Programme

This dissertation reconsiders the nineteenth century’s most famous intellectual property rights: Alexander Graham Bell’s fundamental patents for the telephone. Bell’s contested claim to the invention of the telephone has entered popular history as a controversy over inventive credit. At root, however, the struggle over the technology’s origins represented commercial, rather than scientific conflicts—specifically, the battle to create national monopolies over telephone service.

The dissertation examines the role of basic patents in the early telephone industries of Britain and the United States, circa 1876 to 1900. It explores how companies formed around Bell’s rights came to dominate service and exercise broad control of the technology. The wider aim of the project is to explore how national patent laws shaped the "second industrial revolution," a period of inventive breakthroughs and corporate formations that began in the late nineteenth century and gave birth to industries such as electric light and voice communications, sound recording and film, automobiles and synthetic chemicals.

The importance of patent power to the second industrial revolution has been appreciated by historians without being fully explained. By employing the telephone as a case study, the dissertation seeks to make three main contributions. The first is to adopt an international perspective on the role of patents, showing how the development of new industries related to the form in which intellectual property was produced and reproduced across borders. A second major aim is to reconstruct the processes of patent litigation in Britain and the United States, in order to compare the ways in which the two countries’ legal systems interpreted and enforced broad property rights over a new technology. The third major theme of the dissertation is the role of patents in creating corporate monopolies. In both countries studied here, patents were an important formative influence on the organisation of telephone companies, as well as on the development of the industry as a whole.

This dissertation studies the institutional framework of the first globalized capital market, between 1870 and 1914. Within this structure, it concentrates on two main institutions -bondholders' protective organizations, and the gold standard.
Chapter 1 investigates the market for sovereign debt from the viewpoint of post-default governance. Theoretical and empirical analysis shows that the outcome of debt workouts depended on two dimensions: the institutional variation and the strategic interaction among bondholders' representatives. These aspects are addressed in a model of sovereign debt with constant renegotiation. An original data set of settlements of defaulted debts is used to test the model. Results imply that negotiation-friendly but not debtor-friendly organizations yielded the best ex post results. The representation of bondholders' interests by the issue banks, on the other hand, produced inferior outcomes.
Chapter 2 compares the patterns of foreign investment of two large capital-exporting countries before 1914 - Great Britain and Germany. Three classes of variables were tested as determinants of capital flows: political conditions in recipient countries, long-term prospects of growth, and institutional characteristics. Whereas chapter 1 demonstrated the relevance of institutional quality at the lending countries, this chapter tests for the influence of institutions at the recipients of foreign investment. The empirical analysis supports the view that German capital flows responded to long-term prospects of growth of recipient countries (“fundamentals") as much as British investment. This suggests that the sharp distinction in the literature between “developmental" and “revenue" finances is probably a figment of the absence of detailed data on capital exports outside of Britain.
The stability of the gold standard before 1914 has been extensively studied. Chapter 3 is occupied with a case study, and it tries to provide sufficient understanding of the institutional foundations of exchange rate stability under the classical gold standard. The country under study, Portugal, fits in the typical “periphery" of countries characterized by persistent current account deficits. This chapter demonstrates the role in practice of large market players in sustaining currency stability, over and beyond the atomistic forces of arbitrage and speculation of conventional theoretical frameworks.

This dissertation studies trends in real wages and wage inequality in China from 1858 to 1936. I present the first detailed real wage series by skill group during this period. I construct nominal wage series from the records of employees in the China Maritime Customs service (hereafter “CMC”) for nearly fifty Chinese cities. I also construct group-specific cost of living indices from price data and household budget information contained in CMC trade statistics and surveys. The resulting nominal wage series and cost of living indices make it possible to estimate long-run trends in real wages and skill premia for three basic categories of Chinese workers: unskilled, skilled, and highly skilled.
I find that skill premia rose rapidly during the first three decades of industrialization. After the 1920s, the wage gap between skilled and unskilled labor began to decline, while the gap between highly skilled and unskilled labor continued to rise. These changes in the skill premia, I show, were driven by movements in the wages of skilled and highly skilled labor. China’s enormous reservoir of unskilled labor kept unskilled wages stagnant until a rapid growth spurt in the 1930s.
I find evidence suggesting that demand and supply of skilled labor were the major reasons driving up the skill premia in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Technological advances initially increased the demand for skilled and highly skilled labor, while supply of skilled and highly skilled labor was extremely scarce. Therefore skill premia increased rapidly.
The decline of the skill premium after the 1920s, I show, is very likely to be driven by two factors. First, I marshal new data on the development of new education system in modern China to show that the rapid expansion of modern education increased the supply of skilled labor substantially and was conducive to the decline of the skill premium since the 1920s.
Second, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, China experienced a tremendous growth in trade with the rest of the world. Using the newly constructed China historical trade database, we show that China’s export boom was characterized by a rapid expansion in the production and sale of unskilled-intensive. As a result of China’s trade boom, the skill premium flattened out in the 1910s and then fell by 8 percent between 1920 and 1928. Our results suggest that sustained trade booms in developing countries can significantly impact wage inequality.

Since no paper is involved, there will be no abstract

This dissertation is a political economic examination of access to food, food supply policies and well-being in late colonial Mexico, a period of strong transformations in economic organization, distribution of resources and political power. The study begins with an analysis of heights, an indicator of nutritional status and biological well-being. Height declined significantly in the mid eighteenth century, and afterward it stagnated through the early national era. More significantly, socioeconomic height gaps broadened, while the urban-rural height differential decreased (and even changed direction in favor of city dwellers), suggesting important redistributions of resources and particularly access to food in the late colonial and early national periods. Since the market was a major means to acquire food, chapters 2 and 3 focus on grain markets in the late colonial period. I find that grain markets were more competitive than usually assumed and were becoming more integrated in the last decades of the colonial period. I argue that the pronounced food shortages of the late colonial period were not the consequence of the fragmentation of markets and the manipulation of a local oligarchy, but of the decline of market entitlements due to increasing impoverishment and rising inequality. Market integration was beneficial to the cities because they had greater economic and institutional resources (such as purchasing power, a reserve granary, tithe stocks or Church-sponsored charity) to secure the access to food. The political significance of grain markets is finally apparent in the policies and conflicts about trade between jurisdictions and in the discourse on abuses in grain markets, examined in chapters 4 and 5. The priority of the colonial authorities was to secure access to food to the cities, mining centers, and (in the 1810s) the army, the small fraction of the population on which the regime was more crucially dependent.

My PhD project provided the first intensive analysis of the role of women in trade in the pre-industrial Northern Netherlands, based on a wide variety of primary sources. Contrary to the existing work on women in trade in pre-industrial Europe I did not focus on one segment of trade, or on a limited time period, but I succeeded in assembling quantitative data on the proportion of females in all different branches of the commercial sector for over two centuries. I also investigated the economic, social and demographic variables that shaped women’s role in trade. I sought to establish the relationship between women’s work and economic development in pre-industrial Europe by investigating whether there existed a correlation between female market production and overall economic growth and prosperity. I also sought to illuminate the impact of institutions on female economic participation, with a particular focus on female entrepreneurship.

My findings demonstrated that there was a clear relationship between the size of a branch of commerce and the involvement of women in it. From the late seventeenth century onwards, commercialization led to a significant rise in the proportion of independent businesswomen in Dutch commercial enterprises. Where commercial enterprise prospered, female entrepreneurship flourished as well. My results also indicate a significant correlation between the extent of institutional control – particularly by guilds – and the degree of commercialization in particular sectors of trade. Highly commercialized branches generally had relatively liberal guilds. My doctoral research thus provided the first systematic empirical exploration of the relationship between female economic activity, the institutional framework, and economic growth in one of the most successful economies in pre-industrial Europe.

In my PhD dissertation for the first time a macro analysis was made of the early modern migrations within, into and out of the countries bordering the North Sea for a period of over 300 years (ca. 1550-1850). By combining a wide range of sources, varying from published demographic and wage data series, archival sources such as marriage registers and secondary literature in German, French, Dutch, English and the Scandinavian languages, the size, directions, and the mechanisms of early modern migration in North Western Europe were studied. My thesis showed first of all that the mass migrations of the early modern period were largely guided by the attraction of the Dutch Republic. Large wage differentials and ample opportunities in the Dutch labour market meant that hundreds of thousands of people from the surrounding countries travelled to the coastal provinces of the Dutch Republic to find a living there. In addition, an analysis of the Dutch immigrant labour market showed that while from the second half of the seventeenth century fewer people settled there, the number of so-called non-sedentary migrants rose; the Dutch labour market continued to attract foreigners, but the nature of the migration changed. Moreover, my research has shown that within the North Sea region two migration systems existed. First of all there was the North Sea migration system, with the Dutch Republic as the labour attracting core and the Scandinavian countries, the north-western German territories and Flanders as the labour supplying periphery. On the opposite side of the English Channel a second system existed with London as its core and the rest of England, Scotland, and Ireland as the region from which many people migrated. A comparison of migration patterns demonstrated that in many ways the two systems had similar characteristics. Finally, by comparing the early modern migrations to the well known migrations from north-western Europe to the US in the nineteenth century, it was shown that that the well-studied wave of mass migration of the pre-industrial period was preceded by an earlier, and in many aspects similar, wave of large-scale population movement. Not only were many of the mechanisms behind the two waves of migration comparable, there were also countries that experienced similar emigration levels during both eras.

Elusive Decisions: A Case Study of Intuitive Strategic Decision Making in the Exploitation of the Pilkington Float Glass Process, 1952-1987.

David Bricknell

Manchester Metropolitan University

Abstract

This thesis seeks an objective examination of the use of intuition in the strategic process, utilising historical analysis in examining corporate documents in a long term (35 year) study of a series of important decisions in the implementation of a single strategy, the exploitation of Pilkington’s Float glass process. There is a growing recognition that intuition is an inevitable element of the strategic decision making process and there have been numerous calls for research into intuition. Despite this there have been relatively few organizational studies reported in the literature and these rely on subjective questionnaire responses or interviews. Studies of intuition in decision making normally link it to topical expertise but intuition is also the product of socialisation, and hence culture. The historical account is presented as a series of case studies within the single strategic process of exploitation. Each case takes as its subject a key decision examining the business context of the decision and the explicit and implicit evidence of the factors taken into account by the decision makers. The case studies indicated extensive use of intuition, culturally located at either the company or industrial level. An extrapolation of the theory of path dependence from its economic origins to include social/cultural intuition indicates an explanation of cultural persistence, but path determined solutions were not inevitable. Conscious change to the shared intuitions, and therefore departure from the path, was possible if exogenous economic pressures were sufficient.

This Doctoral thesis was accepted by Manchester Metropolitan University in June 2007.

During the twentieth century the population of England and Wales experienced unprecedented improvements in mortality and particularly morbidity, which has provided a substantial boost to standards of living and economic development. Despite the extensiveness of these health gains, there have been a very limited number of attempts to evaluate and quantify these valuable improvements. None of the existing studies that quantitatively assess improved health actually measure health per se, as they all utilise mortality as a proxy and there are no other studies that quantitatively estimate the value of improved health over such a long time period.

The thesis has filled these voids through developing a quantitative health (mortality and morbidity) measuring tool (referred to as ‘Quality Adjusted Life Expectancy’ [QALE]) that is capable of providing (monetary) estimates about the value of improved health, from a health and welfare perspective. This methodology was applied to key case study illnesses (blindness, breast cancer, stomach cancer and tuberculosis) and then extrapolated forward to include all illnesses, which were combined with mortality in order to provide an aggregate health (QALE) index for twentieth century England. These estimates are bolstered by a detailed qualitative review of the key quality of life features associated with the thesis illnesses, which will also represent a significant feature of the thesis.

This analysis generates answers to the two central questions of the thesis: i) what has been the value of improvements in health (mortality and morbidity) during different periods of the twentieth century in England and Wales, and ii) what has been the impact of improved health upon standards of living and the overall health related welfare of the population in twentieth century England and Wales?

The thesis findings are that twentieth century health improvements and their contribution to standards of living and the growth of GDP defined on a utility, ‘Fisherian’ basis, increase economic growth by 0.5 percent per annum, from 1.5 to 2 percent per annum over the twentieth century, when GDP is adjusted for improved health. This provides important historical detail and a substantial boost to standards of living and a sanguine contribution to claims that improvements in health have been a major contributor to economic welfare in twentieth century England and Wales.

Do endowments or legal tradition explain the subsequent development of financial markets and rule of law? This dissertation undertakes a historical study of Brazilian equity and corporate debt markets to explore this question. According to the “law and finance” literature, the variation in financial development around the world can be explained by the differences in the legal tradition countries follow and the level of protections for creditors and shareholders. This dissertation shows that there is too much variation in investor protections and financial development over time to be attributed to time-invariant factors such as legal origin or endowments at the time of colonization. Instead, the dissertation advances the idea that the changes in legal protections for investors and their enforcement over time were politically determined. The interests of the ruling coalition at different moments shaped different institutions (laws and enforcement) that determined different financial outcomes. Moreover, according to the evidence of this dissertation, the effects of legal origin and other colonial institutions cannot be strongly path-dependent because financial markets and investor protections circa 1910 looked diametrically opposed from what we observe today in that country. For instance, today Brazil is famous for its bad corporate governance practices, its extreme ownership concentration, and weak enforcement of credit contracts, the dissertation uses archival evidence to show that circa 1910 there were strong protections for creditors and shareholders, there was low concentration of ownership and control in large corporations, and courts enforced credit contracts (especially corporate bond contracts) strongly.

Spanish tobacco income (Renta del tabaco) has received a great attention during the past few years. Principally, because the Tobacco Monopoly was a key revenue for the Spanish Royal Treasury from its establishment in 1636. Thus, researches have been mostly focus on its fiscal side.

However, this poster is focused on a different aspect: it presents the regional statistics for tobacco consumption during the 18th century in Spain. And besides it provides some evidences that support the existence of a common pattern or model of tobacco consumption for the Spanish interior provinces at the 18th century.

Data were collected from the “Archivo General de Simancas” and they provide a quite comprehensive list of data regarding tobacco consumption such as prices, types and total amount of legal tobacco consumed.

The main results can be summarized in two. First, the data show a change in the Spanish consumers’ preferences throughout the 18th century: being at the beginning snuff tobacco the most popular whereas at the late 18th century was the smoking tobacco, which is considered the modern way of consumption. Furthermore, data provide that this switch took place differently depending on whether the province is located in the interior or not. As a result it can be said that there was a common consumption model, roughly speaking, for the Spanish interior provinces.

