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This article investigates the tensions inherent in the 'speeding up' of methods of manufacturing paper by hand in Europe. Earlier in 1732, a dynamic administrator hoping to revive the fortunes of the small-paper maker centre near Clermont-Ferrand in France, facilitated the placing of an exceptional order by a Parishian printer. The contract was not large enough, but the high quality required for the luxury edition of the works of a great scholar offered a unique chance for paper makers to display their skills and renew their links with the capital's profitable markets. The mill owners, readily set to work, but they also immediatedly and repeatedly asked their protector to find an outlet for the paper that would inevitably remain after the best realms had left for Paris. The claim was legitimate not only because these paper makers were in need for assistance, but it was impossible for anyone engaged in that business to limit production to the finest paper only. Papers of different qualities inevitably accumulated on their sorting tables.

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 discusses several papers related to economic history of Italy, published in the several journals. In a short paper "La Polonia medievale tra occidente ed oriente europeo," by A. Giesztor, the author examines economic conditions of central Europe, particularly of Poland about A.D. 1000, with particular reference to agriculture. The author decides that Polish agriculture was well adapted for a variety of crops. The paper "La structure economique et sociale de I'etat de I'ordre teutonique en Prusse," sets out to analyse the role that the Teutonic Order had in the life of Prussia. With an indubitable political function the Order showed also its efficiency in the economic sector, revitalizing internal and external commerce to a degree, which the author describes as exceptional. In 1454 the insurrection put an end to its regime in most of the country. B. Geremek deals with the problem of the origins of pauperism in an essay "La popolazione marginale tra ii medioevo e I'eta moderna'." As is evident from the title, the author believes that the problem of pauperism was born in the period of the transformation of society that occurred at the beginning of the modern era.

This paper explores investor behaviour during the South Sea Bubble—the first major speculative boom and bust on the stock markets. Previous literature debates whether investors during this episode acted rationally. Newly acquired data involving parallel markets for the South Sea Company's stock and subscription receipts are analysed, and widening valuation gaps are observed between these substitutable financial instruments. Rational explanations do not prove adequate, and the anomalies are explained by the biased decision-making of investors, and their tendency to view financial markets as wagering markets. The implications of these findings for the current debate on rationality in financial markets are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the economic significance of variation in the number and size of towns across Europe during the early 14th century by comparing the towns of England and of northern Italy. The paper starts by examining the towns of the two countries more closely, distinguishing between those that were very large, large, middle-sized and small. In comparison with rural communities, all towns had more people employed outside agriculture, but this was proportionally more marked in a metropolis like London or Florence than in a small town. The larger the town, the higher the proportion of non-agricultural occupations, the stronger the commitment to producing goods in restricted demand, and the greater the weight of commercial and professional activities. The fact that the contrast between northern Italy and England is so sharp at the top end of the urban scale implies that there was more employment in manufacturing and services in Italy. It also suggests that northern Italy had a wider range of specialized occupations. Studies of urbanization and urban hierarchy characteristically go beyond the statistical classification of towns to establish and explain rank-size relationships between them in different economic regions.

The article comments on the paper "An Economic Theory of the Growth of the Western World," by professors Douglas C. North and Robert Paul Thomas. The paper is related to European economic growth. The theory proposed by North and Thomas relies heavily upon three components. The first is a model for cyclical fluctuations in the pre-industrial economic life of Europe. This model defines the relative changes in the cost of land and labor as changes in population alter the ratio between the two. It incorporates the relative elasticities which have been found in the supply and demand curves for foodstuffs as opposed to those for raw materials and industrial products. North and Thomas then elaborate this last observation into the second major element of their model, a "theory of institutional change." The shifts in factor proportions so heightened the possibilities of profit from production for the market that they exceeded the costs of the institutional innovations needed to change the organization of production and distribution of income. The result was the steady introduction of "secondary" institutional changes such as enclosures, joint-stock companies, government support of certain guilds, and regulation of quality.

