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

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

This article presents information on periodical literature that was published during the year 1976 on economic history in England and Europe from 1700 to 1850. The prolonged decline of speculative general articles seems to have been reversed in 1976. Inspired by the bicentenary of economist Adam Smith, W.D. Grampp's paper "Scots, Jews and Subversives Among the Dismal Scientists," published in the periodical "International Economic History," assesses the opposition to free trade, and scholar R. Roehl's survey of French industrialization suggests closer parallels with England than are commonly admitted. At a further level of abstraction scholar J. Mokyr's paper "Growing up and the Industrial Revolution in Europe," considers the dualism of the cottage and modern sectors of industry and its significance in the analysis of economic growth, and in so doing has raised some interesting challenges for future empirical work, particularly on the labor market. In this field scholar H. Freudenberger and G. Cummins speculate amusingly in the paper "Health, Work and Leisure Before the Industrial Revolution" and suggest that the increased supply of effort from labor after 1750 may have been the lagged effect of earlier nutritional improvement.

This article presents information on the colonial trades and industrial investments in Scotland from 1700-1815. The economic history of Scotland in the eighteenth century is dominated by the dramatic rise of the colonial trades. By far the most important of these was the importation of tobacco from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina and its later sale in continental European markets, although in the last two decades of the century, the trade in sugar, cotton, and rum, from the West Indies, also assumed significance. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century tobacco formed just under half of all Scottish imports, by value, from outside Great Britain in 1772 accounted for 80 per cent of all imports from North America and the West Indies combined, and in 1762 contributed 52 per cent of all Scottish exports. In the perspective of Great Britain as a whole the achievement of the Scots traders was, in a sense, even more remarkable. In one year in the 1750's, Scottish imports of tobacco exceeded those of both London and the English outports combined. For most of the rest of the period up to the American War, the merchants of the north struggled with those of the capital for predominance. Especially during the golden age after about 1750, Scottish-American commerce was almost entirely controlled by the great trading houses of Glasgow.

Presents the author's reply to comments made by several economic historians on his paper "Wealth of Jamaica." Information on errors of wealth and income measurement in the author's paper; Denial that plantations and plantation colonies in the West Indies were profitable enterprises by researcher Robert Paul Thomas; Discussion on the measurable aspects of the sugar colonies of the old empire; Table showing the value of Jamaica's exports of sugar products to Great Britain and Ireland.

This article presents various papers related to economic and industrial history, published in previous issues of different journals. In the paper "Overseas: Lending and Internal Fluctuations, 1870-1914," A.G. Ford discusses, within a theoretical framework, the mechanism of the transfer of resources overseas, and concludes that overseas lending itself largely generated the requisite balance of payments surplus on current account, by damping down home consumption and hence imports, and by stimulating exports. Rising overseas issues therefore meant rising unemployment and falling imports, and vice versa. H.W. Richardson has a go at the same field with the paper "Retardation in Britain's Industrial Growth, 1870-1913." He argues that the slowing down in the rate of growth was caused by an abnormally low rate of structural change within industry, because there was a dearth of new activities capable of taking over as leading sectors which could create whole new growth industries that could more than cancel out the stagnation of the old staples.

This article uses American merchants' papers to identify the leading English textile exporters to New York and Philadelphia (1750–1805). It shows that Yorkshire and Lancashire took the initiative from London after 1783. The north's ascendancy stemmed from refinements to a well-functioning trading system rather than from the creation of wholly new channels of trade. The emergent exporters of Leeds and Manchester were driven as much by the dictates of sales as of manufacturing; their factory investments were just one component of a series of connections with production. American importers retained their role as intermediaries between English exporters and backcountry retailers. [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]

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]

A review of periodical literature for 2021 is presented, with topics that include private-order institution in global trade, forgery in late Georgian London, and patenting behaviour during Britain's industrial revolution.

