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This article uses data from the ledgers of the financial broker Charles Blunt to explore the market in equity options that emerged in London during the stock market boom of the early 1690s. Blunt's ledgers provide a unique opportunity to observe the workings of an early modern derivatives market. They reveal a broadly based and highly active trade in options. The market functioned well, determined value using agreed criteria, and was utilized by a diverse range of individuals to facilitate both risk-seeking and risk-averse investment strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the location patterns of manufacturing plants in Greater London, England. The London conurbation represented the most dynamic growth area of interwar Britain, accounting for almost 35 per cent of national population growth compared with only 17.5 percent during the decade to 1911. This was accompanied by a relative employment shift in favor of manufacturing, which increased its share of total employment in London and Middlesex from 30.2 to 31.4 percent between 1911 and 1931, while the national ratio had declined from 33.5 to 32.5 percent. Meanwhile, London's cultural and social facilities also proved important in attracting particular types of valuable labor, such as management, technical, and scientific staff. This was especially important with regard to overseas-based multinationals, whose staff showed a strong preference for London both on account of its general cosmopolitan culture and because of the presence of expatriate communities. The capital's highly developed business and financial services sector also constituted a strong attraction to firms, allowing them to outsource some activities that might be done internally and facilitating access to services generally provided externally, such as advertising and banking.

This article provides for the first time a robust quantitative estimate of the amount of syphilis infection in the population of London in the later eighteenth century. A measure of the cumulative incidence of having ever been treated for the pox by the age of 35 is constructed, providing an indicator of over 20 per cent syphilitic infection. The principal primary sources are hospital admissions registers, augmented with an analysis of London's workhouse infirmaries. A range of potentially confounding factors are taken into account, including the contemporary conflation between syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections, patients who shunned hospitals in favour of private treatment, possible double‐counting of patients, institutional patients who may have hailed from outside London, and the complexity of establishing what should constitute the 'at‐risk' population of London for this period. Cultural and medical historians have demonstrated considerable pre‐occupation with venereal disease in the texts of the eighteenth century, while demographic and epidemiological historians, lacking any quantitative evidence, have tended to ignore the disease. This article can now demonstrate for the first time just how extensive syphilis was likely to have been and, by doing so, offer an original contribution to major debates in the history of sexuality and the demography of early modern London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides new information and data on the work and pay of skilled and semi‐skilled men on a large London construction project in the early 1700s. It offers firm‐level evidence on the employment relation in the construction industry at the time and sheds some light on the number of days worked per year and per week, showing that employment was more irregular and seasonal than current estimates of income infer. The patterns are considered in the context of new debates about industriousness and economic growth. [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]

This article examines the impact of information asymmetry on the movement of London- Antwerp exchange rates against the backdrop of the Great Debasement of 1544-51. The case of the revaluation of gold coins in the Habsburg Netherlands in 1539, about which the sovereign and the public possessed similar information, is used as the benchmark to judge how far the speed of adjustment was affected by information asymmetry. This article is also part of the recent literature that estimates the degree of financial market integration in late medieval and early modern Europe. In the framework of the threshold autoregressive model, the speed of adjustment and the transaction costs associated with arbitrage are estimated, and the results are judged using the speed of communication as a benchmark since the flow of information played a critical role in financial arbitrage. The results reveal that the sixteenth-century London- Antwerp exchange markets were already as integrated as that during the late nineteenth century, but information asymmetry severely disturbed the effectiveness of exchange arbitrage. [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]

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]

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]

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 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]

It is often asserted that, between 1865 and 1914, economic dependence on British capital subjected settler societies to an unofficial imperialism wielded by the City of London. This article argues that both advocates and critics of such models, particularly in the recent controversy over 'gentlemanly capitalism', pay insufficient attention to the City itself. Using the Edwardian City's connections with Australia and Canada, it illustrates the range of financial intermediaries involved and explores their perceptions of political economy in these countries. It concludes that the City's influence (or 'structural power') was limited by its internal divisions and hazy conceptions of political economy. [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]

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]

Through analysing the composition of the founding shareholders in the West India and London Docks, this article explores the connections between the City of London and the slave economy on the eve of the abolition of the slave trade. It establishes that over one-third of docks investors were active in slave-trading, slave-ownership, or the shipping, trading, finance, and insurance of slave produce. It argues that the slave economy was neither dominant nor marginal, but instead was fully integrated into the City's commercial and financial structure, contributing materially alongside other key sectors to the foundations of the nineteenth-century City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the early development of specialized retail shops in early modern London. It argues that apothecaries' shops were sites of innovative shop design and display. These practices were responses to attitudes to consumption, the problematic nature of the medical commodities which apothecaries sold, and, particularly, contemporary concerns about their reliability, trustworthiness, and honesty. The article concludes that analyses of the rise of the shop need to be revised to incorporate early developments by producer-retailers, such as apothecaries and goldsmiths, and suggests that investments in retailing were driven more by worries about commodities than enticing customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses patterns of morbidity among the monks of Westminster Abbey, a Benedictine foundation in London, England from 1297 to 1355 and from 1381 to 1417. Condition of hospitals during the Middle Ages; Background on monastic life; Analysis of data; Explanation for the changes in the patterns of morbidity; Discussion on whether the community is typical of secular society.

