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This article explores the issue of the Lend-Lease declaration in Great Britain on September 10, 1941. There were two closely linked factors which caused the dramatic reduction in Britain's overseas trade. First, large sections of Britain's manufacturing industry had to be converted to war production, thus reducing the capacity for manufactured exports. By June 1944, 33 percent of Britain's labor force was engaged in war duties and a further 22 percent was in the armed forces. Secondly, America supplied Britain with food, raw materials, industrial and military equipment, without cash payments, under Lend-Lease. The responsibility for Lend-Lease in the early days was delegated to Harry Hopkins, the person in charge for Lend-Lease, though the official head of the agency in charge of Lend-Lease was nominally General J.H. Burns. Despite Hopkins's renowned energy and drive, Lend-Lease supplies to Britain during 1941 only played a marginal role in the war effort. There was an unavoidable time lag between the inception of Lend-Lease and the American economy's ability to produce the goods.

Before 1948, approximately one‐third of the United Kingdom (UK)'s hospital beds were located in voluntary hospitals, many of which continued to benefit from the funds generated by their historic endowments. When the National Health Service (NHS) was created, the vast majority of these hospitals were taken over by the State. This paper examines the neglected question of what happened to these endowments and the role which charity continued to play in the funding of NHS hospitals more generally. It makes an explicit attempt to examine the development of hospital services in each of the UK's constituent nations and shows how the treatment of endowments and the role of charity differed between them. It also highlights the continuing importance of arguments over the 'boundaries' between 'essential' and 'non‐essential' forms of health service expenditure, and between the roles of the statutory and voluntary sectors more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using historical data for the 1700–1914 period, this paper analyses the nature and direction of technical change in Britain. The evidence in this paper indicates that, over this long period, labour‐saving technology adoption was a major response to changes in relative factor prices, thus supporting the hypothesis that 'induced innovation' was a major driver of technical change during the British industrial revolution. Labour saving was made possible and sustained by capital‐augmenting and energy‐augmenting technical change coupled with continuous capital accumulation and abundant energy supplies. This process placed the British economy on a higher capital–labour ratio equilibrium, and was the primary force driving sustained productivity growth, which further raised wages and living standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the role of Richard Hopkins, secretary of the Treasury of Great Britain in applying Keynesian economics in the employment policy of the British government from 1929 to 1945. During this period, official attitudes to employment policy changed to a degree which economist John Maynard Keynes regarded as revolutionary. In 1944, on the other hand, the government issued a White Paper accepting responsibility for the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war, and stated its belief that in the past the power of public expenditure, skillfully applied, to check the onset of a depression has been underestimated. Moreover, whereas down to 1940 the budget had been concerned only with cash accounting for central government revenue and expenditure. The 1941 budget, with its accompanying White Paper on national income and expenditure, introduced a national accounting analytical framework which Keynes described as a revolution in public finance. Aggregate demand management was first adopted to deal with wartime inflation.

The article deals with the implementation of the rule by the Advisory Council on Public Records under the provisions of the Public Records Act of 1967 in Great Britain. Most contemporary historians saw the First World War as a historical watershed from which time onwards the activity and potential role of governments in influencing British economic and social development were much enhanced. As a result, particular areas of historical research, such as diplomatic history and historical studies of social and economic policy, were given enormous stimulus. For all historians access to records is essential. New records are almost always welcome and any restriction on access to information is generally deplored or regretted. In the initial euphoria at the release of so much new material comparatively little attention was paid to the status of the public records as research evidence. In 1970, however, doyen of British interwar historians, the late G. L. Mowat, referred to a part of the new material with characteristic shrewdness.