In Bulgaria the share of secondary production in GDP remained constantly low between c. 1870–1910. To explain the country's exceptionally weak growth, we use endogenous and unified growth theory. Gerschenkron and Palairet blame a self‐sufficiency‐oriented peasant economy for rising labour and raw material costs in industry, which destroyed the competitiveness of Bulgarian manufacturing and prevented industrialisation. We refute the existence of any long‐lasting cost increases in industry after 1878. Quite the opposite was true: the expansion of Bulgaria's secondary sector was restricted by detrimental changes on the demand side, for which peasants were not responsible. Recent research claims that, around 1910, Bulgarian textile production was significantly lower than in 1870. Our study brings to light new data and information that clearly disproves this view. Until around 1910, a booming modern manufacturing sector more than replaced the country's proto‐industries' textile outputs, which had plummeted dramatically during the early years of the newly founded Bulgarian state. However, as the rise of modern manufacturing in textile production coincided with the decline of the entire large sector of traditional manufacturing, secondary production as a whole stagnated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the overseas marketing performance of British industry during 1870-1914. Unfortunately there is no detailed empirical study of the composition and pattern of British trade on a market by market, product by product, basis in the 40 years before 1914. However, an insignificant chi-square test on the changing shares of British exports by continent throws doubt that British trade with Europe and North America declined, while rising with Asia, Australia and Africa. Similar statistical tests did not support the hypothesis that in the years before 1914 British exports shifted from the U.S. and German markets to the safe markets of India and Australia, or that exports shifted from industrial to non-industrial markets. Many of the British consular reports contain familiar indictments of commercial performance overseas. The lack of attention to marketing methods and techniques marks a serious omission in the debate on entrepreneurial failure. The traditional picture of the British industrialist employing amateurish marketing techniques and outdated selling institutions is misleading.

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]

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 examines the impact of war on trade between 1830 and 1913, that is, during the so‐called first wave of globalization. It has been argued that one of the main reasons for the rapid integration of commodity and factor markets that took place during this period was the peaceful character of the post‐Napoleonic nineteenth century. However, little research has been conducted on the actual impact of wars on international trade during this period. Previous research on the link between war and trade in general has found that war reduces trade both between belligerents and between belligerents and third parties (or neutrals). Apart from a handful of country case studies, this research has focused almost exclusively on the period before or after the peaceful nineteenth century. Our results show that, in the nineteenth century, the negative influence of war on trade was mainly limited to the belligerent economies, while belligerent–neutral trade was either unaffected or even increased during times of war. Also, in contrast to the findings of research on twentieth‐century wars, we find that nineteenth‐century wars had a strictly contemporaneous impact on trade, with a return to normalcy ensuing shortly after the cessation of hostilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a debate about whether coastal shipping experienced substantial productivity growth prior to the advent of steam power. To study changes over the long eighteenth century, this article uses thousands of coastal journey times culled from Board of Trade crew lists between 1835 and 1844 and coastal port books for the mid‐to‐late 1600s, along with a newly digitized coastal network. Comparisons between matched samples show that journey speeds, defined as miles sailed per day, were significantly higher in the crew lists compared to the port books, and that voyage cycle times, defined as days between starting two identical voyages, were substantially lower. The study also shows that voyage times in the east coast coal trade were substantially lower around 1840 than around 1700, but the difference was much smaller when peace years are compared. These new data imply that total factor productivity growth in the east coast coal trade was significant, especially if one accounts for gains from peace after 1815. The findings contribute to the larger literature studying the rate and sources of productivity growth during the industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the industrial revolution in England. The industrial revolution emerges from recent reconstructions of macroeconomic data as a protracted process of unbalanced growth. Apparently, the relocation, reorganization, and mechanization of industry proceeded slowly from 1660 to 1860 and for more than a century remained confined to a handful of advanced industries, the smelting of iron, transportation, and above all cotton textiles, which alone accounted for about 60 per cent of the growth in total factor productivity achieved by the British industry between 1780 and 1860. The ancient technique of block printing appeared in Europe in the fifteenth century if not long before. The development of the British skills in the finishing of textiles was therefore not the product of trade with India. This first restriction on trade with Asia took place at a time when London merchants trading with the East Indies had incurred not simply the enmity of the woollen and silk industries but also the hostility of the Levant Co. for invading its markets in Persia with exported woollen cloth as well as undercutting its return trade in raw and finished silks. In retrospect British pragmatism appears more productive than Dutch free trade or French-style mercantilism.

