Search

The article examines the long-term growth of the banking sector in Great Britain and money stock in the period 1844-1880. Detailed estimates of long-term monetary and banking growth in the country exist for the years after the late 1870s, although controversy remains as to their precise accuracy, but even reasonably accurate figures for the greater part of the nineteenth century have proved elusive. It is here that this paper makes a contribution by drawing heavily upon archive material to present new estimates for England and Wales for part of that early period, 1844-80. New estimates are made for commercial bank liabilities to the public and long-term trends in the growth of the money stock are calculated. Data for the number of banks and banking offices are readily available from 1844 in the directory "Banking Almanac," providing one measure of the growth of the commercial banking sector with some breakdown as to the institutional nature and geographical location of firms within the sector. However, they can provide but a crude measure of the growth and density of banking services.

Numerous Acts of Parliament changed the financing of transport infrastructure in eighteenth-century England. This paper examines the economic effects of turnpike acts, which greatly improved road infrastructure by introducing tolls. It shows that turnpike trusts increased property income in local areas by at least 20 per cent. The findings shed light on why local property owners promoted and managed turnpikes. They also show that turnpike trusts accounted for at least 20 per cent of the total growth in real land rents between 1690 and 1815, and added at least 1.65 per cent to national income in 1815. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a historical overview of the agricultural revolution and land ownership problems at Warwickshire, Great Britain in the eighteenth-century. When speaking of its soil and topography most writers have observed that Warwickshire is distinguished by "the quality of variety in a high degree" all placed within the confines of a fairly narrow compass. At the end of the seventeenth century the Arden, lying north and west of the county town, was a neighborhood of mixed light soils formerly wooded, where common fields had never been a significant feature of the organization of farming. To the south and east of the Arden lay the Feldon, itself an area of contrasts in soils and farming pursuits. Extending in an arc from Stratford in the southwest to Rugby in the northeast, the Avon formed a band of rich loamy soil three to four miles deep on either bank. Beyond the river valley the most significant feature of the east and southeast Feldon was the extensive tract of Lower Lias Clay, which stretched up to the marlstone of the Cotswold plateau.

