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This article presents several papers on agrarian history, demography and economic growth, published in previous issues of various journals. In the paper "La Disparition du Paysan Anglais," published in a previous issue of the "Annales," H.J. Habakkuk's main concern is with the two and a half centuries or so after 1500, the subject being approached from the viewpoint of the landowners rather than that of the peasants. Expropriation broadly interpreted, is played down as the basic explanation, emphasis being placed instead on the purchase of peasant lands during the years 1660-1740. In the paper "Agriculture and Economic Growth in England, 1660-1750: Agricultural Change," published in a previous issue of the "Journal of Economic History," E.L. Jones discusses the spread of new techniques and some of their economic consequences. In the paper "Field Patterns in Seventeenth Century Kent," published in a previous issue of the journal "Geography," based on 187 estate maps portraying land holding in about a quarter of the country parishes, A.R.H. Baker re-affirms that the county was almost entirely closed by 1600.

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]

Allegations of British capital market failure are numerous, but frequently contentious. This paper revisits the literature by highlighting the post-1945 market for initial public offerings (IPOs) as a clear instance of capital market failure. Despite the tender method delivering substantially lower underpricing than the traditional fixed-price offer method, it was adopted by only one in 10 firms going public. This missed opportunity cost issuing firms between £1.7 billion and £3.5 billion in real proceeds forgone between 1960 and 1986, excluding privatizations, and was symptomatic of a lack of competition in equity underwriting before Big Bang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in the organization of the Spanish cotton industry from 1736 to 1860 in its core region of Catalonia. As the Spanish cotton industry adopted the most modern technology available and experienced the transition to the factory system, cotton spinning and weaving mills became increasingly vertically integrated. Asset specificity, more than other factors, explains this tendency towards vertical integration. The probability of a firm being vertically integrated was higher among firms located in districts with high concentration ratios, and rose with size and the use of modern machinery. At the same time, subcontracting predominated in other phases of production and distribution, where transaction costs appear to be less important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the idea that emissions of greenhouse gases simply increase over time with income. It adopts a 200-year perspective and includes the important flows of greenhouse gases related to agriculture, not just the CO2 from fossil fuels. The result is that the pattern of Swedish total greenhouse gas emissions over time resembles an N. In contrast, when only emissions from fossil fuels are counted, the pattern over time resembles an inverted U. Among the most important factors generating emissions in agriculture, forest management was especially important, but in addition, draining of wetlands for agriculture played a substantial role. [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]

This paper challenges the prevailing view among economic historians that tea and coffee were luxury articles of consumption prior to the nineteenth century. It reviews an array of available evidence, including national trade statistics and probate inventory studies. In particular, it examines the surprisingly wide social and economic diffusion of tea and coffee drinking among Amsterdam citizens of lower to middling economic status during the period of that city's ascendency and subsequent decline at the centre of global trade networks. Using the distribution of tea and coffee wares of both local and exotic manufacture across households of the artisanal and labouring classes, it seeks to map both the economic reach of the East Indian trade into the poorer parts of the city, as well as to locate the cultural meanings associated with the consumption of these new goods. New data to address this issue have been derived from a substantial collection of after-death inventories drawn up on the estates of middling and poor Amsterdam citizens in the middle decades of the eighteenth century by the Regents of the Municipal Orphanage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century saw the virtual elimination of famine across most of the globe, but also witnessed some of the worst famines ever recorded. The causes usually given for these twentieth-century famines differ from those given for earlier famines, which tend to be more often blamed on harvest failures per se than on human agency. This paper reassesses two of the last century's most notorious famines, the Chinese Great Leap Famine of 1959–61 and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–4, in the light of these rival perspectives. [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.

This article examines Epstein's attempt to rehabilitate pre-modern craft guilds by criticizing my German case study. It demonstrates that his criticisms are baseless and his assertions about European guilds unsupported. Long survival does not establish the efficiency or aggregate economic benefits of any institution. Contrary to rehabilitation views, craft guilds adversely affected quality, skills, and innovation. Guild rent-seeking imposed deadweight losses on the economy and generated no demonstrable positive externalities. Industry flourished where guilds decayed. Despite impairing efficiency, guilds persisted because they redistributed resources to powerful groups. The ‘rehabilitation’ view of guilds is theoretically contradictory and empirically untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tonnage of shipping entering and leaving Ireland grew rapidly from the late eighteenth century until the mid-1870s, after which there was a distinct slowdown. The mid-nineteenth century was notable for a five-fold increase in shipping per capita, an indicator of the Irish economy’s increasing commercialization. The slowdown after 1870 would have been even greater without the industrial dynamism of Belfast, Ireland’s leading port from the 1880s. The early and rapid introduction of steamships from the 1820s made possible large-scale exports of live animals and fresh eggs, products that would account for 60 per cent of agricultural exports and a quarter of total exports by 1910. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including pandemics, child development, and pregnancy.