The article deals with the reason of the British government to end the monopoly of East India Company in 1813 with India. The East India Co. (E.I.C.) Charter Act of 1813, which ended companies' monopoly of trade with India, has been viewed by historians as a significant event in the emergence of British commitment to free trade. The main concern of this article, however, is the reasoning behind the government decision to end monopoly in 1813, rather than the wider question of the efficiency of the E.I.C. It seeks to examine government motives behind the 1813 charter, and re-assesses the significance of the provincial campaigns against monopoly. In opening the India trade, the government was not merely responding to provincial demands for new markets, but was implementing a strategy of its own to combat economic difficulties at home. India was seen primarily as a source of raw materials, rather than as a potential market for British exports.

Presents the author's opinions on articles related to the economic and social history of Great Britain after 1850, which have been published in various periodicals. Views on the manufacturing industry in Great Britain; Views on literature related to international trade; Discussion on labor supply; Discussion on vagrancy.

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.

The article attempts to show the extent to which overvaluation of sterling in the later 1920s could have had an adverse effect on the depressed regions of outer Great Britain. It is argued that any overvaluation of sterling caused by the return to the gold standard at $4.86 would have had a relatively greater adverse impact on "outer" Britain than on the rest of the country by virtue of industrial geography. By making exports uncompetitive overvaluation would have had its most immediate impact on export industries and thus on the regions of "outer" Britain heavily dependent on such industries. This article has concentrated on the effects of an overvaluation of sterling on the export sector, and has ignored the possibility of "domestic" industries suffering from increased import competition as prices fell. There are two obvious reasons for having little concern with imports. The first of these is the relatively small change in imports induced by the value of sterling because of the low demand-elasticity.

The article discusses the international rice and wheat trade from 1868 to 1914. Whilst the international wheat trade has attracted considerable attention from scholars, rice has been comparatively neglected. Economists V.D. Wickizer and M.K. Bennett described in detail the rice economy of monsoon Asia between the wars, and Wickizer also examined rice and wheat in world agriculture and consumption in these years. But the period before the First World War has not been studied in such detail. Yet rice was the world's most important food grain, and the staple for nearly half the world's population, more than the proportion dependent on wheat. The article informs that rice formed an integrated international market before the First World War, something which Wickizer and Bennett did not suggest even for the inter-war years. What is more, the article also proposes that fluctuations in the rice market were directly linked to those in the wheat market, and that the two grains, being substitutes, formed a united market before 1914.

This article examines the empirical data on the international diffusion of the Watt engine before and during the industrial revolution. As far as the international market was concerned, it is desirable to know how many pirate manufacturers exported engines or engine parts, and to what extent these figures, if known, would alter the diffusion pattern. No manufacturing records showing the extent of foreign sales of these other engine producers have yet come to light, but at their period of greatest interest in foreign business some scholars were as concerned in the success or failure of their British competitors abroad as they were in their competitors' activities in the British market. They therefore sought and obtained information on these matters from relations, friends, acquaintances, and employees living or traveling abroad. While, admittedly far less satisfactory, this qualitative evidence suggests that the scale of foreign operations of the British pirates was, on the whole, small and that, were totals known, the conclusions arrived at concerning the rate and directions of diffusion of the Watt engine would be little altered. However, information has been sought not only on actual foreign engine sales but also on the wider potential market demonstrated by foreign inquiries for the Watt engine.

