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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]

Oliver's Comment on my recent article challenges my argument that there were two sterling crises in the autumn of 1964. He argues that there was one only and that the Labour government mishandled it. Oliver has, however, reached these conclusions on the basis of a partial reading of the evidence and a failure to grasp how the changing international context imposed constraints on national economic sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the historical national accounts of Sweden are among the most detailed in the world, there is scope for improvement. This study revises previous historical estimates of Swedish GDP. Agricultural output is upgraded for the nineteenth century following recent research by Swedish agrarian historians on the underestimation of official statistics. Estimates of annual fluctuations before 1861 are significantly improved by using new sources on yield ratios of harvests. For manufacturing, home industries are added, in accordance with modern international guidelines (2008 SNA). The study concludes that early nineteenth-century Sweden was not as poor relative to other West European countries as previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth and change in eighteenth-century Britain, both the expansion of pre-industrial commercial society and the industrial revolution itself, have been explored using a variety of approaches. This article highlights a relatively ignored aspect of the problem, arguing that the state, politics, and political economic ideology played a central role. In particular, the early eighteenth-century political victory of a version of political economy associated with the Whig party, which centred on manufacturing and consumption, was a prerequisite for the economic developments later in the century. The article begins by describing a political economy of manufacturing and its rival, a political economy of re-exporting associated with the Tory party. It then explains how and why a political economy of manufacturing became dominant, examining both political elites and ordinary voters and petitioners. The growth of manufacturing and consumption must be understood, therefore, as political as much as economic events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the costs of transport regulation using the example of agricultural markets in the US. Using a large database of prices by state of agricultural commodities, we find that dispersion fell for many commodities until the First World War. We demonstrate that this reflected changes in transport costs which in turn in the long run depended on productivity growth in railroads. The year 1920 marked a change in this relationship, however, and between the First and Second World Wars we find considerable disintegration of agricultural markets, ultimately as a consequence of the 1920 Transportation Act. We argue that this benefited railroad companies in the 1920s and workers in the 1930s, and we put forward an estimate of the welfare losses for the consumers of railroad services (that is, agricultural producers and final consumers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre-emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata to engage in a wide variety of contractual transactions. However, this system had significant drawbacks in that the poorest serfs could not afford these services and no serf had recourse beyond his local estate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare of agricultural labourers has recently received renewed interest in both establishing living standards for a baseline group over the long term, and assessing the energy available for increased physical labour in the eighteenth century. Disagreement persists. This article examines a key aspect of agricultural labourers' families' welfare: nutrient consumption. We utilize datasets of the diets of agricultural labourers' households for 1787-96, 1835-46, 1863, 1893, and 1912, to analyse the availability of calories and 11 key nutrients. Self-provisioned foodstuffs are incorporated and adjustments are made for beer consumption. Deficiency is computed against household needs. The results corroborate the general levels of calorie availability identified in agricultural production accounts for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and assess these as sufficient for productive agricultural labour. However, no improvement is found in the nutritional aspect of household welfare between 1787-96 and 1835-46, thus endorsing pessimistic views of living standards for this group over this time period. Gains were evident in the next half-century, but these improvements were neither consistent nor dramatic and left a large minority of these households with nutrient deficiencies even in the twentieth century. [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]

Rhine transport was not an absolute condition for German industrialization. Railways proved to be efficient, and in the 1840-1870 period were essential for the industrialization of the Ruhr area. The key questions addressed in this article are: why did inland navigation not disappear from the Rhine region (as it did elsewhere), even recovering after the 1870s? And why did it have an unassailable competitive advantage from the 1890s onwards? Political developments leading to the liberalization of Rhine shipping and the canalization of the river created the opportunity to increase the scale of shipping. This gave it competitive advantages when it came to bulk transport. This article uses new data on freight rates in the Rhine delta to demonstrate the course of Rhine competitiveness. Furthermore, it identifies the institutional conditions, and the technological and organizational improvements, that were the basis of this growing competitiveness. The conclusion is that the element of German international trade that went by the Rhine correlated with the cost of Rhine shipping when compared to that of railway transport. As a consequence of the recovery of Rhine shipping, the port of Rotterdam became stronger than its Belgian neighbour, Antwerp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imposition of the world's first modern income tax in 1799 prompted