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This paper examines the evolution of consumption practices in Venice in the long eighteenth century through the combined use of post‐mortem inventories and household budgets. Although Italy experienced a period of relative decline between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, our findings suggest that Venetian households enjoyed a rich and vibrant material culture that was fully comparable with those of the most advanced European urban economies. However, although new products, practices, and fashions were adopted by Venetian society, the architecture of consumption did not undergo sudden and extreme changes; rather, consumption was gradually refined, following the path that it had begun during the Renaissance. We therefore argue that the Venetian economy did not experience a consumer revolution but, instead, consumer evolution. Moreover, this study shows that sophisticated consumption practices were not exclusive to the more dynamic economies of the continent but were widespread even in those regions that were victims of the Little Divergence. We thus suggest that the relationship between consumption development and economic development was not necessarily causal and that the diffusion of new consumption practices throughout society was a necessary, but insufficient, prerequisite for economic take‐off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the origins of German banks' risk‐taking in the years preceding the 1931 crisis. The 1920s were marked by a large and prolonged increase in capital flows into Germany, chiefly from the United States and the United Kingdom. This coincided, at the individual bank level, with a rise in leverage and a fall in liquidity. We examine possible connections between the two phenomena. Our analysis is based on a combination of historiographical work and statistical modelling based on a newly hand‐collected bimonthly dataset on German reporting banks from 1925 to 1935. Bank by bank we examine the effects of foreign inflows on decisions related to leverage, lending, and liquidity. The Dawes Plan of 1924 and the relative absence of a too‐big‐to‐fail (TBTF) environment allow us to mitigate endogeneity concerns. We suggest that while capital inflows did not seem to impact banks' liquidity decisions, their impact on leverage was non‐negligeable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so‐called New World in 1492, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards settled in Central and South America. This paper assesses the skill selectivity of Spanish migrants who went to Hispanic America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries for the first time. The age‐heaping method is employed to estimate numeracy levels as a proxy for human capital. With a database of 33 929 individual observations, the findings show that Spaniards who left the country to settle in the Spanish territories were positively self‐selected. Additionally, differences are observed in the human capital of those who chose to settle in Mexico, who had a higher level of numeracy, than those who chose Peru. These differences might be due to the viceroyalty structure and educational institutions that encouraged the emigration of people with greater human capital to Mexico. Finally, when the level of numeracy of Spaniards in Hispanic America is compared with the numeracy of the total population, emigrants still had higher levels of human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper investigates the impact of the disruption of the Ottoman Empire on the integration of regional and colonial commodity markets in the Near East. Exploiting a novel dataset on commodity prices in Syria, Egypt, Turkey, France, and the United Kingdom covering the 1787–1939 period, it assesses the extent of price dispersion across markets before and after the end of the Ottoman Empire and investigates the causes behind the change in market integration. The results indicate that, while regional markets disintegrated during 1923–39, reflecting the anti‐global environment of the interwar era, colonial market linkages strengthened. The empirical findings also highlight that border effects, rather the rise of protection per se, were the main drivers behind the increase of regional price dispersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the history of contractual choice in coffee plantations of São Paulo, Brazil. It focuses on the consolidation of non‐captive labour markets in the early phases of the transition from slavery in the country, particularly in the 1840s–50s. Vis‐à‐vis the alternatives of fixed rents and fixed payments per time worked or piece rates, the paper examines the rationale for the adoption of sharecropping arrangements with European bonded labourers. New archival evidence suggests that sharecropping had no obvious productivity advantage over alternative labour–rental arrangements in this period, and that the adoption of sharecropping arrangements resulted from the positional advantage of its first proposers, who influenced later choices of contractual design. A credit‐labour tie‐up long outlived the original sharecropping arrangements, in turn allowing for the immigration of poor and credit‐constrained Europeans, paving the way to insert Brazil into the circuits of mass migration without promoting institutional reforms to attract non‐bonded immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing studies usually find that technical change was very important in constraining the economic growth of the Soviet Union. While these studies have been successful in quantifying the extent of technical change, they have been less successful in quantifying its nature. This paper moves a step closer to probing the essence of Soviet efficiency by splitting the aggregate technical change into its subcomponents – namely, capital and labour efficiency. I find that the Soviet Union registered strong labour efficiency gains during most of the postwar period, converging towards the labour efficiency level of the global frontier – the US. Labour efficiency growth did decrease over time, but labour efficiency was not a primary cause of Soviet growth