_After 1750, Liverpool surpassed major economic centres such as London and Amsterdam to emerge as the leading port city trading in the North Atlantic. Towards the end of the eighteenth century on the other side of the Atlantic, New York would replace Philadelphia in economic importance. A focused study of New York and Liverpool would help to explain why New York emerged as the leading East Coast American port, help to elucidate Liverpool’s role in that process, and fill in gaps in Liverpool’s trading history during this period.

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Swedish-belligerent trade during the Second World War remains under-examined; since the end of the Second World War scholars have focused narrowly on questions posed during the war: most notably whether limitations in Swedish exports would have been sufficient to hinder the German war effort. They have ignored the overall impact of the Swedish trade on the outcome of the war as well as Sweden’s own position between the two sets of belligerents. This paper examines Swedish-belligerent trade and determines it is closely linked to both Swedish and belligerent wartime survival. The belligerents required Swedish manufactures; the Swedes wanted the belligerents to ensure her political and economic survival. This poster builds a comprehensive picture of Swedish trade with the two belligerent blocs; for the first time nominal and real prices as well as weights will be used to show actual changes. It will detail the international system of wartime trade negotiations and then provide the actual trade figures. It will ultimately show Swedish trade supported one belligerent over another, but the benefactor varied depending on the time period; but Swedish economic participation did have a noticeable material impact on the war. Furthermore it will demonstrate Sweden did not profit, but rather paid the belligerents for Swedish independence by providing discounts on some export products while paying high prices for imports. As a consequence of these policies, Swedish neutrality during the Second World War is best characterized as a policy of active self-preservation.

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At the dawn of the 20th Century bauxite deposits of commercial size and quality were only known to exist in two countries: France and the United States, but as aluminium became gradually more important, the hunt for bauxite progressively became more global. Forty years later bauxite had been found on all six continents, and it was an established fact that the mineral could be commercially mined in over 30 countries all over the world. The paper examines how bauxite grew from being a French and US specialty to become a truly global mineral, and in the process integrating formerly remote regions of the world into an international chain of production.

Within a 10 year period from 1962 to 1971, the Canadian company Alcan Ltd saw its investments in Guinea and Guyana nationalised. Despite Alcan's importance in Canada, the Canadian government did little to help this company avert or respond to the loss of its investments in these countries, raising questions about the degree to which the Canadian government was prepared to advance Canadian corporate interests abroad.

What do the bauxite deposits of Jamaica, one of the islands of the Greater Antilles, have to do with the Marshall Plan, an American program to promote the economic recovery of post-war Europe? Quite a lot, as it turns out. During the Second World War the United States experienced serious shortages of aluminium, due in part to problems of securing sufficient shipping for South American bauxite. Together with the depletion of domestic sources, this demonstrated to American leaders that they had to diversify their bauxite supply. However, it was the European Recovery Program, somewhat unexpectedly, that enabled the American Government to support the establishment of both Alcan and the Reynolds Metals Company on Jamaica. This paper traces the development of the American Government’s concerns with bauxite as a strategic material, the beginning of the Jamaican bauxite industry, and how the Marshall Plan was turned into a tool to make the means and ends meet.

Most critiques of the aluminium industry focus on the factories, and we argue in this paper that refineries and smelters are among the worst culprits of global heating.
But bauxite mining destroys an excessive surface area, and has come in for criticism, for example, in Jamaica, Surinam and Australia and Vietnam, where campaigners are trying to prevent mines being constructed by Chalco.

India’s most significant deposits occur as cappings on the biggest mountains in south Orissa and north Andhra Pradesh. Tribal people live in thousands of communities around these mountains, which they regard as sacred entities for the fertility they promote. Appropriately, the base rock of these mountains was named ‘khondalite’ after the region’s predominant tribe, the Konds. Early geologists noticed the perennial streams from these mountains, and modern evidence suggests that their water regime is damaged when the bauxite cappings are mined

Bauxite is one of the few minerals that the Soviet Union did not – and Russia does not – possess in abundance. As the aluminium industry expanded after World War II, and particularly as the major Siberian smelters came on line in the 1960s and 1970s, the shortage of domestic bauxite became a major issue. Although imports of bauxite and alumina began immediately after the end of the war, there was still a perceived need to develop a domestic raw material base for the production of alumina. Major attention was devoted to the use of bauxite substitutes, above all nepheline. The enthusiasm for bauxite substitutes waned in the second half of the 1960s, at the same time as a decision was made to build a bauxite mine in Guinea to feed a new alumina plant in Ukraine.

The paper examines the rise and fall of bauxite substitutes as a policy issue. While persistent technological problems and questions about the economic viability of substitutes did not help their cause, the author suggests that a key determinant of the policy outcome was a change in the Soviet politico-administrative structure, the abolition of regionally based administrative structures, the sovnarkhozy, and the reinstitution of central sectoral ministries in 1965. This weakened the policy capacity of those regional interests which had been pushing for their own local aluminium industries.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the British government, the Gold Coast government and two Commonwealth aluminium producers investigated the possibilities of an integrated aluminium scheme in the Gold Coast; the Volta River project. This paper demonstrates how this constellation of partners came together and why it failed to realise the project: During the period in question, the decolonisation process and the "development era" of British colonial rule impacted on the Volta River project. On the one hand, the British policy of colonial development was instrumental when investigations and negotiations were started. On the other hand, the trajectory of the project corresponds with the trajectory of British colonial rule. Just as Britain's days as a Colonial Power came to an end, the British government's ability to finance its part of the project became evident. When, in addition, the leading aluminium company, Alcan, was unwilling to invest in a newly independent country, the Ghanaian government had no other choice but to find new partners in the project. As such, the integrated Volta River project was abandoned and in its place a modified aluminium scheme operating on imported alumina was realised.

The exploitation of the Greek bauxite ores began in the interwar period, when bauxite was exported as raw material to the international markets in small quantities. After World War II, the integration of Greece in the Marshall Plan favoured the development of the exploitation, while the definition of bauxite as a “strategic material” of high importance for the Western countries leaded to the granting of loans to certain mineral firms from American Economic Aid (not exclusively from the Marshall Plan). Greek bauxite transformed then to a carriage of the globalization process for a small country of the European periphery. The paper discusses this development of the bauxite ores exploitation from mineral enterprises in the context of post-war reconstruction.
The paper draws evidence from business archives, the official publications of the European Recovery Program and the Greek Mines Inspectorate and based on an original archival study in the Greek economic historiography.

Referring to the recent discovery by the Director of the Geological Survey Alfred Kitson of significant deposits of bauxite on Mount Ejuanema on the Kwahu Plateau in the British colony of the Gold Coast (present day Ghana) in December 1917, the Colonial Office remarked in their report of the following year: ‘This discovery may prove to be of the highest Imperial importance. It was therefore considered advisable that the rights in it should be reserved by the Government’ (CO 1917). The Colonial Office’s response was characteristic of the British metropolitan government’s developing approach to raw materials of strategic significance, especially after the munitions crisis following the Somme campaign. The emerging thinking on aluminium specifically was crystallised in a memo distributed within the British Ministry of Munitions in August 1916 that stressed the imperatives of: increasing production of the metal domestically and, less desirably, in Canada; and securing mineral rights for bauxite deposits within the British Empire. The British government’s strategic priorities were to be one of the most significant factors in shaping the fortunes of the UK, and to a lesser extent Canadian, primary aluminium industries for around the next thirty years. They were also a major determinant in the market for bauxite until the mid-1950s, in a world in which around 42 per cent of discovered global reserves of the metal fell under the jurisdiction of the British Empire.
This paper differs from the only study that has detailed British involvement in the political economy of the global aluminium industry across the twentieth-century (Graham 1982) by illustrating that the British government’s approach over this period was primarily determined by strategic priorities rather than being subject to the industry’s agenda, as Graham has suggested. In so doing it places the aluminium industry and the specific issue of bauxite within the wider context of the British government’s approach to raw materials of strategic importance and to the development of a sophisticated military-industrial complex in Britain (Ball 2004; Edgerton 2006; Peden 2007).

Even before World War II, the Aluminium Industrie Aktiengesellschaft (AIAG) in Neuhausen, Switzerland, was already a vertically integrated company with production sites in Switzerland, France, and Germany.
The corporate strategy of management, which at the time was still made up of Germans and Swiss, was essentially determined by policies with respect to raw materials and securing production locations, which allowed the cost-effective production and processing of virgin aluminum in the company’s own processing plants. With low-cost hydro power for performing aluminum electrolysis in the Swiss canton of Valais, easily accessible bauxite mines and alumina works just beyond the border in France, and an expanding German distribution market, the company’s production and sales conditions were ideal.
The political and economic consequences of World War I, however, presented the AIAG with a fundamentally altered situation, and their Swiss management, who were operating from impartial soil, with completely different conditions of activity and scope for decision-making. They had to adapt to fundamentally altered sales conditions; to political tension, economic protectionism, and the pursuit of autarky; and to growing competition on the part of new producers in their traditional distribution countries.
In the period between the two world wars, the corporate group, which was the fifth largest producer of aluminum worldwide, nevertheless developed into a company that operated throughout Europe and was also expanding more and more into the area of metal processing. With the establishment of a factory in Shanghai (1931) and plans for expansion in Indonesia (1938), the AIAG was about to become a global player even before the outbreak of World War II.
This contribution will expound on the how beginning in 1918/19, the AIAG adapted to the often contradictory general political and economic conditions in their most important production and distribution countries of Germany and France. It will also examine the strategies the company developed to react to the changes in domestic policy in both countries and eventually to the obvious threat and finally to the reality of war in Europe, when the group’s headquarters and part of its production sites were in a politically impartial Switzerland, while its sources of raw materials and other production facilities were either in the territory of the Allies or the Axis powers.

In order to succeed in the aluminium industry, vertical integration has been almost a precondition. The industry majors have all had in-house access to bauxite and oxide. In the latter decades, there has been one main exception from this rule, the Norwegian company Hydro which emerged as a successful mid- and down-stream aluminium company.
This paper explores Hydro’s strategies for obtaining bauxite, why the company failed in these endeavours and to what extent this ‘failure’ influenced the company’s results.

Since the 18th century at least, comparatives analysis about labor institutions and labor conditions in Russia have been made as if the boundary between free and unfree labour was a-historically and universally defined. Free labour in the “West” is thus opposed to serf labour in Russia and “Eastern Europe”. We are going to call this assertion into question and show that serfdom was never officially institutionalized in Russia.
However, it was not only a matter of legal definitions; we will also study the way tsarist administration, nobles and peasant themselves made use of legal courts in order to contest ownership titles and, on this ground, peasants’ and workers’ obligations and legal status. These outcomes are quite similar to those had been recently achieved “second serfdom” in Prussia, Lithuania and Poland.
In turn, this means that these labor contracts and institutions are not at the opposite range of so called “free labour” contracts and institutions that, quite the contrary, had much more contraints on workers than usually stated. In order to prove this point, the paper will remind the legal status of labour in Britain (master and servant acts), France (domestic labour and journeymen) and their Empires.
The conclusion will stress the overall importance of legal controls on labour mobility during the economic and social dynamics of 16th up through the end of the 19th century.

This paper outlines the conflictual making of a new regime of labour regulation in India that began to emerge in the interwar period, acquired distinct features between 1937 and 1945 and was fully developed and realised in the first decade of Indian independence. It argues that both the late colonial and the early postcolonial periods need to be taken into consideration to render this regime change discernible. It emphasizes the importance of investigating labour legislation in the double context of informal scenarios of labour regulation and of an emerging 'social policy'.

This paper explores the extent and the process of spread of international labour standards to the factory industry in India during the second half of British rule. It analyses the inter-connections and interfaces between labour laws, ideas and practices, and their socio-economic and political contexts, both local and international. The roles of workers, capitalists and governments in the colony and the metropolis, and international institutions are discussed. The focus here is on jute which was the premier factory industry of eastern India. Opening in the 1850s, this industry was characterised by high profits, a strong and well co-ordinated body of capitalists, but stagnant technology, low wages, abysmal working conditions and a politically unorganised and weak labour force; the state was generally unsympathetic to the workers. While industry was run on capitalist lines, agriculture in the countryside, the source of labour supply to industry, continued to be pervaded by pre-capitalist relations. This paper investigates the process of labour recruitment in industry, role of jobbers, the socio-economic (caste, religious, occupational, regional and linguistic) origins and demographic characteristics of workers, working conditions, wages, living conditions including health and sanitation, gender and family issues, and the nature of links between the sources of labour supply and the destination. The attitudes of workers, aspects of their consciousness with respect to caste, class, religion, language and region, and the roles of employers and state in manipulating and organising the manifestations of particular aspects of the workers’ identities are examined. Profitability, attitudes of employers towards labour and relations between worker and capitalist, both Indian and British are studied. The political process, the contestations between workers and the employers, the role of the state, and the implications of being a colony, in the evolution of labour laws and standards are explored.

How to mobilize labour for agricultural commodity production? Since late XIX° century, all colonial administrations have been confronted in Africa with this difficult question. For a long time the discussion would be reduced to how to get wage labour the best way for European plantations, i.e. the place to be given to Asian labourers and the kind of regulation and contract to be implanted to give the right incentives to the workers. However, during the first decades of the XX° century, the perspective changed radically. Then, mobilization of “native agriculture” becomes the very issue and the central theme of a debate conducted not only in every colony and Empire but also actively between the different colonial administrations. Beside the formal and public debates about forced labour organized within the ILO and the League of Nations, a more "technical debate" exists about the means to be implemented to organize this mobilization. The repeated Congress of Colonial Agriculture and the work of the International Colonial Institute played a major role in this process. The notion of “native peasantry”, ‘paysannat” or “paysan noir” emerged as a central theme of this debate. It organized the production of a large corpus of knowledge and the conception of different devices aimed to govern the native labour. This paper will present the different moments of the debate, the variety of proposals, the point of agreement and disagreement among colonial administration and the kind of implicit international standards it created.

What drives institutional change? This paper analyses the roles of legal tradition, ideology, changes in relative prices, interest groups and coalition formation by looking in detail at the passing of labour law in Spain from 1880 to 1936. In spite of being a civil law country, I show how political elites were very reluctant to intervene in the labour market until 1919. Factors stressed by classic political economy held sway with interest group weaknesses and small coalitions for reform delaying the passing and implementation of labour law. The influence of the international debate about the best way to deal with industrial conflict –both from social Catholicism and from reformist and legal thought in more industrialised countries- shaped however the domestic debate and increased the appeal of labour market regulation. Despite being a civil law country, the “interventionist” coalition was not majority in parliament until the 1910s, while the Senate remained notably abstentionist. As a result, only restricted legislation was passed in the early 20th century, which was generally poorly enforced. The crisis of 1918-1920 increased the decision-making powers of otherwise weak governments (with weak parliamentary support), triggering the definitive consolidation of labour law in Spain.

