constraints within an ethnic diaspora governed more complex and higher‐value arrangements. A different mechanism linking economic incentives to professional reputations across the diasporas plying this trade route predominated in simpler and smaller transactions. Finally, long‐distance and transnational judicial enforcement supplemented these two reputational mechanisms. Capable of matching the value and complexity of transactions with the attributes of governing mechanisms, merchants were able to diversify their transactions, expand the market for agents, better allocate agents to tasks, and stimulate competition among them. The resulting decrease in agency costs was critical in such a significantly competitive market as the sugar trade. Evolving institutional choice thus reinforced the expansion of trade. These hypotheses are corroborated by data from a prosopography of merchants of Jewish origin, derived from notarial records from Oporto and Amsterdam, and from Inquisition files. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India fell behind during colonial rule. The absolute and relative decline of Indian GDP per capita with respect to Britain began before colonization and coincided with the rise of the textile trade with Europe. However, the fortunes of the traditional textile industry cannot explain the decline in the eighteenth century and stagnation in the nineteenth century as India integrated into the global economy of the British Empire. Inadequate investment in agriculture and consequent decline in yield per acre stalled economic growth. Modern industries emerged and grew relatively fast. The reversal began after independence. Policies of industrialization and a green revolution in agriculture increased productivity in agriculture and industry. However, India's growth in the closing decades of the twentieth century has been led by services. A concentration of human capital in the service sector has origins in colonial policy. Expenditure on education prioritized higher education, creating an advantage for the service sector. At the same time, the slow expansion of primary education lowered the accumulation of human capital and put India at a disadvantage in comparison with the fast‐growing economies of East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been claims that British capital was not well deployed in Victorian Britain. There was, allegedly, a lack of support for new and dynamic companies in comparison to the situation in Germany and the US. We find no evidence to support these claims. The London Stock Exchange welcomed young, old, domestic, and foreign firms. It provided funds to firms in old, existing industries as well as patenting firms in 'new‐tech' industries at similar costs of capital. If investors did show a preference for older and foreign firms, it was because those firms offered investors better long‐run performance. In addition, we show some evidence that investors who worked in the same industry and lived close to the firm going public were allotted more shares in high‐quality initial public offerings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large literature emphasizes that elite capture of political institutions hampered the spread of mass schooling in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We collect new data on investments in elementary education and the distribution of voting rights for more than 2,000 local governments in nineteenth‐century Sweden and document that educational expenditure was higher where the distribution of political power was more unequal. In particular, areas governed by local landed elites—even those where a single landowner had de jure dictatorial powers—invested substantially more in mass schooling relative to areas where political power was more widely shared, or where it lay in the hands of capitalist elites. Our findings lend quantitative support to an earlier literature produced by economic and social historians which argues that landed elites advanced mass schooling as part of their historical role as patrons of the local community and as a response to the increasing proletarianization of the rural population, while also furthering our understanding of how Sweden maintained a high level of human capital despite its low level of economic development and restricted franchise in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the composition of firm ownership and entrepreneurship in Egypt between 1910 and 1949 by assembling a novel dataset on multi‐owned firms. The evidence supports two main results. First, Muslim participation remained disproportionately low in partnerships but was distinctly high in corporations relative to non‐Muslims. Second, Muslim‐owned firms were frailer and more likely to experience early exits. The findings are consistent with the view that the region's institutional legacy, such as disparities in physical or human capital, created obstacles for Muslims. When these implications are tested, the findings show that only small‐scale Muslim firms had restricted access to capital. The skewness in Muslim firms' entry and start‐up size is probably the result of legal distortions introduced by the government, which entrenched a small class of political elites in large‐scale firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private and local investors provided much of the capital to improve England's infrastructure during its industrialization. This study investigates the financial returns to investors in turnpike road trusts. It draws on parliamentary reports which provide comprehensive data on finances, including payments to bondholders. One key finding is that turnpike trusts paid their bondholders a return above the yield on government bonds before 1850. Afterwards turnpike interest payments declined, yet they still yielded competitive returns. Another key finding is that the risks were modest. Returns to holding individual turnpike bonds varied, with most paying 4 to 5 per cent and some paying zero. The latter were not the majority and in many cases interest payments resumed within a few years. Diversified portfolios of turnpike bonds enjoyed lower risks, and outperformed portfolios with railway and canal securities traded on the London exchange before 1850. Overall, the results contribute to a better understanding of the risks and returns associated with investing in early public works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experiences of Latin American countries are not fully incorporated into current debates concerning the age of mass