This paper constructs a new chronology of the business cycle in the United Kingdom from 1700 on an annual basis and from 1920 on a quarterly basis to 2010. The new chronology points to several observations about the business cycle. First, the cycle has significantly increased in duration and amplitude over time. Second, contractions have become less frequent but are as persistent and costly as at other times in history. Third, the typical recession has been tick‐shaped with a short contraction and longer recovery. Finally, the major causes of downturns have been sectoral shocks, financial crises, and wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Keynesian Revolution after the publication of the book "The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes," which deals with the employment policy of the government of Great Britain during the Second World War. Thus, it will be argued that great care must be taken in using the term "Keynesian", and that the rather contradictory proposals of the 1944 Employment Policy White Paper should not be seen as a faithful reflection of the furthest extent Keynes was prepared to go to preserve employment without inflation. General unemployment could be avoided by measures to control aggregate demand: open market operations; contracyclical public works; support to consumption through changes in hire-purchase terms, tax reduction, consumer credits, and extensions of the social services. During depressions, the budget would be imbalanced and the debt increased, but this could be counteracted by a capital levy or an annual wealth tax. Whatever the British Treasury may have thought about Keynesian employment policy in theory, the terms of reference of the Steering Committee required them to propose ways of controlling the various categories of aggregate demand. Since Keynes was not intimately involved in discussions of employment policy, he was not forced to resolve the inconsistencies in his thoughts on the budget nor to make a definite stand on policy in the third post-war phase.

This article focuses on parliamentary records in the custody of the House of Lords Record Office, which are relevant to the study of economic history of Great Britain. The records which are in the care of the Lords Record Office are the following: the archives of the House of Lords from 1497 onwards; a few, post-medieval House of Commons documents which survived in the fire of 1834 and a large proportion of the Commons records which have accumulated since that time. The sources for economic history which are to be found among these records fall into three main groups. First, those which related to the public business of both Houses and to proceedings on public Bills; second, the private Bill records of both Houses and lastly, a varied accumulation of papers laid on the Table of the House of Lords.

This article brings together some of the improvements to GDP estimates from the income side since the publication of Charles Feinstein's 1972 volume National income, expenditure and output of the United Kingdom, 1855–1965. Many of the improvements and refinements were made by Feinstein himself and this paper makes a start in bringing the different elements together, focusing chiefly on reconstructing the income‐based estimates for the period 1841–1920. The new data are then used to comment on several features of the late nineteenth‐century UK economy, considering both the trend and cyclical path of the economy. The new data, coupled with modern de‐trending methods, suggest that there was a long‐term slowing of the UK economy from the late nineteenth century, starting from the 1870s. To undertake the trend–cycle decomposition, we employ a wavelets methodology to describe the time–varying features of trends and cycles over this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What caused the recovery from the British Great Depression? A leading explanation – the 'expectations channel' – suggests that a shift in expected inflation lowered real interest rates and stimulated consumption and investment. However, few studies have measured, or tested the economic consequences of, inflation expectations. In this paper, we collect high‐frequency information from primary and secondary sources to measure expected inflation in the United Kingdom between the wars. A high‐frequency vector autoregression suggests that inflation expectations were an important source of the early stages of economic recovery in interwar Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a reassessment of the origins and derivation of many of Sir William Petty's economic ideas, based on an analysis of his unpublished papers. Petty's archive makes clear what a large part Ireland played in his writings, and it is suggested that this preoccupation is essential to an appreciation of him as an economist. It also demonstrates the point that Petty was not principally a theorist but rather a practical political economist whose schemes for the enrichment of the king's dominions were inspired by the underdevelopment which he experienced at first hand in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The decision in 1847 to cut Treasury spending on public relief efforts during the Irish famine is generally attributed by economic historians to the pervasive influence of 'laissez-faire' ideas on the Whig government of Lord John Russell. This article draws on the papers of political leaders and contemporary financial information to argue that economic reasons were the trigger for the change in policy. Robert Peel and Charles Wood's macroeconomic policies of the 1840s, including the gold standard, the Bank Charter Act, and corn law repeal, left the Whigs unable to borrow to finance relief efforts in Ireland without panicking markets. The scaling back of public assistance programmes that resulted from this-and which increased mortality at the height of the Irish famine-was the unintended result of Peel and Wood's economic policies, in the context of the Whig government's parliamentary weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines statistical evidence on industrial horsepower and the accuracy of Factory Return in Great Britain in 1870. The first Factory Act was passed in 1833, following the publication of the reports of the Factory Commissioners. Among other things this Act gave the Factory Inspectors it appointed powers to order the occupiers of factories in the textile industries to furnish any information, including power figures, which they deemed necessary for the execution of their duties under the Act. At this time the Factory Acts applied only to woolen-, worsted-, cotton-, flax- and silk-mills; returns of these were published in the parliamentary papers. In the early 1860s, however, the operation of the legislation was expanded: bleaching and dyeing works were the subject of Acts in 1860 and 1864, as were lace works in 1861. In 1864 the first Factory Acts Extension Act extended the coverage of the legislation outside the textile industries for the first time: now earthenware manufacture apart from bricks and tiles, lucifer match-making, the percussion cap and cartridge trades, paper-staining and fustian-cutting were all brought under the umbrella of the Factory Acts.