The article focuses on business practices and commerce during medieval period in Europe. From the seventh century A.D. onwards, the Arabs not only extended their military conquests but also succeeded in developing long-distance trade and international commerce on a scale which surpassed anything known before. A host of new institutions and instruments of commerce therefore confronted the merchants of Venice, Gaeta, Amalfi, and Bari when, in the eighth century, they once more ventured across the sea in search of trade. Conditions in the Islamic world of that time were extraordinarily favourable to the rapid and unhindered growth of commerce. Among the Muslims, international trade was particularly stimulated by the pilgrimage to the holy places in Arabia, on which a great body of men converged each year from all over the world. The greatest contribution of the Muslim world to medieval economic life was the development of commercial methods based on writing and recording. From the eighth century on, the suftaja as a draft, which was sometimes also a true bill of exchange, came to play an ever more important part in economic life. Business no longer had to be transacted only in cash, nor was there further need for the risky and expensive transportation of large amounts of cash from place to place.

During the period spanning independence in 1822 to mid‐century, Brazil's south‐east shifted from specializing in the export of cane sugar to coffee. This article explores the mechanism underlying this shift by exploiting a wealth of new monthly data on the Brazilian and international coffee and cane sugar markets during the period 1827–40. It argues that the timing of the coffee boom was driven by a rapid increase in foreign market potential associated with the abolition of the tariff on coffee in the US. It estimates that American tariff reform served to increase coffee exports and African slave imports by around one‐fifth. American firms, with indirect links to the slave trade, rapidly became major players in the export market in Rio de Janeiro, while non‐American firms, traditionally specialized in continental European destinations, turned their sights on the American market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to provide an in‐depth study of France's performance in the new international wine market that began to take shape from the middle of the nineteenth century. We analyse the main determinants of its success in exporting ordinary and high‐quality wine using a gravity model for both types of wine. The article shows how France lost foreign markets in the ordinary wine sector, due to difficulties in maintaining its exports, which resulted from the decrease in production caused by the phylloxera plague and increasing competition from growing numbers of producers who were more efficient at producing these types of wines. However, in the high‐quality wine market, French exporters enjoyed considerable success, increasing their exports thanks to their efforts to offer a product that was highly valued abroad and the use of modern marketing and sales techniques. The exports benefited from the fall in transport costs and French colonial expansion. However, exports of both products were severely affected by a series of major events, including the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Prohibition in the US, and the Great Depression. This case study of the wine market shows that the collapse of the first globalization was not the same for all products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The currency devaluations of the 1930s facilitated a faster recovery from the Great Depression in the countries depreciating, but their unilateral manner provoked retaliatory and discriminatory commercial policies abroad. This article explores the importance of the retaliatory motive in the imposition of trade barriers by gold bloc countries during the 1930s and its effects on trade. Relying on new and existing datasets on the introduction of quotas, tariffs, and bilateral trade costs, the quantification of the discriminatory response suggests that these countries imposed significant beggar‐my‐neighbour penalties. The penalties reduced trade to a similar degree that modern regional trade agreements foster trade. Furthermore, the analysis of contemporary newspapers reveals that the devaluations of the early 1930s triggered an Anglo‐French trade conflict marked by tit‐for‐tat protectionist policies. With regards to global trade, the unilateral currency depreciations came at a high price in political and economic terms. These costs must have necessarily reduced their benefit to the world as a whole. [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]