Abstract: This article considers deficiencies in the designation and reassessment of Legal Quays (those authorized for foreign trade), and the detrimental impact of these and other Elizabethan customs reforms from the perspective of Christchurch, a small coastal town then in Hampshire. Throttling the flow of merchandise through such places drove trade, and consequently economic growth, to those other places that enjoyed a convenient Legal Quay. In places without such quays, regulation and the farming of customs caused (and also facilitated) the suppression not only of international trade but also of domestic maritime trade. Though otherwise encouraged by Crown policy, entrepreneurial endeavour in Christchurch was stifled by customs regulation, in particular by the logistical burden introduced with remote record‐keeping for coastal trade in the port books. The town seemed unable to break free of Southampton's controlling influence in order to realize its own apparent economic potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Clark's claims about the scale of English agricultural output from the 1200s to the 1860s flout historical and geographical reality. His income‐based estimates start with the daily real wages of adult males and assume that days worked per year were constant. Those advanced in British economic growth make no such assumption and instead are built up from the output side. They correlate better with population trends and are consistent with an economy slowly growing and becoming richer. Clark's denial that such growth occurred, his assertion that substantially more land must have been under arable cultivation, his belief that conditions of full employment invariably prevailed in the countryside at harvest time, his concern that the wage bill would have exceeded the value of output in British economic growth, his refusal to consider the possibility that the working year was of variable length, and his assertion that output per acre must have been equalized across arable and pasture are all shown to be figments of his ‘Malthus delusion’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Estimates of English income in Broadberry et al.’s British economic growth, 1270–1870 are founded upon a fourfold growth of farm output, and output per farm worker, over this interval. This article shows, using four separate tests, that farm output growth must have been much more limited. The tests are, first, whether in 1300 there was enough work at harvest to employ all the labour force; second, whether the value of output per worker in agriculture was greater than the annual earnings of workers; third, whether the implied relative outputs per acre of arable versus pasture were reasonable; and fourth, whether a much shorter medieval work year was possible. An alternative index of farm output consistent with the labour supply, wages, and farm rents is derived. This shows much less growth during the period 1270–1800. Overall economic growth in England during these years must consequently have been far less than Broadberry et al. estimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article draws on quantitative and descriptive data from Robert Campbell's manual for prospective apprentices, The London tradesman (1747), to demonstrate the responsiveness of apprenticeship premiums in mid-eighteenth-century London to market forces of supply and demand. It first shows that Campbell's data on mid-eighteenth-century journeymen wages, apprenticeship premiums, and masters' set-up costs in London are consistent with other sources. It then applies instrumental variable regressions to estimate the elasticity of apprenticeship premiums with respect to journeymen wages and set-up costs, using Campbell's education and ability requirements by trade to instrument for wages. We find an elasticity of one with respect to wages, and of 0.25 with respect to set-up costs, both statistically significant at a p-value less than 0.1%. We interpret these findings as supporting the thesis that apprenticeship played an important role in adapting the English workforce to the skill requirements of the industrial revolution in its early stages, insofar as the institution of apprenticeship in London was representative of other parts of England. Furthermore, by demonstrating the internal and external consistency of Campbell's observations, our findings should encourage their use as an unparalleled source of detailed, trade-specific wage data from the early years of the industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly every conceivable aspect of the old poor law in England appears to have been studied. Yet some fundamental questions about parish-level provisioning remain hard to answer. These include the amount that people received from the parish, from all sources, each week; how the balance between types of payments shifted over the period, and (correspondingly) within the individual life-course; the range of services or supplements that such individuals received, from the parish, over the course