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

This article examines the archives of the earls of Derby alongside related governmental papers to provide a new perspective on the Royalist land sales. It revisits Thirsk's pioneering work and, while upholding its significance, argues that historians can go further in understanding the social and economic consequences of the land sales. The identity, motivation, and activity of the Interregnum purchasers are re-assessed, and it is suggested that the role of tenants was greater and more complex than has been appreciated. The case study will hopefully shed further light on a part of the Revolution land settlement story which has been underplayed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a case study of four late nineteenth-century share flotations of Indian railway companies. It highlights an important gap in the historiography of Indian railway finance, which has focused on the period up to 1875. The role of N. M. Rothschild as lead underwriter and its relationship with the India Office, managing agents, and investors is analysed. This gives an evolving picture of mutual dependence between the City and Whitehall in the financing of the British Empire's largest investment programme. Gentlemanly capitalists are shown to combine the self-reinforcing roles of arranger, investor, and informal government advisor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite rapid increases in manual workers' wages, poverty rates among the elderly remained high in late Victorian England, although they varied significantly across Poor Law Unions. This paper begins by examining the ability of workers to provide for their old age. A data set is constructed, consisting of all English Poor Law Unions in 1891–2, and regression equations are estimated in order to explain variations across unions in pauperism rates. This is followed by the testing of several conjectures made by contemporaries, and repeated by historians, regarding the deterrent effect of workhouse relief, the effects of wages and of the industrial character of Poor Law Unions on pauperism rates, and regional differences in workers' reliance on the poor law. The paper then examines the implications of these results for the debate over national old age pensions in the decades before the adoption of the Old Age Pension Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper offers a new perspective on the emergence of machinery in the cotton spinning trade during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It does so by examining the interplay between economic, political, and national interests within the early Hanoverian state. Changes in trading relationships between textile producers across the three kingdoms of England/Wales, Ireland, and Scotland created escalating supply-side problems, which, by the 1760s, would precipitate a quest for solutions based on new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the view, voiced especially by S. Ogilvie, that the ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the history of craft guilds is wide of the mark. The paper suggests that Ogilvie oversimplifies the revisionist position; ignores significant new work on European crafts; as a result underestimates the role of the guilds in England and the Low Countries; and incorrectly presents her own case study of the Württemberg worsted industry as typical of European industry in general. Rather than a return to what amounts to a generalized eighteenth-century debunking of the guilds, the paper pleads for more quantitative and regionally specified investigations of the economic contributions of craft guilds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on analyst Carl Bridge's remarks about the article "Great Britain and the Indian Currency Crisis of 1930-1932." Views of Bridge on the nature, function, and composition of the Government of India's currency reserves; Discussion of the Paper Currency and the Gold Standard Reserve of India; Comment on some minor errors stated by Bridge in his commentary.

In this article the author argues that economist Forrest Capie has imposed a highly restrictive arithmetic assumption on the calculations which invalidates the usefulness of his estimates. The author describes how effective rates of protection were calculated for the British inter-war economy. The effective rates of protection depend very much on the way in which protected British industries are assumed to behave. The assumption often made in studies of the rate of effective protection is that the law of one price holds in the domestic market, and that the country concerned is a small participant in the world market, so that any tariff has no effect on the world price of the goods concerned. The implication of this is that a tariff raises the prices of both imports and home sales to the domestic market by the full amount of the tariff. The author remarks that the data presented in this paper also lead one to draw a different inference about the degree of tariff sophistication during the 1930.