Abstract: During the late seventeenth century, Atlantic trade grew dramatically. The New Institutional Economists attribute this to institutional developments. During this period, Quakers emerged as the region's most prominent trading community. Some historians explain this achievement as the result of the competitive advantage that Quakers gained from their formal institutions for contract enforcement. This article studies the London Quaker community to show that, in fact, they only began to police the conduct of business regularly after 1750, as part of a wider effort to promote the Society's reputation. Formal institutional advantages cannot explain the Quakers’ early trading success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Regional trade in South America since independence has long been much smaller than would be expected if geography were the only constraint on trade. Several potential explanations exist, including low technological and demand complementarities; low productivity; and high natural and policy barriers to trade. Focusing on the latter explanations, policy makers have long advocated a South American/Southern Cone Free Trade Area—proposed as early as 1889. Would reductions in trade costs have been sufficient to raise trade significantly, or was trade low for other reasons? We study bilateral trade between 1910 and 1950, when large external shocks altered global supply and demand. These shocks help us show that intra‐regional trade could have been boosted by reductions in trade costs. Trade among Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru could have benefited from more benign trade policies or better infrastructure. Regional trade in textiles, which took off from the 1930s, supports our argument that trade improved when trade costs fell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Previous scholarship has suggested that British trade was generally unaffected by foreign tariffs during the period from 1870 to 1913. This article focuses specifically on Anglo‐American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole intertemporal determinant of Anglo‐American trade costs. However, the determinacy of tariffs for Anglo‐American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which this article reconstructs. The article concludes by claiming that Anglo‐American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth‐century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the institutional structure of medieval overseas trade to explain why trade thrived even in the absence of the state. The literature has dealt mainly with intra-coalition or intra-community relations. However, the literature does not answer the question of how institutions could be created that could support interaction between a large number of distant communities and between merchants who did not necessarily know one another. This article presents such an institution that prevailed in the Baltic Sea region in the late middle ages, referred to here as the inter-communal conciliation mechanism. In case of a dispute, conciliation took place between town councils, rather than the merchants involved in the dispute, thus combining individual liability and communal enforcement. Exploration of the documents reveals a task-specific regularity of behaviour, which was the general practice among merchants to turn to the council of their own community when they had problems in a foreign town, instead of being obliged to solve disputes by themselves. This institution provided a permanent, centralized, and relatively impartial enforcement mechanism to respond to breaches. It was therefore well adapted to large, at least partially anonymous markets, such as the Baltic Sea region, with dozens of towns and thousands of merchants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of merchant companies in structuring overseas trade in early modern Europe by considering the commerce of the Merchant Adventurers of England, the 'regulated' Company which monopolized the cloth export trade to Germany and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the Company's trade to its German 'mart' town of Stade at the close of the sixteenth century through a detailed case study of the trade of one particular merchant, John Quarles. Using correspondence between Quarles and his factors overseas, it considers how membership of this regulated trading company impacted on the practice of its members, both through its formal regulatory regime and the informal pressures that came with corporate affiliation. However, corporate privileges also created 'shadow economies' inhabited by the excluded, those castigated by companies as 'interlopers'. The article considers the connections between interlopers and those 'disorderly brethren' of the company who were prepared to violate corporate regulations in pursuit of opportunities. It shows how the regulatory regimes of merchant companies were shaped by the changing practices of members and non-members as they responded to the structural changes facing European trade in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the case of Denmark-a country which historically had next to no domestic energy resources-for which new historical energy accounts are presented for the years 1800-1913. It demonstrates that Denmark's take-off at the end of the nineteenth century was relatively energy dependent. This is related to Denmark's well-known agricultural transformation and development through the dairy industry, and thus the article complements the literature which argues that expensive energy hindered industrialization, by arguing that similar obstacles would have precluded other countries from a more agriculture-based growth. The Danish cooperative creameries, which spread throughout the country over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, were dependent on coal. Although Denmark had next to no domestic coal deposits, this article demonstrates that Danish geography allowed cheap availability throughout the country through imports. On top of this it emphasizes that another important source of energy was imported feed for cows. [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]

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]