This article presents a list of papers related to economic history of Europe. Some of the papers are: "An early Garolingian Mint in the Low Gountries: Bona-Tiel," by M. Metcalf; "Financial Intermediaries and Economic Development, the Belgian Case," by R.J. Morrison; "Middeleeuwse sociale structuren. Enkele kanttekeningen,"by J. Mertems; "Dutch Theology, Trade and War: 1590-1610," by C. Bangs; and others.

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

This article comments on a study by Patrick O'Brien related to the economic development in Europe. O'Brien states in his paper that commerce between core and periphery for three centuries after 1450 proceeded on a small scale, was not a uniquely profitable field of enterprise and while it generated some externalities, they could in no way be classified as decisive for the economic growth of Western Europe. According to the author, the concept of supernormal profits implies the concept of a normal rate of profit. However, the normal rate of profit in capitalism is the maximum one can get away with. There may enter into the picture a political pressure which defines for given times and places a conventional profit rate, although such pressures have seldom been efficacious for very long. But the whole point of capitalism is the endless accumulation of capital. Though, at any given time profits may be higher from one investment than from another, always within the continuing underlying pressure towards the equalization of profit rates through the market.

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.

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

In this article the author replies to a comment on one of his research papers related to the economic development in Europe. The author remarks that, if the concept of periphery is widened to include the totality of external and internal trade, its contribution to capital formation would be far greater. That procedure would, however, render the geographical and political concreteness normally associated with notions of core and periphery almost vacuous. Author's remarks on profits were addressed to one specific issue of whether or not European capitalists who invested in commerce with the periphery secured exceptionally high rates of return. To be sure, profits represented only one element of manifold connections between core and periphery. The author states that within the totality of world history, foreign trade formed one and by no means the most important element of the story. Commerce with the periphery mattered far less for capital formation than the New School of Development History is prone to assume.

This article analyses coal market integration in Europe over the long nineteenth century. The market integration of coal, a key commodity associated with the industrial revolution, is an aspect of European economic history that has received little attention. The literature on the evolution of markets has concentrated on agricultural products, mostly cereals. This article examines intra‐ and international market integration in the principal coal‐producing countries, Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium; and adds three main consuming southern European countries to the analysis of the international market. It provides new evidence on prices, as well as trade, and uses a straightforward approach to address coal price behaviour. Despite shocks, clear trends toward integration in both domestic and international markets can be observed, even if by one of our measures the latter started at a later date. Processes of market integration, however, seemed to slow from the end of the nineteenth century. Explanations are offered as to the causes of the extent and timing of integrations: reductions, mainly, in transportation costs, but also in information costs, and, in the international market, protectionism. The influence of cartels, on the other hand, may have been limited, particularly in the international market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses price information relating to 12 towns and wage information from 18 towns to develop a real wage index for unskilled urban labourers in Germany during the three-and-a-half centuries preceding the onset of rapid industrialization. Combining the new series with information from other parts of Europe establishes two stages of real wage divergence during the seventeenth to nineteenth century. The first occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century when real wages in centres of trade and finance located on the rim of the North Sea rose far above the level prevailing in their hinterland. The second stage unfolded from the second quarter of the eighteenth century when the real wage in south England, northern and central Italy, and Germany began to diverge; Germany followed a middle path between the other two countries. The second commercial revolution, which improved business techniques and promoted Smithian growth, goes a long way towards accounting for this development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses periodical publications regarding the economic history of Europe after 1700 that were published in 2013, including bibliographies of articles. Topics addressed include the relation of living standards to demography, the history of money and finance, and economic growth and development.