a revival of interest in national accounting. This article examines the extent to which William Pitt the Younger, who proposed the new tax, modelled his estimates of national wealth on those produced a century earlier by the pioneers in this field, Sir William Petty, Charles Davenant, and Gregory King. In addition, the calculations of Benjamin Bell and Henry Beeke, two of Pitt's contemporaries, are analysed in detail to highlight the fragility of these contemporary estimates of national income. This analysis has important implications for economic historians who have used this material to try to establish the structure and growth of national output. National accountants during the long eighteenth century were not, for the most part, concerned with structural change. Rather, their descriptions of economic structure should be understood as reflecting a particular set of a priori claims about what they deemed to be the proper mode and distribution of taxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new meta-narrative of the industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy and that this itself caused industrialization. Contemporary inventions, although derived from scientific discoveries shared with mainland Europe, could only be profitable in the context of Britain's factor prices. Therefore, important inventions were only developed in Britain where they enabled access to a growth path that transcended trajectories associated with more labour-intensive production methods. The criticism presented here concerns perspective and methodology. The account of the high wage economy is misleading because it focuses on men and male wages, underestimates the relative caloric needs of women and children, and bases its view of living standards on an ahistorical and false household economy. A more accurate picture of the structure and functioning of working-class households provides an alternative explanation of inventive and innovative activity in terms of the availability of cheap and amenable female and child labour and thereby offers a broader interpretation of the industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the composition and geographies of individual wealth holding in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century. It draws on various forms of death duty records to determine the individual ownership of wealth including both personal property and real estate. By combining information on these different kinds of property, it is possible to explore how different strata of wealth holders accumulated specific forms of wealth at the time of their death. The article then examines how the composition of that wealth varied according to the wealth holder's location in the urban hierarchy and distance from London. It points out important geographical differences in both the scale and nature of wealth holding and raises questions about the implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly available data on Russian commerce, industry, finance, incorporations, labour, and investment allow a fresh approach to two historical puzzles: the dating of cyclical peaks and troughs in Russia during the six decades before the First World War and the evaluation of theories advanced to explain the causes of these cycles. A diffusion index and a composite index establish the dates and amplitudes of seven complete cycles from 1855 to 1909 and part of an eighth, in 1910-13, interrupted by the First World War. The influence of wars and the Revolution of 1905 on the Russian cycle is clear. A comparison of diffusion indices for Russia and Germany reveals that Russian cycles occasionally diverged from the European pattern in the absence of war and revolution, notably during the industrial boom of the 1890s. The new findings give qualified support to the contention of several Soviet economists in the 1920s that this divergence resulted, at least in part, from the monetary stimulus of exports, primarily of grain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kiryū silk weaving district, located 200 kilometres north of Tokyo, has been one of the most advanced silk weaving districts since the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). In the 1870s, it was a pioneer in the export of silk products from Japan and the leading producer of traditional Japanese kimono and obi (sash belts) for domestic markets. This study finds that the developmental process of the Kiryū district from 1895 to 1930 can be divided into at least two phases, that is, one of gradual growth based on an inter-firm division of labour using hand looms and one of dynamic development based on the factory system using power looms. Weaving manufacturers-cum-contractors pioneered gradual growth by sub-contracting with rural village out-weavers and with a number of specialized, supporting firms in Kiryū town, and grew faster than factory production systems. New joint-stock firms played the role of genuine entrepreneurs by introducing power looms, thereby realizing significant economies of scale. During this new phase, the weaving manufacturers-cum-contractors survived and also introduced new production systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a large number of autobiographies by working men who lived through the industrial revolution has demonstrated that there was an upsurge in child labour in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with children's work entrenched in traditional sectors as well as spreading in newly mechanized factories and workshops. I have interpreted this rise in terms of the appearance of a new equilibrium in the early industrial economy with more and younger children at work. The new equilibrium, in turn, was related to a number of co-incidental developments including: an increase in the relative productivity of children as a result of mechanization, new divisions of labour, and changes in the organization of work; the dynamics of competitive dependence linking labour market and families; high dependency ratios within families; stumbling male wages and pockets of poverty; family instability; and breadwinner frailty. The establishment of these links forges a new synchronization between revised views of the industrial revolution and a revisionist history of child labour. [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]