The article presents reply to a comment of historian Peter Razzell on a study about the relationship of smallpox and a person's height in London, England. Razzell believes that the authors have misunderstood the nature of his criticism and are correspondingly dismissive of it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The authors share every professional historian's concern for the integrity of the data. Razzell argues that the quality of smallpox recording in the Marine Society dataset is so poor that 'the impact of smallpox on average height cannot be settled by analysis of the Marine Society dataset.' The authors believe that this grossly overstates the problems of the records, and is based on a careless reading of the original records on his part. Furthermore, insofar as his claim that some of the boys who are recorded as escaping smallpox had in fact suffered the disease, the direction of bias strengthens rather than weakens the statistical evidence that smallpox reduced height. He bases this conclusion on a comparison of the columns for literacy and smallpox. He argues that if the columns for reading and writing as well as smallpox are blank, it is more likely that the returning officer was negligent.

Discusses the nature of the working class community in London, England during the period between World Wars I and II. Constraints from within by strong kinship and community networks; Inter-generational occupational mobility and exogenous marriage; Social culture of the traditional working class; Entry of juveniles into the labor market; Preferred occupations.

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.

This article focuses on continuity, change, and specialization within metropolitan London with reference to the economy of Westminster during 1750-1820. Metropolitan London by the later eighteenth century was already one of the largest cities in the world. Such variety testified to the marked division of labour within the metropolitan economy. Business and service specialisms alike were encouraged by ready proximity to London's massive consumer market. One important economic characteristic of London was thus its generation of a flourishing labour market that was both specialized and interdependent. The workings of the metropolis after 1750 have, however, featured remarkably little in the textbooks, whether old or new. However, broad structural continuities do not in themselves prove a lack of importance. On the contrary, London's persistent economic pluralism suggests that its diversified role was remarkably successful. Indeed, as Great Britain's trading empire extended into genuinely global dimensions, London's role at the heart of interlocking regional, national, and international networks became ever more crucial and, simultaneously, diversified.

This article focuses on the issue of wage labour in seventeenth-century London, England. It is remarkable how little work has been done until recently on the wage rates paid to early modern workers. Economist Donald Woodward has recently been able to shed light on wage rate variations between northern towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His valuable work has now demonstrated the existence, in that region, of marked variations in wage rates between towns of differing population sizes and economies. For skilled workers, moreover, regional variation became more marked over time. By the end of the seventeenth century his survey found low wage rates for building craftsmen in smaller towns with stagnant economies, but relatively higher ones in those towns and cities with larger and more rapidly growing populations. Woodward went on to make some observations about the determinants of the money wage rate, which, he argued, was influenced mostly by the interaction between the supply of labour and the demand for it rather than by official attempts at regulation or the force of custom.

This article discusses various issues related to the female labor force in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in London, England. It is fair to say that virtually nothing is known about the female labor force in early modern London except in the most unstructured and superficial way. The article author attempts to throw some light on this subject by examining the depositions of female witnesses before the London church courts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Such records are well known for providing insights into migration patterns and literacy. The records of three courts have been employed for this purpose. The most important was the Consistory Court of the bishop of London, which dealt mainly with suits relating to defamation, divorce, or the legality of marriages. Early modem London was a city whose population was dominated by immigrants and the sample provides no surprise in this respect, just under 70 per cent being born outside the metropolis.

Presents the author's opinions on articles related to the economic and social history of England, which have been published in various periodicals. Information on articles related to the economy and society of late medieval England, which have been published in various periodicals; Views on article related to the economic changes in England in the period 1977-1982; Discussion on the topographical evolution of London from the seventh century to early ninth-century; Views on literature related to the industrial history of England.

The article discusses the issue of productivity change in the coal trade from the north-east to London over a 220-year period and clarifies one important aspect of that change, the trend in average ship size. There were substantial improvements in technology and business organization over the period. It has been argued here that although these improvements were not reflected in rapidly declining real or nominal freight rates, none the less the achievements were remarkable. Annual shipments to London by sea increased from around 400,000 tons at the beginning of the period to over 9 million tons by the end, and the increased volume of coal was moved at about the same cost per ton. In a recent issue of the journal "Economic History review," economist S. Ville discussed the magnitude and importance of the trade and described the significant technical and organizational improvements which occurred over the period, including the adoption of larger ships, increased annual voyages per ship, reduced manning requirements, port development, the growth of insurance, and the introduction of navigational aids.