Was there an agro-ecological crisis in Europe which preceded and contributed to pushing forward the agricultural revolution? This article presents a new theoretical and empirical approach to this controversial perspective on agricultural transformation and relates to an ongoing debate on conditions of growth in pre-industrial societies. The results demonstrate that there were indeed indicators of a crisis, which grew stronger during the eighteenth century and culminated in the early nineteenth century. The crisis was, however, not general, but was rather restricted to areas that stand out due to poor natural conditions for agriculture. In other words, the crisis was conditional. Furthermore, the findings show that the crisis could push forward changes that were important for enabling agricultural transformation and growth. However, both the emergence and reversal of the crisis were connected to new opportunities opened up by market development. Enough differences were found between different types of regions to suggest that there were many development paths within the agricultural transformation process, and that they were not necessarily linear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Scholars in the fields of archaeology and numismatics have long been familiar with the phenomenon of periodic recoinage (renovatio monetae), which dominated monetary taxation in medieval Europe for almost 200 years. However, this form of monetary taxation is seldom, if ever, discussed in the literature of economics or economic history. No economic theory has ever been proposed to explain periodic recoinage. The present study aims to make up for this absence. It examines the qualities that typically differentiate regions with periodic recoinage from those with other monetary systems and analyses how periodic recoinage was monitored and enforced. The principal example of frequently renewed coins is uni-faced bracteates, which were often subject to annual or even biannual recoinages. Although bracteates were not the cause of periodic recoinage, their features facilitated frequent renewals. The study discusses the economic consequences of periodic recoinage and links the breakdown of this monetary system with the end of bracteates' role as the principal coin in the fourteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on economic inequality in early modern Europe is complicated by the lack of appropriate data for reconstructing income or wealth distributions. This article presents a study of income inequality in mid-eighteenth-century Old Castile ( Spain) using the Ensenada Cadastre, a census conducted between 1749 and 1759. The article describes the information provided by this census and then discusses its advantages and disadvantages for reconstructing income profiles and calculating income inequality. This is followed by analysis of a dataset derived from the Cadastre that consists of more than 4,000 observations from Palencia (a province in northern Spain) and contains information on sources of household income, each household head's main occupation, residence location, and other household characteristics. Demographic data from this census is used to weight observations in the sample and thereby minimize selection bias. Findings show that inequality in eighteenth-century Spain was probably substantial despite its relative backwardness; that the relationship between inequality and per capita income was not clear-cut and was probably influenced by measurement of the higher incomes; and that although income inequality was largely driven by uneven land distribution, labour income also contributed to overall inequality-especially in urban centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers new technologies and fatal accident rates in European coal mining from 1850 to 1900. Its contributions are twofold: to recover and emphasize improvements in small-scale mine technologies such as safety lamps and ventilation, and, second, to deny any role at this time for later macroinventions such as electrification and mechanization. We discuss the influence of these safety-improving technologies as well as government regulations on different kinds of fatal accident rates. It is proposed that an important and overlooked source of the reduction in fatalities from certain kinds of accidents was the introduction and diffusion of a variety of safety-related technologies, none of particularly large scale. [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 quantifies the activities of medieval and early modern parliaments. It traces the long-term evolution of this European institution, and offers a first pass at analysing its impact on long-term economic development. Starting in Spain in the twelfth century, parliaments gradually spread over the Latin west between 1200 and 1500. In the early modern period, parliaments declined in influence in southern and central Europe and further gained in importance in the Netherlands and Britain, resulting in an institutional 'Little Divergence' between 1500 and 1800. We discuss the background of this phenomenon in detail. Moreover, by analysing the effects of parliamentary activity on city growth we find that these differences in institutional development help to explain the economic divergence between north-western and southern and central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of trust is a key component of economic activity and social ties can make business dealings work better. However, we do not know much about how economic actors created new social ties deliberately in order to pursue their objectives. This article analyses the way in which merchants and entrepreneurs used specific rituals to establish formal social ties, with the intent of protecting their business relationships. It focuses on relational instruments that until now had been neglected, particularly godparenthood and marriage witnessing. It shows that formalization, ritualization, and publicity of ties were used by entrepreneurs to establish trust with their business associates, for example when information was asymmetric or when institutions were perceived as inefficient in guaranteeing