It has been long established that the demographic transition began in eighteenth-century France, yet there is no consensus on exactly why fertility declined. This analysis links fertility life histories to wealth at death data for four rural villages in France, 1750-1850. For the first time, the wealth-fertility relationship during the onset of the French fertility decline can be analysed. Where fertility is declining, wealth is a powerful predictor of smaller family size. This article argues that fertility decline in France was a result of changing levels of economic inequality, associated with the 1789 Revolution. In cross-section, the data support this hypothesis: where fertility is declining, economic inequality is lower than where fertility is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides time series data on the medieval market in freehold land, including the changing social composition of freeholders, level of market activity, size and complexity of landholdings, and shifts in the market value of land. These are subjects hitherto largely ignored due, in part, to the disparate nature of the evidence. It argues that feet of fines, despite archival limitations, if employed with care and an understanding of the underlying changes in the common law of real property, are capable of providing quantifiable evidence spanning hundreds of years and comparable across large areas of England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to disentangle the different forces that shaped Argentinian immigration policy from 1870 to 1930. A new index of immigration policy is presented, showing how immigration restrictions increased over time but, in contrast with the US, Argentina remained open to mass migration until the 1930s. The quantitative evidence presented here suggests that there were economic reasons to restrict immigration prior to the 1930s, namely rising inequality, the closing of the frontier, and the declining relative quality of immigrants. A political economy interpretation helps to understand the long-run evolution of immigration policy. Labour interests could not be translated into Parliament in a direct way. A large share of workers did not have the right to vote simply because they were foreigners. Inequality influenced immigration policy through social unrest since those negatively affected by massive immigration developed alternative actions: general strikes, labour unrest, and violence. Contrary to what economic theory would have predicted, anti-immigration legislation came from Argentinian capital and landowners who feared political and social unrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and why did the Portuguese become the shortest Europeans? In order to find the answer to this question, we trace the trend in Portuguese living standards from the 1720s until recent times. We find that during the early nineteenth century average height in Portugal did not differ significantly from average height in most other European countries, but that when, around 1850, European anthropometric values began to climb sharply, Portugal's did not. In a panel analysis of 12 countries, we find that delay in human-capital formation was the chief factor hindering any improvement in the biological standard of living in Portugal. [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.

This article draws on cases of public insult from the Edinburgh consistory court to explore constructions of credit and reputation during the eighteenth century. Scotland's unique legal context offers new insights into the honour of men and women, replacing the received view that female honour was almost entirely about sexual honour and complicating our understanding of male honour among the middling sort. In contrast to studies that view the credit of men and women as principally contradictory, this study instead identifies significant points of both overlap and divergence in male and female reputation and discusses honour as a family matter. Unlike in England, levels of defamation litigation in Scotland remained high through the eighteenth century, and both the social composition of defamation litigants and the types of insult they brought to court remained consistent. However, the forms and settings of disputes over honour changed, reflecting the interiorization of conflict as the eighteenth century progressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two distinctive regimes are distinguished in Spain over half a millennium. The first one (1270s-1590s) corresponds to a high land-labour ratio frontier economy, which is pastoral, trade-oriented, and led by towns. Wages and food consumption were relatively high. Sustained per capita growth occurred from the end of the Reconquest (1264) to the Black Death (1340s) and resumed from the 1390s only broken by late fifteenth-century turmoil. A second regime (1600s-1810s) corresponds to a more agricultural and densely populated low-wage economy which, although it grew at a pace similar to that of 1270-1600, remained at a lower level. Contrary to pre-industrial western Europe, Spain achieved its highest living standards in the 1340s, not by mid-fifteenth century. Although its death toll was lower, the plague had a more damaging impact on Spain and, far from releasing non-existent demographic pressure, destroyed the equilibrium between scarce population and abundant resources. Pre-1350 per capita income was reached by the late sixteenth century but only exceeded after 1820. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent financial turmoil highlights the incentive of highly leveraged financial institutions to take excessive risk, given the protection of limited liability. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many banks operated under liability rules which obligated shareholders to bear larger costs of bank insolvency in the form of contingent, or even unlimited, liability. This article examines the empirical relationship between the size of banks' contingent liability and their risk-taking behaviour using data on British banks from 1878 to 1912. We find that banks with more contingent liability appear to have taken less risk. We also find evidence that the risk-reducing effects of contingent liability were larger for banks with higher leverage, suggesting that contingent capital mitigated the moral hazard problem at banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North and Weingast's notion of 'credible commitment' arguably offers a reasonable understanding of the factors that allowed the development of a trusting relationship between the state and its potential creditors over the long term. Yet, they failed to recognize the difficulties that were encountered along the way. This article highlights some of those difficulties and shows that at times when credible commitment was in doubt, supporters of the financial revolution held the government to account through the published media and by direct action. This is important for two reasons. First, the contemporary debate regarding the financial revolution, as it is presented by some historians, may lead us to presume that there would have been little public outcry had the government reneged on its debt. Indeed, we might argue that hostility towards financiers had always made default popular with many segments of the population. Yet, clearly opinion was not quite so one-sided and the reaction against potential default was considerable. Second, the fact that the public creditors were willing to act to protect themselves shows that credible commitment was not just created from above by the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent development of the institutions of government; it was demanded from below by the people who invested in the financial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic service was a vital occupational sector in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-particularly for women. This article uses a new series of wage observations from across England, focusing on rural areas. Analysis of the dataset shows that wages paid to servants in rural England slightly increased over the period considered, but at uneven rates dependent on region and precise occupation of servant. The majority of servants, particularly maids, did not experience any significant increase in the wages they were paid. This article also shows a widening wage gap between male and female servants. When differences between regions were analysed, it was shown that the wages paid to servants did not match the model of the north becoming the high wage zone of England by the mid-nineteenth century, although rates of growth there were the highest. For servants the south generally remained an area of higher wages even in the mid-nineteenth century. Geography was probably not the key variable in determining wage levels. The type of household in which a servant was employed was more important than where it was located. The most important variables were the servants' gender, and their occupations in the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past one of the main challenges to households was that of coping with adversity. War, plague, famine, and flood were a constant threat, and could reduce what little improvements families had made in productivity. Economic growth therefore required a means of absorbing external adversities. To see how well late medieval households coped with adversity, this investigation focuses on the households of a small town and its surroundings in early modern Holland. Our findings reveal that several severe external shocks around 1500 had little effect on the general level or distribution of wealth, which suggests that certain forms of insurance may have protected the population. The results show that households increasingly invested in capital markets rather than employing such techniques as scattered holdings and hoarding. This fact indicates that such investment played a vital role in a household's risk aversion strategy. The change from unproductive to more productive risk-aversion strategies also provides some clues about progress with respect to insurance during Holland's financial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A body of nearly 2,000 English finds of individual coins minted c. 973-1100 is surveyed as evidence for the scale and form of the monetary economy. A long-term view indicates that this was a period of expansion in coin use, although growth in this area remained limited compared to the later middle ages, or even the eighth century. Within the eleventh century single-finds suggest more specific developments, including a decline in coin use after the Norman Conquest, and substantial short-term fluctuations related to various economic and monetary factors. Comparison with estimates of coin production suggests a general trend for more of mints' output to enter domestic circulation after c. 1030/40, though this need not solely reflect an increase in monetization. These chronological changes are compared with the pattern of circulation within England. Overall, the kingdom enjoyed a unified currency which did not see marked localization of coin circulation. Parts of northern England were less integrated with the south, but not so far as to suggest active exclusion of non-local coin. More striking was a general trend for both production and circulation to be concentrated in the east and the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents estimates of industrial production in post-Unification Italy's 69 provinces in the census years 1871, 1881, 1901, and 1911. Initially industry was largely artisanal, and located in the former political capitals; but even then the waterfalls of the subalpine north-west attracted what factory industry there was. Contrary to widespread opinion, in the aftermath of Unification the industrial and overall growth leaders were actually in the south, where selected provinces reaped the gains from the freer foreign trade, and infrastructure investment, that accompanied the loss of independence. Over the later nineteenth century industry concentrated into the 'industrial triangle'; but even there industrialization remained sharply local, and excluded the right bank of the upper Po. The early twentieth century, in turn, brought a measure of industrial diffusion-to the centre/north-east, where it was tied to the production of perishables on recently improved land-and concentration within the north-western triangle itself, into its major cities, as progress in energy transmission effectively moved the