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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]

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]

Recent research on exchange rate regime choice in developing countries has revealed that a range of factors, from weak fiscal institutions to high costs of borrowing in their own currencies, limits the range of options available to these countries. This article uses the case of Liberia to illustrate that new states in Africa during the gold standard era faced similar limitations, even in the absence of formal colonial rule. The rapid depreciation of the Liberian dollar in the nineteenth century led to the adoption of sterling as a medium of exchange and store of value. This initially made it easier for Liberia to service its sterling-denominated debt and for Liberians to purchase imports from Britain. However, as economic relations with the US deepened during the twentieth century, instability in the pound-dollar exchange rate created serious dislocations in the Liberian economy, ultimately leading to the official adoption of the US dollar in 1943. The story of Liberia illustrates the long-standing challenges of globalization for peripheral economies and suggests the need for a reassessment of the origins and impact of colonial monetary regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an input-output table for England and Wales for the year 1688 which is based on the extensive dataset compiled by Gregory King in the 1690s, together with other contemporary and modern material relating to the end of the seventeenth century. As well as showing the inter-relationships between the different parts of the economy, the data in the table can be used to compute national income and the shares of different sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and services in total value added. Further, the approach used to compile the table provides a way to subject King's data to as much independent assessment as is possible given alternative sources of information. Sensitivity analysis is used to assess the impact on national income and sector shares of alternative estimates of the grain harvest, metal manufacture, and service sector output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we develop new tools to survey the development of lending-of-last-resort operations in the mid-nineteenth century. One finding is that free lending and extensive liquidity support against good collateral developed gradually after 1847, and was already a fact of life before Bagehot published Lombard Street. Another is that the extension of the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort function went along with a reduction of its exposure to default risks, in contrast with accounts that have associated lending of last resort with moral hazard. Finally, we provide a new interpretation of the 'high rates' advocated by Bagehot. We suggest they were meant to prevent banks from free-riding on the safety offered by the central bank, and were aimed at forcing them to keep lending during crises so as to maintain a critical degree of liquidity in the money market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about various articles related to the economic history of Great Britain since 1850. Economic history, one is often told, is losing its attraction to students. As it becomes more mathematical, a branch perhaps of applied economics, so it loses its adherents, while social history gains those who seek empathy with people in the past, and who disdain quantification as an abstraction from historical reality. In the article "Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain," published in the journal "Past and Present," W.D. Rubinstein shows that traditional generalizations about the rise of manufacturing wealth in the nineteenth century do not survive painstaking counting of probate valuations. These demonstrate that the holders of large wealth at death, other than landowners, had amassed their fortunes predominantly in commerce, finance, and transport, rather than in cotton, engineering, or steel. Rubinstein is clearly right to emphasize the importance of the tertiary sector as a wealth-creator. Even the apparent simplicity of landed wealth based on broad acres does not survive David Cannadine's "The Landowner As Millionaire: The Finances of the Dukes of Devonshire," published in the journal "Agriculture History Review."

This article presents information about several articles related to the economic history of Great Britain from 1700 to 1850. J. Mokyr's article "Demand vs. Supply in the Industrial Revolution," published in the Journal of Economic History," raised fundamental issues. It reexamined the Gilboy thesis of the role of demand in industrialization, attempting to quantify such effects as the impact of food prices and the pull of exports, and concluding that even population growth, if treated as a totally exogenous factor, can have contributed less than 10 percent of the growth of output. Industrial Revolution may thus be restored as a wave of gadgets, provided that their quantity, including the supply of effort, is added to the conventional assessment of their improving quality. It was welcome that there were more articles on industrial history in 1977, and several tackled the kinds of issue demanded by Mokyr's work. Primary industry fared less well in terms of quality, and one potentially useful article, C.A. Whatley's "The Introduction of the Newcomen Engine to Ayrshire," published in the "Industrial Archaeology Review," rather disappointed as an account both of coalfield development and technological change.