of their lives; and how this spectrum of relief adjusted to the massive macro-level changes that we know occurred in the poor relief system between the 1760s and 1834. This study attempts to answer these questions in new depth, by employing a dataset that encompasses all payments to named individuals within the Essex parish of Terling between 1762 and 1834, totalling 143,801 payments to 1,508 recipients. Analysis of this dataset provides new insights into the size, scope, changes, and significance of poor relief in labouring families' lives in southern England in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most prior work on historical female labour supply has been confined to looking at the female labour force participation decision. This article uses the detailed information on weekly hours of work and wages contained in the New Survey of London Life and Labour ( NSLLL) (1928-32) to provide the first estimation of both the participation and the hours-of-work decisions for female workers prior to the Second World War. The main finding is that the labour supply curve was negatively sloped-women worked longer hours at lower wages. It is also possible to compare the determinants of the labour force participation decision and the hours of work decision among females in the NSLLL. It appears that the labour force participation decision was more strongly related to household income level than to own wages, while the hours of work decision among working women was more strongly related to the wage level than to household income. Finally, the article also examines the differential labour market behaviour of married women, female household heads, and young single women; most striking among these results is the evident added-worker effect on married women of the onset of the Great Depression in 1930. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses newspaper advertisements to chart the changes in speeds and fares of stage coaches, identifying the main periods of increasing speeds among London coaches as the 1760s-80s and 1810s-20s, separated by a period when speeds declined. It then measures productivity growth. Fares of London coaches in 1835-6 were about 27 per cent of what they would have been but for improvements in horses, vehicles, and roads from 1750, and the two main periods of productivity growth correspond to those of rising speeds. Speeds and productivity of regional coaches increased more smoothly. The rising productivity firmly identifies road transport as one of the modernizing sectors of the economy. New figures are put forward for the growing number of London and regional coaches, indicating rapid growth in passenger miles. While turnpike trusts had little impact before the 1750s, their increasing effectiveness, together with the use of steel springs and improved horses, was crucial to the rising productivity of the 1760s-80s, and even more so to that of the 1810s-20s. The cross roads were apparently poorer than London roads in the late eighteenth century, but thereafter the gap narrowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the nobility were strongly affected by living standards. Looking at a large sample of parishes after 1540, we find that the positive check had weakened considerably by 1650 even though living standards were static at best, but persisted in London for another century despite its higher wages. In both cases the disappearance of the positive check coincided with the introduction of systematic poor relief, suggesting that government action may have played a role in breaking the link between harvest failure and mass mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article presents new data on mill location in Manchester in 1850 to show that water-transport infrastructure played a key role in determining the intra-urban pattern of factory development. The shift from water to steam power introduced new patterns of industrial water use, rather than the relocation of factories away from waterways. Five new public canals and 23 private canal branches activated a major expansion of Manchester's waterfront, providing the majority of the manufacturing sites that enabled the town to become the world's foremost factory centre. Without effective municipal water supplies, canals were the best available water source for steam engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition to industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by a decline in irregular work attendance. The chronology of that decline is unclear due to a lack of quantitative evidence. This article examines detailed colliery records from a crucial period of industrial transition and shows that traditional patterns of attendance and work effort survived in one of the leading sectors of the industrial revolution well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The study shows how regional and local sources can throw new light upon problems for which national quantitative data are unavailable. [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]