waterfalls into the plains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is on the contribution of an early eighteenth-century aristocratic marriage partnership to the family economy, and particularly to the non-co-resident, extended family. Through a study of the first duke and duchess of Chandos, the active involvement of a husband and wife in furthering the marriages of close kin is highlighted. By outlining the strategy and tactics adopted and discussing their motivation, the article challenges the view that kinship had seriously declined in importance by the early eighteenth century. The Brydgeses did more than broker marriages for close female relatives; they groomed the young women, helped build up and manage their portions using new and modern forms of making money such as investing in the stock market, and found them husbands. The marriages of these young women were a form of patronage. Motivation for this involvement included familial affection and responsibility but extended to increasing and consolidating the duke's socio-political influence through the patronage system and to limiting the potential drain on his estate. The duchess had a vested interest in this: it raised her status within family, connection, and society. The young women concerned, and their parents, were not always grateful for this patronage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

West Africans are on average shorter than Europeans today. Whether this was already the case at the end of the Atlantic slave trade is an important question for the history of nutrition and physical welfare. We present the first study of changing heights for people born mostly in what are now northern Ghana and Burkina Faso during the early nineteenth century. The dataset, not used before for anthropometry, documents men born between 1800 and 1849. Mostly purchased from slave owners, they were recruited into the Dutch army to serve in the Dutch East Indies. We find that height development was stagnant between 1800 and 1830 and deteriorated strongly during the 1840s. In international comparison and after taking selectivity issues into account, these Ghanaian and Burkinabe recruits were notably shorter than north-western Europeans but not shorter than southern Europeans during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Greece, a small peripheral European economy, the service sector and shipping in particular played a highly important role in nineteenth-century economic development. Despite its importance, however, the difficulty of calculating the 'invisible earnings' from the shipping industry's engagement in international activities has led to its underestimation in most analyses of the country's economic growth. This article presents the first estimation of Greek shipping income in the nineteenth century. In addition, it examines the shipping industry within the context of Greek development as a whole, highlighting its significant role in the fully marketized and integrated area of the country's economy in the context of a wider world economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of changing diet and resultant nutrition on living standards over the industrial revolution has been much debated, yet existing data have enabled only general trends to be identified. We use data from Eden's survey of parishes in 1795 and the Rural Queries of 1834 to go beyond average calorie intake, instead focusing on micronutrients and quality of diet. From this we discern regional differences in diet. In 1795 these differences were related to the availability of common land and the nature of women's work. Diet in both periods also maps onto stature. Using five datasets on height, we observe a positive impact of diet in 1795 on men's, women's, and boy's heights. By 1834 the impact is less evident; for men it remained, for women and boys it either no longer existed or became negative. This may indicate the superseding of nutritional factors by environmental ones, but it also hints at the emergence of a different relationship between height and nutrition for women and children compared with men. We speculate that this points to a shift in the intra-household allocation of resources, but challenge the notion that the emergence of male breadwinning automatically led to universal female disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the postwar period, the West German tobacco industry faced several challenges, not least competition from smuggled Virginia cigarettes. This reflected the Americanization of smoking tastes and threatened domestic tax revenue. The popular preference for 'American blend' cigarettes also hindered trade with Greece and Turkey, suppliers of Oriental tobacco to German manufacturers. The proposed solution was tax cuts to stimulate demand for domestically produced cigarettes. These proposals antagonized welfare groups, who saw tax cuts as a threat to the health of the population. The ensuing debates and settlement shed new light on the liberal smoking policies of postwar West Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new data on mill location in Manchester in 1850 to show that water-transport infrastructure played a key role in determining the intra-urban pattern of factory development. The shift from water to steam power introduced new patterns of industrial water use, rather than the relocation of factories away from waterways. Five new public canals and 23 private canal branches activated a major expansion of Manchester's waterfront, providing the majority of the manufacturing sites that enabled the town to become the world's foremost factory centre. Without effective municipal water supplies, canals were the best available water source for steam engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the first broadly representative study for any early twentieth-century economy of the extent to which quoted company ownership was already divorced from managerial control. In the 337 largest, independent, UK companies in the Investor's year book (those with £1 million or more quoted share capital in 1911), the generality of public shareholders were a narrower group than today, but directors personally owned only 3.4 per cent of the shares. This indicates a lower level of personal ownership (and board voting control) in