Agriculture has played a central role in Africa's long‐term economic development. Previous research has argued that the low productivity of African economies has posed significant challenges to African efforts to produce an agricultural surplus or to develop commercial agriculture. Low agricultural productivity has also served as a key explanation for the transatlantic slave trade, on the basis that it was more profitable to export humans overseas than to grow and export produce. However, the field has suffered from a lack of comparable empirical evidence. This article contributes to this field by presenting quantitative data on historical land and labour productivity in Africa, from a case study of the agricultural productivity of Senegambia in the early nineteenth century. Focusing on five key crops, our results suggest that both land and labour productivity was lower in Senegambia than it was in all other parts of the world for which we have found comparable data. This article thus lends support to claims that stress ecological factors as one of the main determinants of Africa's historical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the impact of insecure property rights on the behaviour of owners of land before the Spanish Civil War. The theoretical literature on land reform argues that legal threats to the status quo determine agrarian organization, with owners selling land and moving to other asset classes or engaging in large‐scale substitution of sharecroppers and tenants with wage labourers. This study, which uses municipal data on tenant evictions in Catalonia in 1934–5, does not find that uncertainty over property rights in the 1930s meant that owners tried to substitute tenants with wage labourers, especially in the case of the controversial rabassa morta contracts on vineyards. Here it is argued that after 40 years of organizational adjustment to shocks related to phylloxera infestations, legal changes, urbanization, and changes in relative prices, by the 1930s the margin for adjustment was small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Clark's claims about the scale of English agricultural output from the 1200s to the 1860s flout historical and geographical reality. His income‐based estimates start with the daily real wages of adult males and assume that days worked per year were constant. Those advanced in British economic growth make no such assumption and instead are built up from the output side. They correlate better with population trends and are consistent with an economy slowly growing and becoming richer. Clark's denial that such growth occurred, his assertion that substantially more land must have been under arable cultivation, his belief that conditions of full employment invariably prevailed in the countryside at harvest time, his concern that the wage bill would have exceeded the value of output in British economic growth, his refusal to consider the possibility that the working year was of variable length, and his assertion that output per acre must have been equalized across arable and pasture are all shown to be figments of his ‘Malthus delusion’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A well‐known debate on the Renaissance economy was held in this journal in 1962–4 between Roberto S. Lopez and Harry Miskimin on one hand and Carlo M. Cipolla on the other. More than half a century later, this topic can be reconsidered in the light of much wider information on the late medieval/early modern Italian economy. Using data on population, urbanization, prices, wages, and GDP, this article outlines the macroeconomic trends in central and northern Italy in the age of the Renaissance (1350–1550). The frequent plagues during the early Renaissance—that is, between 1348 and 1450—decimated the population, probably causing more deaths than in other European countries. Hence resources per worker increased and labour productivity, incomes, and standards of living improved remarkably. A favourable economic environment thus seems to have been a pre‐condition for the Renaissance in culture, art, and politics and the spread of new kinds of consumer demand. From the middle of the fifteenth century, living standards gradually worsened and eventually reached the low levels that had prevailed prior to the Renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Estimates of English income in Broadberry et al.’s British economic growth, 1270–1870 are founded upon a fourfold growth of farm output, and output per farm worker, over this interval. This article shows, using four separate tests, that farm output growth must have been much more limited. The tests are, first, whether in 1300 there was enough work at harvest to employ all the labour force; second, whether the value of output per worker in agriculture was greater than the annual earnings of workers; third, whether the implied relative outputs per acre of arable versus pasture were reasonable; and fourth, whether a much shorter medieval work year was possible. An alternative index of farm output consistent with the labour supply, wages, and farm rents is derived. This shows much less growth during the period 1270–1800. Overall economic growth in England during these years must consequently have been far less than Broadberry et al. estimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the late 1920s, German coal mining saw an exceptional surge in labour productivity, led by the performance of the Ruhr coal mines. It is commonly accepted in the relevant literature that the economy-wide 