retardation. That retardation was instead caused by a decline in capital efficiency. At a disaggregated level, I find that the decrease in capital efficiency was driven by structures. I hypothesize that labour shortages and an inadequate investment policy resulted in a large stock of unfinished, and hence idle, structures, distorting Soviet economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper qualitatively and quantitatively examines the development of the sovereign debt market in Prewar China under different governments. During the Beijing Era (1912–26), accompanied by the establishment of necessary financial institutions, the sovereign debt market emerged to meet fiscal needs. Surprisingly, the Nationalist government, in power from 1927, successfully cultivated a robust market characterized by its expanding size and liquidity. Setting itself apart from its predecessors, the government established credibility as a borrower in two key ways. Firstly, it demonstrated unwavering commitment to debt service by settling previous debts and offering well‐structured new ones, even during challenging times. Furthermore, the government escrowed fiscal revenue, pledged for debt repayments, to a semi‐independent committee of private bankers on behalf of debtholders, enhancing public confidence. Secondly, the government showcased its ability to secure tax revenues for debt repayments. However, starting from 1931/2, the debt market experienced a decline due to the government's compromised ability to pay resulting from external wars and shifting political priorities that weakened its commitment to debt repayments. Empirical evidence confirms the market's responsiveness to regime shifts and policy changes. This paper sheds light on how a nascent autocratic government can successfully borrow from the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the impact of collectivization on patricide in China during the Cultural Revolution. From 1955 to 1957, nearly 96 per cent of farmers were organized into communes. Consequently, fathers lost control over family wealth. We propose that this shift decreased fathers' bargaining power over their adult sons, which might increase family conflicts. On the basis of a novel dataset, we find that the speed of collectivization significantly increased patricide, and the result is robust by employing ruggedness to instrumenting for the speed of collectivization. Our study extends the literature on intra‐household bargaining from couples to intergenerational relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a new interpretation of Brazil's independence that relates the process of political emancipation to the Portuguese empire's fiscal crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We discuss the origins and impact of the fiscal crisis that followed the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal in 1807 and the transfer of the government to Rio de Janeiro. Quantitative evidence shows that expenditures with the palace and the army in Brazil were higher than those discussed in the previous literature. Moreover, the government was only able to finance itself by increasing loans via paper money issuances from the Bank of Brazil. Real wages show that the inflationary policy in the 1810s led to a rapid decline in living standards, fuelling dissatisfaction with the government. Our findings are consistent with views expressed in contemporary official correspondence and parliamentary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the classic question of legal origins: whether laws originating from common or civil law traditions are more effective in promoting governance rules with stronger shareholder and investor protection. But corporate governance cannot be easily disentangled from other sources that can influence firm outcomes. This paper disentangles these effects by assembling a new dataset of corporations in Egypt between 1887 and 1914. Egypt had an unusual system of incorporation. The main legal system was a close French transplant but entrepreneurs – Europeans and Egyptians alike – had the option of incorporating under any European law. This practice allowed extraordinary legal flexibility in choice of law, governance provisions, and board composition. The new findings show that companies incorporated under British law provided weaker shareholder protection than companies incorporated under French laws, especially in giving weaker voting rights to minority shareholders, preventing oversight over directors' borrowing powers, and limiting director rotation. These rules mattered for firm performance. Corporations with weaker investor protection had higher failure risk, were less profitable, and had lower firm value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to a growing literature on state capacity with reference to the early modern Asian empires. The historiography of these states, and especially the Mughal empire of South Asia, has moved away from an image of unrestrained despotism towards that of a constrained state, but has yet to explore fully what these constraints were and what the state did to overcome them. Using a new dataset on conflicts in Mughal South Asia, and an analytical model, the paper shows how forgiving rebel leaders was used as a strategic tool to secure stability, in a setting where high information costs made intermediaries indispensable to the state. The paper also offers some comparison between Asian empires on the role of intermediaries in shaping state constraint and fiscal policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I show inter alia that, by one barely known but official measure, imports of goods into the United Kingdom towards the end of the Second World War were more than twice the best‐known measure. The lower measure is that found in the historical British national accounts and in the Bank of England's A millennium of macroeconomic data. That invaluable compendium in fact has both these measures, and indeed another one also, but this is not clear, and there is no proper explanation of the differences between these series. The differences matter. What I will show to be the most obvious, though not the only legitimate, measure of wartime