This paper is concerned with the process of gender segmentation of occupations, and the extent to which the gendered nature of a technology, or the use of that technology, is transferred from one country to another. Two imported technologies, the postal system and the telephone, are used as case studies to explore the gendering of occupations in late 19th century Japan. The gendering of these occupations, which was the result of a combination of conscious policy decisions, adaptation to local circumstances and social perceptions of gender, helped establish a gender division of labour that was to continue throughout the 20th century.

As a consequence of early demographic transition, France was the first country to experience population ageing. The process occurred relatively slowly however, resulting in gradual social adaptations. In this paper, we examine the changing living standards of individuals aged over 60, their place in society, their income and savings between 1820 and 1940 based on a sample from the TRA survey. At the beginning of the period, in a time with only little pension schemes, few people were able to live on their savings. Moreover, the availability of other ways of living old age seems rather limited and, in all cases, did not increase so as to face with the ageing process. Therefore, state pension at a broad scale may be part of the answer to the increasing proportion of poor old people in the beginning of twentieth century France. We take advantage of very detailed information on pensions at the individual level to explore the link between pension and savings. Pensions gave an access to wealth to large spans of the population.

This paper examines how Singapore provides for old age financing using the individual saving approach. The Singapore approach requires each citizen to work and save sufficiently to buy a house, pay for healthcare and also for old age expenditures. However, the individual saving approach is not sufficient to ensure that the average citizen can achieve all these goals as the purchasing power of saving may be eroded by inflation. Hence, the purchasing power of saving must be protected and the best protection of purchasing power comes from the government. But would the average government have the ability to ensure that inflation rate is low, and that housing, university education, public transport and healthcare services are affordable? The aim of this paper is to examine how Singapore as a country manages to strike a balance using the citizen-government partnership to achieve the goals of society security.
The individual saving approach means that the government would spend less on social welfare; hence, government tax revenue can increase as, unless there is a recession, there is full employment. This individual saving approach therefore enables the government to achieve a budget surplus each year. The government in turn invests its budget surpluses in education and productive investment. As a result, Singapore enjoys a current account surplus over the years, and consequently, Singapore’s foreign exchange reserves continue to increase. The Singapore dollar has therefore strengthened; this protects the purchasing power of citizens as it helps to keep the inflation rate low. The government also ensures that home ownership is within the reach of working citizens, and that healthcare is affordable and education from primary schools to tertiary education is affordable and at the same time internationally competitive in quality.

Double-ageing is a common phenomenon among industrialized countries today. Scholars agree that especially pay-as-you-go financed public pension schemes face serious long-term economic problems arising from increasing old-age and system dependency ratios. As a con-sequence, raising contribution rates or even lowering benefit levels cause intergenerational redistribution of financial burdens from present to future generations. However, the question how different old-age policies affect intergenerational burdens empirically is not yet answered satisfactorily.
Based on the historical example of the German Knappschaften, the oldest profession-specific social insurance scheme, I investigate the relationship between demographic change and sus-tainable finance of social security. Initially, Knappschaften were financed via the pay-as-you-go mechanism. I especially focus on the invalidity insurance which offered disability and sur-vivors’ pensions. Since pension benefits were paid until death, invalidity insurance insured against the risk of longevity as well.
First, based on a sample of all 102 Prussian Knappschaften between 1854 and 1922 (i.e. the core region for mining-specific social security), major demographic trends are highlighted leading to the conclusion that ageing vigorously affected the operation of a number of Knapp-schaften. Among other things, system dependency ratios visualize the resulting financing problems at the time. Second, generational accounting is used in order to derive baseline com-putations of historical generational accounts for a number of Knappschaften with respect to the base year 1868. Third, the generational accounts are used to investigate the intergenera-tional redistribution of financial burdens caused by the mixture of economic policy measures Knappschaften adopted (e.g. lowering or raising contributions and pension levels). The di-mension of intergenerational redistribution will be compared among insurers subjected to age-ing and such insurers not affected at all.
By doing so, this historical case study intends to make a contribution both to the recent dis-cussion about the relationship between demographic change and sustainable finance of old-age security and to the understanding of the formation phase of social security since the mid-dle of the 19th century.

This paper discusses the origins of the «three-pillar» pension model, which has become a classic since its prominent mention by the World Bank in a famous 1994 report entitled "Averting the Old Age Crisis”. I discuss this reform model, based on clear ideological preferences for funded pensions over pay-as-you-go systems, and retrace its Swiss roots as well as its international diffusion. Using materials from private insurers' networks, international organizations, and expert reports, this paper offers a case study of the «de-nationalization» of pension reform models from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

By the year 1900, Sweden probably held the oldest population in the contemporary world. Sweden was also the first nation to implement a universal pension system in 1913. The universal character in early social legislation has certainly been decisive for the development of the Swedish welfare state. This alternative was, however, not self-evident. Why did the reforms turn universal, when the continental model, the Bismarck social security system, was exclusively directed at industrial workers?

Research has concentrated on demographic factors and growing demands for social security, or on the fact that Sweden still was a predominantly rural society with about 2,400 local authorities. In this article we will study the development of social legislation in the light of local government expenditures and incomes, and suggest an overlooked possibility: The designation of the first universal national social security reform was a redistributional response to uneven distribution of incomes and general expenditures among the rural districts in Sweden.

The aim of this paper is to study the implementation of the Swedish pension system and its causes. The analyses are effected on national level, but with exemplifications from three rural regions in southern Sweden, with different economic characteristics, and comparisons between countryside and towns.

Analysis of coresidence and mortality.

This paper will look at the eighteenth-century origins of modern old age pensions, with special attention to three themes. I will examine ways of living for old people, the relationship between the timing of the ageing process and the size and scope of pension schemes. We begin by examining the diversity of modes and conceptions of old age pensions, emphasizing the broad range of ways in which old people could earn, receive, and sometimes plan for pensions. In the end, we will conclude by coming to grips with the intellectual underpinnings of the concept of old age pensions in the age of the Enlightenment.

The experiences of conquest led by the aristocracy and the communes in the Medieval Mediterranean —in those cases where there were no deportations or enslavement on a huge scale (Valencia, Sicily, Mahdiya, Morea, Crete, Cyprus, Syria)— resulted in the integration of “strange” populations in the social order of Latin Christendom (feudalism). The conquerors did not implement policies to assimilate or equal these populations with Latin settlers, but were subjected to a strict ethnic segregation expressed through the language of the Roman Church. Collective discrimination allowed the imposition of a special treatment to indigenous population in matters of taxation, servile duties and bondage to the land. In the beginning these forms of domination were composed of elements inherited and modified from the previous Muslim and Byzantine tax systems, but its development led to specific practices of social control that offer features usually considered as fully characteristic of the modern colonialism.

1. Tana (Azaq, Azov) became a major center of international trade with the foundation of the Golden Horde and the establishment of Genoese and Venetian trading stations in late 1260s.
2. Italian trade from late 13th century till 1340s had great international dimensions and was focused mainly on the purchase of luxury goods and spices in exchange of western silver and cloth. It did not affect local handicraft of the Tatar dominated areas.
3. Great changes went on after the Black Death of 1347-49 and the subsequent discords and disintegration of the Golden Horde after 1360s. Italian trade at first was restricted or limited but gradually reoriented on local goods and wares of the Black Sea-Russian area. Period of stagnation till 1380s gave place to a slow increase from 1420s. A further integration of the area in the Mediterranean trading system will be shown on the statistical bases of commercial transactions attested in archival documents. In 1420s-1470s Venetians dominated in the area and restricted the Genoese presence. Social effects as mixed marriages of the Italians with the indigenes, the involvement of the Greeks, Tatars and Slavs in local and long-distance trade will be traced. Still a high level of trade in early 14th century was never achieved later.
4. A special statistical analysis of slave trade in Tana is done with an accent on prices, ethnicity, origin and age of slaves and routes of slave trade.

The ways to establish a feudal system were very different in the Mediterranean, besides if we attend to the characteristics from each territory. In our case, in the Kingdom of Valencia, the colonization of the second half of the 13th and beginning of the 14th Century meant the appearance of a net of small towns which soon became the main settlements for the exchanges. These small towns had their own area of influence, because of concentrating agrarian excess and originating different manufacturing activities. Furthermore, they were the first residence for the small nobility.
The transformations not only affected the agrarian sector ships set sail. From the city of Valencia together with ships with farming products and woollen cloths of medium quality too. These ships set sail in direction of the kingdom of Napli and Sicilia, where they loaded grain for coming back to Valencia. When this trade gave symptoms of tiredness, in the second half of the 15th, the silk industry developed, thanks to the arrival of Ligurian merchants and artesans. Their demand favoured the diffusion of a crop until then in minority, like the mulberry trees, in different areas of the country.
All in all, these phenomenons were not exempt from contradictions. Valencia had consolidated itself at the top of the regional trade and consequently became the centre redistributor of raw material and merchandises arrived from the Mediterranean and from the North of Europe. However, the influence of Valencia was not just its kingdom. Valencia was the door to the sea for Aragon and Castile. The end of the arrival of the settlers did not stop the growth of the city. During de second half of 14th and the 15th the city increased its population thanks to the immigration from the neighbouring lands of Aragon and Castile and from the North of the Valencian Country, which suffered an important demographic decrease. In spite of the economic development in some sectors, the progressive erosion of the familiar property, not only peasant but also artesans, finished with the revolt of the Germanies (1519-1522) against the urban oligarchy and the lords.

In this paper we will explore comparatively the historical evolution of different territories conquered by Latin Christians in European periphery during the Middle Ages, specially of the kingdom of Valencia in the Iberian Peninsula. The purposes of comparison are essentially three: know how conquest affected indigenous populations of those regions, how the new colonial societies were built, and finally deal with one aspect which seems inherently tied to the feudal expansion process: its conceptualization as colonialism, this means, whether this expansion can be qualified or not as colonial.

“Colonialism” as a phenomenon of medieval European history has, this paper contends, not been adequately “problematized.” The major exception is Robert Bartlett’s influential The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (1994). In this Bartlett argues that colonialism did mark the medieval expansion of Europe, but that it was a process of “cellular multiplication” in which the social, cultural, and economic forms of the core areas of northwestern Europe were replicated on the peripheries of these core areas. This paper argues that this model does not necessarily fit the experience of North Wales under English rule. Here a model of “internal colonialism” seems to fit better, one in which the native ruling elements were systematically kept away from the levers of power, the country was heavily exploited for its economic and manpower resources, and the emergence of something like what Michael Hechter has called a “reactive nationalism” took place.

The conquest and colonization of the Balearic Islands by the feudal forces of Catalonia and Aragon (1229-1287), with the participation of urban elements and led by the Crown, is part of the process usually -and improperly- called, , Reconquista. However, as it has been repeatedly stated, should be described rather as a "conquest of al-Andalus," which belongs to a more general process of expansion of European feudalism. The lands that are the target of this expansion are not in any way empty, but inhabited by peoples that do not have feudal institutions, or whose institutions are less developed than those of its European neighbours and conquerors. In this way, the conquerors introduce a feudal society based on the migration of Christian colons (the most of them from NE Catalonia, or Catalunya Vella) to the islands after the removal and enslavement of the Muslim native population. According to that, the basis of the new kingdom of Majorca will be the distribution (repartiment) of the soil between the conquerors according to their position into the feudal system, (from the Crown and the high nobles to the small peasants). The aim of this paper is to show the origins and chronology of the arrival of these peasant colons, and the changes that their activity produced on the agrarian landscape. In fact, according to the rich documentary sources of the Majorcan archives, the colonisation was made by family groups that already were established a few decades after the conquest. Much of them failed in their purpose, due to the difficulties of adapting the former agrarian structure of the Moors (small exploitations with intensive irrigation for the needs of small autonomous clan groups) to the Feudal systems of exploitation, because all the lands had to pay feudal rents to the King, the Church and the nobles, and also needed big capital investments, which originated considerable debts. However, a considerable number of family groups (mainly the ones who arrived first) became pagesos grassos (rich farmers), that sometimes could have more land that the lowest nobles (cavallers). Finally, the continuous arrival of Christian colons (every time more poor) determined that the Crown, in order to maintain its rents, led a new repartition of lands (Ordinacions) in 1300.

The aim of this paper is to present a new dataset of global inequality between 1820 and the present, based on the available historical evidence, and to tentatively analyse some of the results that emerge from these data. The importance of the subject hardly needs to be stressed: the enormous increase of inequality on a global scale is one of the most significant – and worrying - features of the development of the world economy in the past 200 years. Economic historians have also intensely discussed the long term trends in the world that lead to the growing income disparities between nations and changed patterns of inequality within nations, although often using other concepts (such as ‘the Great Divergence’). We argue, however, that we lack the historical data to really analyse these patterns of changing global inequality in detail. For these reasons, we have set out to try to create a new dataset of global inequality focused on improving the estimates of inequality within countries through the use of the results of (old and) recent research on this topic, and through the application of a number of indirect ways of measuring (changes in) income inequality in the past.

Latin America is the most unequal region in the world and there is intense debate about the explanations and time aspects of such high levels of income inequality. Latin America was also the region, not including European offshoots, which underwent the most rapid growth during the first globalization boom. It can therefore be taken as an interesting case study of how globalization forces impinged on growth and income distribution in peripheral regions. In this paper we present a first estimate of income inequality in the Southern Cone of South America (Brazil 1872 and 1920, Chile 1870 and 1920, Uruguay 1920) and this includes some assumptions about Argentina (1870 and 1920), and Uruguay (1870).
We find that inequality was relatively high on the eve of the first globalization boom. Thus, inequality is not the result of globalization, but a structural feature. Inequality increased between 1870 and 1920, both within individual countries and between countries. Globalization alone is not a good explanation for that, but it interacted with the expansion of the frontier and with institutional persistence and change in old and new areas, giving room for contradictory movements.
Inequality was clearly high at the wake of the globalization process. This was a particular kind of inequality, which was a part of one set of institutions closely linked to primary exports, and sluggish technological change and human capital formation.