mutual good behaviour. The analysis covers a long period, from the late middle ages to today. It pays particular attention to the consequences of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth. Contrary to the received wisdom, it suggests that formal social ties such as godparenthood continued to play an important role in economic activity during and after the industrial revolution. New databases on early modern Italy and nineteenth-century France are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to square two seemingly contradictory strands in the literature on economic development in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. On the one hand, there is an extensive historiography stressing the rise of nationalism and its close correlate of growing efforts to organize economic life along ethno-linguistic lines. On the other, there is a substantial body of research that emphasizes significant improvements in market integration across the empire as an outcome of the diffusion of industrialization and an expanding railway network, among other factors. In this article, it is argued that the process of market integration was systematically asymmetric, shaped by intensifying intra-empire nationality conflicts. While grain markets in Austria-Hungary became overall more integrated over time, they also became systematically biased: regions with a similar ethno-linguistic composition of their population came to display significantly smaller price gaps between each other than regions with different compositions. The emergence and persistence of this differential integration cannot be explained by changes in infrastructure and transport costs, simple geographical features, asymmetric integration with neighbouring regions abroad, or communication problems. Instead, differential market integration along ethno-linguistic lines was driven by the formation of ethno-linguistic networks due to intensifying conflict between groups-economic nationalism mattered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and when did the 'great tourist invasion of Europe' come about? Although a few writers have tried to characterize the rise in travel, their descriptions are almost exclusively narrative with colourful opinions and very little quantitative evidence. This is our attempt to fill in the gap. We have linked together several series on overseas travel in order to produce a consistent long-term series covering the period 1820 to 2000, and have also constructed a new time series on passenger fares for much of the period in which ocean travel was the means of going abroad. We use these new data, along with other evidence on GDP per capita, air fares, exchange rates, and indexes of technological change in the travel industry, in an attempt to explain the long-term rise in overseas travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of human capital in economic growth is now largely uncontested. One indicator of human capital frequently used for the pre-1900 period is age heaping, which has been increasingly used to measure gender-specific differences. In this note, we find that in some historical samples, married women heap significantly less than unmarried women. This is still true after correcting for possible selection effects. A possible explanation is that a percentage of women adapted their ages to that of their husbands, hence biasing the Whipple index. We find the same effect to a lesser extent for men. Since this bias differs over time and across countries, a consistent comparison of female age heaping should be made by focusing on unmarried women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the empirical determinants of the treaty network of the 1860s and 1870s. It makes use of three central theories about the determinants of Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) formation, considering economic fundamentals from neoclassical and 'new' trade theory, political-economy variables, and international interaction due to trade diversion fears (dependence of later PTAs on former). These possible determinants are operationalized using a newly constructed dataset for bilateral cooperation and non-cooperation among 13 European countries and the US. The results of logistic regression analysis show that the treaty network can be explained by a combination of 'pure' welfare-oriented economic theory with political economy and international interaction models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a compilation of monthly and annual wheat price data, this article examines the trend of market development in Europe from the late medieval period to the industrial revolution. In contrast to much of the earlier scholarship, which suggests that markets improved, the findings propose that markets were on average as well integrated in Europe in the early sixteenth century as in the late eighteenth century. In the intervening period, markets are found to have suffered a severe contraction. These findings enable us to build a more complete picture of markets in history, and to carry out a better examination of the relationship between markets and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe but far behind that in the leading economies in north-western Europe. Real wages stagnated in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rose slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, with little cumulative change for 200 years. The income disparities of the early twentieth century were due to long-run stagnation in China combined with industrialization in Japan and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the ways in which historians and economists have applied the term ‘globalization’ to the early modern era. It distinguishes a soft and a hard definition, and goes on to test the claims made about the driving forces shaping the growth and character of long-distance trade between Europe and Asia in the age of the European trading companies. On the basis of new estimates of the volume and value of European trade with Asia, the article concludes by identifying the factors limiting the growth of trade in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of