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This article presents response of the authors on comments made by various economists on the paper "Inflation and Philanthropy in England: A Re-assessment of W.K. Jordan's Data" that was published in a 1976 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." The flurry of comment provoked by the paper seems clearly to establish that, although considerable time has passed since the publication of economist W.K. Jordan's various works, they remain as controversial now as ever with regard to two major points, the immense generosity thesis and the real value of the charitable benefactions of the age. As Professor D.C. Coleman quite correctly points out, and as the authors just as pointedly stated in the paper. Jordan's work has come under considerable fire for his conscious disregard of inflationary pressures. Indeed, so long and so continuous has been this stream of criticism that the most amazing thing about the whole affair is that it has taken so long for someone to undertake an orderly analysis of the inflationary effect. Coleman is offended by their curious failure to cite his and Professor L. Stone's reviews, suggesting the application of the Phelps Brown-Hopkins index. The simple fact is that the authors were unaware of them. The procedure was so obvious and has been suggested so often that a search of seventeen-year-old book reviews hardly seemed relevant to the task at hand.

The article deals with agriculture and industrial revolution in Great Britain from 1659-1815. The literature of development economics and economic history has been marked by increased attention to agriculture's contribution to economic progress. Historians have not only taken proper cognizance of this theory and taxonomy but have added significantly to our comprehension of the way in which agriculture actually affected the pace and pattern of economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Agriculture's role in the industrialization of Europe, America, and Japan has certainly not been neglected or derogated. Here in Great Britain, agrarian history may be the most deeply studied aspect of the first Industrial Revolution, and recent research on agriculture from the Civil to the Great War has taken that branch of economic history to a high level of sophistication. And his volume of republished papers evinces a real feeling for the landscape, soil, and techniques of British farming, and displays the qualities of intellectual caution and gritty integrity, that are the hallmarks of agrarian historians who till a field of history where national data are always hard to find and where sensible inference depends upon wide reading and long reflection into the secrets of rural economy--secrets not readily accessible to strangers from towns.

The article presents information on research papers and research grants that are included in the November 1976 issue of the journal "The Economic History Review." Some of the research papers are "The Development of the Steamship," by R.S. Craig and R.C. Floud; "Industry and Technology in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century," by J.R. Harris; "Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland," by K.T. Hoppen; "The Organization of Manuscript Material in the Fawcett Library for Preservation and Use by Researchers," by G.I.M. Horton; and others.

The article focuses on the emergence of the disciplines of economics and economic history in England. The disagreement between economists Alfred Marshall and Ven. William Cunningham is not unfamiliar to economic historians, but they have tended to view it either as a personal squabble or as a local offshoot of the more famous Methodenstreit which began in Germany a decade or so earlier. Cunningham's charge was that Marshall had instead squeezed and bruised the facts into whatever laws would maximize the apparent area of applicability of his own brand of economics. In this attempt to turn economics into a universal science, he had instead theorized himself out of the capacity to offer opinions on the issues of the day other than as a private layman. Economics, as Cunningham saw it, was there to criticize particular legislation, and any principles developed for this end must be consonant with the particular needs and aims and ambitions of the nation in which the legislation is carried out. Thus economists should be collecting empirical data as a means to giving advice appropriate to its time and place.

This article presents comments of the author on the paper "Trends in Real Wages, 1750-1850," by M.W. Flinn on real wages in Great Britain from 1750-1850 that was published in a 1974 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." The first issue must be the applicability of the London-based price series. The tenor of Flinn's remarks is that while none of the available series meets the requirements of the ideal index, retail prices must move in sympathy with wholesale prices and one may doubt the possibility of marked variations in regional price movements. In any case, he contends, the quite remarkable degree of agreement of the several indexes inspires confidence in generalizing not only about the direction but also about the extent of price changes, particularly over the period 1790-1850. However, a number of questions may be raised here. The first involves Flinn's method of analysis. Rightly anxious to avoid the dangers of arguing about long-run trends in terms of movements to and from short-run peaks, he is aware that the choice of dates is a crucial one. Thus, for the volatile period from 1790 to the mid-1820's, he selects the following: 1788/92 (five-year average); 1809/15 (omitting the peak years 1812 and 1813 = an average of five years taken over a seven-year period); and 1820/6 (seven-year period).