goods imports suggests that real imports were higher at the end of the war than in the 1930s, and higher as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP). By contrast the national accounts figures show an absolute real‐terms fall, and a larger still fall as a proportion of GDP. This really mattered in an economy already exceptional for its high imports. In this paper I clarify the nature of the different measures of imports and how they have resulted in a radically different understanding of the British war effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the contribution of enslaved workers to output and growth in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century is a crucial building block to better understand the contours of nineteenth‐century US economic history, and more generally, the connection between slavery and capitalism. Existing estimates only present a partial picture and are potentially problematic. In this paper, we use data on enslaved person valuations to calculate the contribution made by enslaved workers to regional and national gross national product (GNP) in 1839 and 1859 and to the growth in per capita output in the 20 years before the Civil War. We find that in the United States, enslaved workers were responsible for somewhere between 12.49 per cent and 18.0 per cent of the increase in output per capita between 1839 and 1859. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The London Assurance Company (LA), which incorporated during the bubble of 1720, experienced more dramatic price movements in its shares than the South Sea Company. This paper examines how incorporating during the bubble affected its long run performance. We show that the bubble in the Company's share price was partly attributable to changes in market structure during the share issuance process. As a result of the bubble, the Company's original subscribers, who had been curated for expertise and political connections, overwhelmingly exited during 1720 and were replaced by unsuccessful speculators. Analysis of LA shareholder behaviour up to 1737 suggests that this loss of shareholder expertise had detrimental consequences for the Company's performance. These results demonstrate how a bubble in the shares of a newly created company can lead to an exodus of value‐adding investors, damaging the company's long‐term prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By relying on the number of (surviving) boys per hundred girls observed in the population censuses as a cumulative measure of differential mortality during birth, infancy, and childhood, this paper shows that average Italian child sex ratios (aged 0–4) were abnormally high between 1861 and 1921. Our estimations indicate that unexplained excess female mortality resulted in around 2–3 per cent of 'missing girls' during this period. Likewise, by constructing a new dataset on child sex ratios at the provincial level during the same period, this article shows that child sex ratios tended to be higher in Southern Italy, a geographical cleavage that became stronger as time went by. Crucially, the results reported here cannot be explained by registration issues because (1) the analysis holds if we focus on the sex ratios of older children (aged 5–9) and (2) these patterns are also clearly visible using death registers. Unexplained excess female mortality early in life disappeared from the 1920s onwards, thus suggesting that either discriminatory practices gradually vanished and/or that they no longer translated into higher mortality rates due to enhanced living standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss the basis of the illegal slave trade between Africa and Cuba, measuring its volume and profit during the first half of the nineteenth century. Due to its illegal nature, the sources for exploring this trade were systematically destroyed, but we have been able to locate the accountancy of 17 expeditions that gives us a comprehensive understanding of the profits, margins, and risks. The basis to understanding this business was the murderous use of enslaved persons in the sugar mills, which forced a continuous repositioning through an illegal, although tolerated by the Spanish authorities, business. We demonstrate that from an economic point of view, the slave trade after illegalization was highly profitable, as the financial return of successful expeditions was near 100 per cent of the invested capital in less than a year. The risk of capture by the British authorities, associated with its illegal nature, was only high during the initial moments, and became steadily lower afterwards. In terms of volume, the trade of a half million enslaved persons illegally smuggled into Cuba produced what was probably the island's most important market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the relationship between land revenue systems and returns to agricultural labour in colonial India. I provide the first district‐level comparative estimates of agricultural labour returns relative to average income, on the basis of wage/income ratios for 1916. I then use those estimates to analyse the impact of the land revenue systems established by the British colonial authorities. Results show that districts with a larger proportion of non‐landlord land revenue systems presented higher relative wages, closer to the average income. This effect was mainly driven by differences in land concentration connected to the type of landownership introduced by land revenue systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Between the 1940s and 1970s, Spain used a variety of economic policies that hindered international trade. Because the mix of tariffs, quotas, administrative barriers, and exchange rate regimes varied greatly over time, the quantification of the effect of the various trade policies on international trade in this period is particularly elusive. In this paper, we use historical bilateral trade flows and a structural gravity model to quantify the evolution of Spain's border thickness, a summary measure of its barriers to international trade. We find that Spain's borders in the period 1948–75 were thicker than those of any other country in Western Europe, even