'rationalization boom' explains that pattern. This study tests the related hypothesis that 'negative rationalization', in the form of a massive wave of mine closures over the period 1924-9, played a significant role in stimulating aggregate labour productivity in the Ruhr coal district. Using an original dataset for the totality of Ruhr coal mines, the causes of productivity change over the broader period 1913-38 are identified, using the decomposition method of Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan. Results suggest that labour productivity was driven largely by improvements at individual mines, attributable to the intensified mechanization of underground operations. In sharp contrast, turnover effects were marginal, overall, compared to the effects stemming from the producer dynamics among surviving mines. Thus, the practical productivity implications of mine closures during the rationalization boom are negligible and overrated in the literature. These findings indicate the necessity of testing the relative importance of 'negative rationalization' in the form of plant closures in other branches of the Weimar economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no consensus among specialists in agricultural contracts over whether the long-term inefficiencies that classical economists attributed to sharecropping actually exist. This article maintains that they do exist and are partly caused by the fact that sharecropping is hardly compatible with the tenant being compensated for improvements, viticulture being the main historical exception. In line with recent contributions to the sharecropping literature, the article contends that the widely held belief among scholars of agricultural contracts that sharecropping was very frequent in Europe's vineyards is incorrect. However, it also provides evidence of an issue whose importance has gone largely unnoticed: prior to the twentieth century, many of the European vineyards worked by sharecroppers had been created by the sharecroppers themselves, through contracts which entitled them to compensation. Those contracts abounded while viticulture depended basically on two inputs, land and labour. When viticulture became a heavy consumer of capital, they were rapidly abandoned, but not in Catalonia, with a paradoxical result: the Catalan rabassa morta contract, which for centuries had made it possible to eliminate both the long- and short-term inefficiencies of sharecropping, ended up becoming an obstacle to overcoming the short-term inefficiencies. The article discusses why that happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization across the Roman Empire created a demand for building materials on an unprecedented scale. Quarrying was largely conducted by municipalities, institutions, or landed aristocrats, who owned or inherited the valuable land from which stone was extracted. By using principles of economics as a guide, and with greater coordination between theory and written and archaeological sources, this article examines the decision-making processes involved in opening a quarry. Theories of economic rationality, resource economics, and statistical methods are helpful for understanding the prices for marble recorded in Diocletian's Edict, Roman jurists' writings about exploitation on private land, and newly discovered quarries in the region of Aphrodisias, Turkey. Here it is argued that the exchange of local building stone took place in a competitive market where landowners actively tried to improve their financial situation, but did so at considerable risk. At Aphrodisias, examples of failed attempts exist alongside long-running and successful enterprises. Entrepreneurs there did not extract a homogeneous set of resources, but chose to target marbles with inconsistent physical properties at increasing distances from the city in response to greater demand and rising prices. Roman jurists, primarily interested in protecting property value, made landowners calculate whether potential profits earned from sales outweighed the degradation of land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the eleventh century and mid-thirteenth century a Sterling Area evolved in the British Isles, with a common currency based upon the English silver penny and equivalents of it produced in Scotland and Ireland. This Sterling Area began to contract in the second half of the fourteenth century, when reductions in the bullion content of Scottish coins ended the equivalence of the English and Scottish currencies, and in the fifteenth century Ireland developed its own coinage. Estimates of the currency of the Sterling Area are provided, taking the chronology of its growth and contraction into account. Estimates of the sterling currency are not estimates of the currency of England, and they cannot be combined with data relating exclusively to England in economic modelling, without qualification. Per capita currency estimates and values of coin hoards and single coin finds are at a high level around 1400, falling in the second half of the fifteenth century, indicating that the European 'bullion famine' of the 1390s to c. 1415 had less effect on the currency than the second late medieval bullion crisis, from the 1430s to the 1460s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many public pension insurance schemes today use the pay-as-you-go financing mechanism. This mechanism is vulnerable to an ageing population, which puts pressure on the intergenerational contract implicit in these schemes and raises