This article presents response of the author on the comments made by scholar Mark Kishlansky on the paper "The Sales of Crown Lands during the English Revolution." No objection can be made to the fairness and clarity with which Kishlansky has summarized the argument of the article. There is only one sentence with which the author would cavil: at no point in the article does he states or implies that "the lands were sold only in large parcels." In his subsequent critique Kishlansky raises a valid point. He is quite right in observing that some officers who were not in service in January 1648 did, in fact, benefit from the Act for Sale of Crown Lands. However, these men appear to have been the exception to the rule. The wording of the Act on this point is hardly a model of clarity, but the intention seems clear original creditors whose debentures were to be; redeemable on crown land were defined as "Officers or Soldiers, who were in the Parliaments Service within this Nation in January 1647." The correspondence of Captain Adam Baynes confirms that the law was applied in most cases. In the letters written to Baynes during the early 1650's there are frequent references to this critical point, and more than one indication that the debentures of soldiers who had not been in the service in January 1648 fetched a much lower price because they were not redeemable on crown land.

This article presents the author's comments on the paper "The Sales of Crown Lands during the English Revolution," by Ian Gentles. Gentles argues that in its inspiration and operation the Rump's land-settlement scheme was indistinguishable from any other administrative decision generated by the Long Parliament's need for solvency. In its inevitable consequences the land settlement is seen as a thinly disguised rape of the soldiery by their own officers in the dark alley provided by the Crown Lands Act. This interpretation is an indictment of the official policies of the Rump and the conduct of the officer corps of the Army. The Rump attempted to find the least expensive course for settlement of military arrears and struck upon the sale of the recently acquired crown lands. The value of these lands was then deliberately inflated and, as a further hedge, soldiers who had left the Army prior to 1648 were excluded from claiming debentures for their arrears. To solve the administrative problems, the lands were sold only in large parcels. In consequence, only officers were able to benefit from the Act and the Close Rolls contain numerous examples of regimental lands enrolled to individual officers.

This article presents information on periodical literature published in the year 1973 on social and economic history. The technique of dating hedges by the number of species growing in them is a fairly recent one and scholar Geoffrey Hewlett in his paper in published in the periodical "Agricultural History Review," applies it to Otford. In "Reconstructing a Historical Landscape From Field Documentary Evidence: Otford in Kent," he attempts to map the area with reference to hedges and he reminds readers that soil conditions and the availability of shrub species grown locally must be taken into account. In the same journal, scholar Wendy Davies in her learned paper on "Unciae: Land Measurement in the Liber Landavensis" notes that the measurement was used only on lands between the rivers Usk and Wye. She believes that the term may derive from the use in that area of a Roman technical term signifying an heir's portion and that it derived a secondary meaning of a holding and a tertiary meaning of a unit of measurement of about 500 acres.

This article presents comments of the author on the paper "Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling," by W.A. Cole that was published in a 1958 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." In a closely argued and elaborately calculated analysis of the effect of price changes on the demand for legally imported tea, Cole claimed to have found a technique for determining the extent and fluctuations of the illicit trade in tea and thus for ascertaining the trends in eighteenth-century smuggling in general. It was a compelling study and has commanded considerable interest. But one seriously doubts whether he has in fact succeeded in establishing the precise extent or order of magnitude of smuggling for that century even in the quantity of smuggled tea. The method adopted by Cole required, in addition to data on population, fairly accurate figures on the quantities and prices of legal tea consumed in Great Britain. These he has not obtained. This paper will demonstrate that the time series upon which all his calculations and estimates of smuggling are based do not provide sufficiently accurate data for the kind of study he has undertaken. What is more disturbing is that when the figures on quantities and prices are corrected, they no longer yield acceptable estimates of the quantities of tea smuggled into Great Britain.

This article presents response of the author to the comments made by scholar Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui on the paper "Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling" that was published in a 1958 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." In the paper, the author did not, as his critics suggest, claim to have established the precise extent of smuggling, or even to have determined with confidence the order of magnitude of the problem. On the contrary, he emphasized that any estimate of smuggling was bound to be speculative and cannot be exact; all that he claimed to have achieved was a reasonable guess at the probable order of magnitude of the contraband trade. And without in any way seeking to recreate the illusion of certainty which may appear to flow from a rigorous statistical analysis grounded on impeccable economic theory, he ventures to doubt whether his estimates are as untenable as the Muis attempt to suggest, or whether their objections to the methods he employed in making them are any more fundamental than those which he himself pointed out in his original paper.