the largest securities market of the early twentieth century than in any of the world's major securities markets toward the end of that century. Berle, Means, Gordon, and others subsequently quantified the US's later and (on this dimension) less advanced managerial 'revolution'. Their evidence was widely misinterpreted: some erroneously concluded that the US pioneered this aspect of 'modernity' and that the 'divorce' of ownership from control, globally, was a new and continuing trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to explain why the Paris Bourse was highly successful in the nineteenth century in spite of the supposedly inefficient monopoly of the official market, the Parquet. The literature argues that the official monopoly was sidelined by a free, innovative market known as the Coulisse, but it fails to explain how the Coulisse emerged despite the monopoly and how the two markets persisted alongside each other during the entire century. We provide a detailed history of how these two markets emerged and interacted. The Parquet increasingly developed as a high-end market, providing security, transparency, and effective settlement-delivery to unsophisticated investors trading on the spot market. The Coulisse provided liquidity, immediacy, and opacity to professional investors trading mostly forward. In line with recent theoretical developments, we argue that the juxtaposition of heterogeneous organizations had important virtues for market participants, since it allowed the exchanges to specialize in different investors and services and made the exchanges complementary to each other. We demonstrate our claim by looking at both the formal rules and the actual functioning of the Parquet, drawing on its archives which we have recently classified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the sources of competitive advantage in the interwar British radio industry. Specifically, it examines why sections of the industry that reaped substantial monopoly rents from the downstream value chain failed to dominate the industry. During the 1920s Marconi (which controlled the fundamental UK patents) had a key cost advantage, as had other members of the 'Big Six' electrical engineering firms which formed the BBC and were granted preferential royalties. Meanwhile the valve manufacturers' cartel was also able to extract high rents from set manufacturers. The vertical integration literature suggests that input monopolists have incentives to control downstream production. Yet-in contrast to the gramophone industry, which became concentrated into two huge companies following market saturation in the 1930s-radio retained a much more competitive structure. The Big Six failed to capitalize fully on their initial cost advantages owing to logistical weaknesses in supplying markets subject to rapid technical and design obsolescence. Subsequently, during the 1930s, marketing innovations are shown to have played a key role in allowing several independents to establish successful brands. This gave them sufficient scale to provide strong bargaining positions with input suppliers, negating most of their initial cost disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This article examines the relationship between human growth, final height, and the environment in early nineteenth-century England. While the reasons for stuntedness are multifactoral and involve lack of nourishment and in utero conditions, we should also give emphasis to respiratory, gastro-enteric, and bone disease along with the inadequate and sometimes harmful arrangements for convalescence, involving opiates and inadequate rest. Hard work and prevailing social attitudes slowed recovery and affected limb and organ development. While survival chances may have improved, and indeed were enhanced by measures such as targeted poor relief, quality of life for infants and children remained low and had an influence on their height as adults. The bodies of surviving working-class children showed the burden of hard times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simon Szreter's book Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860-1940 argues that social and economic class fails to explain the cross-sectional differences in marital fertility as reported in the 1911 census of England and Wales. Szreter's conclusion made the book immediately influential, and it remains so. This finding matters a great deal for debates about the causes of the European fertility decline of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For decades scholars have argued whether the main forces at work were ideational or social and economic. This note reports a simple graphical and statistical re-analysis of Szreter's own data. We show that social class does explain cross-sectional differences in English marital fertility in 1911. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study makes the first systematic attempt to trace the long-term development of Latin American numeracy, a phenomenon of great interest to economic historians in that it serves as an accurate gauge of human capital development. In order to approximate basic numeracy we use age-heaping techniques. We find that Latin America was on a path of convergence with western Europe during the early eighteenth century. During the early nineteenth century, not only did numeracy development stagnate in some Latin American countries but differences among some of them actually increased. While numeracy rates in Argentina, Uruguay, and to a lesser extent Brazil, along with Europe, underwent a significant increase in the late nineteenth century, they declined in Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. By performing a regression analysis, we find that, even when we control for investment in education, mass immigration contributed to human capital formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by noting that military revolutions and civil wars in early modern Europe provide an unduly narrow framework for understanding the transition from a domain to a tax state. Taking Anglo-Saxon England as a case study, it is suggested that political restrictions led to the establishment of direct and indirect taxation, thereby providing rulers with revenues which surpassed those from domain resources. The