The article discusses the changes and trends in real wages, price, and productivity in the Great Britain from 1880 to 1913. A topic of far greater concern than the movements in real wages has been the wider question of Britain's long-run economic success or failure as reflected in the slowdown in the growth of output and productivity. Differences in estimation and interpretation of Britain's economic growth have proved remarkably persistent, and there is no more agreement today than when these issues were first discussed over 60 years ago. In particular, there is a major conflict of evidence between estimates of gross domestic product based on income data, and those derived from output data. The primary object of the present paper is to reopen discussion of the abrupt change in the progress of real wages in the Edwardian era, and to set this within the context of the larger debate. The behavior of average real wages is central to the contrast between the two GDP series. If it is possible first to establish and then to explain the behavior of real wages, this should help considerably towards clarification of the extent and timing of any retardation in real output and productivity.

The article deals with the costs and risks involved in the decision of the British government in 1786 to transport convicts to Australia. The British government's decision, taken in 1786, to transport convicts to Australia has been the subject of a lively debate among historians for the past 35 years. Until 1952 nearly all historians agreed that the colony in New South Wales and Norfolk Island was established for only one purpose: as a receptacle for convicts. The British authorities were averse to building new penitentiaries, and were unable to find alternative destinations for British convicts, consequently they chose Australia as a suitable place to which they should be removed. The question posed at the beginning of this paper was: "Why did Britain transport convicts to Australia"? Although it is impossible to answer definitively, in the sense that it is impossible to read the minds of policymakers, past or current, both the documentary evidence and the statistical evidence tell a remarkably similar story. According to the traditional interpretation of contemporary documents, Australia was seen as a low-cost alternative to new British prisons.

The article focuses on the taxation policies in Great Britain. From the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution, Great Britain's taxation system operated to provide its navy and army with the indispensable monetary means required to combat the country's foes and to maintain the military forces and the credit of the central government in conditions of readiness for the next war. Of course any survey of fiscal activity provides only a sketch and not a rounded portrait of the role of a government, but that perspective does help to encapsulate its central preoccupation, namely the waging of armed conflict. Public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society. While funding alleviated the need for sharp and sudden rises in taxes, the real cost of taxation afflicting Great Britain's economy and society mounted decade by decade. Tax evasion, corruption and frauds on the revenue were pervasive throughout Great Britain. By the late seventeenth century, the British tax structure had developed well beyond the systems of more traditional societies with their limited range of levies falling mainly upon land and other immovable assets.

The article presents a list of papers related to economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in different journals. Some of the papers are: "Sixteenth-Century Probate Documents From Manchester," by M.J. Alexander; "The Buckinghamshire Posse Comitatus," by I.F.W. Beckett; "The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies, 1862-82," by P. Clarke; "Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England," by K.D.M. Snell; "Systems of Land Holding Between Landowners and Farmers," by R. Stratton; "The Timing and Pattern of Technological Development in English Agriculture," by R.J. Sullivan; "Dearth and Marketing of Agricultural Produce," by W. Thwaites; "Rural Rebels in Southern England in the 1830s," by R. Wells; "The Union of 1707 and Scottish Development " by T.M. Devine and others. Some other papers are: "Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon Settlement," by M.L. Faull; "Comparative National Balance Sheets," by R.W. Goldsmiths; "The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland," by C. Haigh and the like.

The article comments on the paper "The Landscape and the Machine: Technical Interrelatedness, Land Tenure and the Mechanization of the Corn Harvest in Victorian Britain," by Paul A. David, that appeared in the book "Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain After 1840," edited by Donald N. McCloskey. David contends that the slowness with which mechanical reapers were adopted by British farmers is to be explained by physical features of the farm landscape in Britain which made their adoption relatively unattractive. David's evidence for the index of the harvest differential turns out on inspection to be based on rates of pay of women workers on one farm in Northumberland. Whether this is an adequate basis for estimating the movement of the differential for (predominantly) male workers in all the corn-growing regions of England, might be questioned. Given that the critical factors determining the profitability of mechanization-cum-improvement were the incremental cereal yield and the cost of improvement, it is proper to ask whether any doubt attaches to the values David posits for the other parameters and variables composing these expressions.