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues that this conclusion is not supported by what little evidence we have. The persistence view is based on an historical literature which has made little or no effort to be comparative. Modern analysts see a more unequal Latin America compared with Asia and the rich post-industrial nations and then assume that this must always have been true. Indeed, some have argued that high inequality appeared very early in the post-conquest Americas, and that this fact supported rent-seeking and anti-growth institutions which help explain the disappointing growth performance we observe there even today. This paper argues to the contrary. Compared with the rest of the world, inequality was not high in pre-conquest 1491, nor was it high in the post-conquest decades following 1492. Indeed, it was not even high in the mid-19th century just prior Latin America’s belle époque. It only became high thereafter. Historical persistence in Latin American inequality is a myth.

The modus operandi for supplying the Duc de Crillon’s army can serve to illustrate the problem of mobilising warfare resources and how these consequences may vary according to the way this problem is tackled. This example shows that the Spanish authorities involved in the process did not trust the market as the main channel for supplying that expeditionary force, preferring to fall back on monopoly practices. They opted to wrap given merchants in a shield of privilege, thereby disrupting the commercial advantages that the island had boasted hitherto. The exhaustion of local resources and disincentives to traders tended to exacerbate the shortfalls; the government then tried to solve the problem by price fixing, curtailing trade even more. The only way the state could see of cutting through this vicious circle was to commission massive purchases from the clique of merchants close to the uppermost echelons of power, without looking at the cost or weighing up other alternatives. This interventionism was a cumbersome incubus on trade. It was not until the Intendant was changed that trade was stimulated anew and competition encouraged, whereupon the local merchants themselves, now unfettered, managed to improve the supply situation and bring down its cost. Tellingly, the troops that returned to Campo de San Roque to try to end the siege of Gibraltar brought with them more victual-laden ships than those that had gone with the Minorca expeditionary force.

To raise money for war was essential, but no less essential was the application of the money raised to the maximization of coercive power. This paper looks at the British government's employment of German soldiers - both in their own units and as recruits for British regiments - during the War of American Independence. It seeks to understand why British ministers chose this option by examining the costs and benefits of using German as opposed to British (or other) troops. Reliance on the Germans, it is argued, has to be seen in the context of the mobilization strategy pursued by the government (particularly the king) at the beginning of the American war.

Troops’ payment was one of the largest items on the war budgets of early modern states. Private financiers played a crucial role in ensuring the steady flow of funds necessary to maintain the armed forces. This paper investigates the role of ‘military solicitors’ in the Dutch Republic, who acted as brokers between state, credit market and the military. It traces the origins and development of the system of ‘military soliciting’, focusing on the ways in which the state and entrepreneurs tried to strengthen their respective positions in this important area of military organization. It also tries to answer the question why, despite several attempts to replace ‘military soliciting’ by more centralized, state-run systems of troops’ payment, brokerage practices persisted until the fall of the Republic in 1795.

Abstract: This paper draws on new fiscal and commercial estimates to suggest that British governments' comparative command of resources was decisive enough by the late eighteenth century to render the matter of effective mobilization and deployment a relatively moot question. British governments' ability to more than match the Spanish Crown's vast colonial resources from a narrower tax base lay in comparatively massive import volumes. This long-standing advantage enabled Britain to spare its own manufactures from crippling taxation, while Spanish governments' inescapable reliance on a wider spectrum of external trade helped to price Spanish re-exports out of colonial markets.

Abstract

The paper is focused on the possibilities of entrepreneurial promotion based on military demand and tries to answer the question to what extent military spending caused the development of efficient and long-lasting enterprises, influential in the economic activity at large. The problem is posed within the general frame of how the state addressed its spending, by way of contractors, or by direct administration, and particularly in the first case, what kind of entrepreneur emerged as a result.
The study is made on the sector of the munitions provisioning, and especially the production of cannon balls. A detailed study is made of the factory of Eugui, Navarra, which during many years was the only cannon balls factory in Spain, a fact that stresses its importance as an example of this relevant sector for the provisioning of the army and the navy. During the period under survey, 1689-1766, the factory was a private enterprise that worked always as a contractor, with a de facto monopoly on the provisioning of cannon balls for the state.
The conclusion is that state demand was not sufficient to promote a sound and stable entrepreneurial activity due to its weakness, to the fact that it was highly intermittent, and because of administrative encumbrances. Besides, it was difficult for the factory to alternate state demand with the production for the civil market, in fact it did nothing for the second. The reality is that the factory was totally dependent of the state demand which main characteristic was uncertainty.

Resources to fight the War for Independence from Great Britain (1775-1783) were to be provided to the U.S. Congress by the individual states based on each state’s population share in the united colonies. Congressional spending, however, largely flowed to where the theater of war was located. Thus a geographic imbalance in revenue and spending arose. Because much of the spending was through issuing paper money, geographic variation in inflation as well as in general economic activity resulted. This in turn affected the relative strength of each state’s attachment to the union with ramifications on maintaining political unity.

There were several factors which are explaining the quick decadence of Spanish Navy after 1795. One of them was the presence or lack of political and naval leadership. The aim of this work is to explore this factor in relation to naval spending. The chosen example is Antonio Valdés (1783-1795), the best Secretary of the Navy in Spain during this period of the European history, between the end of the War for American Independence and the Peninsular War. Valdés’ excellent administration is showing us that it was a sensible way of preparing the Spanish Navy for sea warfare. But Valdés’ programme failed, mainly because the Spanish Royal Treasure policy did not adapt itself to those challenges. The Spanish finance policy was inadequate to fulfil its international commitments and keep a powerful Navy in the long term. Spain was not a Fiscal-Military State.

The political historiography of the fiscal military state usually concentrates on the on relationship between the state appartus and society with regard to the raising money. Although in most cases the prerogative of decisions regarding expenditure remain firmly in the hands of the executive, debate and challenge did occur. This paper examines the role of the British Parliment in shaping expenditure at a critial time in the formation of the British fiscal military state.

The Victualling Board in London had the responsibility for feeding the navy and the army abroad, a task which between 1793 and 1815 involved supplying provisions to tens of thousands of men all over the world. From a low point in the 1780s, the Board and the Office which it managed improved in terms of honesty and efficiency only slowly, in fits and starts. Nevertheless, during the war there were only a few and minor operational failures. The Board made over 4,000 contracts during these years, and in general the 'front end' of the operation - contracting with perchants and producers - was well done. The major failure was in accounting, a problem shared across most government departments, trying to keep pace with a never-ending war which continued to increase in scale. After political pressure, a number of the Victualling Board memebers were retired in 1808 and the accounting problem was solved by a younger and less tired set of administrators. By the end of the conflict, it was a leaner and fitter organisation than when the war started twenty-two years earlier.

Between the 18th and early 19th centuries, Portugal was involved in several wars: the Fantastic War (1762–1763), the Roussillon War and the War of Catalonia (1793–1795), the War of the Oranges (1801), and the Peninsular War (1807-1814). This context demanded a deep reorganization of the Portuguese state administration (Moreira, 2007). The aim of this study is to contribute to the picture of how Portuguese military efforts were partially financed by Great Britain during the particularly unstable first half of the 19th century, that is during the Peninsular war.
Documents in the archives of Tribunal de Contas (Audit Court).were researched and allowed the identification of the payment and inspection processes with regard to military expenditure. These interesting sources reveal the major roles that the Royal Treasury and, during the Peninsular War, the British support assumed in the issue of the military fiscal state. This Portuguese and British alliance, so effective in the battlefield that it led to major changes in European history by defeating the French empire, was supported not only by identical political ideas but it was also founded on solid economic common efforts.
The results of the research on British support to military expenses during Peninsular War, will be presented basically on three points:
- War chest to receive the Donations offered by Great Britain for the maintenance and sustenance of a part of the Portuguese Army
- Portuguese Current account of the Treasurer General of the Central Army
- Great Britain in current account with Portugal, for the Subsidies offered for the up-keep of a part of the Portuguese Army

Conclusion based on papers delivered to Congresses at Helsinki and Utrecht

The transatlantic slave trade was a co-operative venture between European and African slavers. The Europeans built forts along the African coast but the pattern of fort-building indicates that it was the African kingdoms who held the upper hand. The British case shows that there were a variety of partial solutions to the problem of maintaining the forts.

The paper deals with the Swedish military expenditure, witch accounts for a half of total expenditure during the period 1722-1809 – in accordance with the main budget figures. Increasing spending under war years resulted in growing national debt, however the debt services were sometimes excluded from the budget, and this paper aims to shed light on the problem. Wartime spending and the displacement effect have been pointed out by previous studies as the major cause for rising expenditure in Sweden. The paper tries to show other causes as well, like investments in infrastructure, fortification and a monetary reform, witch also contributed to the growing military expenses. Expenditure for army was twice as much as for the navy in general under the period, though the continuous rise in naval spending appears in the budget figures from 1770s onwards. The main budget figures underestimate however the amount of military spending, as some of the accounted items have only been entered in the budget at outdated values (from early 17th century). The nominal salaries of military officials paid through the “indelningsverk” (allotment system) have been entered in the accounts, although they have been able to obtain their salaries directly from the peasants whose taxes had been allotted to them, at a more or less inflation-proof level. The paper hence puts forward an example of how to recalculate salaries and military expenditures at current prices.

Our paper aims at dealing in depth with the question of the ordinary budgets of Spanish Monarchy in the XVIIIth century and, above all, what use was made of these funds. We already have some information about this subject. In this case, we have used the methodology of centre our study just in one year systematically, like 1765, for examining deepest the accounts generated in all around the spanish territories, where the income was generated and where it was definitely spent. This has allowed us to compare those classic budget studies in spanish historiography with our own statistics to detect the differences and the reality of the situation of income and spending as specified in individual documents. Our conclusions will be transferred to all the years of the 1760 decade.

In the early modern Period, European states fought many wars, but on the contrary, Japan had not fought wars for more than two hundred years after a long warfare period from 1467 to 1630s. The political conditions of Europe and Japan were completely different in the eighteenth century.
However, the constitution of Japan was military one even if Japan was a peaceful country. In this sense the European and Japanese constitution were very similar. Both areas had military regimes.
Although Tokugawa regime was a military one, Japan enjoyed peaceful period for over two hundred years. On the one hand, in early modern period, Europe fought many wars, and the economy in Europe developed. On the other hand, Japan had no wars and it succeeded in economic development even if the extent of the development was inferior to European development.

The paper attempts to master a broad framework for analysis of Soviet policy towards trade block in Europe. It seeks changes and continuity from the first attempts to create a new trade organization in 1952 to ambitious plans of Khrustchev in 1955-1964 and Pan-European politics of Brezhnev developed after 1964 in various forms.

This paper looks over such unofficial relations between the EC and the European communist countries, considered both as singular states and as economic group represented by the CMEA, in the 1970s. The author considers the rationales, actions and decisions of the Soviet Union, the Eastern European countries, and the EC. The author then reports a selected account of the various contacts that occurred between the EC and the communist states within the multilateral context of the CSCE, concurrent contacts between the EC and the CMEA, and of EC bilateral relations with the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries. In the conclusion, the author debates some existing scholarly interpretations, of which she enlightens shortages and points of strength, and attempts to make an assessment of the EC relations with the Soviet bloc, in which she considers the subject’s political rationales to be the most explanatory factor in determining the deadlock of the situation.

The goal of this paper is to examine the tension between the general policy of Communist countries in the East, which was the rejection of the EEC and the economic necessity of economic relationships and trade with the countries of Western Europe. The question of how strong the political goals in the economic decision in the field of trade and East-West economic relationships during the Cold War really were is very important in this context. After the turning point of 1947, caused by the rejection of the Marshall Plan by Poland and Czechoslovakia and the western embargo which was declared on 1st March in 1948, the Eastern European States seem to be still interest in the contact with the West. Especially some row materials, the know-how in technological issues, and capital were very important for the relationships between eastern and western part of Europe.

The paper starts with the year 1969, when crucial changes in the international situation were brought about by the new integration phases of both the CMEA and the EEC. It will trace the evolution of the CMEA policy towards the EEC up until the first official meeting between the two organisations in February 1975. The paper will analyse how the CMEA policy vis-à-vis the EEC was negotiated and formulated in the organisation’s various decision-making bodies. The questions this paper addresses are: what kind of economic, political and institutional questions did the CMEA have to deal with when discussing its policy towards the EEC; what were the individual member states’ goals with regard to the EEC and what possibilities did they have to pursue them within the CMEA institutional framework. The paper focuses particularly on the Soviet role in CMEA policy making, but seeks to question its ability to dictate the organisation’s policy. Special emphasis is therefore also put on evaluating the small CMEA countries’ abilities to manoeuvre between their national interests and bloc obligations.

The years of 1962 and 1972 mark two spectacular announcements by Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Brezhnev, signaling a possible Soviet recognition of the European Economic Community. Until then, the EEC, while being vigorously attacked by communist propaganda as a “community of monopolists” and an economic basis for NATO, was not officially recognized by Moscow. Whereas Khrushchev soon after the first announcement seems to have lost interest in establishing formal relations with the EEC, Brezhnev managed after the second announcement to induce negotiations between the European Community and the Eastern economic bloc, the CMEA. This paper relying on Soviet as well as Western archival documents and publications analyzes the background, circumstances and consequences of this step. The analysis takes into account various factors defining the external and internal context of the Soviet initiative, such as the EEC integration and enlargement process, East-West détente, Soviet relations to West European states, in particular West Germany, CMEA integration, and the Soviet and East European economic and political interests.

This paper evaluates the relationship between British and Belgian interests in Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), a company that was set up in 1906 to valorise the mineral richness of Katanga, the southern province of the Congo Free State which was the private colonial possession of Belgian King Leopold II from 1885 on until the Belgian State took over Congo as a Belgian colony in 1908. It discusses the “Belgianization” of UMHK, a process that unfolded up to about 1930. While the foundations of Katanga’s copper industry and UMHK were laid by the combination of British/South African mining capital and expertise expanding northwards (Tanganyika Concessions Limited) on the one hand, and the governing chartered company Comité Spécial du Katanga on the other, copper extraction in the region was increasingly “Belgified” so that by the 1920s the industry was firmly under the control of the Société Générale du Belgique, and had acquired a distinctly Belgian outlook at every level of its operations. The central question is how to interpret and explain this evolution in the ownership structure of UMHK. In answering this question, this paper offers a re-evaluation of established historiography on the development of the UMHK and copper mining in Katanga, and makes a case for stronger cross-fertilization between business and colonial history to enhance our understanding of large expatriate companies in a colonial context.