the ‘Voyages of Discovery’ on European spice markets, asking whether the exploits of Vasco da Gama and others brought European and Asian spice markets closer together. To this end we compare trends in pepper and fine spice prices before and after 1503, the year when da Gama returned from his financially successful second voyage. Other authors have examined trends in nominal spice prices, but this article uses relative spice prices, that is, accounting for inflation. We find that the Voyages of Discovery had a major impact on European spice markets, and provide a simple model of monopoly and oligopoly to decompose the sources of the Cape route's impact on European markets. Finally, we offer some speculations regarding the impact of the Cape route on intra-European market integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses club theory to explain why two major medieval commercial centres declined in the early modern period. Lübeck and Danzig illuminate the difficulties experienced by old-style European towns where early modern guilds (and other privileged ‘corporations’) had a lot of political influence in making the transition to the new style of north-west European cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg. The article refutes theories proposing that the special privileges awarded to a merchant elite enhanced economic growth; instead, it is argued that those privileges gave rise to ‘club goods’ that were beneficial only to a small number of merchants and were provided at the expense of society at large, resulting in economic decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is no longer the main sector in the economy of rural Europe. Based on a comparative analysis of nine upland areas from five different countries (Scotland, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Spain), this article argues that, contrary to the claims of most social science work on ‘rural restructuring’, the decline of agriculture in the rural economy should be understood from a long-term perspective and in relation to European industrialization, rather than as a recent process linked to postmodern dynamics. In fact, widely diverging paths of rural change during industrialization similarly imply occupational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an example of private transnational governance in the first decades after the Second World War: the Council of European Industrial Federations (CEIF), created in 1949 by the peak-level trade associations in western Europe. Based on this case, the article takes issue with two predominant views in the current literature: a view that sees the European integration process, at least in its early stages, as driven largely by nation-states and political agendas; and another view, widespread among business and economic historians, that contacts between business associations at that time served the main purpose of re-establishing international cartels. The CEIF actually performed a wide variety of functions: it represented organized business at international events and in organizations, acted as a multilateral arena for the exchange of information and for building trust among the businesspeople of various European countries, and, from 1958 onwards, helped bridge the divide between those inside and those outside the Common Market. On occasions, for example, in the case of export incentives, it even managed to forge a consensus for policy action when national governments were unable to agree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions—the structures of rules and norms governing economic transactions—are widely assigned a central role in economic development. Yet economic history is still dominated by the belief that institutions arise and survive because they are economically efficient. This article shows that alternative explanations of institutions, particularly those incorporating distributional effects, are consistent with economic theory and supported by empirical findings. Distributional conflicts provide a better explanation than efficiency for the core economic institutions of pre-industrial Europe: serfdom, the community, the craft guild, and the merchant guild. The article concludes by proposing four desiderata for any economic theory of institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1900s, the European film industry exported throughout the world, at times supplying half the US market. By 1920, however, European films had virtually disappeared from America, and had become marginal in Europe. Theory on sunk costs and market structure suggests that an escalation of sunk costs during a rapid US growth phase resulted in increased concentration; eight surviving companies dominated international film production and distribution forever after. European film companies, although overall profitable, could not take part, and after the war could not catch up. US, British, and French time series data for 1890–1930 support the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European integration and corporate restructuring: the strategy of Unilever, c.1957-c.1990. While much has been written about the politics of European integration, discussion about the role of business in this process has been largely confined to lobbying activities. This article focuses on the business reaction to European integration. It highlights the constraints facing one of Europe's largest firms in building a regional detergents business. These included divergences in market demand and political obstacles to rationalization, but more serious was a corporate culture based around local decision making and consensus. The study demonstrates that a full understanding of the European integration process must incorporate a firm-level analysis of how Europe-wide businesses were built after 1957. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the economic concepts and preferences of Bohemian serfs through a study of the Friedland estate in Europe between 1583 and 1692. Description of the Bohemian serfs' concept of wages or cost of labor; View of production costs; Information on the peasants' lack of the concept of profit.