the question as to how they might be eroded. This is not a new problem, and to put it into historical perspective, this article studies the intergenerational contract that formed the core of the Prussian miners' invalidity insurance in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century (1861-1920). With the so-called Knappschaften, miners relied on what was probably the most comprehensive and advanced occupational pension system existing in Germany around the time when Bismarckian social insurance was established. Financed via the pay-as-you-go mechanism, the miners' pension funds faced stress from their ageing memberships early on, and this potentially undermined their ability to maintain intergenerationally fair pensions. In order to examine whether or not the intergenerational contract among German miners showed signs of erosion, we look at the Knappschaftens' profitability, as measured by actual and promised internal rates of return. This article shows that the intergenerational contract indeed weakened over time unless miners' funds were large and continued to grow, and that a pension reform in 1906 served to stabilize generosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article compares the real GDP per capita of the Cape Colony and Natal between 1861 and 1909 with that of Australia's two most developed colonies, Victoria and New South Wales. Estimates of European and non- European GDP per capita for both South African colonies are also provided. Together, this information allows for the first time an evaluation of the growth performance of these important parts of the South African economy in the colonial era. The article concludes that South African performance in this period was stronger than often assumed and that by the beginning of the twentieth century European South Africans, now more fully integrated into a British World economy, operated at a level of GDP per capita that matched and in some places may have exceeded that of Australians. Non- European South Africans, however, did not share in these same advances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents historical indices for the main dimensions of economic freedom and an aggregate index for the developed countries of today, specifically pre-1994 OECD members. Economic liberty expanded over the last century-and-a-half, reaching more than two-thirds of its possible maximum. However, its evolution has been far from linear. After a substantial improvement from the mid-nineteenth century, the First World War brought a major setback. The postwar recovery up to 1929 was followed by a dramatic decline in the 1930s. Significant progress took place during the 1950s but fell short of the pre- First World War peak. After a period of stagnation, steady expansion since the early 1980s has resulted in the highest levels of economic liberty of the last two centuries. Each of the main dimensions of economic freedom exhibited a distinctive trend and its contribution to the aggregate index varied over time. Overall, improved property rights provided the main contribution to the long-run advancement of economic liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British industrial revolution. The roots of this process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became integrated into international trade, and a successful printed calico industry concentrated in the city of Barcelona. Although the factory system was largely adopted by the cotton industry in the 1840s, the diffusion of the spinning jenny in Catalonia had occurred earlier, in the 1790s. In line with Allen, this article explores whether relative factor prices played a role in the widespread adoption of the spinning jenny in Catalonia. First, series of real wages in Barcelona are supplied for the period 1500-1808. Second, the prices of labour and capital are compared and the potential profitability of the adoption of the spinning jenny is analysed. Findings show that although Catalonia was not a high wage economy in the way that Britain was in the second half of the eighteenth century, evidence from the cotton spinning sector confirms the relevance of relative factor prices in the adoption of new technology. Within the booming cotton sector after the 1780s, high wages created strong incentives for the adoption of the labour-saving spinning jenny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor relief in the pre-industrial period is a much-investigated topic, but we still lack an idea of its quantitative importance and development, especially in a comparative perspective. This article estimates the magnitude of the various kinds of formalized relief for three present-day countries ( Italy, England, and the Netherlands) in the very long run (1400-1850). The results show that in this period a substantial share of GDP, up to 3 per cent, could be spent on formal relief, offering subsistence to up to 8-9 per cent of the population, with a gradual rise over time and the highest figures being reached in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. The three cases show a steep decline around 1800, a pattern found more generally in Europe. Next, these results are placed in a broader geographical perspective. This highlights the sharp differences within countries-which could be even larger than those between countries-and the high levels reached in the regions bordering the southern shores of the North Sea. In the last section, the results are used to discuss the possible causes underlying these long-run patterns and geographical