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It appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large as that of Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution. The following review of the archeological and document evidence indicates that three events occurring in the first half of the first millennium BC trigger the emergence of a specialized and integrated classical economy after 500 BC: (i) growth in demand for silver as a medium of exchange in economies in the Near East; (ii) technical breakthroughs in hull construction and sailing rig in merchant shipping of the late Bronze Age; (iii) perfection of ferrous metallurgy into the European hinterland. This last event raised agricultural productivity to a level capable of supporting the occupational specialization needed to sustain a vigorous trading economy. To these initial causes may be added the diffusion of alphabetic writing. While it did not create opportunities for long-distance trade, the diffusion of writing supplied the means of responding on a scale large enough economically to matter.

In their new book, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (Cambridge, 2008), Olmstead and Rhode offer a radically new interpretation of American agricultural development from the late 18th to early 20th century. While earlier scholars have ascribed a central role to mechanization, Olmstead and Rhode argue that dramatic biological gains were made by an army of improving farmers responding to the challenges of insect pests, biological pathogens, new soils and movement into new climatic zones. These gains remained largely hidden because of the way most statistics have been presented and discussed. By teasing out these advances from the historical record, Olmstead and Rhode not only challenge interpretations about the nature of agricultural development in the United States but also open up a whole new research agenda that promises to revitalize the field of agricultural history here and elsewhere.

The large-scale structure of world economic history exhibits three steady states punctuated by two phase transitions. The first transition arrived with the domestication of plants and animals; the second with the invention of engines capable of converting thermal to mechanical energy for applications in mining, manufacturing, and transportation. Yet, although both transitions led to increases in the absolute size of the economy, they affected the standard of living differently. Whereas the Industrial Revolution resulted in sustained growth in real per capita income for more than two centuries, over nine millennia the Agricultural Revolution spent itself in population growth that left per capita income insignificantly higher, and possibly lower than the level prevailing under hunting and gathering. This pattern raises three fundamental questions in economic history: why did the first great technological transition produce secular stasis in living standards? Why has the second yielded both steady growth in population and rising living standards? What triggered the transition from the stationary agricultural state to the progressive industrial state?

Thomas Piketty’s capitalism in the twenty-first century is arguably the most significant book in empirical economics since Simon Kuznets’s Modern Economic Growth (1966) and, on a theoretical plane, since Keynes’s General Theory (1936). Like Kuznets’s masterpiece, this massive report on long-term trends in shares of income and wealth in the top decile and centile percent of their distribution quantifies a crucial and until now underreported dimension of aggregate economic performance. Like Keynes’s, it raises fundamental questions about economics conceived as a science uniquely concerned with the allocation of scarce resources regardless of how the resources are distributed among individuals. Piketty’s study focuses on that distribution, and in particular the share of the 10% of individuals who currently own 50–60% of private wealth in western societies and take home 35–50% of the national income (Piketty, 2014, pp. 247–249). The findings are new.

The Ricardian model that inspires the conventional account of pre-industrial economic history assumes that productive opportunities are fully exploited, and that economic growth and fluctuations reflect the interaction of technological improvement, diminishing returns to labour and capital, and homeostatic demographic responses to changes in per capita income. This article argues that the long swings in output and productivity were the consequence of endogenous variation in trading costs affecting the profitability of undertaking specialised investment in market production. Because its markets were often ‘thin’, the pre-industrial economy possessed latent reserves of productivity that were not fully exploited. A search-equilibrium model is developed to demonstrate how such an economy could experience swings in output and productivity in the absence of technological or other ‘fundamental’ changes. The argument is supported by evidence indicating that the level of output in the second century may have approached that of the early eighteenth century.‘For those who care for the overmastering pattern, the elements are evidently there for a heroically simplified version of English history before the nineteenth century in which long-term movements in prices, in income distribution, in investment, in real wages, and in migration are dominated by changes in the growth of population’. – H. J. Habakkuk (1958).‘We may say broadly that while the part which nature plays in production shows a tendency to diminishing return, the part which man plays shows a tendency to increasing return’. – Alfred Marshall.