This article, focusing on Seebohm Rowntree's poverty surveys, considers the importance and durability of the concept of secondary poverty. It argues that secondary poverty was a central component of Rowntree's first survey of York, carried out in 1899, and in his lectures and writing in the Edwardian period. Moreover, secondary poverty remained an important feature of Rowntree's analysis during the interwar years and after the Second World War, and was adopted by other researchers in various ways. Although secondary poverty was not seriously examined in the published version of Rowntree's 1936 York survey, there is evidence that it was originally intended to feature, and it is clear that impressionistic evidence of poverty was gathered by Rowntree's investigators, as had been the case in 1899. Moreover, although it was completely expunged from the third survey of York, carried out by Rowntree and Lavers in 1950, a separate inquiry into secondary poverty was carried out in the early 1950s, with a number of prominent supporters. Subsequently, dissatisfaction with income-based definitions and measurements of poverty allowed the concept of secondary poverty to continue to exercise an influence on the study of poverty in the postwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth-century Britain, but was a minor cause of death by the mid-nineteenth century. Although vaccination was crucial to the decline of smallpox, especially in urban areas, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it remains disputed the extent to which smallpox mortality declined before vaccination. Analysis of age-specific changes in smallpox burials within the large west London parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields revealed a precipitous reduction in adult smallpox risk from the 1770s, and this pattern was duplicated in the east London parish of St Dunstan's. Most adult smallpox victims were rural migrants, and such a drop in their susceptibility is consistent with a sudden increase in exposure to smallpox in rural areas. We investigated whether this was due to the spread of inoculation, or an increase in smallpox transmission, using changes in the age patterns of child smallpox burials. Smallpox mortality rose among infants, and smallpox burials became concentrated at the youngest ages, suggesting a sudden increase in infectiousness of the smallpox virus. Such a change intensified the process of smallpox endemicization in the English population, but also made cities substantially safer for young adult migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a reponse to Davenport, Schwarz, and Boulton's article, 'The decline of adult smallpox in eighteenth-century London'. It introduces new data on the parish of St Mary Whitechapel which casts doubt on the pattern of the age incidence of smallpox found by Davenport et al. However, it is concluded that there was a decline in adult smallpox in London, accompanied by a concentration of the disease among children under the age of five. Davenport et al.'s argument that the shift in the age incidence was due to the endemicization of smallpox in England is challenged, with an alternative view that these age changes can be accounted for by the practice of inoculation, both in the hinterland southern parishes of England and in London itself. A detailed discussion is carried out on the history of inoculation in London for the period 1760-1812. It is suggested that inoculation became increasingly popular in this period, rivalling in popularity the practice of vaccination. This was associated with a class conflict between the medical supporters of Jenner and the general population, with many of the latter being practitioners of the old inoculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a contribution to the long-running debate concerning the extent and motivation of medieval storage, this article uses purveyance accounts to examine such facilities in England prior to the Black Death. Three hundred and fifteen cases of predominantly urban storage were recorded for 97 communities for the products of agriculture purchased by the purveyors, mostly threshed grains. When these 315 cases were analysed using an Excel database, it was found that, in contrast to the often magnificent barns on monastic and other lordly estates, this storage was much smaller and informal, often indistinguishable, it seems, from the domestic storage for families themselves. As modest as it was, however, it likely played an important role in the increasing commercialization of medieval England, even perhaps to the extent of making society at the time more susceptible to subsistence crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most studies of early modern north-western Europe, England is regarded as the successor of the Netherlands in terms of economic leadership. Whereas related topics like institutional and technological change or changes in trade and capital flows have been incorporated into the research on the comparison of these two rival states, labour migration is usually omitted. This article aims to fill this lacuna by focusing on labour migration to the two core regions of the Netherlands and England: the Randstad and London. Two main research questions are raised in this article. First of all, in what way did the two cores and their hinterlands differ with regard to their demographic, economic, and spatial structures, and how did this contribute to different trends in labour migration over time? Secondly, what was the effect of the configuration of the demand and supply factors of London and the Randstad for their economies and for those who lived in them? By trying to answer these two questions this article aims not only to shed light on a hitherto largely unexplored topic in the comparative geographic, economic, and demographic history of the two countries, but also to contribute to the understanding of migration as a factor in the promotion of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a new source for assessing the distribution of wealth in early modern England derived from witness depositions taken by the church courts. It discusses the accuracy of statements of 'worth' provided by thousands of witnesses between the mid-sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries, and uses the monetary estimates of worth in goods that the majority of deponents supplied to assess the changing distribution of personal wealth. We argue that this data supports recent claims that the pre-industrial English economy experienced significant levels of economic growth, while showing that its benefits were increasingly unevenly distributed between different social groups. In particular, the century after 1550 witnessed spectacular increases in yeoman worth that outstripped inflation by a factor of 10. The relative wealth of yeomen was also underpinned by its more secure distribution over the life cycle which further compounded the differences between them and other social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of English and Welsh lead mines to the silver supplies of mints between Domesday Book and the end of the fifteenth century is assessed in this article, comparing evidence for the size of silver production with mint output data. It is shown that the proposal that northern Pennine mines were the principal source of the silver in the late twelfth-century English currency is untenable. Welsh mines supplied limited amounts of silver to local mints around 1200. Devon silver made a significant but not predominant contribution to mint output at times of bullion scarcity in the 1290s and the mid-fifteenth century. Imported silver was usually a greater source of the metal in the English currency than locally mined silver, and gold coins constituted most of England's money supply from the mid-fourteenth century onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dividends can provide a tangible signal of earnings, but this function depends upon characteristics of financial reporting that were not always present in early financial capitalism. Although eighteenth-century English canal companies offered low-risk securitized capital approved by Parliament and were important to the development of financial capitalism, little is known about the economic state of the canal industry, beyond observed dividend levels. This article estimates rates of return on equity for a set of major English canals, but shows that their financial reporting under-represented equity inputs so that dividend rates did not reliably signal operating returns or equity-based rates of return. [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]