differences, including urbanization, wealth, religion, and social-organizational features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on quantitative and descriptive data from Robert Campbell's manual for prospective apprentices, The London tradesman (1747), to demonstrate the responsiveness of apprenticeship premiums in mid-eighteenth-century London to market forces of supply and demand. It first shows that Campbell's data on mid-eighteenth-century journeymen wages, apprenticeship premiums, and masters' set-up costs in London are consistent with other sources. It then applies instrumental variable regressions to estimate the elasticity of apprenticeship premiums with respect to journeymen wages and set-up costs, using Campbell's education and ability requirements by trade to instrument for wages. We find an elasticity of one with respect to wages, and of 0.25 with respect to set-up costs, both statistically significant at a p-value less than 0.1%. We interpret these findings as supporting the thesis that apprenticeship played an important role in adapting the English workforce to the skill requirements of the industrial revolution in its early stages, insofar as the institution of apprenticeship in London was representative of other parts of England. Furthermore, by demonstrating the internal and external consistency of Campbell's observations, our findings should encourage their use as an unparalleled source of detailed, trade-specific wage data from the early years of the industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the distribution of exports from mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp at the individual and group level (grouped by merchant origin). Recently, scholars have argued that sixteenth-century Antwerp, and in its wake a series of other cities, hosted an open-access market as a result of an evolution towards open-access institutions. However, the direct effect of this institutional change on merchant enterprise is hard to measure. Relying on detailed tax records, preferences at the individual merchant level for particular destinations and commodities are documented, to evaluate whether exporters had equal chances in Antwerp's export market. A few exporters had large export shares next to a multitude of smaller merchants. The exports of these smaller merchants to distant destinations and their participation in the export of important products demonstrate a fairly level commercial playing field with regard to their larger-scale colleagues. Foreign traders had access to trade in Low Countries products, while local merchants were active in the export of major transit products. The activities of the latter group are particularly important; contrary to previous literature, Low Countries traders did not differ in their preference for home-grown products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly every conceivable aspect of the old poor law in England appears to have been studied. Yet some fundamental questions about parish-level provisioning remain hard to answer. These include the amount that people received from the parish, from all sources, each week; how the balance between types of payments shifted over the period, and (correspondingly) within the individual life-course; the range of services or supplements that such individuals received, from the parish, over the course of their lives; and how this spectrum of relief adjusted to the massive macro-level changes that we know occurred in the poor relief system between the 1760s and 1834. This study attempts to answer these questions in new depth, by employing a dataset that encompasses all payments to named individuals within the Essex parish of Terling between 1762 and 1834, totalling 143,801 payments to 1,508 recipients. Analysis of this dataset provides new insights into the size, scope, changes, and significance of poor relief in labouring families' lives in southern England in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early twentieth century constituted the heyday of the 'breadwinner-homemaker' household, characterized by a high degree of intra-household functional specialization between paid and domestic work according to age, gender, and marital status. This article examines the links between formal workforce participation and access to resources for individualized discretionary spending in British working-class households during the late 1930s, via an analysis of household leisure expenditures. Leisure spending is particularly salient to intra-household resource allocation, as it constitutes one of the most highly prioritized areas of individualized expenditure, especially for young, single people. Using a database compiled from surviving returns to the Ministry of Labour's national 1937/8 working-class expenditure survey, we examine leisure participation rates for over 600 households, using a detailed set of commercial leisure activities together with other relevant variables. We find that the employment status of family members other than the male breadwinner was a key factor influencing their access to commercial leisure. Our analysis thus supports the view that the breadwinner-homemaker household was characterized by strong power imbalances that concentrated resources-especially for individualized expenditures-in the hands of those family members who engaged in paid labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as the history of African economic historiography, economic development in Africa, and links between trade and finance.