after the liberalization of trade that started in 1959. These comparatively higher impediments to international trade implied substantial negative effects on consumer welfare. We estimate that accumulated welfare costs over the period 1948–75 exceed 20 per cent of a year's total consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of regional disparities within the present‐day borders of Turkey since 1913. Based on our estimates for 58 provinces, we find β‐convergence, an inverse U, and more recently, the beginnings of an N‐shaped pattern for value added per capita. We also find that regional disparities in Turkey exhibit a number of special features that do not easily fit the well‐studied pattern of the early industrializers. First, while per capita value added in other regions moved towards country averages, the differences between the East and the rest of the country persisted and even increased until recently. Second, spatial distribution of economic activity became more concentrated over time due to continued migration to the megacity of Istanbul. Third, we find that regional disparities in per capita value added in Turkey and other developing countries have been higher than those experienced by the early industrializers. These findings raise questions about the extent to which the regional disparities experiences of Turkey and other developing countries have been different than those of the early industrializers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The paper examines mortality patterns in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, from 1859 to 1940. It produces important new insights into Mediterranean urban historical demography and is the first comprehensive study of urban mortality in Greece, utilising the largest and one of the longest time series at the individual level yet calculated from civil registration and census data. Abridged life tables were constructed for the first time for a Greek urban settlement, enabling the calculation of age‐specific mortality rates and life expectancies. Hermoupolis experienced much higher mortality levels than the national average. The findings suggest that early childhood mortality started to decline rapidly from the late nineteenth century onwards, with declines in early adulthood and infancy following. The paper reinforces and confirms our limited knowledge about the timing of the mortality transition in Greece. It proposes that an urban penalty was clearly operating in the country even during the early twentieth century. Finally, this paper suggests that a combination of factors was responsible for the mortality decline in Hermoupolis, including wider access to water, which even when it was not clean enough to drink, nevertheless enabled improvements in personal hygiene among the residents of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian Empire had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Using a variety of official statistical sources and qualitative evidence, this paper documents uniquely high infant mortality among ethnic Russians. In contrast, among other ethnic groups of the empire, infant mortality rates did not exceed those of the European countries by much. The evidence suggests that the explanation for the Russian infant mortality pattern was ethnic‐specific infant care practices, such as the early introduction of solid food, which increased the incidence of lethal gastrointestinal diseases. Our findings highlight the importance of traditional infant feeding practices in mortality in pre‐industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Historical research on the race between education and technology has focused on the West but barely touched upon 'the rest'. A new occupational wage database for 50 African and Asian economies allows us to compare long‐run patterns in skill premiums across the colonial and post‐colonial eras (c. 1870–2010). Our data reveal three major patterns. First, skilled labour was considerably more expensive in colonial Africa and Asia than in pre‐industrial Europe. Second, skill premiums were distinctly higher in Africa than in Asia. Third, in both regions, skill premiums fell dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, ultimately converging to levels long observed in the West. Our paper takes a first step to explain both the origins of the Africa–Asia gap and the drivers of global skill premium convergence, paying special attention to the colonial context that shaped demand, supply, and labour market institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the causal relationships and interdependence between inflation and globalisation over centuries: in the sixteenth century, in the age of Spanish silver; then in the first age of modern globalisation from in the middle of the nineteenth century; and finally in the new globalisation that took off in the 1970s. In the latter cases, inflation was a response to a negative supply shock, and eventually generated policy decisions on economic opening. Both recent globalisations may be explained as technologically driven, and some of the most important productivity gains involved the cost of transport, but the fundamental innovations substantially pre‐dated the moment at which they were economically transformative. Scarcity dramatically changes relative prices, but not the overall price level. Initially inflation became a policy solution, an attractive way of meeting the challenges of scarcity, but then its increasing costs became apparent, and more, rather than less, global integration looked like a way of reducing costs and minimising social pressure. Policy choices were involved in generating the globalised world: not only the removal of impediments to commerce, but also a consensus around a stable and internationally applicable monetary framework, whether the gold standard in the late nineteenth century or a modern inflation targeting regime in the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses articles in the issue on topics including the role of British and German foreign banks in facilitating trade in the first globalization, the history of the currency board of Hong Kong, China, as well as the end of the Sterling Area.

