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Analysis of the link between the Soviet occupation of East Germany and internal resistance within the German Democratic Republic reveals that ongoing payment of reparations by East Germans out of local production—via the Soviet’s ownership of prominent local companies—affected both the incidence and the intensity of unrest at the precinct level during the uprising of June 17, 1953. This result is robust when controlling for variation in the presence of Soviet military bases and deaths in Soviet nkvd Special Camps, as well as a host of regional factors potentially correlated with differences in unrest.

The tools of econometric analysis and inferential statistics reveal that senior Nazi-era judges in pre-war Germany exhibited statistically significant levels of discretion in their sentencing of individuals convicted of high treason or treason. In fact, some of these judges, though appointed to the People’s Court to serve the Nazi state, were inclined to show relative leniency, within certain political limits, when taking into account the characteristics, backgrounds, affiliations, actions, and experiences of those whom they convicted. A modicum of judicial autonomy can co-exist with dictatorship so long as it enhances the efficiency of the courts and does not impugn the regime.

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

This article uses the court records of a sample of individuals, aged between 15 and 62, tried for high treason in Nazi Germany to analyze a rare, real-world prisoner's-dilemma-like scenario that resisters faced once taken into custody: keep quiet and protect their collaborators or turn informant in the hope of obtaining leniency? We find that, although self-interest and defection to the authorities was the norm for most, significant rates of cooperation remained. We also find evidence that the size of the stake, age, education, beliefs, affiliations, and sense of community could play roles in facilitating cooperative behavior.

This article explores whether deregulation of the Australian retail banking sector in the 1980s delivered the enhanced consumer choice that had been promised. Using new data on banking products and their usage, it analyses consumers' ability to select optimal ‘frontier’ products. It concludes that following deregulation of retail banking, product offerings underwent such tumultuous change that the scope for effective consumer choice was severely constrained. While there were improvements towards the end of the period, progress was not assisted by the banks' strategy of proliferating and re-bundling products. Consequently, the anticipated improvements to consumer choice were slow to arrive.

In this chapter, our analysis of serious internal resistance to Hitler’s regime begins with an examination of the overall structure and composition of that resistance from the inception of Nazi rule in January 1933 through to the collapse of the German legal system in early 1945. The chapter seeks to answer two fundamental questions in particular, one temporal and one geographic: namely, how did the levels of serious resistance change across time and what regions were most active in this resistance? Along the way, a number of secondary issues are also considered: inter alia, can a distinct periodisation of resistance be identified, how did the different phases of the war impact resistance activities, did the intensity of such activities in any location merely reflect its population size, and is it more appropriate to talk of the commonality or distinctiveness of regional resistance experiences? The answers to such questions gleaned from quantitative analyses of the available data on treason, and high treason shed new light on, and challenge aspects of, our understanding of the path of serious resistance within Nazi Germany. The chapter offers a new periodisation of serious resistance in Nazi Germany.

Analysis of the sixty-nine juveniles tried for high treason before the People's Court in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, based on the available court records, finds that juvenile resistance in Nazi Germany possessed a distinct form and character; it was a phenomenon rather than an exceptional act. Juvenile resisters charged with high treason were typically working-class males of German ethnicity, motivated primarily by left-wing and religious beliefs, acting in small groups free of significant adult supervision and direction. Examination of the verdicts and sentencing of these juvenile resisters sheds light on how the Nazi justice system reacted to such serious internal resistance from its young.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the significance of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and all that it purported to stand for has been largely cast aside. Other than as a cautionary tale, the GDR has been widely seen as offering little to contemporary political discourse. By contrast, in recent years, its experience, especially in its early formative period, has attracted a lot of attention from historians. In part this burst of activity can be attributed to the opening of closed archives in eastern Europe, but it is also related to the desire to understand better how a flawed system could maintain such seeming stability for so long, and then, how all that could collapse so suddenly and ignobly in 1989. Was its demise inevitable, rooted, as it were, in the DNA of the system, or were there alternative paths that could have been taken? Much of the recent research is founded on the premise that insights and answers to such questions can be uncovered by going back to the origins of the system. This article is written in the same vein. Its aim is to shed light on how aspects of the East German workplace evolved in the period between the beginnings of Soviet occupation and the establishment of a Soviet-style planned economy by 1949–50.