This article examines the business and politics of British decolonization in the 20th century. Historians are increasingly interested in the role of British business in the ending of the British empire. A succession of books, articles and theses based on an interrogation of a newly available business and government papers has examined the business-government relations during the decolonization of particular territories. In surveying the subject literature of business, government and decolonization, this article synthesizes a set of currently disparate case studies and provides the general assessment of the roles of British entrepreneurs, firms and commerical associations in the process of retreat from empire. In so doing, it is possible to scrutinize paradigms which have postulated a close relationship between British businesses and British governments during the end of empire. Neo-marxist, neo-colonial analyses view decolonization as a premptive strategy in which British governments, serving the interest of metropolitan capitalism, cynically anticipated and outmaneouvred colonial radicalism by prematuredly transfering political sovereignty to 'moderate' nationalists.

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]

Using a newly expanded set of 41 social tables from premodern societies, this article tries to identify the factors associated with the level of inequality and the inequality extraction ratio (how close to the maximum inequality the elites have pushed actual inequality). Strong evidence is found to show that elites in colonies were more extractive, and that more densely populated and less urbanized countries exhibited lower extraction ratios. Several possibilities are proposed, linking high population density to low inequality and to low elite extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews periodical literature in economic history published in 1993. The period of Anglo-Saxon settlement is represented by one study this year. The author of the study examines the Kentish evidence of 18 known cemeteries, five settlements, and various casual finds to argue that fertile soils and good communications made the Derwent valley a particularly attractive area for Saxon colonization between the fifth and the seventh centuries. Of all the texts relating to village society in the late Saxon period the "Rectitudines singularum personarum," and the "Gerefa," are surely the best known. The "Rectitudines" is a more businesslike document, apparently designed to set standards for the internal management of an estate in south-western England in the mid tenth century or earlier. Current rethinking of the processes of long-term economic development is carried further in a few papers with direct relevance to the medieval period. The extent to which higher standards of living in the later middle ages fed into cultural enrichment is well illustrated in a number of papers relating to parishes and guilds.

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 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 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 discussion on several publications on economics between the period of 1700 to 1850. In a year when economist D. Cannadine rightly laments the current concern of historians to show that less happened, less dramatically than was once thought, it seems appropriate that recent gradualist interpretations of the industrial revolution should be subject to some introspection. Economist J.G. Williamson examines the differences between his and economist N.F.R. Crafts's position on the causes of measures suggesting slow aggregate growth pre-1820 arguing that technological change in agriculture on the scale suggested by Crafts would have caused deindustrialization. In his paper, Williamson concentrates his general equilibrium model on the employment, distribution, and accumulation effects of labour market failure based on a computation of real wage gaps between regions. The labour market failed to reallocate efficiently, he concludes, but the failure of the capital market was even more pronounced. In criticizing Williamson's work, Crafts focuses on the thesis that Napoleonic War debts crowded out private capital formation. He argues that war debts may have crowded out consumption but not investment.

The article probes into the inequality hypotheses of author Alexis de Tocqueville through an examination of the relationship between the rich and the destitute in Sweden from 1805 to 1855. In his book "Democracy in America," published in 1835, De Tocqueville viewed the U.S. as a country experiencing decreasing economic inequality during the two generations after independence. In this study, which drew comparisons between America and Europe, he focused mainly on the reduced influence of the rich, and especially of the landed aristocracy, and made general statements concerning decreasing inequality or, rather, increasing equality in France and elsewhere over a long period. Tocqueville presented a somewhat contrasting view in a paper, also dated 1835, dealing with the destitute of Europe. Here he remarked that 17 per cent of the English, but only 4 per cent of the Portuguese, were destitute, and that the wealthier nations and the more advanced areas within countries suffered most from the problems of destitution. Tocqueville also sketched a hypothesis of polar equality, where societies begin with equality in the hunting stage of development and experience increased inequality with the rise of private property.

The article proposes a personal wealth distribution for late eighteenth-century England and Wales using fire insurance policy registers of the Sun Fire Office and Royal Exchange Assurance insurance companies. Fire insurance policy registers constitute perhaps the most extensive inventory of British wealth-holding for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Samples drawn from them have already been used as data sources for a number of purposes, but their most important application may well be in studying inequality, for which detailed data of almost any sort are scarce for the eighteenth century. The author shows here that the distribution of insured property can be adjusted to take account of the under-representation of poor and/or outlying wealth-holders in the sample. In this paper, therefore, he develops a personal wealth distribution for England and Wales c. 1780 using fire insurance policy registers of the Sun Fire Office and Royal Exchange Assurance insurance companies.