When and why did Sterling Area countries stop holding sterling as the majority of their foreign exchange reserves? This paper takes a comparative approach to examine the relative importance of various determinants of adherence to sterling in its declining years as an international currency. Using an original cross‐national panel dataset covering the period 1965–79, we conduct survival analysis which systematically evaluates a comprehensive set of economic and political factors, at the country level as well as in international relations, about when and why countries chose to diversify their reserves away from sterling. Our results highlight the significance of international transactional factors in influencing adherence to sterling, while the effects of British geopolitical retrenchment, Commonwealth cultural ties, and distributional issues were more ambiguous and sensitive to local conditions. We also find that domestic political and historical factors, such as democracy and imperial legacy, played a role in sterling's international unravelling. Finally, we use our results to examine the experience of individual sterling countries and their decisions to diversify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of finance in the development of trade draws increasing attention from economists and economic historians. Yet empirical studies, especially from an historical perspective, continue to be scarce. This study analyses the role of German and British foreign banks in the internationalisation of trade during the first globalisation. It creates a novel data set on the bilateral trade of Germany and Great Britain with the rest of the world and the number and geographical distribution of German and British foreign banks between 1881 and 1913. Using an augmented gravity model of trade, the article shows that banks had a significant positive impact on exports and imports and that this effect was even more pronounced in case of German banks and trade. Moreover, the effect of German banks on trade is the highest in the years closer to bank entry, supporting the idea of German banks being initiators of trade. In contrast, the effect of British banks seems constant over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currency boards have had an enduring attraction as a solution to exchange rate and monetary credibility for small open economies, despite few successful examples. In this context, the case of Hong Kong stands out for its longevity; it survived the handover to China, the Asian financial crises in 1997, and the global crises in 2007–8 and 2020. The 1983 currency crisis and the decision to link the exchange rate to the US$ is usually treated as an outcome of local political uncertainty due to the Sino‐British negotiations which set the framework for how Hong Kong would fit with the rest of China after 1997. We present fresh archival evidence from Hong Kong and London to reveal the year‐long debates over Hong Kong's monetary system after a drop in the exchange rate in September 1982 and to demonstrate how most of the protagonists in Hong Kong and London came only reluctantly to accept the idea of re‐pegging the dollar once public expectations had been raised. We also show how the mixture of currency and banking instability affected the terms of the negotiations in 1982 and 1983 and set the framework for the one country, two currencies system that prevails today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the economics of innovation in livestock rearing during the first globalisation in Uruguay, the country with the most cattle per person in the world, both then and now. Using a new historical dataset of Uruguayan agriculture, the first one at a sub‐provincial level, I exploit regional differences in the adoption of cattle crossbreeding – the genetic improvement of local herds through hybridisation with foreign breeds. Contrary to traditional historiographical claims, I find that this innovation was not primarily explained by the location of enlightened elites (European or local) or by the scale of productive units (i.e. latifundia); rather, rural producers invested in crossbreeding wherever their local landscapes and previous productive choices encouraged it. While it affected biological processes that spanned several agricultural calendars, and thereby developed more slowly than innovations in crop farming, technical change in Uruguayan ranching was also environmentally sensitive, largely scale‐neutral, congruent with previous agricultural patterns, and hinged on a widespread response from producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century had settled across the globe, from North and South America to Australia to the southern tip of Africa. While theories of institutional persistence explain the 'reversal of fortunes' between settled and unsettled regions, few studies consider the large differences in early living standards between settler societies. This paper uses newly transcribed household‐level tax censuses from the Dutch and British Cape Colony and the United States shortly after independence to show comparative levels of income and wealth over four decades both between the two regions and within them. Cape farmers were, on average, more affluent than their American counterparts. While crop output and livestock were more unequally distributed at the Cape, ownership of enslaved people in America was more unequal. There was little indication of an imminent reversal of