Despite the protectionist policies and mentalities prevalent in France, French overseas trading houses often actively challenged their foreign rivals. That is exactly what CFAO, the largest French trader in sub-Saharan French Africa, did: it deliberately went to challenge and provoke its British rivals (in Ghana and Nigeria especially) by building extensive networks of trading posts, collecting points for foodstuff and the distribution of European and American goods and equipment. Its entry into these territories in the early years of the 2oth century allowed it to refine its strategy, tank up on its business acumen, extend its European supply network and enhance its competitiveness in British colonies. Thus we see that the key to its success resides in its becoming an international player, in its “globalisation” drive of the years 1900 to 1940.

The UMHK was the giant company of the Belgian Congo with a major stake in the Katanga mineral resources. During the period 1906-1960 UMHK succeeded in founding a well working mining company in Katanga. UMHK reshaped the Katanga region according to her mining needs. Operational and financial results were impressive. She succeeded in obtaining extremely high profits allowing her to distribute a plethora of dividends, to depreciate her investments, to build considerable reserves, augmenting its capital by transforming reserves into capital while building at the same time an enormous portfolio of stocks. These financial results contributed also to the Congo state finances. The UMHK was however a colonial company, heavily involved in colonial policies. This became the best visible in 1960 and after, at times when UMHK became to be opposed to the first democratic government of Congo and was involved in the Katanga secession war.

Created in Cameroon in 1957, the Alucam company (a subsidiary of the Alcan Rio Tinto group) produces today 100 000 tonnes of aluminium per year, of which two thirds are exported, and manufactures corrugated sheet and household utensils for markets in Africa.

The story starts in colonial France and takes place in a country that gained its independence in 1960, less than three years after the start-up of the plant by Pechiney, a flagship of French industry. Alucam carries a certain weight in Cameroon's economy, as measured in terms of employment, investments, financial earnings and tax revenues, but this weight should not be overestimated and is far from that of the oil industry or the farming sector. The company and the country are closely tied by common interests: hydroelectric power, first of all, which was at the origin of the creation of Alucam. They are bound as well by the shareholders' agreement in which the Cameroon government has progressively acquired a growing share, becoming in the 1980s the owner of half the capital and a major stakeholder in the company's development. Their interests further converge in the emergence of a local market and specific products to replace traditional utensils, making aluminium in many respects a “national” material. The bonds have also become tighter and stronger in the face of unforeseeable difficulties and crises. From the hydrological whims of the Sanaga river, combined with years of dire drought, to the uncontrollable ups and downs of the price of aluminium, plus the devaluation of the CFA franc and the disappearance of Pechiney, the historic shareholder (2003), there has been no lack of opportunities for disbanding.

But in spite of the problems, Alucam can be considered as a success story: Why? What effect did the political order (French Empire, Independence) have on Alucam’s development? How did the company make its way through the events? What global strategies were employed in the past by Pechiney to ensure Alucam’s sustainability? To what extent has Alucam contributed to the industrialisation of Cameroon? What effects had globalisation on Alucam’s history, spreading at an ever faster pace since the end of the Cold War, and calling into question geo-strategic balances on the continent?

In this paper, the development of the Firestone Company in Liberia during 1944-1971 is considered from two perspectives. (1) The growth of the company and its role in the Liberian economy can be explained primarily by global rubber markets, profit maximizing behavior by Firestone, and well-functioning Liberian labor markets, in other words the “nature” of neoclassical economics. (2) The path of the company was dominated by initial conditions and the political environment of Liberia, i.e. “nurtured” by the “Americo-Liberian” elite into non-competitive behavior. The discussion is especially relevant for the Presidency of William V.S. Tubman (1944-1971) as he introduced an aggressive “Open Door” policy to attract private foreign investment and a unification policy to solve simmering tensions between the elite coastal Liberians, mostly of North American descent, and Liberians living in the interior of the country, largely still functioning in tribal societies.

This work intends to give a picture of Italian business activities, particularly in Eritrea, from settlement to the proclamation of the empire. Italian colonies in Africa, Eritrea’s continent, were established in regions that, all together, had little natural resources (except Ethiopia, the colonization of which did not last very long, and Libya, whose oil was never extracted from the ground), presenting little opportunity for the colonial power that would take possession of them to accumulate great wealth.
During the period in which Italy had full control, the exploitation of the colonies went through different phases, with varying degrees of importance, depending on the economic conditions, the reaction of local populations, the possibility to send resources to the Mother country and to other international markets. Thus, colonial «economic policies» reflected such phases.
The sources and documents utilized were cross-checked against other types of evidence, which contributed to the reconstruction of the historic and economic situation. This included, among others, newspapers from that period, reports by the Chamber of Commerce of Eritrea and Ethiopia, personal documents of eminent personalities of that time, together with a revised survey of economic activities conducted during the years of the foundation of the empire by the fascist regime. All these documents have made it possible to gain an insight into private business activities in Eritrea and to draw a comparison with other Italian colonies.
Eritrea was Italy’s first colony, in terms of its foundation date. It was also the most important for Italy and for many Italians, and their families, who were born or lived there for a long time.
Throughout the period of the Italian presence, Eritrea was the only African possession where Italian colonialism was able to deploy all its resources, which were limited due to its intrinsic weakness, contrary to the colonialism of the major European powers.
It would be important to understand, what role, if any, was played by the credit provided by Italian banks in the colonies also through the analysis of the sources held both in the historic archive of the Bank of Italy and in the more traditional central archive of the State. To this end, the Bank of Italy was a pioneer in Eritrea, as well a in Somalia, another former Italian colony, where it was followed by small banks founded by Italian residents, with some local collaborations, and, in 1935, by branches of Banco di Roma, Banco di Napoli and Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.

This paper clarifies the impacts of the growth of colonial port towns in South India upon the indigenous reproduction system in the hinterland by examining the grain trade between Madras or Pondicherry and their hinterlands in the early modern period. The shift from the service-exchange system to commodity production in the locality was caused not only by the development of the textile trade but also by the grain trade participated by the village landlords. The developing market economy in the period intensified the integrity of port towns with their hinterland, which culminated in colonial rule in South India.

The pre-modern period witnessed major developments with great repercussions in the world of global commerce. While the discovery of the sea-route across the Cape to Asia ushered in a new age as far as commerce between Europe and Asia was concerned, there was an expansion of commerce taking place within the Eurasian world too. The growth of the latter was facilitated to a large extent due to the fact that since the close of the sixteenth century onwards, the Safavids, the Uzbeks and the Mughals provided a broadly similar commercial and linguistic environment in Iran, Turan, and India respectively, with Persian as the most widely used language for administrative and cultural purposes. The strategic position of the Indian subcontinent, producer of many commodities dear to the pre-colonial world, and a springboard for those who wanted to sail further east, Mughal India became home to many Turkish, Iranian and Armenian merchants and politico-military adventurers who could pursue their career there with relative freedom. This paper seeks to highlight how Armenian merchants combined shipping with connections in the hinterland.

This paper will examine the characteristics of the port town of Nagasaki, which was under the control of the central government in the shogunal capital of Edo, as the sole place in the territory of Tokugawa Japan in which a European mercantile enterprise or the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was allowed to have a branch office along with their rivals of Chinese traders, as well as the port town’s relationship with its “hinterland”. The socio-economic and political consequences that the trade in Nagasaki brought on the northern frontier of Ezo-chi (roughly current Hokkaido), the production place of marine goods that took on importance in the state’s export trade, particularly during the 18th century, will also be explored.

This paper provides a new explanation of socio-economic characters of early Penang under the control of English East India Company. Drawing upon recently research and few archival sources, maritime trade, population, internal improvement and agricultural development of Penang between 1786 and 1830 will be examined. In this, three key issues could be addressed; firstly, how can Penang’s trade and society in the period be characterized? Secondly, how important was Penang as a free port in the world of maritime Asia? And thirdly, to what extent was the growth of Penang’s maritime trade closely related to economic development in the hinterland? This paper also gives much attention to the importance of colonial governors' policies to the development of the society and economy of early Penang.

This paper reconsiders the impact of the opium trade on the maritime trade system in China before the Opium War, along with reasons for the expansion of the opium trade.
Many scholars studied the opium trade before the Opium War. However, a number of unsolved issues remain. First, earlier studies did not deal fully with the circulation of opium along the coast or the people conducting this trade. Therefore, they failed to understand the reasons for the rapid spread of opium along the coast.
Second, many earlier studies overlooked the transformation of the maritime trade system in China before the expansion of the opium trade. Therefore, these studies also failed to understand the impact of the opium trade on this system.
Thirdly, previous studies have tended to emphasize that the corruption which was rife among Chinese officials and soldiers was the main reason for the failure to prohibit the opium trade. If we emphasize corruption, we must analyze its institutional background. However, there has been little consideration of the institutional background of the opium trade in the first half of the 19th century, especially of the trade control system of the Qing government operating since the 18th century. Therefore, there is no full explanation available for the expansion of the opium trade and the failure of prohibition.
Having considered these issues, we first provide an overview of the maritime trade control system and its development during the 18th century. We also reconsider the fluctuation of this system associated with the development of trade. We then analyze the circulation of opium and its influence before the Opium War. Finally, by studying the countermeasures instigated by the Qing government against the opium trade, we can consider the reason for the failure of the opium ban and the problems in the maritime trade control system for the government.

In the early modern period, ports served as maritime terminals where merchandise produced in the hinterland and commodities imported from distant places were exchanged. There existed between ports and their hinterlands a relationship of interdependence and complementarities. Their prosperity that depended on a complex set of inter-related dynamics such as the production and consumption capacity, strength of the commercial entrepreneurs, volume and value of maritime trade, and, above all, the policies and orientation of the states and their rulers, was naturally vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time. This volatility is most conspicuous in the eighteenth century when the political economies of South Asia and the Islamic World in general underwent a major transformation. This paper tracks the trajectory of changes in the fortunes of the ports of Gujarat and their hinterlands brought about by certain politico-economic developments during this period. What major reconfigurations took place in the structure of the coast with regard to the relative importance of the ports and how in turn these transformed the society, economy, and the people of the region that constituted the hinterland? How did the producers, merchants, and rulers of Gujarat respond to these challenges and what were the consequences? These are some fundamental questions this paper attempts to address on the basis of the information culled from the English, Dutch, and Persian primary sources.

Reports created by the Dutch colonial government in Batavia from the 1870s to the 1920s explained that the “traditional society” of Banten had been under the influence of the powerful local elite, who had exercised authority over a number of villages, and they had been considerably independent of the sultan. Examining eighteenth-century local and Dutch sources, this paper discusses that such features in the local society was in fact formed in the second half of the eighteenth century, mainly as a result of the Dutch policy to promote pepper cultivation. I also discuss that the newly formed “traditional society” was not a static society, but in fact commoners were increasingly market-oriented and were attempting to take economic chances, by responding to outside market situations.

There is no abstract because I will only be a commentator on other pappers

The South-East Asian economy developed to a new stage in production system during the eighteenth century. This development in the economy was caused by outside factors as well as indigenous factors while it happened before the age of full-scale colonisation in the nineteenth century. The paper attempts to generalise systematic changes in tin production and its export trade in Siam, Malay states and the island of Bangka. Special attention is paid to the following points: economic functions of port and hinterland links; growing Chinese influences on production and export trade as well as increasing demand from the Chinese market; and re-consideration of the trading activities and policy of the Dutch East India Company in terms of monopoly.

This paper studies the evolution of Spanish regional inequality from 1860 to 1930. To tackle this issue, we construct a new database of regional employment by major industries, wages and per capita GDP. The results point to the coexistence of two basic forces to explain the growth of regional economic inequality between 1860 and 1930. The spurt of the Spanish industrialization process, in a context of growing economic integration of regions, promoted the divergence of regional productive structures and the concentration of manufacturing in a small group of regions, which also concentrated the greatest advances in terms of labour productivity. Since 1900, the diffusion of industrialization to a greater number of regions generated the emulation of production structures and a process of catching-up in labour productivity.

This paper presents new estimates of Portuguese regional GDP from 1890 to 1960, when official data is already available. The estimations have been done following the methodology set by Geary and Stark (2002). The existence of this long term series will allow analysing some relevant aspects that are usually addressed in regional studies. First, it will be described the regional process of economic growth and the evolution of regional inequality. And finally, there will be presented the main plausible hypothesis that may explain the regional’ patterns of growth and inequality.

This paper deals with the interaction between local public finance and regional gaps in Italy after the Unification. At that time the legislation prescribed uniform tasks and bureaucracies but left to each municipality the funding of local public expenditure by means of different kind of taxes. In absence of any sort of automatic transfer from the more industrialized regions to the poor ones, the consequences of this sort of fiscal decentralization were twofold. It contributed to the deepening of regional divides because less developed provinces were forced to a lower level of local public expenditure for primary school, charity and so on. Besides, the system didn't work and at the beginning of the 19th century the state was forced to change it, by subsidizing directly the poorest regions

The paper presents regional value added figures for Belgium between 1896 and 1970. First the Geary and Starck (2002) method for allocating country level GDP data over the nine provinces is compared with the official regional GDP figure for an overlapping year. Next the method is used to produce regional figures for 1896, 1937 and 1947. They show that even within a small country with excellent internal communications there were substantial and persistent inequalities.

For a long period, the regional dimension of Swedish long-term economic evolution has remained largely unanalyzed. One reason for this is lack of coherent data on regional economic outcomes. This paper discusses how a variety of the method outlined by Geary and Stark (2002) can be used to estimate GDPs for the 24 Swedish counties for the period 1900-2000. In the paper, focus lies heavily on presenting data sources and discussing the methodological aspects of regional GDP calculations in a Swedish context.
Two major robustness checks of the Geary and Stark method are carried out. Firstly, we perform calculations comparing data for the three broad sectors of agriculture, industry and services with more detailed calculations using data on 14 sectors. We show that the Geary and Stark method proves rather robust to sectoral disaggregation, at least within industry and services. However, we also identify some specific pitfalls with the method. The treatment of forestry as part of agriculture will pose problems for the overall regional GDP estimations, since labor productivity in forestry is significantly higher than in agriculture, and forestry is a major part of agriculture in the most Northern provinces. We show that treating forestry as a separate category is fundamental for our understanding of the regional evolution of the Swedish economic geography, as neglecting this difference would lead to severe underestimations of the Swedish GDP in the Northern provinces. Similar findings could probably be generalized to many countries.
Secondly, we also gauge the extent to with the Geary and Stark method with 3 sectors can reproduce the regional distribution of GDP in 1990, from which we have access to officially collected regional GDP data from Statistics Sweden.
Overall, the paper will compare the effects of estimating regional GDP with aggregate data using the Geary and Stark method, to estimations with more detailed data. The paper is concluded by providing the first results on the evolution of regional disparities in Sweden during the 20th century.