The article discusses the use of counterfactual argument in analyzing economic history. Since it is the purpose of this paper to show that the role of counterfactual argument in historical explanation is limited in a much more fundamental way than economist J.D. Gould showed, it is essential to establish at the outset the limits of its application that he has acknowledged. From the following summary it appears that he sees its application as limited to those historical problems which are "unique", not unduly "open", and from which "strong" counterfactual inferences can be drawn. In Gould's view it is "likely that if historical problems exist which are particularly apt for counterfactual treatment they will be found amongst events which are in some important sense unique, but not unduly open. That is to say, that where the events in question can be regarded as specific instances of classes of events, the operation of which is felt to be governed by some covering law, and are therefore non-unique, the "direct", traditional approach has advantages over the counterfactual one.

This article comments on a paper by Richard T. Stillson that examined the financial aspects of the early history of the Malayan rubber industry. Stillson offers some very interesting observations and propositions both about the development of that industry and, more generally, about the role-played by financial institutions in the process of economic development. For instance, he properly draws attention to the indirect benefits, which foreign-owned financial institutions may bring to a developing country; and one would not challenge his view that institutional connections with important foreign capital markets may confer beneficial liquidity on long-term local assets, which would otherwise be very illiquid in a purely local capital market. Unfortunately, however, Stillson does not succeed in establishing the validity of certain specific propositions, which he advances about Malaya. He uses the authorized capital of sterling rubber companies to represent the inflow of British capital but, as will now be shown, this variable is an unsatisfactory measure of the annual investment flow, and of its cumulative total at any point of time.

This article focuses on the items in the questionnaire by William Lovett, secretary of the Chartist General Convention, aimed at discovering the major economic, political and social matters affecting the working class in Great Britain. The answers to such a series of questions, with the comments of the local Chartist and Radical organizers, would provide a very considerable and useful body of information on the problems and grievances of the working classes and thus aid the central Chartist organization in its attempts to agitate the country. There is, however, no evidence to show that the Chartist Convention made any use of the information, beyond the general knowledge which it gave that body of the state of the working classes throughout the country. It may be that insufficient local associations completed the questionnaires to justify the drawing of conclusions, as is suggested by the fact that among the papers of the Convention there are collected together returns from only a few associations.

This article discusses the book "The Cambridge Economic History of Europe," vol. 1, "The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages," edited by M.M. Postan. The book's comments on the incidence of taxation could be the beginning of a very fruitful inquiry. The history of taxation is related to that of credit, usury, and even commercial transactions, because purchasers of agricultural produce seem usually to have called shortly before the tax collectors. A study of taxation would also throw light upon the tendencies, which perpetually renewed the social category of seigneurs, because most of the newly rich were not merchants but, as G. Fourquin observes, notables, that is to say, officials, servants of the prince, and their fortunes were promoted by fiscal innovations. Finally, it is conceivable that economic historians would find an examination of certain mental attitudes useful, if only to establish more clearly what were the true springs of economic development, because, as M. Finley has shown in a remarkable paper presented to the Aix-en-Provence conference, they were not located in earlier societies where they are today.

The article examines the possibility of providing a solution to the debasement of coinage in England between 1542 and 1551. It is commonplace in historical writing that the Tudor dynasty of Great Britain debasement was a fiscal experiment, devised to provide the Crown with a new and lucrative source of revenue. It is equally well known that there are conflicting views regarding the size of the revenue involved. In 1921, in his study of government finance between, F.C. Dietz calculated that from the beginning of the debasement in May 1544 until its end in July 1551 the Crown received revenues from the coinage amounting to 1,014,500 pounds: 363,000 pounds. On the other hand, in 1931, in his book "The Pound Sterling," A.E. Feavearyear stated that the debasement of the coinage, which he saw beginning as far back as July 1542, yielded a net profit of 227,378 pound, but gave no corresponding estimate for the period thereafter, believing that "no exact figures of the issues are available." The difference was great and particularly puzzling for both authors claimed the authoritative support of official mint accounts. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the evidence with a view to determining how far it is still possible to provide a satisfactory solution to this problem.

The article presents a discussion related to social distribution of landed property and landowners in England between from 1436 to 1700, in reference to the paper of F.M.L Thompson on the topic. Thompson has provided a fruitful and fascinating conspectus of the distribution of landed property. His main purpose was to consider how and why England became overwhelmingly a land of tenant farmers by the end of the eighteenth century and the consequences of this for the subsequent development of the economy. Nevertheless it may be worth seeing whether there is more material available about the situation at the beginning of his inquiry which may at least provide a basis for slightly better-informed guessing. It may also be possible to provide more information about the numbers in the various categories of landowners, or at least show why more accurate information about this would be desirable. The only general criticism of Thompson, which the author ventures to make, is that it is not always clear what data are being used in his calculations.