External borrowing constituted an important part of sovereign finances in early modern Europe. As payments could not be enforced through third parties, sovereigns had to convince lenders of their commitment to service their loans. Although the literature has dealt with this problem extensively, little is known about what supported lending in early modern Europe. This article therefore asks whether and how commitment mechanisms identified in the sovereign borrowing literature made external borrowing safer in early modern Europe. It attempts to answer this question by analysing the loans that a small and peripheral state ( Denmark) issued in Europe's foremost international investment hub (eighteenth-century Holland). Primary sources demonstrate that Denmark inspired confidence in investors and serviced its loans well; a new dataset with securities prices reveals yields to maturity in accordance with this. Economic spillovers (domestic economic damage) and reputation (loss of access to external loans) are identified as the mechanisms that kept the Danish sovereigns committed to honouring their debts. The Danish case shows, however, that these commitment mechanisms could only be adopted after the growth and integration of northern Europe's economies. This suggests that commitment mechanisms are not as universally applicable as the literature often seems to claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did imitations of Raiffeisen's rural cooperative savings and loans associations work well in some European countries, but fail in others? This article considers the example of Raiffeisenism in Ireland and in the Netherlands. Raiffeisen banks arrived in both places at the same time, but had drastically different fates. In Ireland they were almost wiped out by the early 1920s, while in the Netherlands they proved to be a long-lasting institutional transplant. Raiffeisen banks were successful in the Netherlands because they operated in niche markets with few competitors, while rural financial markets in Ireland were unsegmented and populated by long-established incumbents, leaving little room for new players, whatever their institutional advantages. Dutch Raiffeisen banks were largely self-financing, closely integrated into the wider rural economy, and able to take advantage of economic and religious divisions in rural society. Their Irish counterparts were not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity to access information about the names, characteristics, and socio-economic status of individuals and the laws, local customs, and legal institutions of societies. Although researchers have noted various limitations of these records, the problem of selection bias has not been systematically studied. Since litigants would probably settle disputes in which one side is likely to be a clear winner, the cases that go to trial are more likely to be the difficult and uncertain ones that comprise a non-random subset of all disputes. This article presents a study of selection bias in Ottoman courts in the town of Kastamonu in northern Anatolia, from the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Disputes are categorized by type and the distribution of court participants is studied according to composition, gender, and socio-religious status. A regression analysis is run to determine the factors affecting the likelihood of cases being tried in court. The results indicate that the cases that ended up in court were selected systematically. If the selection bias is ignored, research based on Ottoman court records may be seriously flawed in its ability to yield general conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews several periodical articles published in 2012 including "Four Windows on Early Britain," by M. Carver, published in "Haskins Society Journal," "Poverty and its relief in late medieval England," by C. Dyer, published in "Past and Present," and "Death and the Maiden," by J.M. Bennett, published in the "Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies."

A bibliography on the subject of the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland is presented, which includes the books "The English Country House: Explained," by T. Yorke, "The Plantation of Ulster," by J. Bardon, and "English Country House Eccentrics," by D. Evans.

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British labour market experienced an influx of female clerical workers. Employers argued that female employment increased opportunities for men to advance; however, most male clerks regarded this expansion of the labour supply as a threat to their pay and status. This article examines the effects of female employment on male clerks using data from Williams Deacon's Bank covering a period 25 years prior to and 25 years subsequent to the initial employment of women. It is shown that, within position, women were substitutes for younger men, but not for senior men. In addition, the employment of women in routine positions allowed the bank to expand its branch network, creating new higher-level positions, which were almost always filled by men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1680 and 1730 the English and Welsh copper industry rose from the dead and by the mid-eighteenth century it had become Europe's leading copper producer. The revival followed the extension of sugar cultivation in England's colonies and the creation of a strong new demand for copper, which was reflected in rising exports and rising prices. Buoyant demand created a favourable market for the inventive activity needed to cut costs in the native industry, which encouraged investment in a systematic programme of research and development and culminated in important breakthroughs in smelting and mining technologies which transformed the non-ferrous metal industries. The story provides an insight into how the economic context shaped the way useful knowledge was produced and consumed. Colonial expansion not only provided England with additional resources overseas but also encouraged the reallocation of human and financial capital to make better use of slack resources at home. Empire and technical change intersected with positive consequences for economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How comfortable was the life of the average settler in the Dutch Cape Colony of the eighteenth century? The generally accepted view is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress being made in the 143 years of Dutch rule (1652-1795). This article shows that new evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records contradicts earlier historical accounts. These documents bear witness to a relatively affluent settler society, comparable to some of the most prosperous regions of eighteenth-century England and Holland. This detailed picture of the material wealth of the Colony should inspire a revision of the standard accounts. The causes and consequences of this prosperity are also considered briefly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews periodical literature on economic history that was published in 2011. Topics noted include the origins of medieval common rights systems, statistics from the record-keeping text "Little Domesday Book," and gender roles in medieval Europe. Also addressed are the history of British maritime trade, the payment of compensation to British slave owners following abolition, and the history of the Scottish banking system. In addition, the history of property rights, cultural aspects of feminism, and post-World War II British politics are discussed.