This article offers an examination of the patterns and motivations behind parish apprenticeship in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. It stresses continuity in outlook from parish officials binding children, which involved placements in both the traditional and industrializing sectors of the economy. Evidence on the ages, employment types, and locations of 3,285 pauper apprentices bound from different parts of London between 1767 and 1833 indicates a variety of local patterns. The analysis reveals a pattern of youthful age at binding, a range of employment experiences, and parish-specific links to particular trades and manufactures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a discussion of the allocation of merchants' capital in early Tudor London among household furnishings, business inventories, debts, orphans' estates, landed property, and other forms of income. Previously, historians had to rely on either goods or income summary assessments in the enrolled subsidy returns to estimate wealth. These newly discovered valuations for 1535 provide quantitative evidence for the enormous importance of credit in trade, and show that merchants, as soon as they could, invested much of their wealth in property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses national and local records of debt and evidence from coins, prices, and wages to discuss the economic effects of the gold coinage that was introduced into England in 1344. It distinguishes between the deflationary effects of gold and those of the falling population on prices and credit, and shows that a coinage dominated by gold reduced the volume of credit and transactions far more than the mortality rate and the total circulation of coin would indicate was likely. It relates these findings to the economic and social changes of the fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a subterranean, highly elastic energy source, coal played a vital role in the cotton industry revolution. Coal was also vital to Lancashire's primacy in this revolution, because it was necessary both to the original accumulation of agglomeration economies before the steam age and to their reinforcement during the steam age. In no other part of the world was the cotton industry situated on a coalfield, and the response of other parts of the world cotton industry to Lancashire's agglomeration advantages was dispersal in search of cheap water and/or labour power. Lancashire coal helped to shape the global pattern of cotton production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Settlement of Tithes of 1638 can be tested for biases in its London rents. Even so, it proves to be a relatively good source for seventeenth-century London, and for calculating associated median and mean rents, as well as a Gini coefficient of inequality for the distribution of resources. Through other evidence in the Settlement, rent/income ratios for London can be approximated, and from them estimates made of London's median income. Median rents and income also allow estimates of the percentage of Londoners in poverty. Though the last is inevitably disputable, the estimate holds up well to testing by other evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how the Trade Facilities Act and the liquidation of certain government-owned assets spurred the industrial intervention of the Bank of England in the 1920s. What emerges is that the Treasury had a much greater role in the Bank of England's industrial intervention than has been hitherto suggested. This article places the theme of the Bank of England's industrial intervention within broader discussions about Treasury history and Britain's postwar reconstruction, and refines the argument that the original involvement of the Bank of England with industry merely represented an extension of its prewar operations of branch banking and its duties as a central bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The joint-stock banks that established after the liberalizing legislation of 1826 were periodically criticized during the nineteenth century for their low-quality and rapidly deteriorating shareholder constituencies. The quality of a bank's shareholding constituency was of paramount importance because of unlimited shareholder liability. Using archival records, this article examines the quality of bank shareholder constituencies over the nineteenth century. The main finding is that shareholder constituencies did not deteriorate in quality until the introduction of limited liability. The non-deterioration of constituencies is attributed to bank deeds which locked in the aggregate quality of shareholder constituencies by empowering directors to vet all share transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new source, 1840s Admiralty seamen's tickets, is used to explore three anthropometric issues. First, did being born in a city, with its associated disamenities, lead to stunting? Second, did being born near a city, whose markets sucked away foodstuffs, lead to stunting? Third, did child labour lead to stunting? We find that only those born in very large cities suffered a level of stunting that contemporaries could have observed. Being born near a city, which gave parents opportunities to trade away family calories, and perhaps increased exposure to disease, did not cause stunting. Britain was a well-integrated market; all families, whatever their locations, had options to trade and faced similar disease environments. Finally, although adults who had gone to sea young were shorter than those who did not enlist until fully grown, going to sea did not stunt. Instead, plentiful food at sea attracted stunted adolescents, who reversed most of their stunting as a result. But child labour at sea was different from other forms of children's work because wages were largely hypothecated to the child as food and shelter onboard. In contrast, where wages were paid to the child or his parents in cash, they became submerged in the household economy and their benefits were shared with other family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During Tawney's century, Kent was London's principal coastwise supplier of grain. This trade was concentrated in the ports of Milton, Faversham, and Sandwich, and largely controlled by merchant-oligarchs living in them, who played a pivotal role in fostering the development of market integration and regional agrarian specialization. In periods of shortage, urban merchants prioritized their own commercial interest, and the subsistence needs of their own resident poor, at the expense of the county's rural poor, and in opposition to policies advocated by their guardians on the county bench. The regional politics of dearth need to be analysed at least as much in terms of vertical as of horizontal fissures in the social structure, and against the background of the politics of plenty, for over-dependence on the London market provoked protest from producers following good harvests and hardened their attitudes to the poor when the situation was reversed. Some forms of popular protest usually assumed to embody plebeian critiques of the failures of local justices should in fact be read primarily as expressions of the unity that often bound governors and their client-poor in opposition to the rival subsistence claims of other little commonwealths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the importance of forging wrought iron with charcoal after coal-based methods came to dominate iron manufacture from the end of the eighteenth century. Previously it has been argued that charcoal ironmaking declined because it was less economical than using mineral fuel. Evidence from Shropshire shows that after a short period of decline, charcoal ironmaking in the county increased in real terms. This is explained by examination of the expanding market for high-quality iron, and in particular wire manufacture and related industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents a review of periodical literature on economic history in 2002. A plausible alternative to any straightforward equation between cultural change and population movement clearly lies in attention to the construction of identity, but many problems remain in applying such approaches to the available archaeological record. Economic factors receive particular emphasis in two studies of aristocratic culture in late Anglo-Saxon England. These processes are in turn attributed to increased agricultural productivity and entrepreneurship, and increased extraction of dues and renders in the form of coin. All these changes are held to have induced a series of transformations in the political culture of the mid-eleventh century, characterized by the deployment of wealth and cash in political intervention. The economy of Britain in the twelfth century is relatively neglected by historians. The development of nucleated villages has been a key theme of work on settlement. Dispersed settlement could be encouraged by the asserting associated with the population growth of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries although population was in decline in this region even before the Black Death.