Les céréales cultivées ont tiré certaines de leurs caractéristiques de la façon dont elles étaient récoltées lors de leur domestication - à la faucille pour le blé, à la faux pour l'avoine. Comme le choix de la faucille allait de pair avec celui de grains dont l'attache à la tige était plus fragile, les cultivateurs n'ont ensuite pu moissonner le blé qu'à la faucille. La faux, plus rapide, aurait provoqué trop de pertes et n'était donc utilisée que pour l'avoine. La coexistence de ces deux instruments est un exemple frappant de dépendance temporelle dans la mesure où les conditions initiales - ici le fait que la domestication du blé est antérieure de plusieurs millénaires à celle de l'avoine - ont eu des conséquences très durables sur le choix des techniques et sur l'organisation sociale en Europe du néolithique au XIXe siècle.

This article surveys cliometric research on the development of the French economy, with special emphasis on the fiscal and monetary history of the Revolution, the alleged retardation of the French economy in the nineteenth century, and the question of agricultural productivity in the early modern and industrial age.

Privileged Spaces: Agricultural Productivity and Urban Provisioning Zones in Pre-industrial Europe. G. Grantham. Urbanized regions constituted the privileged economic space of pre-industrial societies. It was here that the gains from the division of labour were most fully realized. This paper investigates the question whether agricultural productivity set an effective limit to the extent of such gains of constraining the size of pre-industrial cities. Simulations of the provisioning regions for cities of different sizes using contemporary input coefficients indicate that zones defined by direct marketing of produce by farmers could readily support cities up to 250,000. The binding constraint on cities below this size was demographic; above this size it was the cost of organizing a stable long-distance trade in foodstuffs. Productivity was highest within the zone of direct marketing. These findings suggest that pre-industrial agricultural productivity was determined more by commercial opportunity than autonomous technological change., Grantham George W., Sarget Marie-Noëlle. Espaces privilégiés : productivité agraire et zones d'approvisionnement des villes dans l'Europe préindustrielle. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 52ᵉ année, N. 3, 1997. pp. 695-725.

The French census of 1851 is one of the few nineteenth-century censuses that attempted to record the work of women and children carried out within households. This paper argues that the occupational designations in the nominative census lists are an accurate indicator of employment status. This paper analyzes a sample of 70,000 persons drawn from a set of rural communes in northern France. The data indicate that women’s labour force participation was strongly affected by marital status, the occupation of the husband and the presence of young children in the household. The data lend support to the hypothesis that the main driver of labour force participation was poverty.

Economic historians frequently employ estimates of the share of the active population engaged in agricultural work as a statistical indicator of economic progress. They presume that in the past increases in per caput income were always associated with the displacement of labour from food production to manufacturing and the provision of services. The logic of this assumption is that in a closed economy the only way labour can be reallocated from the production of foodstuffs to that of other commodities is through a rise in agricultural labour productivity. This connection is considered to be so strictly monotonic that students of early modern and early industrial Europe have inferred the productivity of agricultural labour from estimated trends in the share of the population occupied in farming.2 This leads to the striking discovery that agricultural labour productivity in northern Europe rose steadily between the seventeenth century and the early nineteenth, which is apparently difficult to reconcile with rising food prices and falling real wages, suggesting strongly diminishing returns to agricultural labour and growing stress on the food supply in the face of accelerating population growth in the later eighteenth century.3 The apparent displacement of labour from agriculture to industry between i6oo and i8oo is even more paradoxical, bearing in mind that mechanization of agricultural operations on a massive scale was delayed until after i840, and that the agricultural innovations of the early modern period tended to be labour using rather than labour saving.4 International comparative advantage provides a possible resolution of the paradox and may in part explain the British case after I780.' But the redeployment of the labour force in non-agricultural activity before i850