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 focuses on issues concerning the standard of living in London, England from 1700 to 1860. The debate on the standard of living during the industrial revolution has been conducted within four constraints. Because of high rents and relatively high labor costs, London was not a natural center for the large-scale processing of raw materials, but was a city of workshops. The most dire effects of industrialization in other parts of the country were not experienced before the 1860s and 1870s, when heavy engineering, shipbuilding, leather processing, clock and watchmaking, bookbinding, and papermaking all left the metropolis. Until then the workshop predominated in manufacturing, and within the workshop productivity and wages tended to increase but slowly. It is therefore not surprising that during the course of the eighteenth century, and until the 1840s, real wages in London followed roughly the movement of real wages in cities as far apart as Paris, Leipzig and Berlin. Living standards can be classified in many ways, but the limitations of the data are such that only wage rate statistics can provide a time series suitable for London.

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 examines the retail trade of milk in London, England from 1790 to 1914. After an initial exploration of the development of types of milk retailing and a discussion of problems in interpreting available source material, the expansion of the trade will be considered structurally in terms of the "retailing revolution." The stability of the retailing price will then be shown to have been an important element of associated service provision by dairymen, especially in the doorstep delivery of milk. The modern experience of separation of production and sale of agricultural produce is quite inappropriate for an understanding of the milk trade in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The demand for regular doorstep delivery of previously ordered quantities, a key structural feature of the trade after about 1850, was rare before this date outside the wealthiest households. Milk was less of a convenience food than it is today, and contributed little to the average diet. Its purchase was either casual, in quantities small enough to prevent wastage caused by souring, or occasional, as part of the cream teas enjoyed by the frequenters of the pleasure gardens and resorts of peripheral London.

The article discusses the impact of industrialization on state reform and local economy in London, England. The changes in the industrial and labor structures were linked to a revolution in Victorian taste and buying habits. Modern retailing and an era of mass consumption accompanied the decades of prosperity and declining prices. Labor and industry were subject to the indigenous problems of the city's growth. Moreover, technological changes had an impact on the structure of industry and the make-up of the labor force. In addition to new acquisition of machinery, the mode of production within the clothing trades was altered by the introduction of subdivision and sub-contracting of labor. Women workers complained that state regulation had caused a reduction in their employment in regulated industries.

This article attempts to set out a data that tends to support professor T.S. Willan's view of the integrity of the merchant class in England as suggested in his book "The Muscovy Merchants of 1555." Willan suggested in his book that few of the Londoners who were charter members of Muscovy Co. were sons of gentry, rather it was lesser provincial families who sent their sons to London, England. He also suggested that few of the Muscovy merchants retired altogether from London, and that those who did were exceptional. The evidence from which these data are drawn is based on a survey of the lives of 140 men; that is, those citizens of London who were aldermen in January 1600 and those who were elected to the Court of Aldermen between the beginning of 1600 and the end of 1624. These men comprise a sample of London's richest citizens in the early seventeenth century. By drawing mainly on three sources: the inventories of estates summarized in the Common Serjeant's Books in London, wills and assessments for the subsidy, it is possible to estimate that 55 of the 140 citizens in the sample were worth over 20,000 pounds in goods at the times of their deaths.

This article analyses cloth exports between 1600 to 1640 from London, England. To test this conclusion it is necessary to transform the quantities of short-cloth exports into values in order to permit them to be added to the given values of exports of new draperies. It will be noticed that the estimates of the share of London and of the out-ports in the national total are not particularly sensitive to the value chosen for the short-cloth. On the other hand, the various uncertainties in the basic data on quantities and prices and the fact that different years have to be chosen for different ports imply that the margin of error in many of the figures must be considerable. It is true that a further decline of wool exports and of the older style of "worsteds", of which a few were still exported in the mid-sixteenth century, is to be offset against this increase. But wool exports on the eve of the debasement appear to have been only about 5 per cent of the total by value, and worsteds substantially less than that.

This article focuses on the role of the country gentry in the adverse balance of payments in transactions involving London, England. For the economic historian a series of questions about balances of payments is inherent in this fact, not only for such other centers and for regions but also for occupational and social groups. Among the latter, the social group which must continuously have shown, from every district of its habitation, an adverse balance of payments in transactions involving London was the country gentry, especially those among it who regularly spent several months of each year in London as their occasions required: as members of Parliament; visitors to London whether or not Parliament was in session because social and business interests could better be cultivated during the season; or courtiers or office-holders. Coming to London thus, for a career, for business for pleasure, most likely for all three, staying often for two or more months at a time in lodgings, houses or parts of houses which they rented, or permanent residences which they owned, their need for funds to spend in London was insistent during such periods, while their incomes were for the most part drawn from country sources. To make these incomes available in London was an essential duty of estate stewards.