This article paper is concerned with the similarity of the growth performance of the British economy during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties and with the usefulness of the "new-old" industry dichotomy in illuminating the trends of the inter-war period. The inter-war years emerge as a period of growth almost as rapid as any of comparable length in British measured history. The exact rating of the performance naturally varies slightly with the growth criterion adopted and the termini used for the other periods; the simplest way to establish the validity of the conclusion and at the same time leave it open to the reader's judgment is to draw in the inter-war trends on the Matthews graph. The similarity of the growth performance in the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties is largely maintained even when activity is divided into Goods production and Service production. Services get their unity partly from their physical intangibility as final products, partly from supposed differences in income demand elasticities or productivity improvement possibilities, partly, and increasingly, from the statistical difficulties of arriving at satisfactory real output series.

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

The article presents a list of documents on the economic history of Great Britain and Ireland. Some of the documents listed are: "Survey of Documents in Private Keeping," by J. Ainsworth; "Clyde Company Papers," edited by P. L. Brown; "Report to the General Board of Health on Darlington, 1850," edited by H. J. Smith; "Calendar of the Irish Council Book, 1 March 1581 to 1 July 1586," edited by D. B. Quinn; "The Minutes of the Edinburgh Trades Council, 1859--1873," edited by D. F. McKenzie; "Seventeenth-Century Hearth Money Rolls With Full Transcript Relating to Co. Sligo," edited by E. MacLysaght.

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

Late Victorian Britain was very important in the development of British dominance in light consumer goods industries, such as fermented liquors and spirits; detergents and perfumery; bicycles and other carriages; paper, stationery, and bookbinding; and games of all kinds and sports goods. Firms developed technology-based innovations and marketing-based innovations, creating abnormal peaks of trademark registrations in certain industries. This article investigates those peaks and shows that factors usually pointed out as explaining British economic decline in heavy industries did not impact on the development of light consumer goods industries, and on the contrary encouraged their fast growth during this period. Trademark registrations are shown to provide new insights into the debate on British relative decline, when combined with other industry and firm-level data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper examines major privately owned British railway companies before the First World War. Quantitative evidence is presented on return on capital employed (ROCE), total factor productivity (TFP) growth, cost inefficiency, and speed of passenger services. There were discrepancies in performance across companies but ROCE and TFP typically fell during our period. Cost inefficiency rose before 1900 but then was brought under control as a profits collapse loomed. Without the discipline of either strong competition or effective regulation, managerial failure was common. This sector is an important qualification to the conventional wisdom that late Victorian Britain did not fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Phillip Schofield on the response of villagers during England's Great Famine, one by Steve Hindle on the early modern price revolution, and one by Stephen Hipkin on England's grain trade.

In the 1830s the British and American economies were hit by a series of shared macroeconomic shocks. This paper investigates the role of markets for America's State bonds in Britain and the USA during and between the crises in 1837, 1839, and 1842.There is strong evidence that the crises in 1839 and 1842 originated in the USA and spread to Britain. There is also strong evidence that credit markets for American state bonds were tighter in the USA than in London between 1839 and 1842. The idea that the depression that began in 1839 in the USA was triggered by credit conditions in Britain and transmitted via the market for state credit, finds no support here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's 'high wage economy' view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such 'high wage economy' in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low‐productivity, low‐wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a modest contribution to the entrepreneurial standards debate in Great Britain by throwing light on a variety of competing individuals and small firms trading, before the arrival of corporate publishing giants, in cheap serial fiction and periodicals for the young. The market for printed material increased rapidly from the mid nineteenth century onwards, so that the publishing trade generally became a significant aspect of London's commercial development. Railway distribution, the penny post, and a growth of government spending, all helped to raise the scale of demand for print to an entirely new level. In 1871 nearly 30 per cent of London's population was aged between 5 and 20 years, the largest concentrated target group for the penny dreadful. During a period of rising real wages, the demand for boy labor, or well-paid but unskilled errand boy jobs, was a special characteristic of the economy of late Victorian London. The City of London's prolific output of cheap juvenile fiction from the 1860s onwards exemplifies the ability of these blessed with sufficient entrepreneurial spirit to capitalize on a rising market demand among the young for entertaining and adventurous escapism.