A bibliography is provided on the subject of the economic history and social history of the British Isles, including the books "Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O’Malley 1924–1957," N. Allen, "The Corsini Letters," edited by P. Beale, A. Almond and M. Scott-Archer and "William Robert Broughton’s voyage to the North Pacific, 1795–1798," edited by A. David.

Peasant producers are now recognized as having played an important part in the late medieval economy: this can also be said of peasant producers in eastern England before the Conquest. In the wake of the Viking invasions Scandinavian settlers from the second half of the ninth century entered a region that was already commercially active. Independent farmers raised sheep, possibly a newly introduced breed, on the Lincolnshire Wolds and marketed their wool. A network of Anglo-Scandinavian shippers and traders, members of a merchant elite, controlled important places on river routes. That Lincolnshire was an area of light manorialization and many sokemen had an invigorating effect on its economy. Peasant producers had comparative freedom and by controlling markets and extracting cash from the inhabitants of their sokes Anglo-Norman lords profited from an economy that had been invigorated by Scandinavian enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies concluded that a private-order institution based on a multilateral reputation mechanism was particularly important in governing agency relations among the Maghribi traders who operated in the Muslim Mediterranean. The legal system and a bilateral reputation mechanism were particularly important among the Genoese traders. Initial cultural, social, and political factors led to this institutional distinction, while the incorporation of culture in the resulting institutions influenced subsequent institutional developments. In particular, the particularities of the late medieval European institutions contributed to the rise of the modern-impersonal-markets in Europe. The analysis also substantiates the contention that private-order institutions can support sophisticated exchange and market-promoting policies should take this into account, particularly in countries lacking an effective court system. An article by Edwards and Ogilvie challenges this analysis. It alleges that the Maghribis, like European traders, relied on court enforcement and a bilateral reputation mechanism in which a narrow social circle responded to opportunism. This article shows that Edwards and Ogilvie's analysis and conclusions are wrong. It refutes each of their empirical claims and presents additional pieces of evidence supporting the institutional distinction conjecture. The discussion is structured around the methodological challenge associated with comparative and historical institutional analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New evidence from a series of 11 Bristol customs accounts indicates that Irish consumption patterns underwent significant changes over the course of the sixteenth century. This article considers the use of the Bristol 'particular' accounts and port books as a source for Irish material culture and consumption studies and uses the customs data as a statistical framework on which to establish how, why, and to what extent patterns of consumption changed in Ireland. It considers who was consuming the increasing range of commodities that were imported into Ireland from Bristol towards the end of the century, and what changing consumption patterns may reveal about the nature of Ireland's economy, society, and culture during this critical period in Irish history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern cliometric studies use dummy variables to measure the effects of institutions. The dummy variable approach can be misleading, as illustrated by recent research on the impact of colonial rule on borrowing terms. We show how trying to measure a 'colonial effect' without an analysis of the financial consequences of political subjection can be misleading. The main effect of the British Empire was to remove the default risk. Establishing how this was done, and with what effects, should take us closer to a proper understanding of the effect of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to answer three basic questions about the nineteenth-century cotton textile industry in Bengal that still remain unresolved in the literature; namely, when did the industry begin to decay, what was the extent of its decay during the early nineteenth century, and what were the factors that led to this? In the absence of data on production, this article seeks to settle the debate on the basis of the industry's market performance and its consumption of raw materials. It contests the prevailing hypothesis that the industry's perpetual decline started in the late eighteenth or the early nineteenth century. Instead, it is argued that the decline started around the mid-1820s. The pace of its decline was, however, slow though steady at the beginning, but reached crisis point by 1860, when around 563,000 workers lost their jobs. Regarding the extent of its decay, this article concludes that the industry was diminished by about 28 per cent by the mid-1800s. However, it survived in the high-end and low-end domestic markets. Evidence is also gathered in favour of the hypothesis that, although British discriminatory policies undoubtedly depressed the industry's export outlet, its decay is better explained by technological innovations in Great Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article consists of a series of literature reviews summarizing research on the economic history of Great Britain during the year 2007. Common themes addressed in these essays include home economics, economic factors in the legal system and government, and the history of economic thought. The periodization of these pieces runs from 400-1100, 1100-1500, 1500-1700, 1700-1850, 1850-1945, and 1945-2007. The relationships between British economic history and developments in fields such as historical archaeology, the history of sport, and social history are considered.