fortunes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship on the early modern consumer revolution postulates a dichotomy between the classic pioneering countries of England and the Netherlands and the remaining parts of Europe, which were more stagnant. We contribute to this literature by analysing probate inventories in a rural area in north‐western Germany. We show that a closer look at these spaces, which had an intermediate level of development and integration into global markets, reveals a more gradual development and a discernible market evolution. Sumptuary laws may have somewhat slowed down the change in material culture in German regions, but the presence of towns and the proximity to the Netherlands had noticeably positive effects on consumer behaviour. The proto‐industrial orientation of local economies proved to be particularly important, as it led to the granting of access to global markets, in addition to greater availability of cash. We observe a delayed diffusion of the new consumer culture in intermediate European regions and argue for a more gradual view of the European consumer revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article measures the relationship between marital rates and female economic independence in eighteenth‐century England and Wales through an assessment of their confinement in debtors' prisons. While an array of scholarship has emphasised the enduring agency of women who were able to continue managing enterprises after marriage, this has arguably too severely diminished the significance of coverture which eradicated the legal identity of wives. By insisting agency requires the ability to be held accountable not merely in terms of the capacity to act, this research emphasises that, until it was abolished, coverture continued to matter in a practical economic sense and not merely in legal theory. As marriage rates increased, the rate at which women were held accountable for their debts declined, suggesting a proportional limitation of their independence, functioning essentially as their husband's employee. Industrialisation had little impact upon female accountability, suggesting that demography rather than capitalism governed how women engaged with the market. Furthermore, this research highlights a striking shift in how women understood their own identity, increasingly adopting occupational rather than marital descriptions of themselves possibly owing to the increased marginality of singlewomen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Health improved in English cities in the last third of the nineteenth century, in tandem with substantial increases in public spending on water supplies and sanitation. However, previous efforts to measure the contribution of public expenditures to mortality improvements have been hampered by difficulties in quantifying public health investments and the lack of mortality data for specifically urban populations. We improve upon the existing evidence base by (1) creating measures of the stock of urban district sanitary capital, by type, on the basis of capital expenditure flows, rather than loan stocks; (2) using mortality and capital stock data that relate to the same administrative units (urban districts), and (3) studying the period 1880–1909 as well as the earlier period from 1845. The stock of sewerage capital was robustly related to improvements in all‐cause mortality after 1880. The size of this effect varied with the extent of public investment in water supplies, suggesting complementarity between the two assets. For the period 1845–84, investments in water were associated with declines in infant and child mortality but the effect was much smaller and less precisely estimated in later decades. Our results suggest that improvements in water and sewerage targeted different transmission pathways for faecal–oral diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the introduction of limited liability, a growing number of individuals in Britain from a widening social spectrum, including the less affluent, began to own stocks and shares. Drawing upon a unique and large dataset of 35 848 investors between 1870 and 1935, this study analyses joint holdings which have been a neglected aspect of investor behaviour. Our findings reveal that joint holdings were quite common and that about one in five UK investors were involved in a joint investment. Men were more likely to be joint holders than women for reasons related to institutions of social ownership such as trusts and executorships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of sentiment in the US economy from 1920 to 1934 using digitised articles from The Wall Street Journal. We derive a monthly sentiment index and use a 10‐variable vector error correction model to identify sentiment shocks that are orthogonal to fundamentals. We show the timing and strength of these shocks and their resultant effects on the economy using historical decompositions. Intermittent impacts of up to 15 per cent on industrial production, 10 per cent on the S&P 500 and bank loans, and 37 basis points for the credit risk spread suggest a large role for sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