The article presents a restatement of the economists N.F.R. Crafts and C.K. Harley's views on the output growth and the British industrial revolution. Authors stress that the considerable volume of work since their original papers does not provide any serious quantitative challenge to their main findings nor does it go any distance towards reinstating economists P. Deane and W.A. Cole's view, which was the previous orthodoxy. The authors accept that measurement of growth yields only a range of best guess estimates. Nevertheless, it is important not to overstate the degree of uncertainty. The authors have made revisions to their earlier estimates in the course of the paper; these are generally fairly small and tend to reduce slightly the estimated growth rates. They demonstrate that total factor productivity estimation is much less problematic than the critics claim. They also accept that their approach to the industrial revolution has been shaped by the pursuit of particular questions and that other approaches are both valid and potentially important. Finally, they reaffirm the importance of the industrial revolution as an historical discontinuity.

The article presents a list of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland. Some of them are "The Religious Census of Sussex 1851," edited by J.A. Vickers; "The Robert Hall Diaries, 1947-53," edited by A. Cairncross; "The Catholic Question in Ireland and England, 1798-1882: The Papers of Denys Scully," by B. MacDermot; "The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733-64," by J.E. Tierney; "Returns of Papists, 1767," by E.S. Worrall; "The Rabbit and the Medieval East Anglian Economy," by M. Bailey; "A History of Laxton: England's Last Open-Field Village," by J.V. Beckett; "Transhumance Economy, Setting and Settlement in Highland," by A. Bil; "The Empty Fields: The Agricultural Strike of 1914," by R. Brazier; "Towards an Agricultural Geography of Medieval England," by B.M.S Campbell; "The Cost of Capital and Medieval Agriculture Technique," by G. Clark; "British Agricultural Policy, 1912-36: A Study in Conservative Politics," A.F. Cooper; "Harvests of Charge: The Royal Agricultural Society of England, 1838-1988," by N.P.W. Goddard.

The article focuses on an index of total munitions output of Great Britain during the second World War prepared by E.A.G. Robinson, head of Programs Division of the British Ministry of Production. The Ministry was set up in February 1942 in order to coordinate war production under conditions of acute generalized shortage in the economy as a whole. According to Robinson, the index was considered to be rather secret at the time; it was not passed on to the Central Statistical Office then or subsequently, and this is why it was not eventually published in the Statistical digest of the war or in any companion volumes of the British civil series of the official History of the second World War. The Robinson index was reported weekly and monthly. It covered three main kinds of military goods: army equipment, aircraft, and warships. The original figures underlying the Robinson index cannot be pinpointed with accuracy. Tests show, however, that the quarterly movement of the monthly index is satisfactorily replicated by combining the Ministry of Supply index of finished output of total warlike stores, published after the war, with total structure weight of finished aircraft, also published after the war, and with series based on wartime estimates of quarterly employment on Admiralty orders with the appropriate lag.

The article examines the central statistics of estimates of the British economic growth between 1700 and 1831. In calculating national accounts for the period 1700 to 1831 data on industrial output are relatively abundant. From customs and excise records N.F.R. Crafts draws on evidence about the production of cotton, linen, silk, beer, leather, soap, candles, and paper. Alongside these he places separate industry studies for wool, building, iron, copper, and coal. Historians have long turned to customs and excise data to estimate the size of specific industries. On the face of it, the eighteenth-century state's success in raising large revenues by these means might appear to confirm the reliability of the records which have been utilized. Certainly, many historians have supposed as much, taking amounts passing before the eyes of the customs and excise men as reasonably accurate indicators of the scale of trade and industry. Data for the output of non-excised industries are often even less reliable. For many industries only highly fragmentary statistics are available, usually for particular products in particular places.

The article presents a list of literary publications related to the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland. Some of them are: "The Need for a Consular Service in France: An Eighteenth-Century British Memorandum," by J. Black; Extracts From the Account Books of St. Peter's Parish in Cork City, 1770-1814," by R. Folliott; "The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spenser, 1835-1910," edited by P. Gordon; "The Rolls and Register of Bishop Oliver Sutton," edited by R.M.T. Hill; "The Port of Bristol, 1848-84," by D. Large; "Elizabeth Montagu: Bluestocking Turned Landlady," by J.V. Beckett; "Rural Poverty Eighty Years Ago," by R. Cotchin; "Agricultural Protection in Berkshire and opposition to the Collection of Agricultural Statistics," by J.P. Dodd; "Medieval Assarting Hamlets in Bilsdale, North-East Yorkshire," by J. McDonnell;" "English Settlements,"by J.N.L. Myres; "The Perception of Profit Before the Leasing of Demesnes,"by D. Postles; "Forestry in Northern Powys," by R.E. Stumbles.