This article outlines the attempts of British central government to react to the perceived inadequacy of official economic statistics. A huge amount of work went into this project, the main aim of which was to speed up the production of statistics so that the economy could be analysed in more detail, and thus better managed. If this was to work, more data was required on the labour market, on productivity, on production, and on the interlinkages between those indicators. British official statistics clearly were more comprehensive and more detailed at the end of this period than they had been at the start. Even so, the effort was usually thought to have been a failure by the early 1970s. More detail took time to produce; it was difficult to recruit the necessary staff; successive administrative reorganizations also absorbed energies. The devolved informality of British government hampered the emergence of an overall picture. Businesses and trade unions resisted attempts to collect more data, especially when it showed them in an unflattering light. Above all, the elite, specialist, and technical nature of the reform process meant that very little political and popular pressure built up to force through further changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines a case involving the town of Angouleme, France, in 1769, in which the prominent bankers of the town were accused of charging usurious rates of interest, showing the significance of the outcome of the case for writing economic history. Analysis of the work titled `Memoire sur les prets d'argent' by Turgot, Intendant of the Limousin, at the time; Importance of this text to economic theory; Insight into the case involving the commercial crisis as taken from the text.

The article presents a review of literature on economic history published in 1992 categorized into periods. The time-period includes the medieval era, from 1500 to 1700, from 1700 to 1850, and since 1850. The importance of location for patterns of continuity in the use of the land is illustrated by C. Fenton-Thomas, who has made pollen analyses from 13 sites in County Durham. These suggest continuous occupation through the first millennium A.D. in the lowlands of the Tees valley, but a less stable pattern elsewhere in the county. Within the discipline of economic history, agrarian studies have produced an especially fruitful crop. Perhaps most notable is M. Overton and B.M.S. Campbell's important study of Norfolk livestock farming. The authors succeed in dovetailing manorial and probate inventory sources to identify a doubling of stocking densities between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, implying significant productivity gains in the pastoral sector. Sex, or rather gender, is both widening its scope and making progress towards integration into mainstream economic and social history. In the early eighteenth century, real men had sex with both women and adolescent males. A flexible, but controversial use of E.P. Thompson's "moral economy" model is proposed by J. Bohstedt to explain the variety of motivations and actions of eighteenth-century food rioters, and which might also incorporate J. Barber's anti-tithe protesters.

This article presents information on the practice of cost accounting during industrial revolution. It is informed that cost accounting provides data necessary to measure the true cost of products to aid in the determination of selling prices. Costing is also integral, both in the past and at the present time, to evaluating the efficiency of the productive process and of decision making. The current understanding of cost management during the industrial revolution is the result of a cooperative effort between economic and accounting historians. The bulk of research into the business history of the period is contained in a substantial number of studies of individual firms and entrepreneurs, typically by economic historians who have invested considerable time, often a whole career, in the effort. The restricted availability of archival resources has limited research into accounting, and the lack of easy access to accounting documents may also have diminished insights into the existence and complexity of cost accounting systems. Traditional accounting historians appear to have reached their conclusions on assumptions drawn from the instruction manuals of the period. As more financial records come under scrutiny, interpretations are being reconsidered.