Examines the comparison drawn between the financial provisions made by English and continental European banks for industrial companies, during the half-century before 1939. Examination of evidence on the history of banks and bank lending; Main elements of the historical and theoretical comparisons made between English and continental European banks; Analysis of research on historical developments in countries that developed universal banking.

Discusses the importance of Christopher Columbus's bibliography and discovery of America in European economic setting. Theme of Europe's earlier expansion of books about Columbus; Awareness of the background of the expansion; Interest of demythologizing re-evaluations of Columbus and the voyages; History of colonization after Columbus's discovery.

Discusses macroinventions, economic growth and the industrial revolution in Great Britain and France. Definition of revolution in the article; Quantitative views of French 18th-century capabilities; Comparison of technological change in 18th century.

The article focuses on the factors that may have influenced the decision of more than 50 million people who left Europe for overseas destinations between the Napoleonic Wars and the depression of the 1930s. In the absence of reliable direct evidence, historians have had little choice but to infer motivation from indirect evidence, such as ages, occupations, and marital status of the emigrants or the economic and social characteristics of the areas from which they came. Migration is also notoriously difficult to measure. This article examines three questions about the emigration decision. First, how far was this dominated by the economic benefits of emigration--the relative level of (expected) income in the sending and receiving countries? Alternatively, how far was the information that was available to potential emigrants an independent cause of emigration? The second question concerns the apparent contrasts between emigration from northern and western, and from southern and eastern, Europe. The relative income hypothesis has typically been favored by economists. Finally, how far was the decision to emigrate taken as an alternative to another move, for example, within the country?

The article comments on a study by economist R. Brenner on the model of centrality of the agrarian class structure or the balance of class relationships within the countryside in Europe. Whereas Brenner suggested a single road to the capitalist farms of the eighteenth century, it may perhaps now be seen that there were several ways in which these farms emerged. According to the author, the climate of the sixteenth century was quite different from that envisaged by Brenner. The role of the law was more important than Brenner assumed. It was not a simple instrument of class oppression but served to limit the demands that lords placed on tenants according to principles of equity, though the law was not implemented consistently over time. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that in the early and mid-sixteenth century lords could not have foreseen that the agrarian economy was entering on a period of relative prosperity. Instead, the obvious policy for many lords, especially those who were financially insecure, was to capitalize on their estates by making new leases or close their options on the future by granting confirmations or even selling the freehold of their lands. In deciding which option to take, timing may well have been important. In the earlier part of the sixteenth century, the conversion of copyhold was probably uncontentious.

Presents the author's opinions on fascism in Italy. Views on the economic policies in Italy; Discussion on the economic conditions in Italy; Information on exports of Germany and Italy; Views on the political conditions in Italy; Information on the annual growth rates of industrial production in Europe.

The article examines the continental European cattle trades from 1400 to 1600. The article discusses, first, the development of the network of international exchanges in the context of the decline in indigenous western European local supply systems. Second, the evolution of new production forms is considered, together with those changes in transport and commercial organization which, by reducing transactions costs, yielded an increasing supply of animals at falling real prices. Finally, the effects of these market changes on patterns of west European urban meat consumption are explored, thereby completing a picture of the cattle trades in a period of dramatic economic transformation. Born in the 1470s, the international cattle trades grew out of, and subsequently displaced, an earlier pattern of commercial exchange. For more than a hundred years prior to this date, all over Europe, in conditions of plentiful land and cheap money, a rising demand for meat had largely been satisfied within the context of a network of regional markets.

The article focuses on the economic, social, and political changes that occurred as European societies ceased to be primarily agrarian in economic structure and devoted proportionately more of their resources and labor to the production of non-agricultural commodities and services. Industrialization is not identical either with economic growth or economic development, although it is closely associated with both. The process of economic growth, including in the modern era the special case of industrialization, involves the interaction of four broad classes or categories of factors--population, resources, technology, and institutions. In conclusion, there was not one model for industrialization in the nineteenth century. Coal and human capital were the two basic ingredients, but in combination with one another and with other elements they produced a variety of patterns of industrialization. The customary depiction of an industrial revolution in Great Britain and its repetition in continental Europe and elsewhere distorts the historical record.

The article focuses on the explanations that have been offered for the decline in European mortality which began in the 17th century and accelerated in the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the great killers of European populations, smallpox and measles share a number of important characteristics. Both evoke life-long immunity after first contact, and both require populations of a minimum size to become endemic, in the case of measles perhaps half a million or more, depending upon density. At less than the required minimum the parasite will run out of susceptible hosts and disappear, only to re-emerge when a crop of new susceptibles has built up and the disease is reintroduced. When that happens, epidemics are likely to be severe because adults may be affected as well as children. The eighteenth century saw a divergence in the life expectancy of aristocrats and commoners in England, and probably throughout Northwest Europe, and it seems likely that this coincided with the divergence of mortality rates in Northwest Europe compared to Southern Europe and Europe east of the Elbe.