1. Introduction: town and country in Europe, 1300-1800 S. R. Epstein 2. Town and country in Sweden, 1450-1650 Robert Sandberg 3. Town and country in Holland, 1300-1550 Peter Hoppenbrouwers 4. Town and country in the Dutch Republic, 1550-1800 Marjolein 't Hart 5. Town and country in England, 1300-1570 James A. Galloway 6. Town and country in England, 1570-1750 Paul Glennie 7. Town and country in the Polish Commonwealth, 1350-1650 Andrzej Janeczek 8. Town and country in the Austrian and Czech Lands, 1450-1750 Markus Cerman and Herbert Knittler 9. Town and country in Germany, 1350-1600 Tom Scott 10. Town and country in Switzerland, 1450-1750 Martin Korner 11. Town and country in France, 1550-1750 Thomas Brennan 12. Town and country in Castile, 1400-1650 Pablo Sanchez Leon 13. Town and country in central and northern Italy, 1500-1750 Carlo Maria Belfanti 14. Town and country in the Kingdom of Naples, 1500-1750 Brigitte Marin.

Owing to the high cost of transporting farm produce before the railway age, the land-intensiveness of European mixed farming caused both production and consumption of foodstuffs and intermediate farm inputs in the steady state to be highly dispersed, a spatial configuration offering weak inducement to reorganize farm structure or to invest available labour and capital with a view to increasing output. In such conditions the most common cause of rising agricultural productivity was spatial concentration of demand, which raised the demand price of farm produce and farm inputs within the privileged space bounded by discontinuities in the cost of land transport. The ultimate cause of observed changes in agricultural productivity before the nineteenth century must therefore be sought outside the farming sector in the development of markets for tradable manufactures, tradable services, and the economies of scale in their provision that supported spatial concentration of population.

Between 1300 and 1500 the French agricultural economy was subjected to massive demographic, political, fiscal and monetary shocks. Despite these shocks, the seigniorial system of property rights governing the ownership and use of land remained largely unchanged. This paper describes the shocks and analyes the responses to them.

Cognitive obstacles to perception of novelty on the scientific frontier created obstacles to evaluating scientific work and recruiting scientific workers had to be overcome for the scientific enterprise to expand to the point where it could significantly affect factor productivity. The principal problems arise from the idiosyncracy of observations on the research frontier and the exceptional specificity of the human capital employed in identifying and validating scientific novelty. Resolution of these problems was by no means inevitable or predictable, as the scientific institutions which had emerged as the principal institutional support of ‘Open Science’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth century could not be efficiently scaled up to accommodate the requirements of a greatly expanded scientific enterprise. This paper recounts how in the second quarter of the nineteenth century the emergence of decentralized university-based research networks in Germany resolved the problem of scale, laying the foundations for the discoveries that powered the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Recent archaeological findings indicate that the Hellenistic and Roman economy was a specialized market economy that obtained levels of factor productivity that appear to be on a par with levels current on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This raises the question when that economy began to form. The present paper shows that the most likely dating for the ‘birth of the European economy was the middle third of the first millennium BC. It attributes the knitting of trans-European connections to advances in marine technology in the Middle Bronze Age, the discovery and exploitation of the Iberian silver deposits as specie for the Middle Eastern economies, the advent of iron, and the development of the wine trade between the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. The final factor was the spread of alphabetic writing. Each of these developments has an independent history, suggesting that early European integration was in many respects the product of a random concatenation of quite distinct causes, rather than the joint outcome of a general cause like population growth or changing property rights institutions.

This book's central message is summed up in the following sentence, which appears about midway through it: “The transformation of reproductive patterns was part of a massive shift in the nature of social relations because social change was experienced by thinking people who reflected on it and changed their behavior with regard to it” (p. 243). The statement epitomizes both the book's flaccid prose and its lack of intellectual rigor. According to its author, the birth of modernization in the west was marked by the establishment of a “western” demographic pattern based on the economic viability of the nuclear family and the unusual length of time between puberty and marriage. But since everything social is connected to everything else, explaining this demographic change—if indeed it happened, a question we cannot yet answer on the basis of current knowledge—seems to require explaining everything else as well. Some intimation of this sort seems to have tempted David Levine to take the reader on a ramble through the vast literature on the medieval economy and society that has accumulated since the rebirth of medieval studies in the 1930s. It is a temptation devoutly to be resisted.