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Late Victorian Britain was very important in the development of British dominance in light consumer goods industries, such as fermented liquors and spirits; detergents and perfumery; bicycles and other carriages; paper, stationery, and bookbinding; and games of all kinds and sports goods. Firms developed technology-based innovations and marketing-based innovations, creating abnormal peaks of trademark registrations in certain industries. This article investigates those peaks and shows that factors usually pointed out as explaining British economic decline in heavy industries did not impact on the development of light consumer goods industries, and on the contrary encouraged their fast growth during this period. Trademark registrations are shown to provide new insights into the debate on British relative decline, when combined with other industry and firm-level data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article uses newspaper advertisements to chart the changes in speeds and fares of stage coaches, identifying the main periods of increasing speeds among London coaches as the 1760s-80s and 1810s-20s, separated by a period when speeds declined. It then measures productivity growth. Fares of London coaches in 1835-6 were about 27 per cent of what they would have been but for improvements in horses, vehicles, and roads from 1750, and the two main periods of productivity growth correspond to those of rising speeds. Speeds and productivity of regional coaches increased more smoothly. The rising productivity firmly identifies road transport as one of the modernizing sectors of the economy. New figures are put forward for the growing number of London and regional coaches, indicating rapid growth in passenger miles. While turnpike trusts had little impact before the 1750s, their increasing effectiveness, together with the use of steel springs and improved horses, was crucial to the rising productivity of the 1760s-80s, and even more so to that of the 1810s-20s. The cross roads were apparently poorer than London roads in the late eighteenth century, but thereafter the gap narrowed. [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]

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]

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]