We know the policy of quarantining plague victims and their families together within their households entailed considerable costs and controversy in early modern Europe. Less clear is the extent to which the authorities implemented the policy in the face of this. This paper presents a novel approach to the measurement of enforcement which relies on linking deceased individuals listed in parish registers into household groups and then measuring changes in within‐household mortality between parishes and epidemics. This provides a more complete assessment of the scale of implementation than would be possible using documentary sources alone. Measuring within‐household mortality allows us to understand patterns of quarantine enforcement in settlements across early modern Europe. Here the focus is restricted to three epidemics that occurred in Bristol – one of England's most populous and prosperous cities. The analysis reveals household quarantine was enforced in 1603–4 with unprecedented vigour. The effects of quarantine are particularly pronounced in the affluent parishes where elite residence was highest. Greater evidence for enforcement is explained by greater elite oversight and control, as well as their desire to protect their own households. The scale of the impact is shocking. Household quarantine could double within household mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Given the scanty and inadequate studies on Serbia's growth performance before the First World War, this paper presents production‐side GDP estimates for Serbia for six years between 1867 and 1910. It probes into the growth dynamics, assessing convergence with the more developed countries of north‐western Europe, as well as progress towards achieving modern economic growth. Although the economy showed some dynamism in terms of overall GDP, per capita GDP in pre‐First World War Serbia grew by only 0.28 per cent per annum, as much of the overall GDP growth was eroded by rapid population growth. Far from converging with north‐western Europe, Serbia continued to fall behind. Sluggish structural transformation and slow income per capita growth suggest that Serbia's transition to modern economic growth was in its infancy. Growth in the dominant agricultural sector was extensive, driven by expanding arable land and population growth. Land was affordable and easy to obtain; hence, peasants invested little in new technologies. Meanwhile, the modern industrial and service sectors were below a threshold that could sustain rapid growth. Nevertheless, this study also highlights the rapid expansion of a small modern sector and export diversification that reflected emergent 'green shoots' in 1905–10. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

European settler colonies are often thought to have been characterised by a continued expansion of the landed frontier, which impacted the distribution of wealth across their settler populations. Hampered by a lack of data, few studies have been able to study this in depth. How does settlement timing affect wealth and wealth accumulation when frontier expansion is not a smooth, continuous process? Was it the case that pioneers reaped greater economic benefits from locating their farms on superior land, or would they be disadvantaged compared with later arrivals owing to limited infrastructure or greater risk of conflict with indigenous populations? In this paper, we use a unique dataset that allows us to analyse the link between time of arrival and wealth accumulation in a colonial agrarian frontier society: the Graaff‐Reinet district in South Africa's Cape Colony between 1786 and 1850. We find that those who arrived early located their farms in the more climatologically suitable areas of the district and utilised their superior lands to accumulate wealth more quickly than latecomers. However, owing to institutional changes that favoured later British arrivals, we also show that the existence of an early‐arrival premium did not mean persistence in land ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assemble the Irish industrial data currently available for the years 1800–1921, the period during which the entire island was in a political union with Great Britain, and construct an annual index of Irish industrial output for 1800–1913. We also construct a new industrial price index. Irish industrial output grew by an average of 1.3 per cent per annum between 1800 and the outbreak of the First World War. Industrial growth was slightly slower than previously thought, especially during the two decades immediately preceding the Great Famine. While Ireland did not experience absolute deindustrialisation either before the Famine or afterwards, its industrial growth was disappointing when considered in a comparative perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its foundation as a private corporation in 1694, the Bank of England extended large amounts of credit to support the British private economy and to support an increasingly centralised British state. The Bank helped the British state reach a position of geopolitical and economic hegemony in the international economic order. In this paper, we deploy recalibrated financial data to analyse an evolving trajectory of connections between the British economy, the state, and the Bank of England. We show how these connections contributed to form an effective and efficient fiscal–naval state and promote the development of a system of financial intermediation for the economy. This symbiotic relationship became stronger after 1793. The evidence that we consider here shows that although the Bank was nominally a private institution and profits were paid to its shareholders, it was playing a public role well before Bagehot's doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]