The article presents several reference materials and papers on finance and agriculture and natural resource development which were published in various journals. Some of the papers include, "Structure and Balance in Western Mining History," by L. Artherton, published in the journal "Huntington Library Quarterly," "California Crops That Failed," by J.E. Baur, published in the journal "California Historical Society Quarterly," "American Diplomacy, the 1933 Wheat Conference, and Recognition of the Soviet Union," by R.E. Bowers, published in the journal "Agricultural History," "An Economic Analysis of Midwestern Farm Land Values and Farm Land Income, 1860 to 1900," by J.D. Bowman, published in the journal "Yale Economic Essays," "Colonial Currency and Contemporary Monetary Theory: A Review Article," by M.L. Burnstein, published in the journal "Explorations in Entrepreneurial History," "Wildcats and Patriots: The Story of the Marine Bank" by D.J. Arnst, published in the journal "Minnesota History," "Sober Second Thoughts on Van Buren, the Albany Regency, and the Wall Street Conspiracy," by F.O. Gatell, published in "Journal of American History."

The article examines the geographical distribution of wealth in England from 1334-1649. In a paper by author E.J. Buckatzsch, attempt was made to measure statistically changes in the distribution of wealth between the counties over an extended period of eight centuries. By employing two statistical measures, Buckatzsch was able to show that statistically significant redistribution of wealth occurred only in the periods 1086-1150, 1150-1283, 1503-1641, and 1693-1803, while at all other times between 1086 and 1843, the distribution of wealth between the counties remained relatively stable. Buckatzsch argued that the tax assessments of 1453 and 1504 showed that practically no redistribution of wealth had taken place between the counties since 1334, while the tax assessment of 1641 showed that a marked, and statistically significant, redistribution of wealth had occurred after 1504. In practice Buckatzsch used a combination of tax assessments on movable property, and tax assessments on annual incomes derived mainly from real property.

This article presents response of the author on comments made by writer J.D. Gould on the paper "Inflation of Prices in Early Sixteenth-Century England" that was published in a 1961 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." In his comment on the paper related to prices in Tudor and Stuart England, Gould, while in agreement with the general contention, rejects the section dealing with grain-price fluctuations. His objections are mainly based upon the following three points, that the theoretical model of Brenner I is irrelevant and inappropriate, that the author's statistical evidence is presented in an inconsistent form and does not cover the whole period in a uniform manner and that the author contradicts himself with regard to an upward trend and a downward trend in the coefficient of variation of grain prices. He quite agrees with Gould's improved model in his paper, and in the absence of any satisfactory historical evidence to support either his or mine, the author finds his by far the most convincing. Were it not for the fact that the author had spent two years in West Africa examining price behavior in regions where rapid economic transition is taking place, he should has accepted Gould's model without hesitation.

This section presents a list of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1971. Some of the publications listed are: "The Hardwick Hall Inventories of 1601," edited by L. Boynton; "Bridgwater Borough Archives," edited by R.W. Dunning and T.D. Tremlett; "Collected Writings of J.M. Keynes," edited by E. Johnson; "The Acts of William I, King of Scots: 1165-1214," edited by G.W.S. Barrow; "A Calendar of the Talbot Papers in the College of Arms," edited by G.R. Batho; "The Journal of Giles Moore," edited by R. Bird; "The Register of Winwick Parish Church," edited by R. Dickinson; "The Register of Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Exeter: 1420-1455," edited by G.R. Dunstan; "Marriage Allegations in the Diocese of Gloucester," vol. 2, "1681-1700," edited by B. Frith; "Accounts of the Treasurer of Scotland: XII, 1566-1574," edited by C.T. McInnes; "The Dorset Lay Subsidy Roll of 1332," edited by A.D. Mills; and "Minute Book of the Men's Meeting of the Society of Friends in Bristol: 1661-1686," edited by R. Mortimer.

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

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

The article comments on a paper about the crisis of aristocracy in England during 1558-1641. The author remarks that the social interpretation of the English Revolution is a controversial subject. It is tempting to say that the Civil War was preceded by a major transference of land to the gentry and to argue that they rose to political power as a consequence. The problem of demonstrating changes in the economic position of different classes in society and of establishing the relationship between such changes and subsequent political events, is a grave one. Imprecise terminology, inexact genealogy, and uncertain statistics lead only too easily to unsupported conclusions. According to the author, each of the calculations made in the paper, throws further light on the predicament of the peerage during these years. The care with which this case is presented and the support that these statistics lend to one another have commanded acceptance. Indeed, the figures have already been used as a basis for further calculations.