migration, even though 13 million Europeans migrated to the region between 1870 and 1930. This survey draws together different aspects of the Latin America immigration experience. Its main objective is to rethink the role of European migration to the region, addressing several major questions in the economics of migration: whether immigrants were positively selected from their sending countries, how immigrants assimilated into the host economies, the role of immigration policies, and the long‐run effects of immigration. Immigrants came from the economically backward areas of southern and eastern Europe, yet their adjustment to the host labour markets in Latin America seems to have been successful. The possibility of rapid social upgrading made Latin America attractive for European immigrants. Migrants were positively selected from origin according to literacy. The most revealing aspect of new research is showing the positive long‐run effects that European immigrants had in Latin American countries. The political economy of immigration policies deserves new research, particularly for Brazil and Cuba. The case of Argentina shows a more complex scenario than the classic representation of landowners constantly supporting an open‐door policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture has played a central role in Africa's long‐term economic development. Previous research has argued that the low productivity of African economies has posed significant challenges to African efforts to produce an agricultural surplus or to develop commercial agriculture. Low agricultural productivity has also served as a key explanation for the transatlantic slave trade, on the basis that it was more profitable to export humans overseas than to grow and export produce. However, the field has suffered from a lack of comparable empirical evidence. This article contributes to this field by presenting quantitative data on historical land and labour productivity in Africa, from a case study of the agricultural productivity of Senegambia in the early nineteenth century. Focusing on five key crops, our results suggest that both land and labour productivity was lower in Senegambia than it was in all other parts of the world for which we have found comparable data. This article thus lends support to claims that stress ecological factors as one of the main determinants of Africa's historical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the impact of insecure property rights on the behaviour of owners of land before the Spanish Civil War. The theoretical literature on land reform argues that legal threats to the status quo determine agrarian organization, with owners selling land and moving to other asset classes or engaging in large‐scale substitution of sharecroppers and tenants with wage labourers. This study, which uses municipal data on tenant evictions in Catalonia in 1934–5, does not find that uncertainty over property rights in the 1930s meant that owners tried to substitute tenants with wage labourers, especially in the case of the controversial rabassa morta contracts on vineyards. Here it is argued that after 40 years of organizational adjustment to shocks related to phylloxera infestations, legal changes, urbanization, and changes in relative prices, by the 1930s the margin for adjustment was small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exceptional weather conditions and associated harvest failures of 1315–17 marked the beginning of the worst subsistence crisis in European history. Until now, historians have mainly viewed the Great Famine, and medieval famines in general, through theoretical models of the larger fourteenth‐century crisis. However, this article suggests that this approach is flawed and instead applies recent theories on contemporary famines to the crisis of 1315–17 in the county of Flanders. This new perspective not only leads to a re‐examination of existing explanations, such as the role of warfare, but also reveals the importance of property rights in entitlement to food: the power of elites, the relative number of large‐scale landowners, and the structure of household income all influenced peasants' degree of vulnerability. [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]

Retail markets were a notable feature of urban England in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, particularly in the midlands and north. Market halls were the most visible manifestation of this, and were important public buildings. This article looks beyond the imposing architecture to take a more critical view of their function and justification. It argues that while most were well‐managed and earned income in excess of current expenditure, very substantial investment in large and elaborate buildings was hard to justify in purely financial terms. The return on capital was often negligible. Food and drink traders were the largest group in almost all markets, but there were significant numbers of traders selling clothing, textiles, and household goods. There was some justification to complaints that local authorities were providing publicly financed miscellaneous shops in competition with rent‐ and rate‐paying shopkeepers. Most retailers supplying basic necessities operated from shops rather than markets. Saturday night markets were important in working‐class culture and as a source of cheap food, but most day‐to‐day necessities were purchased from local shops or street traders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fragmented geographical, fiscal, and financial state inherited by Philip II of Spain, while the public debt reached an unprecedented level (50–60 per cent of GDP), the critical refinancing of unfunded asientos into funded juros was operated by merchant‐bankers who signed the asientos. This process is illustrated, using abundant archival documentation, by an asiento with the Maluenda brothers in 1595, which provided the Crown with steady monthly cash payments for a year with options to sell juros for two‐thirds of the credit, and a monthly rate of 1 per cent on the interim balance. Other examples are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly assembled datasets on the size and composition of the London Stock Exchange present some results contradicting conventional wisdom. A forensic examination of one study of corporate equities in the Investor's Monthly Manual between 1869 and 1929 suggests both idiosyncratic mistakes and generic biases that limit the usefulness of this source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]