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 productivity growth in the English coal trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are three methodological steps to related to productivity change in the coal trade: Identifying sources of productivity change; Measuring their effect on the productivity of the trade; Assessing the wider consequences for economic development. The bulk of the author's original article was concerned with identifying very clear sources of productivity change. Economist W. Hausman accepts the author's remarks concerning sources of productivity change and adds no further comment about them. His concentration is upon measuring productivity growth where he comes to different and more specific conclusions. On the third methodological step, the impact of productivity growth, he appears equivocal. On the one hand he suggests the impact was minimal and on the other that great benefits were brought to the economies of London and the north-east. Even if one were to accept Hausman's conclusion of minimal falls in shipping costs or freight rates, this does not rule out a growth of total factor productivity of the magnitude outlined in the author's paper.

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.

Presents the author's comments on the paper "Total Factor Productivity Growth and the Revision of Post-1870 British Economic History," by Stephen Nicholas, published in the 1982 issue of the journal "Economic History Review." Application of total factor productivity (TFP) calculations in analyzing British economic growth; Limitations of the standard geometric index of TFP analysis; Source of the measurement of technical progress in the class of geometric indices; Problems with Nicholas stylized calculations of the effects of introducing market imperfections.

The article discusses the trends in economic history as an advance level (A-level) subject and the problems associated with its literature. In an age of specialization, the subject provides a good insight into the study of economics as well as history. It derives admirable features from both its parents. From history the subject inherits not only those somewhat unfashionable qualities of fascination and social compassion but also a first understanding of the origins and chronology of the really important historical developments such as industrialization and economic growth and demographic and social change. From economics it borrows its framework of theory and from the social sciences generally practitioners have borrowed the techniques for measuring economic and social change in broad aggregates and acknowledged the necessity for opening up the British perspective by comparative study. The dominant feature of economic history A-level syllabuses is their extraordinary orthodoxy. Invariably they are confined to English economic history, usually since 1750.

The article presents the author's reply to the comments made by N. Rollings on his article about Keynesian revolution and economic policy-making. Rollings rightly points out the importance of practical and administrative influences in what was undoubtedly a period of great crisis and upheaval in economic policy, but he has certainly not shown that the concept of a Keynesian revolution is an inappropriate tool with which to approach an understanding of this period. Finally, attention must be turned to the overall significance of budgetary policy. Rollings has noted that if one looks beyond the budget, there is apparently evidence of the penetration of the Treasury by Keynesian analysis rather earlier than was the case with budgetary policy. He cites the case of the programming of public investment. He might equally have taken the more spectacular case of monetary policy. On May 15, 1945, Treasury officials forwarded to the Chancellor a blueprint for postwar monetary policy which was not only explicitly Keynesian in analysis but was even adorned with quotations from "The General Theory."

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

The article examines an aspect of the Irish economy in 1841 that was shared to some degree by all European countries at that time, that is, the regional variation in the division of labour and in the specialization of the proto-industrial and agricultural labor force. The author remarks that, since economist Adam Smith's famous description of an eighteenth-century pin factory, there has been perhaps no more percipient treatment of the division of labour and its relationship to productivity and efficiency. Translated into general sociological terms, growth and labour specialization demand that the spectrum of distinct occupations widens as a society increases in productivity. Economic historians have recently expressed interest in the stockpile of European occupational data surviving from the nineteenth century and sometimes earlier periods. These occupational data are found in censuses, tax records, estate papers, and sometimes earlier period. As a basis of social categorization, demographers and sociologists employ occupational data, but their primary interests lie elsewhere, household and family size, social mobility, migration, crime, and rebellion.

The article discusses the interpretation of economist E.G. West regarding the educational history in Great Britain in the 19th century. In an important paper published in 1970 West applied the theory of economic externalities to the understanding of nineteenth-century British education. After pointing out that the existence of external benefits to one group from the consumption of a second group does not prove the need for collective intervention. West presented evidence to support arguments that private purchase was providing optimal quantities of education given the resource limitations of the time. Unfortunately, West's presentation contains factual errors which may have led him into a serious misrepresentation of English educational history. If so, this is important because West's ideas have enjoyed wide circulation in places where they have considerable influence upon present day policy making, as the above quotations demonstrate. One of the good features of a well-working market economy is that consumers maximize satisfaction because they buy the products they themselves most prefer.

The article presents a response of the author to comments by economist H.J. Kiesling on the author's paper about the 19th century educational history in Great Britain. Kiesling challenges the claim that the 1851 Education Census was incorrect in stating that most working-class education prior to 1833 was the fruit of private liberality incited mainly by religious zeal. This criticism is ineffective partly because he misquotes both the author and the Census. Kiesling also pays close attention to the author's statement that the biggest part of the cost of day schooling in this period was covered neither by the Church nor by philanthropy, but from direct payments from working families. The phrase "working families" surely includes, as the author intended it to include, middle class parents who used their professional incomes to purchase education. It should be noticed that the author's observation that the largest part of the total cost of schooling came from fees does not necessarily call for evidence of an above 50 percent share, as Kiesling appears to believe.