Nigerian rubber exports expanded rapidly during the Second World War 'battle for rubber'. This was achieved by overcoming obstacles to greater exploitation of both wild and planted rubber. This article outlines Nigeria's wartime experience, focusing on the Benin region that dominated smallholder production after the war. British policies initially restricted rubber planting. After Japan occupied South-East Asia, Britain encouraged maximum production. Late in the war, officials struggled with the planting boom that had occurred. The war was a period of both continuity and change for Benin, and exposed the limited capacity of the colonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case study of cocoa-farming in Ghana, this article takes up the longrunning but recently neglected debate about the 'cash crop revolution' in tropical Africa during the early colonial period. It focuses on the supply side, to test the much criticized but never superseded 'vent-for-surplus' interpretation of the export expansion as a substitution of labour for leisure. The article argues that while the model captured certain features of the case, such as the application of labour to underused land, its defining claim about labour is without empirical foundation. Rather, the evidence points to a reallocation of resources from existing market activities towards the adoption of an exotic crop, entailing a shift towards a new, qualitatively different and more profitable kind of production function. This innovation is best understood in the context of the long-term search of African producers for ways of realizing the economic potential of their resource of relatively abundant land, while ameliorating the constraints which the environment put upon its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1680 and 1730 the English and Welsh copper industry rose from the dead and by the mid-eighteenth century it had become Europe's leading copper producer. The revival followed the extension of sugar cultivation in England's colonies and the creation of a strong new demand for copper, which was reflected in rising exports and rising prices. Buoyant demand created a favourable market for the inventive activity needed to cut costs in the native industry, which encouraged investment in a systematic programme of research and development and culminated in important breakthroughs in smelting and mining technologies which transformed the non-ferrous metal industries. The story provides an insight into how the economic context shaped the way useful knowledge was produced and consumed. Colonial expansion not only provided England with additional resources overseas but also encouraged the reallocation of human and financial capital to make better use of slack resources at home. Empire and technical change intersected with positive consequences for economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rhine transport was not an absolute condition for German industrialization. Railways proved to be efficient, and in the 1840-1870 period were essential for the industrialization of the Ruhr area. The key questions addressed in this article are: why did inland navigation not disappear from the Rhine region (as it did elsewhere), even recovering after the 1870s? And why did it have an unassailable competitive advantage from the 1890s onwards? Political developments leading to the liberalization of Rhine shipping and the canalization of the river created the opportunity to increase the scale of shipping. This gave it competitive advantages when it came to bulk transport. This article uses new data on freight rates in the Rhine delta to demonstrate the course of Rhine competitiveness. Furthermore, it identifies the institutional conditions, and the technological and organizational improvements, that were the basis of this growing competitiveness. The conclusion is that the element of German international trade that went by the Rhine correlated with the cost of Rhine shipping when compared to that of railway transport. As a consequence of the recovery of Rhine shipping, the port of Rotterdam became stronger than its Belgian neighbour, Antwerp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents estimates of industrial production in post-Unification Italy's 69 provinces in the census years 1871, 1881, 1901, and 1911. Initially industry was largely artisanal, and located in the former political capitals; but even then the waterfalls of the subalpine north-west attracted what factory industry there was. Contrary to widespread opinion, in the aftermath of Unification the industrial and overall growth leaders were actually in the south, where selected provinces reaped the gains from the freer foreign trade, and infrastructure investment, that accompanied the loss of independence. Over the later nineteenth century industry concentrated into the 'industrial triangle'; but even there industrialization remained sharply local, and excluded the right bank of the upper Po. The early twentieth century, in turn, brought a measure of industrial diffusion-to the centre/north-east, where it was tied to the production of perishables on recently improved land-and concentration within the north-western triangle itself, into its major cities, as progress in energy transmission effectively moved the waterfalls into the plains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wars are increasingly frequent, and the trend has been steadily upward since 1870. The main tradition of western political and philosophical thought suggests that extensive economic globalization and democratization over this period should have reduced appetites for war far below their current level. This view is clearly incomplete: at best, confounding factors are at work. Here, we explore