When the Treaties of Rome were signed (1957), the few regional policy measures introduced were meagre and rudimentary, not very well coordinated and followed vague objectives. The Italian delegation played an important part in calling constant attention to the importance of fighting economic disparities between poor and rich regions and considered as its own special victory the establishment of the European Social Fund and the European Investment Bank. Nonetheless, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that results fell short of expectations and regional policy continued to be a national problem until the middle of the 1980s when finally convergence became an end to be met with proper EC financial assistance.
The paper will trace the evolution of the European Community regional policy from the very beginning to the end of the 1990s, evaluating the instruments introduced and assessing the impact of EC regional policy on the weakest member regions.

This paper presents value added estimates for the Italian regions, in benchmark years from 1891 until 1951, which are linked to those from official figures available from 1971 in order to offer a long-term picture. Regional activity rates and productivity are also discussed and compared. Thus some questions are briefly reconsidered: the positioning of Italy in the inter-national debate on regional convergence, where it stands out for the long run persistence of its disparities, the origins and extent of the north-south divide, the role of migration, regional policy, and social capital in shaping the pattern of regional inequality.

The Southeast of Brazil has an income level that approaches a mid level OECD country while the Northeast has an income comparable to Sub Saharan Africa. How did this happen? We know that it developed during the XIX century, as before that the Northeast, the first large sugar export region in the colony, responsible for up to 80% of world sugar production by the end of the XVI century, was the richest region. We postulate that the emergence of the income gap is even more localized in time and can be traced to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the massive inflow of slaves that followed.

According to O’Rourke, 2006, the years from 1793 to 1815 saw an unusually bloody, lengthy and widespread conflict between Great Britain and France, which widened to include many of the other leading powers of the day. The objective of this project is to offer a quantitative assessment of the economic impact of the conflict in a very specific region, the Port of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The reason for such a choice is that this region, due to data availability, offers a unique opportunity to test not only the direct effects of the conflict on relative prices, as O’Rourke 2006 has done, with some detail for the USA, France and Britain, but also to test the influence of slavery on economic development as this region during the conflict became the largest slave port in the world. Shortly afterwards, with the port as the capital of the Portuguese empire due to the flight of the Portuguese Royal Family following Napoleon’s invasion of Iberia in 1807, Rio de Janeiro (and the Brazilian southeast in general) turned into the most dynamic region in Brazil, opening an income gap between it and the old Northeast sugar export zones that lasts to this day.

Given the data at hand we will also discuss a local version of the famous Eric William’s thesis from Capitalism and Slavery, where he asserts that the slave trade was fundamental to the launch of the British Industrial Revolution. Although there is enough evidence now to reject this hypothesis for Britain, because the size of the slave trade was comparatively small to have mattered, the same is not true for Brazil. We claim that the slave trade allowed Brazil to become the largest coffee exporter in the world, by the end of the XIX century one of the early industrializers in Latin America and currently one the 10 largest economies in the world. So, contrary to O’Rourke, 2006, the Napoleonic Wars were not a disruptive event for this region, but one the defining moments in the economic history of Brazil.

This paper presents new estimates of Portuguese regional GDP from 1890 to 1950, when official data is already available. The estimations have been done following the methodology set by Geary and Stark (2002). The existence of this long term series will allow analysing some relevant aspects that are usually addressed in regional studies. First, it will be described the regional process of economic growth and the evolution of regional inequality. And finally, there will be presented the main plausible hypothesis that may explain the regional’ patterns of growth and inequality.

The regions of East-Central Europe have since long been characterized by both a significant economic lag compared to Western Europe and pronounced income differentials between them. This paper explores the impact of geography as one of the fundamental determinants of economic development. Drawing on a new comprehensive data set the paper, first, documents the level and growth in per capita incomes across the 22 major regions of the former Habsburg Empire which encompassed much of East-Central Europe. The regional income differences are shown to have been far larger than the historiography has recognized so far and there is little, if any, evidence of intra-empire catching-up of the poor with the rich between 1870 and 1910. In a second step, regions’ market access has been estimated as a Harris-type market potential function, involving all Habsburg regions’ GDP, foreign countries’ GDP and fully time-varying measures of transport cost. Finally, and employing panel data analysis, the paper provides historical evidence that the geography of access to both domestic and foreign markets is statistically significant and quantitatively important in accounting for the large variation in regional per capita incomes. This finding is robust to instrumenting the market access measure and to controlling for regional natural resource endowments and institutional characteristics. Better access to markets did imply higher GDP per capita.

JEL classification: N13, N73, N93, R12
Keywords: regional income, economic growth, economic geography, pre-1913 period, Central and Eastern Europe

Panel: The Political Economy and Geography of British and Indigenous Land Tenures


The lands north of the plantation regions of the British New World were not encumbered by the complex system of old English tenures and convoluted conveyances. Following on a Royal Proclamation (1763), the British Crown recognized an Indigenous interest in lands and this was referred to as Indian Title. This property interest could only be surrendered to the Crown thorough what became know as a treaty process. Still, real problems associated with surveying and granting titles existed for colonial and later American officials. Often colonial administrators were faced with a basic decision: should land be sold or should it be granted? Fundamentally, the state had to work out policies that would promote the settlement of lands, cover the costs of surveying and maintaining a system of grants and registration. One outcome of the devising of New World tenures was a grant in land referred to as a “bounty,” and Métis scrip had its origins in this type of grant. Bounty lands were prone to fall into the control of speculators. Métis Land Scrip was a grant from the Canadian government, generally for 240 acres of Homestead Lands, designed to extinguish the Indian title of a category of Aboriginal people referred to as “haflbreeds” or Métis. As it turned out, theses grants neither afforded the protection of a land interest as that provided by Indian Reserves and treaties rights nor the security of their fee simple property interests. These paper grants facilitated a circumvention of Homestead Land regulations for settlers thereby permitting speculators in Métis scrip coupons to expand the market for land. Senior officials were aware that the conveying of Métis land scrip interests was fraught with forgery and fraud, and as in other instances in which the collective title of Indigenous people has been individualized and commercialized, the market displaces the law.

When examining property rights and tenure in a historical context, one often assumes that the legal framework is the guiding determinant in defining and describing ownership and access. In reality, other socioeconomic factors are just as or more important in shaping policy and human behaviour regarding land use. The British governance of indigenous lands and processes of colonization demonstrates the reactive nature of legislation to the changing economic relationships with indigenous peoples. In 1837 the Select Committee Report on Aborigines proposed the uniform regulation of all lands within the colonies and treatment of the Indigenous peoples residing therein. While this committee report originated out of the interest of humanitarian principles and moral concerns it also outlined the goals of colonization for the empire and the regulation of lands for economic gain. Specifically it recommended that the ‘Protection of Natives’ devolve on the executive , the purchase, granting, or transfer of title/tenure within the empire should be strictly regulated by the Crown and that the Crown should not support or condone the purchase of lands by British citizens of lands outside the Queen’s Dominion. Overall this report concluded that the overexploitation of indigenous peoples would hinder the economic expansion of the empire. Although advised to establish a uniform policy for dealing with its colonies Britain did not and could not govern accordingly.
The comparative history and changes of land tenure in the British colonies existing in Fiji, New Zealand and Canada’s subarctic reveals the adaptability of British law to existing indigenous tenures and changing economic conditions. Market factors such as the demand for and availability of commodities shaped the tenure of indigenous groups and determined their relationships with traders, land companies, and settlers. The traditional indigenous tenure of ‘Natives’ and how the British perceived those structures also influenced how local colonial governments governed. While land alienation ultimately occurred in all three case studies differences exist; in their transition from trade to the commoditization of land, the reaction of indigenous tenures to both British law and capitalism, and the breadth of land dispossession. The land governance in the colonies of Canada, Fiji, and New Zealand did not strictly follow the recommendations of the 1837 Select Committee on Aborigines arguably because of the variability in history, the existing tenures of indigenous peoples and the changing role of the market.

This paper seeks to provide an historical analysis of British colonial ideology and legal understanding of the Métis in the early nineteenth century. It will consider the impact British imperial attitudes towards aboriginal peoples had upon nineteenth century Canadian jurisprudence. More specifically, the paper offers a detailed analysis of not only the formal legal attitudes (Imperial and Canadian) that has applicability to the historical, and ongoing, experiences of the Métis-something that has been done to some degree-but also to situate those legal and constitutional decisions within a more precise consideration of the Anglo-Canadian legal culture that provided the impetus for, and the intellectual underpinning to subsequent legislative initiatives.
The legal history that I envisage is one that casts light upon the mental worlds and the legal culture of British and colonial policy-makers when they came to count, and usually discount, aboriginal and Métis rights and claims in what became western Canada. Some aspects of this imperial process will be familiar to specialists, but a re-evaluation of the colonial period, and the precise place of the Métis within that historical context, is necessary to remind ourselves, jurists and policy-makers that the genesis of Canadian and Métis legal experiences have indigenous, imperial and transatlantic (if not global) contexts.
The emergence of Canadian law, legal institutions, jurisdictions and legal culture was inextricably connected to the related processes of European and British imperial expansion, and of cross-cultural interaction between Anglo-European and indigenous American peoples. Yet, without the vestiges of state, the legal institutional apparatus or clearly defined structures of authority that delineated social relations and the social order in the ‘old world’, the fur traders, the Hudson’s Bay Company officials, later jurists and colonial governors faced the daunting task of re-inventing and imposing, as they were obliged to do, the legal framework of Britain in the ‘new world’. Quite simply, the British took with them their laws and they were expected not only to live by them, but also to provide them to the indigenous inhabitants of the lands (for example, Rupert’s Land) they named, claimed and appropriated as their own.

This paper examines a unique period and process in the British Colonial history. The colonization of New Zealand by the British in the mid 19th century, while influenced and informed by policies and experiences in other their colonies, was an ‘experiment’ in applying British law to Aboriginal societies. From the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, through the Native Lands Acts and Native Land Court of the 1860s, and throughout the continual revisions to the Native Lands Acts and Native policy of the late 19th century, the constantly changing interpretation of Maori land rights has left an aura of distrust and confusion about the Crown’s historical obligations to protect Maori land rights which persists today.

This paper examines Maori land rights in relation to how they were recognized by the British then incorporated and affirmed in Treaty in 1840 and colonial law during the mid 19th century. This paper will commence by outlining the rights and powers that the Maori were guaranteed in the Treaty of Waitangi, examining how Maori customary law and tenure contrasted British Common Law in relation to the concepts of occupation and use of land and resources. It will then examine the imposition of British Tenure on Maori customary tenure through the Native Lands Acts 1862 and 1865 and the actions of the Native Land Court. In closing, it will review the attempts of the Crown to limit further alienation of Maori lands through protective legislative measures instituted in the late 19th century, and in conclusion, comment on the ultimate effect of the Native Land Court on Maori society and the collective tribal estate.

This paper will explore the dynamics of trust building within the jewellery making district of Providence, Rhode Island

After an eight-month investigation in 1641, the Long Parliament declared that Soap Makers of Westminster (otherwise known as the ‘Westminster Company’) had held an illegal patent under Charles I. In the resulting decision, the principals were adjudged delinquents and ordered to make recompense to the sixteen soap boilers imprisoned in 1633. Those sixteen, and several others, had, in 1637, taken over the soap patent under the auspices of the ‘Company of the Soapmakers of London’. Despite the protestation of independent soap boilers and a suit at common law, no similar action was taken against the London Company for alleged abuse of their patent in turn. Meanwhile, the advent of the soap excise presented an opportunity for both the London Company and the independent soap boilers to lobby for the right to farm that branch of the revenue. Arguments of the merits of shifting the main part of the excise from the finished product of manufacture to the raw materials (thereby raising the relatively light excises on oils, tallow, and especially potashes) were deployed in an increasingly bitter commercial rivalry. Central to the anti-monopolist rhetoric were debates about how to foster public trust. But unlike the excise on liquors, the revenues from the soap excise were never sufficient to secure significant levels of public debt. By the mid-1650s, the soap excise had failed and was repealed at the Restoration. After examining the underlying economic realities of the soap industry, this paper ends by contrasting the Interregnum experience with direct taxation on soap with the far more successful soap excise of the eighteenth century.

This paper investigates the origins of boerenleenbanken, early twentieth-century cooperative microfinance institutions for farmers located in the Netherlands. It explores why these banks were established when they were and not earlier or later. It finds that the current consensus view is that the sector's origins are not solely economic, that the involvement of religious organisations was likely a necessary condition for their widespread proliferation. Using a newly constructed panel of bank-specific financial stability indicators for the entire population of boerenleenbanken combined with social data from the 1920 census, this paper tests the consensus view by measuring and then analysing their differential performance across the country. Despite some evidence of a relationship between illiquidity and religiosity, it concludes that it is difficult to isolate religion from the multitude of other region-specific factors that likely also lie behind the origins of the sector.

This paper is concerned with the institutional framework of the French West Indian trade in the late eighteenth century and the role of networks in promoting trust and credit in long-distance trade. Britain and France were the two trading largest nations in the eighteenth century and dominated commerce in the North Atlantic. Despite the success of both nations in transatlantic commerce, the Anglo-Saxon literature conveys a critical view of the French West Indian trade, and in particular of the institutions that shaped it. Stein (1979, 1988) attacked the structure of the firm, on the grounds that French firms were “archaic” because they were family-based, and unable to provide the necessary capital and resources for long-distance trade. More recently, Pearson and Richardson (2008) stressed by contrast the success of the British slave trade, which saw the development of more “depersonalized” commercial practices. The legal provisions in the French trade have also been deemed inadequate and inefficient, and criticized for favoring the debtor over the creditor and preventing merchants, who had advanced large sums to planters from recovering their funds (Price, 1991). Despite this, the macro-evidence suggests a dynamic trade between France and the West Indies. This paper examines the role of informal institutions and organizations such as commercial networks as a viable substitute for the imperfect rule of law. Networks are seen as the solution to the problem of exchange over long distances, because they generate trust and reduce transactions costs. Merchants faced with problems of information assymetry and moral hazard relied on networks forged by kinship ties, religious affinities or long-term personal connections to establish business relationships. This paper focuses in particular on the relationship between metropolitan merchants and the firms they employed as their agents in the West Indies, by focusing on the transatlantic organization of a firm based in Nantes in the late 1780s, the Chaurand.