The article comments on a paper about the trend of land sale in England during 1540-1640. In Trinity term 1604, the index of Feet of Fines records a sale of the manor of Much Waltham by some social historians. At first sight, this appears to be yet another sale of a manor by a declining aristocrat to a rising gentleman. This transaction is a typical enforcement to use, which has appeared in the index of Feet of Fines in a form indistinguishable from a sale. The Feet of Fines, being a legal record, provide a record of legal title to land. However, the standard methods of keeping land out of wardship, among other things, involved the separation of title from possession, and it is therefore not to be expected that a list of those who held title to land will correspond very closely with the list of its actual possessors. The author remarks that, the appearance of only one purchaser in the Feet of Fines does not guarantee that the transaction is not a use. The author concludes that, it is possible that the entries in Feet of Fines and do conceal a rapid increase in the volume of land sales.

The article presents a list of the published writings of social historian R.H. Tawney. Some of the books listed here are: "The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century"; "The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Chain-making Industry under the Trade Boards Act of 1909"; "Tudor Economic Documents"; "The British Labor Movement"; "Land and Labour in China"; and "The Radical Tradition." Some of the papers listed here are: "The Report of the Central Unemployed Body for London"; "The Departmental Committee on Half-time"; "A Report of a Visit to Germany Made by Members of the Rochdale Branch"; "The Halving of Boy and Girl Labour"; "The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace"; "Democracy or Defeat"; "The Coal Industry Commission and the Consumer"; "The Recent Proposals for the Nationalization of the British Coal Industry"; "The Unemployment Crisis in England"; "The End of the Struggle in the Coal Industry"; "The Problem of the British Coal Industry"; and "The Possible Cost of Raising the School-Leaving."

The article focuses on the social and political history of the European town of Basel, Switzerland. The town was famed for its paper manufacture and its printers, and its university had been founded in 1460. The site of Basel was almost unique, the first permanent bridge over the Rhine was built there in 1225. This created a nodal point for traffic from the regions on either side of the Alps. Basel was not spared by the Black Death which afflicted so much of Europe but, soon after the great pestilence of 1349, Basel was struck by a catastrophe which may have been still more severe. In the political context, Basel was of some importance, perhaps rather too much so for the taste of the urban population affected by this. Underlying Basel's political position was its economic and financial importance, something which was to continue well into the future. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was still the largest town in Switzerland, and later still much of the development of the modern Swiss economy was financed from there.

The article presents information about articles published in various journals. "The Estates of the Cobham Family in the Later Thirteenth Century," described by Teresa May in Archaeologia Cantiana, LXXXIV, show a large demesne and numerous very small tenancies paying rents in money, kind, and services. About two-thirds of the holdings in Cobham changed hands in one generation at the end of the thirteenth century and over the same period there is evidence of increased activity on the demesne. The special role that business capital with its unusual flexibility played in the economy and, on the debit side, the impermanence of such capital are emphasized by Richard Grassby in a further valuable paper on English businessmen, "English Merchant Capitalism in the Late Seventeenth Century. The Composition of Business Fortunes," Past & Present, XLVI. The diverse ways London businessmen held their wealth at their careers' end are considered in some detail, as are the ways it had been obtained, the conclusion here being that great wealth derived more from financial dealings and capital gains than from trade.

This article presents information on the comments made on the paper "Charles Booth and Labor Colonies in 1889-1905," by John Brown. The paper is, in the words of the author is concerned with one aspect of scholar Charles Booth's work, his ideas on unemployment. More generally, it is an attempt to describe and explain some of the neglected moral assumptions behind the discussion of policy. The paper is also intended as a contribution to a necessary revaluation of the climate of opinion in which the great social legislation of the 1905 Liberal government occurred. The essence of the paper is that late Victorian and Edwardian social policy was not, as is usually assumed, based upon non-doctrinaire empirical investigation; that in fact the investigations of Booth, and of those he influenced, are compromised by their unawareness of their own preconceptions and therefore they lapsed into moral attitudes which influenced their analyses of the problems under investigation. This has largely escaped the attention of historians, who tend to ignore problems surrounding the role of value judgments. It is this neglected question of value judgments, particularly with reference to Booth, that is to be considered here.