Between 1870 and the 1950s, the volume and proportion of British exports to the Empire and Commonwealth grew steadily. Many have attributed this trend to non-market advantages allegedly rooted in imperial rule and the inherent Britishness of these markets. Quantitative methods show, however, that in most periods, other considerations, most notably the economic growth of the importing markets, were of much greater importance in explaining the pattern of British exports.

Britain of the nineteenth century was a net recipient of migrant remittances. Surprisingly little, however, is known about the flow of such funds to the UK. This article addresses this hiatus in several ways. First, it provides an account of the main mechanisms by which remittances were transferred in this period. Second, it presents new estimates of the volume of remittances flowing to Britain between 1875 and 1913, and, in doing so, offers a comparison of remittance patterns between different Anglophone societies. Third, it assesses the significance of remittances for their recipients in the UK. The article ends by considering the implications of all of the above for the way in which historians are currently trying to formulate the concept of a ‘British world’.

Transnational expansion and the establishment of settlements in other parts of the world, invariably at the expense of the Indigenous Peoples, have been both regular and defining features of global...

The belief that Britain's empire markets were soft is well entrenched in the literature. It is, however, a belief that has been largely untested. Indeed, the literature does not even offer an explicit definition of softness. This article attempts to fill this gap by discussing the meaning of the term and then posing the question whether between 1870 and 1914 Britain's fastest growing markets—Australasia and Canada—can in fact reasonably be labelled soft, as has often been assumed. The article concludes that the demand for British imports in these markets was driven more by considerations of income and price than by colonial sentiment or preference.

Poor patenting performance is often taken as a sign of low inventiveness. This article explores this belief by looking at the case of 19th-century Victoria, where the level of foreign patenting consistently grew at a much faster rate than that of local patenting. By mapping movements in both foreign and Australian revealed technological advantage in Victoria in this period, this article demonstrates that this faster rate of foreign patenting was due not to the technological weaknesses of the Australian colonies, but rather to the nature and timing of their economic development.

This paper uses patent data from Victoria to examine the roles played by skill and experience in Australian invention during the colonial era. In addition to identifying a broadening involvement of Australians in inventive activity in the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper also provides evidence which indicates that technological creativity in Australia in this period did not depend on either the existence of a body of highly skilled workers or major advances in the stock of knowledge of which only they were cognizant. Rather, common sense and the acquisition of basic practical skills appear to have been the only prerequisites for inventiveness. Given the widespread availability of such skills in the colonies, the article concludes that the supply of patentable ideas in nineteenth-century Australia must have been fairly elastic.

In the literature on British economic decline entrepreneurship is typically assessed by its outcome. By contrast, this paper argues that the soundness of entrepreneurship is best tested by viewing it ex ante. In other words, it is the process, and not the product, of entrepreneurship that is important in determining its quality. When this is accepted, competence, rather than infallibility, becomes the criterion by which entrepreneurship is best judged. In the latter half of the article, this approach is applied to the British paper industry's search for a new source of cellulose in the second half of the nineteenth century.

For most of the nineteenth century Britain held an undisputed lead in the field of paper-machine technology. By the 1890s this lead had been lost to America. This article argues that Britain's loss...

This article uses money order data to examine the determinants of British migrant remittances prior to 1914. Using panel data and cointegration analysis, it provides evidence of four distinct types of remittance behavior, lending support to Lucas and Stark's theory that remittances are driven by an implicit contract between remitter and remittee. The relative strengths of these different forms of remittance varied across the English-speaking world, with the largest differences occurring between migrants residing in America and those in the self-governing dominions. The explanation for these differences is seen to lie in the distinctive nature of British emigration to America.