main section of the article uses sources from coinage and wills to poetry and letters in order to give a general idea of the chronological development of a medieval tax state. This analysis challenges the views of the new fiscal historians, who argue that a collapse in a medieval domain state acts as the precondition for the emergence of a tax state. Instead, this article suggests that new policies arose because of the need of Anglo-Saxon kings and their advisers to take account of the requirements of ecclesiastical authorities, as well as a heavy revenue imperative, in paying for resistance against the Vikings. The article ends with a discussion of the comparative applications of the contexts and catalysts which lead to the adoption of pioneering fiscal policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition to industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by a decline in irregular work attendance. The chronology of that decline is unclear due to a lack of quantitative evidence. This article examines detailed colliery records from a crucial period of industrial transition and shows that traditional patterns of attendance and work effort survived in one of the leading sectors of the industrial revolution well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The study shows how regional and local sources can throw new light upon problems for which national quantitative data are unavailable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of trust is a key component of economic activity and social ties can make business dealings work better. However, we do not know much about how economic actors created new social ties deliberately in order to pursue their objectives. This article analyses the way in which merchants and entrepreneurs used specific rituals to establish formal social ties, with the intent of protecting their business relationships. It focuses on relational instruments that until now had been neglected, particularly godparenthood and marriage witnessing. It shows that formalization, ritualization, and publicity of ties were used by entrepreneurs to establish trust with their business associates, for example when information was asymmetric or when institutions were perceived as inefficient in guaranteeing mutual good behaviour. The analysis covers a long period, from the late middle ages to today. It pays particular attention to the consequences of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth. Contrary to the received wisdom, it suggests that formal social ties such as godparenthood continued to play an important role in economic activity during and after the industrial revolution. New databases on early modern Italy and nineteenth-century France are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seminal work of J. B. Jefferys highlighted two unusual features of the Victorian equity market, namely high share denomination and uncalled capital. This article examines the extent to which publicly traded company stocks in the nineteenth century had these features. It also analyses the effect of these features on stock returns using monthly data for the London Stock Market over the period 1825-70. We find that stocks with unpaid capital earned a higher return, which is consistent with investors being rewarded for the risk of a call on their personal assets. We also find that stocks with a high share denomination earned a lower return, which is consistent with the view that this feature was conducive to superior corporate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article in this journal, Newton claimed that there were two sterling crises in the autumn of 1964 and that the government response to the second crisis followed a 'textbook reaction'. This comment challenges both suggestions and argues that there was one sterling crisis and that the government did not deal with the crisis adequately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses recently digitized samples of apprentices and masters in London and Bristol to quantify the practice of apprenticeship in the late seventeenth century. Apprenticeship appears much more fluid than is traditionally understood. Many apprentices did not complete their terms of indenture; late arrival and early departure from the master's household were widespread. Other apprentices appear to have been absent temporarily, returning to the master shortly before the end of their indenture. Regression analysis indicates that the patterns of presence and absence broadly reflect the resources and external opportunities available to apprentices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'land abundance' view of African history uses sparse population to explain economic institutions. This article uses colonial court records to show that the Egba of Nigeria fit this theory's predictions. Before 1914, the Egba had imprecisely defined land rights, relied on dependent and forced labour, and used labour to secure loans. These institutions responded to the changing availability of land, labour, and capital. An initial period of land scarcity altered land ownership. A market existed for the most valuable land. Slaves were used by those with better opportunities to acquire them, and credit expanded after the introduction of tree crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The usual story of the 'first era of globalization' at the end of the nineteenth century sees Denmark as something of an outlier: a country which, like the UK, resisted the globalization backlash in the wake of the inflow of cheap grain from the New World, but where agriculture, rather than going into decline, in fact flourished. Key to the success of Danish agriculture was an early diversification towards dairy production. This article challenges this simple story which sees Denmark as something of a liberal paragon. Denmark's success owed much to a prudent use of trade policy which favoured dairy production. Moreover, this favouritism continued even after a more general movement to free trade in the 1860s. Using micro-level data from individual dairies, we quantify the implied subsidy to dairy production from the tariffs, and demonstrate that in many cases this ensured the profitability of individual dairies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]