The importance of merchant guilds for the commercial development of Europe is beyond doubt. However, there is still little agreement as to why they emerged, persisted and ultimately declined between the 11th and 18th centuries. Historical studies have focused on individual cases and idiosyncratic circumstances that restrict severely comparability, while economic approaches based on game or contract theory often impose narrow assumptions on their models which find it hard to deal with two key features of these institutions: in very imperfect markets merchants used more than one institution to solve a given problem while a given institution often addressed more than one problem. In this paper we suggest a new methodological approach that allows us to pursue a comparative analysis without loosing rigour. We assess a new dataset of 185 observations of merchant organisations from four towns 1300-1800 at 50 year intervals. Our model is based on only one assumption: merchants will only delegate control over their dealings if they can expect a positive return from the loss of control. On this basis, we classify our dataset into five ordinal categories of degrees of control delegation. Using maximum likelihood estimation we investigate the probability that merchants, under a given set of market and political circumstances, delegate control.

The importance of merchant guilds for the commercial development of Europe is beyond doubt. However, there is still little agreement as to why they emerged, persisted and ultimately declined between the 11th and 18th centuries. Historical studies have focused on individual cases and idiosyncratic circumstances that restrict severely comparability, while economic approaches based on game or contract theory often impose narrow assumptions on their models which find it hard to deal with two key features of these institutions: in very imperfect markets merchants used more than one institution to solve a given problem while a given institution often addressed more than one problem. In this paper we suggest a new methodological approach that allows us to pursue a comparative analysis without loosing rigour. We assess a new dataset of 185 observations of merchant organisations from four towns 1300-1800 at 50 year intervals. Our model is based on only one assumption: merchants will only delegate control over their dealings if they can expect a positive return from the loss of control. On this basis, we classify our dataset into five ordinal categories of degrees of control delegation. Using maximum likelihood estimation we investigate the probability that merchants, under a given set of market and political circumstances, delegate control.

Why did Indian merchants turn to the courts for dispute settlement of hundi transactions? How did traditional hundi transactions espouse trust, and in what way did these mechanisms of trust fail? Why did the courts provide a platform dealing with these disputes? This discussion examines the parameters of trust shaping how Indian merchants employed the indigenous South Asian credit institution hundi during the British colonial period. Legal cases shed light on how hundi contracts were formed, and provide evidence of customary sanctions, which were largely rooted in calculative forms of trust. These court cases also reveal the ways in which such contracts were breached, and the impact of litigation on the institution within the British Indian courts. In particular, it scrutinizes how custom-based and communal sanctions embedded in hundi transactions interacted with British Indian legislation. Litigiousness did affect the integrity of hundi contracts, and this paper analyzes how hundi assumed a distinctly formal character which created a new basis for mercantile transactions.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two firms, J.P. Morgan & Co. and Kuhn, Loeb & Co., dominated investment banking in the United States. Because the banks were formidable competitors, they were often named in reference to each other. Relative to their proximity in the history of American banking, however, very little has been written about their social relations. This paper is an analysis of the firms before the First World War when J.P. Morgan, Sr. and Jacob H. Schiff were the respective leading partners. J.P. Morgan, Sr. and Jacob H. Schiff were not friends, but they had ideological commonalities, which stemmed from their nineteenth-century historical traditions and shared circumstances. They ascribed to what has been called “The Gentleman Banker’s Code.” In other words, they believed that the pursuit of another bank’s clients was inefficient and in poor taste. When they were alive, alliances between the banks were also an accepted part of doing business, indicative of the general trend towards economic consolidation and cooperation before the First World War. Under their tenure, trust in business relations and firm cooperation was not predicated on affective ties or close social interaction. Morgan, Sr. and Schiff’s trust in each other was built on shared the economic and ideological ties of merchant banking networks from the nineteenth century. These networks developed in a particular historical space where there was little government regulation, a lack of centralized banking, and a subordinate American position to Europe in global banking. During the early twentieth century, these conditions began to change, as did the makeup of their financial networks and the firms themselves. Within this context, the lack of shared ties between the senior partners and the firms outside of merchant banking networks would have important consequences. While the general outlines of the firms’ economic relations during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may be familiar, the details of their social ties have not been fully explored. This paper studies the firms’ relations within the context of the larger economic and social elite in New York City before the First World War.

The paper gives an overview of different aspects of the development of the world's first stock exchange in the first century of its existence.
The impressive growth of the secondary market indicates that the traders managed to overcome the problem of ambiguity in this very risky trade where huge sums of money were at stake. The paper shows that the presence of dealers on the market and the introduction of very efficient monthly clearing meetings significantly improved the functioning of the market. Where dealers stood in-between traders, thus taking up the risk involved in share transactions and making it unnecessary for infrequent traders to check the reputation of other traders, the settlement meetings enabled its participants to monitor the behaviour of the other participants, thus reducing the hassle of checking a counterparty's trustworthiness.

Late medieval and early modern business relations were based largely on personal connections and personal knowledge. Reputation—social capital, more generally—played a substantial part in regulating the distribution of human, material and financial resources. Bankruptcy ruined the businessperson’s credibility and credit-worthiness—in the parlance of that time, the “trust and faith” (Trauen und Glauben) of his and his family’s name. It was no small matter, when one’s reputation was the best guarantor of economic security, stability and success. Thus, the question is worth asking, under what circumstances the Trauen und Glauben of an early modern merchant-financier might be lost or regained and whether such considerations ceased to matter.

This paper takes up a number of bankruptcies in early modern Augsburg to consider the function of trust in business relations and bankruptcy resolutions. It attempts to chart the circumstances under which it could be lost and regained. It considers its role in the dynamic between communal and individual responsibility and the degree to which it was modified or replaced by the development of economic and legal institutions.

This paper revisits the claim that for establishment of trust among traders in early ‎modern times, it was vital that there be relationships of kinship or close-knit networks ‎based on ethnicity or religion. My case study, based on the portfolios of agents held ‎by Portuguese Jewish merchants in Amsterdam and New Christian (converso) ‎merchants in the city of Oporto and Brazil between the years 1595 and 1618, casts ‎doubt on such argument.‎
It is often assumed that existing trade conditions required merchants to choose ‎their agents from within one’s family or close-knit networks comprised of fellow ‎coreligionists and countrymen to be assured that they were honest and trustworthy. ‎For example, the sugar trade of the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam and the New ‎Christians in Portugal and Brazil is often presented as emblematic of such ‎organizational practices.
‎ At closer scrutiny, however, it emerges that most of their business ‎relationships came from outside their family (strictly speaking) and many from ‎outside their group because maintaining multiple associations simultaneously with ‎people of different backgrounds in the same foreign port offered the following ‎advantages: it mitigated various business risks, increased profits, enhanced the quality ‎of information, served to monitor more effectively other associates trading in the ‎same places. ‎
‎ This case study has been constructed by bringing together disparate data ‎gathered from various sources during two years of doctoral dissertation research ‎conducted mainly in Portuguese, but also in Dutch, archives. It sheds light on ‎evolving mechanisms of trust that enabled early modern international private trade to ‎mitigate the principal-agent problem and to promote economic development on a ‎global scale.‎

This paper has emerged from research carried out for an Australian Research Council project about the mining communities of Leonora and Gwalia in the outback area of Western Australia. In an area where mining was the predominant occupation for men and where migrants from Italy and Dalmatia formed a large proportion of the population, to what extent did women engage in economic activity and save money? The records of the Commonwealth bank and the oral histories of eighty five people that we have now collected and archived give us some circumstantial evidence about women and family life in these remote towns. Historians have been able to chart the development of a ‘savings culture’ among ordinary European people in the eighteenth and particularly in the nineteenth century. To what extent was this savings culture apparent when Europeans were transplanted to the desert? To what extent was their economic activity informal or formal? The paper will suggest links to the social mobility of the succeeding generations of those who lived and worked in these towns.

Although a significant proportion of early modern widows whose husbands had been merchants or artisans found ways to carry on the family business themselves until their sons were old enough to assume control of the enterprise or the workshop, most did not. Sale or abandonment of their husbands’ business did not mean, however, that the widows who chose this route were not financially savvy and prepared and willing to take charge of assets from the company, or at least that portion that fell under their disposition. Especially those women, by no means the minority, who obtained at least partial control of the estates and tutelage of their children were in fact aggressive in putting that money to work to build their children’s futures. Using notary documents, in this paper I will examine the investment strategies of French widows, primarily from Normandy. These women obtained control of significant funds upon the deaths of their husbands, and I will demonstrate that they invested those funds very similarly to their deceased husbands, placing some of the money in commercial ventures such as fishing voyages to the New World or maritime insurance underwriting. But like their husbands, these women fixed their vision of the future mostly on the upward social mobility of their sons, and used most of the funds to purchase a wide variety of public and private rentes, urban and especially rural real estate and, when possible, offices for their sons. They thus shared the general conception of the ideal trajectory for a family lineage in France, one in which commercial profits were not plowed back into commerce but rather were used to lift the family line out of commerce.

This paper explores whether or not women landowners in early-modern England can justifiably be called financial managers. It is based on research conducted mainly on women landowners in the northern county of Yorkshire. It examines women’s qualifications for the task of managing land, forming several conclusions about the impact of life stage, marital status, individual personality and circumstance on women’s willingness and capacity for land management. It also examines the degree to which women landowners relied upon male kin members and professional land managers to run their estates. It concludes that, to some extent, women’s active land management depended on the size of the estate and whether or not they, themselves, were resident on the estate. The sample of women studied is very large, and the estates owned or held by lease and fee fine ranged from less than half an acre to 10,000 acres. High levels of active financial management have been found in those women for whom farming was their lifestyle, whereas the women landowners with larger estates were more inclined to employ others as stewards, sometimes out of necessity when landholdings were widely spread. However, the hands-off approach was far from being the dominant model and the paper will illustrate this with several case studies. In some cases, women landowners managed a mixed portfolio of land with capital investment in stocks and shares, lending (including mortgages) and capital ventures such as mining and, again, this will be illustrated with reference to individual case studies. One finding is that even those women who did not act as financial managers, nevertheless had a very keen sense of the value of their landed estate and sometimes ordered the use of their land to maximise their financial benefit. This was not always the case amongst women for whom landed estate management was tied up with their sense of duty to family and a desire to pass lands on in ways that retained its connection with a family name.

Political change and the new liberal legislation of mid-19th century Spain gave rise to a modern financial system. This system grew parallel to the former financial institutions and to the informal practices to obtain credit and investment characteristic of the ancien régime. Barcelona was the industrial (fundamentally textile) and commercial city of 19th-century Spain par excellence and in the middle of the eighteen hundreds it became equipped with a network of credit, saving and investment institutions.

This paper will present, for mid-19th century Barcelona, an analysis from a gender perspective of the city’s financial and microfinance institutions (Banks, Savings Banks, Montes de Piedad and Montepíos). First we will analyze the participation of women as shareholders and clients of the Banco de Barcelona and their specific attitudes to investment, risk and saving. The results, which in principle indicate a low representation of women in the main banks (they represent only 5.2% of shareholders with 3% of the subscribed capital and they do not appear in the category of clients with the greatest credit capacity), will be contrasted with the literature existing on this subject ( J.BASKIN & P.MIRANTI, 1997; D.GREEN & A.OWENS, 2003; J.MALTBY & J.RUTTERFORD, 2006; L.NEWTON & Ph.COTTRELL, 2006; J. REIIS, 2008; A. LAURENCE, 2009).

We will then analyze the participation of women as savers and borrowers in three institutions which make up the periphery of the financial system in the Barcelona of the eighteen hundreds: the Caja de Ahorros de Barcelona, the Monte de Piedad de Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza and the Montepío Barcelonés. The results will allow us to observe the preferences and attitudes of women from the lower strata of society in relation to saving and to obtaining credit. We will also explore the response of women to the appearance of microfinance institutions for poor families, day labourers and artisans, and the extension of the use of these institutions and how they spread around the city. Finally, the sources will allow us to observe that the appearance of banks for the poor reduced the barriers of access to credit by women, generating the essential trust and the necessary learning to generalize their use. A good example of this is that in the mid-19th century, women represented 73% of the clients of the Monte de Piedad de NSE, only 33% of those of the Montepío, while in the Caja de Ahorros de Barcelona 50% of savers were women. The results will be contrasted with the literature existing on this subject (S.L. HOLT, 1991; A.HOLLIS, 1998; M.G.MOZARELLI, 2001; AVALLONE, 2001, 2007; M.FERRIERE, 2004; L. FONTAINE, 2001; D.M.ROSS, 2005).

In short, given the absence in Spanish historiography of studies on women and finance, this paper is the first time the financial strategies of women from different socio-economic groups have been presented, showing how they adapted to the new legislation of the eighteen hundreds and to the new institutional framework, in an industrial city such as Barcelona in the mid-19th century. In this context women participated actively in the financial system as borrowers and lenders, but their representation was significantly higher on the periphery of this financial system.

The end of the seventeenth century saw the dramatic expansion of financial markets both private and public. Although predating the changes of the 1690s, the stock market flourished, helped by the rise of the financial press. Shares were used as a source of income through dividends, as a source of capital gains or losses, and as security for other financial transactions. Two parallel and sometimes contradictory stories emerge in the descriptions from these early decades of the age of financial capitalism. The first tells of a shift from using more personal to more impersonal services where a person was less tied to his or her range of family and kin connections. The second tells of a fractured society where alliance politically affects behaviour economically. Thus the Bank of England is often described as a Whig institution and the South Sea Company Tory. The implication is thus that one’s political affiliation determines one’s share activity. This paper explores the extent to which those who purchased or sold shares in one company were also active in other companies. Using share transfer data from the Bank of England, the East India Company, Royal Africa Company and the South Sea Annuities we examine portfolio holdings of those active in the stock market before, during and immediately after the South Sea Bubble. Given the nature of the data, we are in a position to determine how many unique individuals were involved in each of these companies and how many of these individuals owned shares in more than one company. The data also allows us to determine whether cross company portfolios were a function of wealth, activity in the market. or gender. The results of this study will be a careful enumeration of market activity by a broad cross section of people. It will further our understanding of how and when the shift from a world of personal to impersonal finance occurred.

Bessie Parkes was frustrated by the lack of economic power of women in the mid nineteenth century. In her book, Essays on Woman’s Work published in England in 1865 she wanted fathers to settle more money on their daughters and teach them how to make their capital work for them. She was unaware that within the maritime industry women did just that by investing in the local shipping industry and buying and selling shares. They were active in ship management and held portfolios of shares across several ships.

In Britain, all share transactions had to be registered with the local customs office in each port and the shipping registers record the movement of shares over the lifetime of the ship as they were bought and sold, bequeathed and mortgaged. While the registers do not provide financial data as found in records relating to companies, they do show the actions of the shipping investors as their, and the ships’, fortunes and circumstances changed. This paper will consider the strategies of some of these women in relation to their shareholding and compare their actions with male shareholders.