The article presents a discussion on the periodical literatures of 1969. Some of the literatures include: "The Explanation of English Regional Differences," by G.C. Homans, "Economic Growth in England Before the Industrial Revolution: Some Methodological Issues," by R.M. Hartwell and "Size and Structure of the Household in England Over Three Centuries," by Peter Laslett. Homan contends, a narrowly economic explanation to see regional social differences in terms of technical and geographical differences and leads to generalizations for which the evidence is inadequate, though it maybe less so in the Middle Ages than in the sixteenth century. The vexed question of the extent of aggregate economic growth in pre-industrial England is brought into the open again in a challenging paper by Hartwell. Surveying the current position, he reminds that despite the accumulating knowledge, ambiguity and uncertainty still reign. He concludes with a plea for greater definition of the problems to be investigated, and for more concern with ways of making the results of inquiries comparable.

The article comments on a paper by economist E.H. Hunt related to the agricultural labor productivity in rural England from 1850 to 1914. Hunt has advanced the intriguing idea that well into the present century large areas of rural England continued to manifest many of the features typical of economically underdeveloped agrarian societies. In the paper, Hunt begins by suggesting that the appearance during the nineteenth century of a persisting pattern of inter-regional agricultural wage-rate differences within England did not lead to corresponding regional variations in unit farm labour costs. While wage rates in the south-eastern and East Anglian counties remained below those prevailing in the northerly districts, this is held to have conveyed no advantage to the conduct of agriculture in the cheap labour areas, because lower wages were merely the counterpart of lower output per worker there. Lacking comprehensive statistical measures of regional average labour productivity in agriculture to support this contention, Hunt found it necessary to fall back upon such qualitative indications as are supplied in the reports of various Royal Commissions dealing with nineteenth-century agrarian problems.

This article analyses, in relation to the West Indian colonies, the changes during Joseph Chamberlain's Colonial Secretaryship in Great Britain's Colonial Office attitudes and policy towards the supply and expenditure of capital from these three sources. The modernization of the sugar industry by amalgamation of estates and the introduction of new techniques was most successfully pursued between 1870 and 1895 in British Guiana and Trinidad. It was financed by private capital. No imperial grants or loans were available, for the policy of the British government after 1870 was to extend direct financial assistance to the West Indies only for exceptional purposes such as hurricane relief. The Colonial Office adopted a similar attitude to non-planting enterprise before 1895, namely that, in general, colonial governments should not financially assist private individuals or particular industries. Secretaries of State and officials showed little awareness of the need to overcome the reluctance of capitalists to invest in the West Indies outside the sugar industry; indeed they tended to regard most private concessionaires with suspicion. In these circumstances the main source of capital expenditure in the West Indian colonies between 1870 and 1895, apart from that undertaken by the sugar planters, was colonial government expenditure on public works, especially communications, largely financed by loans raised on the London capital market.

Abstract: Despite the considerable attention granted to the history of international business, we still have a limited knowledge of the historical impact of multinationals on host economies. This article presents the case of the giant Italian rayon firm Snia Viscosa which was acquired by its direct rivals, Courtaulds in the UK and the German firm Glanzstoff, in 1927. Italian deflation which underpinned the return of the country to the gold standard between 1925 and 1927 and the parlous financial conditions of Snia Viscosa proved incentives in what seemed to be a fire sale investment. This investment mitigated the credit crunch and allowed Snia Viscosa to have access to foreign rayon expertise. Evidence suggests that the regime and economic nationalism exerted some pressure on foreign interests and were instrumental in the abandonment of plans intended to reduce Italian rayon output dramatically. One contribution of this article is its use of business history to illustrate how recessions can reshape foreign direct investment flows and the tensions that may arise between domestic business interests and foreign stakeholders during recessions. In addition, the history of Snia Viscosa shows the importance of foreign interests and multinationals in the long‐term industrialization of Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the seminal work by W. A. Lewis, exports of primary products have been deemed the main or sole source of growth in tropical countries before the Great Depression. However, this conventional wisdom relies on very limited evidence. This article analyses the growth of exports with a constant market share analysis for 84 tropical polities. Exports grew a lot, but less than total trade, while relative prices of tropical products remained roughly constant. We thus tentatively infer that the decline in the tropical shares of world trade reflects an insufficient demand for tropical products. Asia dealt well with these headwinds throughout the whole period, while African polities blossomed after the First World War. The loser was (South) America, and most notably the Caribbean former slave colonies, especially before 1870. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social democracy and market liberalism provide different solutions to the same problem: how to provide for life-cycle dependency. Social democracy makes lateral transfers from producers to dependents by means of progressive taxation. Market liberalism uses financial markets to transfer financial entitlement over time. Social democracy came up against the upper limits of public expenditure in the 1970s. The 'market turn' from social democracy to market liberalism was enabled by liberalized credit in the 1980s. Much of this was absorbed into homeownership, which attracted majorities of households (and voters) in the developed world. Early movers did well, but eventually easy credit drove house prices beyond the reach of younger cohorts. Debt service diminished effective demand, which instigated financial instability. Both social democracy and market liberalism are currently in crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of periodical literature for 2021 is presented, with topics that include balance of power, funeral culture in early medieval Europe, and taxes and wealth redistribution in late antique.