the capacity to wage war. Most fundamentally, the growing number of sovereign states has been closely associated with the spread of democracy and increasing commercial openness, as well as the number of bilateral conflicts. Trade and democracy are traditionally thought of as goods, both in themselves, and because they reduce the willingness to go to war, given the national capacity to do so, but the same factors may also have been increasing the capacity for war, and thus its frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Franco-German trade relationship is viewed from a long-term perspective, the conventional view that trade ties were rather good before 1914 becomes doubtful. In fact, trade statistics point to the absolute and relative decline in trade flows between the two countries after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. This postwar episode of Franco-German trade history is far from incidental. On the basis of a comprehensive study of Franco-German trade by product, this article reveals a complete restructuring of French trade with Germany after the conflict and invites a new analysis of its economic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the commercial and financial activities of commercial networks active in the 'Venetian' eastern Mediterranean between the loss of Cyprus (1571) and the onset of the War of Candia (1645). The goal of the article is to present the results of recent research on early modern Mediterranean trade and finance, drawing attention to some promising areas of investigation that have been overlooked by scholarship and that constitute part of the author's own work in progress. The central question is: how did traditional Mediterranean networks and trade fare in the age of global expansion? In other words, did Mediterranean trade networks experience an evolution in their structures similar to the rest of the world? An attempt is made to answer this question through an analysis of the activities of Greek, Venetian, and English mercantile and financial networks in the eastern Mediterranean, showing the peculiarities of the interplay between trade and finance that underpinned the economy of the Venetian Stato da Mar . This attempt highlights two phenomena at play within the 'Venetian Mediterranean': firstly, that foreign operators began directly financing Venetian imperial administrative structures, and secondly, that the number of Venetian merchants involved in these operations increased as new players entered the financial game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peasant producers are now recognized as having played an important part in the late medieval economy: this can also be said of peasant producers in eastern England before the Conquest. In the wake of the Viking invasions Scandinavian settlers from the second half of the ninth century entered a region that was already commercially active. Independent farmers raised sheep, possibly a newly introduced breed, on the Lincolnshire Wolds and marketed their wool. A network of Anglo-Scandinavian shippers and traders, members of a merchant elite, controlled important places on river routes. That Lincolnshire was an area of light manorialization and many sokemen had an invigorating effect on its economy. Peasant producers had comparative freedom and by controlling markets and extracting cash from the inhabitants of their sokes Anglo-Norman lords profited from an economy that had been invigorated by Scandinavian enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies concluded that a private-order institution based on a multilateral reputation mechanism was particularly important in governing agency relations among the Maghribi traders who operated in the Muslim Mediterranean. The legal system and a bilateral reputation mechanism were particularly important among the Genoese traders. Initial cultural, social, and political factors led to this institutional distinction, while the incorporation of culture in the resulting institutions influenced subsequent institutional developments. In particular, the particularities of the late medieval European institutions contributed to the rise of the modern-impersonal-markets in Europe. The analysis also substantiates the contention that private-order institutions can support sophisticated exchange and market-promoting policies should take this into account, particularly in countries lacking an effective court system. An article by Edwards and Ogilvie challenges this analysis. It alleges that the Maghribis, like European traders, relied on court enforcement and a bilateral reputation mechanism in which a narrow social circle responded to opportunism. This article shows that Edwards and Ogilvie's analysis and conclusions are wrong. It refutes each of their empirical claims and presents additional pieces of evidence supporting the institutional distinction conjecture. The discussion is structured around the methodological challenge associated with comparative and historical institutional analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses historical fact as a natural experiment to measure a country's welfare loss from shifting from an allowed to a restricted trade situation, based on international trade theory. A welfare loss of 8 per cent of GDP is found. The evolution of domestic import and export prices in Spain in 1940-58 fits international trade theory assumptions. The main years of autarky are not those commonly considered, but 1947-55, marked by the exclusion of Spain from the Marshall Plan and the Madrid Treaty between Franco's regime and the US. The upper-bound welfare loss for 1947-55 is 26 per cent of GDP. [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]

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]