Studies middle-class income and spending patterns in Great Britain during the industrial revolution. Problems of income distribution and living standards; Nominal and real earnings of clerks employed in the London, England service of the East India Co. between 1760 and 1850; Index of living costs for middle-income earners.

The article focuses on the economic condition of the British cotton industry during the 1940s. Particular emphasis is laid on the government policy and planning at the industry level. Despite the government's best efforts 30 per cent of Lancashire, England's spindleage remained idle in 1950, output was far below prewar levels, and productivity levels were disappointing. As a result of overtime working, and the closure of inefficient units under the concentration scheme, yarn production per operative had risen during the war, but progress was slow after 1945. Recruitment had been sluggish, and in 1950 the number of workers in spinning and weaving was still 120,000 below the level of 1937. The government's targets for Lancashire were achieved because they were pitched at modest levels which took account of productive inefficiency and the continuing labor shortage. Cotton made a significant contribution to the export drive in the 1940s, the value of all cotton textile exports increased from pound 87 million in 1946 to pound 211 million in 1950, maintaining a constant 9 per cent share of all British visible exports. But Lancashire could have done more if enough people had been willing to return to the mills.

This article examines the employment conditions in the cotton industry in Great Britain from 1950 to 1970. This examination of imports and exports is based on data collected from the statistical reports of the Cotton Board. The results suggest that the relative impact of these factors on employment varied significantly over the period. Between 1950 and 1955 declining exports made the largest contribution to the fall in the employment of cotton operatives. Rising imports were the major factor accounting for declining employment between 1955 and 1960, while falling domestic demand for cloth and yarn was the predominant influence during the 1960s. Participation in this trade, for which demand was relatively buoyant, helped many of Lancashire, England's cotton mills to survive through these difficult years. The accounting procedure is a static technique which is unable to identify any dynamic linkages or interdependencies between the factors analyzed. The reaction in Lancashire to this inexorable decline points to the need for further investigation into the underlying causes of the cotton industry's demise.