The article relates the function of the Arthur Viscount Lisle's letters in tracing the operations of a London business. The Lisle letters give the impression, confirmed by other letters that the middle ranks of society from which John Husee sprang were producing swarms of young men like him. Versatile, resourceful and thoroughly well educated, they provided wealthy and aristocratic families with services, which can best epitomize as secretarial, though few of them could write with such skill and charm as Husee, and fewer perhaps were called upon to perform quite such onerous and responsible duties. In an earlier age William Worcester provided Sir John Fastolf with the benefit of such services; and one could see that Harry Dogett, whom his employer addressed as his old friend, did as much for Sir William Stonor. Husee was not so much employed by Lisle as dedicated to Lisle and his family: pathetically anxious to please; devastated when he failed to do so; and on call at all hours, despite arrears of pay, rebuffs, and even ill-natured comments on his character and services.

This article focuses on the standard of living of English workers during the Industrial Revolution in England and Wales. This paper mines an expanding data base and emerges with a far clearer picture of workers' fortunes after 1750. While optimists and pessimists can both draw support from the enterprise, the pessimists' case emerges with the greater need for redirection and repair. This is a rich source for consistent time series on well-defined occupations. Annual earnings are reported there for large numbers of employees in each occupational category', spanning the whole earnings distribution over age, tenure, and skill within a given occupational group. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, farm and non-farm common labourers gained ground 021 higher-paid workers,, the labour aristocracy especially. From 1815 to the middle of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, the gap between higher- and lower-paid workers widened dramatically. Finally, the cost-of-living index should use commodity weights which reflect workers' budgets shares.

The article discusses several periodical literature on British economic and social history published in various journals. Some of the papers mentioned in the article include, "The Social and Economic Effects of Plague in the Low Countries, 1349-1500," by W.P. Blockmans, "The Effects of the Black Death on English Higher Education," by William J. Courtenay, "Bury St. Edmunds and the Populations of Late Medieval English Towns, 1270-1530," by Robert S. Gottfried. In the investigation of demographic change the period of protracted population decline during the later middle ages continues to attract the attention of most scholars, with epidemiological studies about the origins, diffusion and effects of plague taking the centre of the stage. Students of English medieval demographic history have revealed considerable variations in the incidence of plague within particular epidemics at a point in time. Yet few, if any, would suggest any lessening of the importance of the disease in determining mortality through time and subscribe to the scepticism of other authors concerning the importance of plague as a determinant of the prolonged population decline of the later middle ages.

This article presents information on periodical literature that was published during the year 1976 on the variety and complexity of landlord-peasant class relations in England from 1500 to 1700. R. Brenner's insistence, in his wide-ranging and thought-provoking paper "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe" that was published in a 1976 issue of the periodical "Past and Present" that the question of who was to gain and who was to lose from a growing demand for land would be determined by the qualitative character of landlord-peasant class relations thrusts a fundamental Tawney theme to the foreground of the picture. A number of other writers illustrate its variety and complexity. In the paper "The Agrarian Problem in Sixteenth- Century Lincolnshire: Two Cases from the Court of Star Chamber" by R.W. Ambler and M. Watkinson that was published in the periodical "Lincolnshire History and Archaeology" print documents illustrating two such conflicts. The plaintiffs in one case were villagers, complaining about a newly risen landlord who was converting, harassing copyholders, and depopulating in a pure Tawney manner. In the other case, however, it was the encloser who was complaining about villagers entering into, and grazing their beasts upon, land, which he was set upon farming in severalty. In neither case, unfortunately, have the judgments survived, so we are unsure as to whether landlord or peasant prevailed.

This article presents comments of the author on the paper "Inflation and Philanthropy in England: A Re-assessment of W.K. Jordan's Data," by W.G. Bittle and R. Todd Lane that was published in a 1976 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." Economist W.K. Jordan failed to deflate his statistics of the amounts donated to charity between 1480 and 1660 to take into account the fall in the value of money over the period. In arguing for the deflation of his data, his critics are also asking for a modification of Jordan's claims for the growth of private philanthropy in this period. The author has tried to show that there is at least something to be said for the view that those kinds of private charity most required did grow even in real terms between 1480 and 1660. Jordan may have done his cause no good by the form in which he presented some of his supporting evidence but the thesis itself is not necessarily invalid, although it does need qualification. To balance this somewhat optimistic conclusion, however, one must also take into account the scale of the assistance provided. Even on the least pessimistic assumptions the totals in the tables, when adjusted to cover the whole country, cannot represent more than some 0.5 per cent and 0.25 per cent respectively of current national income in any decade. In view of the social needs of the time, even after the early seventeenth-century explosion of giving, what must have been more audible was not the bang but the whimper.