The article discusses the structure of pay in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Section I of the article shows that much of the measured rise in pay ratios during this period is due to the behavior of two of economist J.G. Williamson's new earnings series. It is argued, moreover, that these two series are seriously flawed and should be abandoned. Section II presents revised pay ratios based on the remaining series in Williamson's sample of occupations and briefly indicates some implications of these revised pay ratios for the analysis of factors affecting trends in the structure of pay in Britain, with emphasis on the period of apparent wage stretching after 1815. The detailed behaviour of the revised estimates shows the influence of technical change on the structure of pay to have been less direct than Williamson suggests. The principal effect of imbalanced technical progress envisaged by Williamson is a disproportionate rise in the demand for skills in manufacturing during early industrialization.

This article provides information on various published papers related to economic and social changes in Great Britain since 1850. The concept of social control--essentially middle-class manipulation of the masses for the sake of social stability--that leapt abruptly to prominence in the late 1970s lies behind much of the work produced in 1984. Pat Thane looks at the question from the point of view of the recipient in her article, "The Working Class and State 'Welfare' in Britain, 1880-1914," and demonstrates that the working classes were not enthusiastic about welfare proposals from the state. Accepting the difficulty of discovering attitudes, she finds, through an examination of the records of several agencies, widespread suspicion of Liberal politics as a threat to working class independence. Further support from a different kind of article is brought by Victor Bailey in "In Darkest England and the Way Out: The Salvation Army, Social Reform and the Labour Movement, 1855-1910." This brings out the parallels between religious evangelism and socialism as moralizing agencies appealing to self-respect and working for social reform.

This article provides information on various published papers related to economic and social changes in Great Britain from 1500 to 1700. The yield of 1984 saw some recovery from the dearth of the previous year. There is still a lack of articles in economic history, which suggests a prolonged deviation of the course of the discipline towards social issues. Agricultural history, upon which there was little to report in 1985, has been better served in 1984, although much of the work is of a particular, local, and often specialized character. Michael Reed's article, "Enclosure in North Buckinghamshire, 1500-1750," stresses the importance of preparliamentary enclosure in a typical midland landscape and draws one's attention especially to the volume of enclosure by voluntary agreement. Changes in English agrarian society between 1500 and 1700 are examined in depth only for parts of the north. The article by R.W. Hoyle, "Lords, Tenants and Tenant Right in the Sixteenth Century: Four Studies," analyses the structure of four manors of north Yorkshire, England and shows that the regime of customary tenant right was flexible so far as the lord's options in managing his estates were concerned.

This article provides information on various published papers related to economic and social changes in Great Britain during the late Middle Ages. The historians have expanded the picture of the economy and society in this era, after the tumultuous changes of the eleventh century, in 1986 researchers probe at the very foundations of the existing historical framework. Colin Richmond in his paper, "The Pastons Revisited: Marriage and the Family in Fifteenth-Century England," throws considerable light on the nature of the marital bond, stressing the importance of economic and political considerations in its formulation but allowing a major role for the uncertainties inherent in a very personal human relationship. If social historians have thus considerably expanded the knowledge of aristocratic family life, in 1986 economic historians have not been found wanting in presenting a clearer picture of the rural economy within which the aristocratic family operated. In a number of papers the basic forms of production organization come under consideration.

Presents the author's reply to the comments on his paper "Total Factor Productivity Growth and the Revision of Post-1870 British Economic History," published in the 1982 issue of the journal "Economic History Review." Criticism of the use of total factor productivity (TFP) indexes in measuring productivity growth in Great Britain in 1870; Assumptions used in constructing the TFP index; Analysis of the incorporation of non-constant returns and market imperfections in the productivity index.