A review of periodical literature for 2021 is presented, with topics that include economic inequality in preindustrial times, credit and investment between town and countryside, and immigrant economic organization.

A review of periodical literature for 2021 is presented, with topics that include private-order institution in global trade, forgery in late Georgian London, and patenting behaviour during Britain's industrial revolution.

What was the role of energy in shaping modern economies and fuelling the transition to sustained economic growth? In the historiography on the industrial revolution, the transition to fossil energy carriers plays a central role. Despite recent efforts to gather new empirical evidence, long‐term comparative studies on energy transitions and their economic impact before and during the first industrial revolution remain rare. As a contribution to this literature, this article presents new quantitative data on energy consumption from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in the Low Countries. To explore differences in the chronology and impact of energy transitions, we compare the total levels of energy consumption, the energy mix, and the prices of fuels between two cities in the northern and southern Low Countries: Leiden and Ghent. This analysis enables us to explore more clearly which factors played a key role in the interaction between energy, economic growth, and industrialisation. The transition towards a cheap‐energy economy in Holland was associated with economic growth, but not with mechanisation. On the other hand, the rapid mechanisation process in Ghent was associated not with a cheap‐energy economy (relative to that of Leiden), but more specifically with a cheap‐coal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early nineteenth‐century demographic trends on sugar estates in Jamaica, the most important British Caribbean colony, are examined through the 1817–32 public slave registers. We seek evidence regarding the background to the island's 1831–2 popular insurrection, the immediate cause of the London parliament's vote in 1833 to abolish colonial slavery. Some historians argue that the revolt occurred as 'political' effect from a sudden upsurge of metropolitan anti‐slavery activism in 1830–1. They believe the uprising broke out despite improvement in enslaved people's material welfare, favoured by many slaveholders to secure population increase after the closure of the British transatlantic slave trade in 1808. Alternative 'economic' assessments judge that increasing workloads had been aggravating popular unrest before the revolt. Commercial pressures, and the imminent likelihood of emancipation, allegedly outweighed welfare concerns. The excess of slave deaths over births widened between 1817 and 1832. However, the registers show that demographic deficits resulted mainly from the ageing of the last Africa‐born cohorts. Jamaica‐born enslaved people became self‐reproducing. There was no general pre‐1831 regime deterioration. Most slaveholders sought to maintain their Jamaican assets for the long term through pro‐natalist measures, and did not expect emancipation. The revolt's causes were thus more 'political' than 'economic'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a unique source from the Swedish royal demesnes to examine the work and relative wages of women in sixteenth‐century Sweden, an economic laggard in the early modern period. The source pertains to workers hired on yearly contracts, a type more representative of historical labour markets than day labour on large construction sites, and this allows us to observe directly the food consumed by workers. We speak to the debate on the 'little divergence' within Europe, as women's work and gender differentials in pay is a key indicator of women's relative autonomy and seen as a cause for the economic ascendency of the North Sea region during the period. We find small gender differentials among both unskilled and skilled workers, indicating that Sweden was a part of the 'golden age' for women. We argue that despite superficial equality, women's economic outlooks were restrained in many other ways – including their access to higher‐skilled work and jobs in the expanding parts of the economy – adding important nuance to the discussion about the relationship between women's social position and economic growth in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work provides data on human capital for the Guarani Jesuit missions during the eighteenth century. Based on the age heaping methodology, the results of a large sample (over 3600 observations) suggest that the knowledge of numerical skills in these missions was exceptional. A comparison with other regions and locations with different institutional frameworks, religious or otherwise, or led by other religious orders, confirms the exceptionality of the Guarani Jesuit missions. The model of these missions, based on productive self‐sufficiency and egalitarian and cohesive social organisation, as well as respect for the pre‐existing culture exemplified by their Guaranisation and adaptation to the Guarani world view and language, could explain their successful educational performance and the intergenerational transmission of human capital beyond the disappearance of the Jesuit missions after 1767. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Bulgaria the share of secondary production in GDP remained constantly low between c. 1870–1910. To explain the country's exceptionally weak growth, we use endogenous and unified growth theory. Gerschenkron and Palairet blame a self‐sufficiency‐oriented peasant economy for rising labour and raw material costs in industry, which destroyed the competitiveness of Bulgarian manufacturing and prevented industrialisation. We refute the existence of any long‐lasting cost increases in industry after 1878. Quite the opposite was true: the expansion of Bulgaria's secondary sector was restricted by detrimental changes on the demand side, for which peasants were not responsible. Recent research claims that, around 1910, Bulgarian textile production was significantly lower than in 1870. Our study brings to light new data and information that clearly disproves this view. Until around 1910, a booming modern manufacturing sector more than replaced the country's proto‐industries' textile outputs, which had plummeted dramatically during the early years of the newly founded Bulgarian state. However, as the rise of modern manufacturing in textile production coincided with the decline of the entire large sector of traditional manufacturing, secondary production as a whole stagnated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What effect did the settlement of European farmers have on the indigenous agricultural sector during the colonial period? On the one hand, European immigrants imported skills and capital but, on the other, they took control of local resources. By looking at the short‐term effect of Italian farming in colonial Libya, I shed new light on this question. Through regression analysis on a novel village dataset covering the entire country, I show that, in 1939, proximity to Italian farms was associated with significantly lower land productivity relative to distant locations. Lower yields can be explained by the adoption of land‐extensive cultivation techniques, implemented by indigenous farmers to counteract a labour drain operated by Italian farms through factor markets. The combined mitigating effect of monetary wages and land‐extensive farming only partially compensated for the fall in income linked to reduced land productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Committee on Industrial Organisation was established in the early 1960s to evaluate the level of preparedness of Irish industry for the imminent dismantling of the country's protectionist trade barriers. The Committee's sectoral reports list the 900 or so manufacturing firms that it surveyed and that together accounted for more than half of Irish manufacturing employment. From a range of archival sources, this article identifies the nationality of ownership of most of these firms, alongside their date of establishment and level of employment in 1960. Industrial grants data are used to strip out export-oriented businesses that began to arrive in the 1950s. This makes it possible to estimate the employment share and sectoral presence of tariff-jumping foreign firms. The latter is analysed through the lens of modern perspectives on foreign direct investment. The article also enhances our understanding of the interest-group politics of the trade liberalization process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Risorgimento (1800–61), southern Italy was less industrial than central‐northern Italy and initially agricultural provinces in the north saw rapid structural transformation. During the Renaissance (1400–1600), structural transformation in the south led to a near halving of the initial difference in agricultural employment share between the centre‐north and the south, but convergence came to a halt with the 'seventeenth‐century crisis'. These trends suggest that regional inequality was evolving rather than persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in England from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century, based on a novel database of distributions of taxable household wealth across 17 counties plus London. To account for high thresholds of fiscal exemption, a new method is introduced to reconstruct complete distributions from left‐censored observations. First, we analyse inequality at the county level, finding an impressive stability across time in the relative position of the English counties, perturbed only by the tendency of the South and South‐East to become relatively more inegalitarian. Then, we produce an aggregate distribution representative of England as a whole, and we detect an overall tendency for inequality to grow from medieval to early modern times due largely to North–South divergence in average household wealth. We discuss our results in the light of the recent literature on historical inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Edwardian era, the British Dominions adopted policies of imperial preference amid a period of rising imports from the United States and industrial continental Europe. Hitherto, there has been no econometric assessment of whether these policies diverted the Dominions' imports towards the Empire, as was intended. This article focuses on New Zealand's initial policy of imperial preference, codified in the Preferential and Reciprocal Trade Act of 1903. New Zealand's policy was unique insofar as it extended preference to only certain commodities and not others. Using propensity score matching, this study exploits the cross‐commodity variation in the extension of preference and finds that, on the whole, the Preferential and Reciprocal Trade Act did not divert New Zealand's imports towards the Empire. However, for those few commodities receiving very high absolute margins of preference (20 per cent ad valorem), a statistically significant effect of the preferential policy is found. Altogether, this case study of New Zealand reveals a contrast between the Edwardian system of imperial preference and the trade‐diverting system of imperial preference that resulted from the Ottawa Agreements of the interwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]