The article focuses on the role of the London Stock Exchange in the British securities market from 1850 to 1914. This was not only at the level of the issues of governments or vast corporations but also throughout the range of securities available. Though located in London offices, a number of London Stock Exchange brokers and jobbers maintained constant and immediate communication with contacts on other exchanges, and acted in concert with them to ensure the existence of a continuous market in a growing volume and variety of stocks and shares. By the early twentieth century the securities market had become complex and sophisticated, offering an opening at the most appropriate place and level to all transferable securities, and providing a facility by which these securities could become known to the entire investing public when their size and nature warranted it. However, in the few years before World War I the functioning of this market was being circumscribed because the majority of members of the London Stock Exchange had lost the direct benefits they obtained from external contacts, and had failed to perceive the indirect benefits brought by an open market.

The article cites a study about the fire insurance policy registers accumulated by the Sun Fire Office in Great Britain in 1780. The present study, the first of its kind to endeavor to make use of the policy registers as a whole, examined the policies issued by the Sun in 1780. In that year the Sun was by far the largest insurance company in Great Britain, covering sums perhaps twice as large as the Royal Exchange Assurance. In 1796, with the Phoenix as another rival in the field, the Sun estimated its share as 38 percent of the market in London, England, and 60 percent of the provincial market, except in those few areas where local companies were active. For the purpose of the study, the latter was insignificant. Few of them were founded before 1780 and during the succeeding two decades they accounted for only about four percent of national policies. In 1780 the Sun issued about 15,000 new policies. Routine renewal policies were about seven times as numerous as new policies, but the available evidence suggests that the latter provide an acceptable sample of the whole.

This article focuses on effects of the Cotton Famine in Lancashire, England on health and diet of working class people in Great Britain. The Famine has previously been treated as a raw material crisis complicated by concurrent problems of over-production, but the hypothesis presented here is that it was also an occasion when the population of the cotton towns experienced a major disruption of earnings which brought food shortages, nutritional deficiencies, an epidemic spread of infectious disease, and even death: in short, all the principal characteristics of a true famine. Harvest-failure or market disruption or interruption of income led to the hoarding of food, fear, panic, and social disorder. In cases of psycho-social famine there was perhaps little, if any, change in nutritional status and any increase in morbidity was probably due to previously-existing environmental problems or to an acceleration in the transmission of disease caused by social disorder. The Cotton Famine thus created in Lancashire a period of heavy unemployment which lasted from the spring of 1862 until the summer of 1863, a period of at least fifteen months during which time the numbers in receipt of public assistance approached nearly 25 per cent of the total population.

This article discusses the growth and management of the iron industry in England during the sixteenth century. Apart from the increase in the quantities of material to be handled, the added complexity of the indirect process meant greater difficulty in the identification of technical deficiencies. If undetected, these could result in poor yields with effects, which could be financially serious over the long periods for which furnaces could be continuously in blast. Similarly, difficulties in obtaining regular supplies of raw materials on a sufficient scale could lead to considerable uncertainty. Such aspects of management in the industry have been apt to be over-shadowed by the actual details of technical change, and are rather less well known than managerial methods in industries where less technical development took place. Establishing the profitability of this undertaking from the accounts presents certain difficulties. The surplus on the working account bears no relation to total profit due to the practice of omitting all receipts from bulk as opposed to casual sales of iron.

The article examines the issue of aristocracy in England in the late 16th century. Laurence Stone's book "The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641" has extended the discussion of this very important work from the primarily economic aspects, which have been the concern of most earlier reviewers, to more general considerations about the role and activities of the nobility within the state in this crucial century of English history. Stone's book is so challenging that it is sure to continue to arouse discussion from a wide range of viewpoints. Among these, it is of importance to compare Stone's evidence and conclusions about the English aristocracy with the situation of their continental peers. Such a comparison is likely to suggest in what ways the experiences of the English nobility differed from those of continental nobilities, and hence test Stone's conclusion that the crisis of the nobility was one of the three main causes of the English revolution, the other two being the decline in respect for and obedience to the Monarchy, and the failure of the Established Church to comprehend within itself all but the Roman Catholics.