Maybe even more than in other areas of the history of women’s work, the ‘separate spheres’ ideology has left its mark on research into the high-profile commercial activities of women. According to this concept, at the end of the eighteenth century a culture of domesticity arose that confined women to the private sphere of the home, while the public sphere became the domain of men. Because historians generally acknowledge that early modern business was even more risky than its present-day counterpart, perhaps it is assumed that female activity in the early modern business world was even scarcer than today and that in general women were not voluntarily involved in these enterprises.
Moreover, unlike women from the lower classes that performed wage labour or ran small businesses out of sheer economic need, the hypothesis is that in the higher echelons of society, women would have been able to follow the ideal of the domesticity cult and withdraw from economic life because they had plenty of financial reserves.
Nevertheless, these assumptions do not seem to mirror the actual situation in early modern Holland. Women do indeed appear in many sources related to large-scale businesses and high-profile financial activities.
It is the aim of this paper to come to a better understanding of the role of women in early modern finance. This paper will focus on the financial activities of male and female account holders in the Amsterdam Wisselbank, a principal financial institution in the Dutch Republic. It will specifically address the question to what extent gender norms affected the behaviour of men and women in high-profile financial activities and how gender norms were in turn affected by economic trends.
Based on the account books of the Wisselbank, data on financial activities of accountholders has been gathered for two centuries (1600-1800). This is complemented by data from notary archives and from tax registers which makes it possible to assess not only the size of the account holders’ financial activities, but also the character of their economic activities as well as their overall wealth.

The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, it attempts to provide, for the first time, a survey of the construction of estimates of the quantity of money in Greece since the inception of the National Bank of Greece in 1842 until the eve of WWII. Second, it studies the composition of money supply and examines its long run behaviour. Fortunately, the compilation of long time series for the money stock and its main components gives us the opportunity to carry out this task.
Specifically, we describe in detail the methods of construction and the sources of data used in building these aggregates. We discuss the data collection procedure and publication practices. The end product is presented in a data appendix.
Concerning the quantity of money, the trend behaviour of its main determinants (i.e. the monetary base, the currency-deposit ratio and the reserve-deposit ratio) was studied. Two metrics of the public confidence in the banking system, namely the money multiplier and the income velocity of money were also assessed. It was found that the money supply changes closely followed the changes in the monetary base, while money multiplier which reflects the behaviour of the people and the banks, had a minimum impact. This finding, close in accordance with similar findings for other less developed European countries, demonstrates that money creation primarily determined the money stock. It was also found that during the periods of currency convertibility, public confidence in the domestic banking system was promoted, as measured by money multiplier and velocity.

In late 1922, Gosbank, the Russian state bank began to issue a new paper currency, the chervonets. It was intended to circulate alongside the rapidly depreciating treasury ruble (sovznak). The chervonets was vaguely backed by gold, and was far more stable than the sovznak. Its purpose was to provide credit for state enterprises, while the sovznak was retained to provide a continuing source of seigniorage. During the dual currency period, 1922-24, the economy recovered from the depths descended during War Communism, and recovery was probably facilitated by the scheme. It therefore provided a model for stabilization, which, because of its Soviet origins, was attractive to left-leaning financial administrators.
In this light, we look at the role played by the chervonets experiment in the stabilization of the dinar in Yugoslavia associated with Dragoslav Avramović in January 1994. Avramović thought a chervonets based stabilization would enable him to economize on hard currency backing for the dinar, since the IMF and World Bank refused to assist, because of UN mandatory sanctions. Avramović built key elements of the chervonets experiment into his stabilization. His “new dinar” (i.e. the Yugoslav chervonets) circulated alongside the “old” dinar (i.e. the sovznak equivalent) for several months, but as the old dinar was de-facto locked to the new, it could not therefore provide an independent source of seigniorage. I will argue that he did not understand how the chervonets scheme had actually worked. This may have been because of his fear of being accused of “monetarism”. The partial failure of his stabilization resulted from his misunderstanding of the stabilization mechanism, and his subservience to the Milošević garnitura.

The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, it attempts to provide, for the first time, a survey of the construction of estimates of the quantity of money in Greece since the inception of the National Bank of Greece in 1842 until the eve of WWII. Second, it studies the composition of money supply and examines its long run behaviour. Fortunately, the compilation of long time series for the money stock and its main components gives us the opportunity to carry out this task.
Specifically, we describe in detail the methods of construction and the sources of data used in building these aggregates. We discuss the data collection procedure and publication practices. The end product is presented in a data appendix.
Concerning the quantity of money, the trend behaviour of its main determinants (i.e. the monetary base, the currency-deposit ratio and the reserve-deposit ratio) was studied. Two metrics of the public confidence in the banking system, namely the money multiplier and the income velocity of money were also assessed. It was found that the money supply changes closely followed the changes in the monetary base, while money multiplier which reflects the behaviour of the people and the banks, had a minimum impact. This finding, close in accordance with similar findings for other less developed European countries, demonstrates that money creation primarily determined the money stock. It was also found that during the periods of currency convertibility, public confidence in the domestic banking system was promoted, as measured by money multiplier and velocity.

In late 1922, Gosbank, the Russian state bank began to issue a new paper currency, the chervonets. It was intended to circulate alongside the rapidly depreciating treasury ruble (sovznak). The chervonets was vaguely backed by gold, and was far more stable than the sovznak. Its purpose was to provide credit for state enterprises, while the sovznak was retained to provide a continuing source of seigniorage. During the dual currency period, 1922-24, the economy recovered from the depths descended during War Communism, and recovery was probably facilitated by the scheme. It therefore provided a model for stabilization, which, because of its Soviet origins, was attractive to left-leaning financial administrators.
In this light, we look at the role played by the chervonets experiment in the stabilization of the dinar in Yugoslavia associated with Dragoslav Avramović in January 1994. Avramović thought a chervonets based stabilization would enable him to economize on hard currency backing for the dinar, since the IMF and World Bank refused to assist, because of UN mandatory sanctions. Avramović built key elements of the chervonets experiment into his stabilization. His “new dinar” (i.e. the Yugoslav chervonets) circulated alongside the “old” dinar (i.e. the sovznak equivalent) for several months, but as the old dinar was de-facto locked to the new, it could not therefore provide an independent source of seigniorage. I will argue that he did not understand how the chervonets scheme had actually worked. This may have been because of his fear of being accused of “monetarism”. The partial failure of his stabilization resulted from his misunderstanding of the stabilization mechanism, and his subservience to the Milošević garnitura.

The paper reveals the fact that economic development of Yugoslavia in the interwar period depended heavily on financial capital that reached industrial firms with the intermediation of the affiliations of foreign European banks. The analysis is based on archival materials of Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Commerce and Industry of The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as well as on documentation from National Bank of Yugoslavia.
The first part of the paper will analyze the economic and financial situation in new state immediately after the First World War and the fate of foreign banks and their branch offices. Special attention will be paid to the new legal act passed in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia which referred both to the modes of establishing and functioning of foreign financial institutions as well as to the degree of control state had over them.
The second part of the paper will analyze the functioning of affiliates and branch offices of foreign financial institutions before the Great Depression in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, that is to say before 1931. Special attention will be paid to the establishment of international banking consortia established to finance industrial firms in Yugoslavia. The very fact that these consortia existed indicated which segments of Yugoslav economy were of particular interest to foreign investors. The analysis will also point to the links that existed between foreign financial representatives and domestic political elite.
The third part of the paper will focus on the analysis of economic situation in Yugoslavia after the financial crisis caused by the Great Depression. The role that National Bank of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia played in surmounting the crisis will also indicate to the methods the Bank used in an attempt to gain control over foreign capital in Yugoslavia up to the beginning of the Second World War.

MONEY AND ECONOMIC DE/STABILIZATION IN BULGARIA: A VIEW FROM THE COMMUNIST FILES

Roumen Avramov
Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia

(Abstract)

The “monetary policy” tools and two episodes of macroeconomic stabilization during the communist regime in Bulgaria are explored. The study draws from the declassified archives of the Bulgarian National Bank which shed light on the procedures adopted and on the conceptual/ideological barriers faced by the decision-makers.
The paper deals with the monobank’s mechanics, whose essential aspects are the automatic credit extended by the monetary authority in line with the imperatives of the plan, and the simplistic rules applied to match the supply and demand of narrow money. The futility of the attempts to handle excessive credit is displayed. Cash was supposed to be strictly controlled by double-checking the output of consumer goods and households’ incomes but files portray unrestrained revenues, unsatisfied consumer demand, mushrooming pockets of “grey economy” and a growing scale of forced savings.
Stabilization strategies applied during two severe debt crises are surveyed. While after 1958 the current account deficits were financed by the London and Paris-based Soviet banks (subsidiaries of Gosbank), in 1962 and 1964 the country had to arrange its debt arrears. Archives meticulously document the shuttles of the negotiators, reconstruct the tactics of both sides and reveal the (long kept “top secret”) “final solution” with the selling of the country’s gold reserves. Documents about policies adopted during the debt crisis of the late 1980s disclose the debates inside the governing circles and the views of the technocrats. The leadership was informed in details about all kind of distortions, but completely ill-equipped and unqualified to understand and to solve the problems: the debacle of the communist regime was the outcome not only of its built-in biases, but of its intellectual shortfall as well.
In concluding, the paper reviews alternative ideas on stabilization formulated by the most critically-minded economists of the same period. The confrontation of the competing pre-1989 visions outlines a facet of the intellectual potential available at the start of the Transition to a market economy. Despite the strong critical impetus, however, nobody was really prepared to conceptualize the actual economic, social and political upheaval that was to be generated by the move from overriding state ownership to private property.

This article is a summary of the author’s recently published book “Banking in Central and Eastern Europe 1980-2006” and provides an overview of the history of banking transition from communism to capitalism in 14 Central and Eastern European countries (the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan). The essential functions of credit institutions in the former socialist economic system (monitoring and facilitation of plan fulfillment) are explained. The comprehensive collapse of the former system triggered a sustained weakening of the state structure. In most countries, the 1990s were a decade of major banking upheavals, turmoil and reform. The turn of the millennium featured sector consolidation, or it has been a culminating point of restructuring efforts. The first years of the new millennium have generally featured calmer, stronger and more open banking sectors than the 1990s. Two “banking reform waves” are distinguished, salient features of which all countries (need to) run through in order to mature. The first reform wave includes extensive liberalization measures and initial limited restructuring and tightening efforts. The macroeconomic situation temporarily stabilizes. But underlying distorted incentives favor the renewed accumulation of bad loans and set the stage for new banking crises. Only the second reform wave ushers in hard budget constraints, in-depth privatization and “real” owners (which are mostly – but not exclusively - foreign direct investors). Banking regulation and supervision improve substantially. Western European FDI has come to dominate banking in all former socialist countries that have either already become members of the EU or are candidates or have been given an official “perspective” to (eventually) join the Union. Recen-tly, dynamic catching-up processes have gathered momentum in many countries. Against the back-ground of strong economic recovery and expansion, credit booms have unfolded, not without considerable risks.

The inter-war economic crisis has strongly marked the entire Romania’s economic system leading to the disappearance of some of the credit institutions, deeply transforming the management of the others, as well as the relationships between the credit system, the state authority, the National Bank of Romania, customers etc.
To point out all these transformations, in the introduction to our study, we have outlined the features of the Romanian banking system during the first inter-war decade including the laws governing its activity.
After that, we have examined the most important effects of the crisis on the Romanian credit system: the withdrawal of foreign capital, the liquidity crisis and the weakness of agricultural debtors. In this context, we have analyzed the evolution of some of the biggest Romanian banks of that epoch: Banca Marmorosch Blank, Banca Chrissoveloni, Banca Românească etc. and their reaction to the crisis manifestations. An important role was assigned to the National Bank of Romania and to its support of the Romanian credit system, through the channel of the discount, and other instruments.
In place of a conclusion, we have taken the liberty of showing that beyond the immediate reactions, the state and the central bank have responded to the crises effects by a series of legal regulations taking into consideration a more careful supervision of the credit institutions activity, also by establishing the Higher Banking Council.

The objective of this paper is to study the fiscal influence over money creation, and hence on inflation in Bulgaria since its liberation from the Ottoman Empire until present. Our analysis follows the historical development of money in circulation taking into account all institutional and legal aspects of the relationship between the Bulgarian fiscal and monetary authorities in a market economy. An integral part of the historical analysis is the descriptive evidence of archival documents and critical literature from the respective times. The study incorporates money growth accounting and balance-sheet analysis looking for different channels of government financing. Applying econometric techniques, we will make an attempt to generate an estimate of the fiscal impact on the monetary base, and therefore on inflation.
Studying the interaction between fiscal and monetary policies in a long-term horizon will allow us to check whether the fiscal impact on money creation differed under different monetary regimes and specific political and economic circumstances. For the purpose of a cross-time comparison, we will provide an evidence of the recently lived fiscal dominance in Bulgaria at the beginning of its transition in the 90’s which ended up with hyperinflation.

The paper reveals the fact that economic development of Yugoslavia in the interwar period depended heavily on financial capital that reached industrial firms with the intermediation of the affiliations of foreign European banks. The analysis is based on archival materials of Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Commerce and Industry of The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as well as on documentation from National Bank of Yugoslavia.
The first part of the paper will analyze the economic and financial situation in new state immediately after the First World War and the fate of foreign banks and their branch offices. Special attention will be paid to the new legal act passed in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia which referred both to the modes of establishing and functioning of foreign financial institutions as well as to the degree of control state had over them.
The second part of the paper will analyze the functioning of affiliates and branch offices of foreign financial institutions before the Great Depression in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, that is to say before 1931. Special attention will be paid to the establishment of international banking consortia established to finance industrial firms in Yugoslavia. The very fact that these consortia existed indicated which segments of Yugoslav economy were of particular interest to foreign investors. The analysis will also point to the links that existed between foreign financial representatives and domestic political elite.
The third part of the paper will focus on the analysis of economic situation in Yugoslavia after the financial crisis caused by the Great Depression. The role that National Bank of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia played in surmounting the crisis will also indicate to the methods the Bank used in an attempt to gain control over foreign capital in Yugoslavia up to the beginning of the Second World War.

This paper constructs business cycle indices for the South-East European (SEE)
countries from 1899 to 1989 in order to address two questions: to what extent has
there been a common SEE business cycle, and to what extent has there been
synchronisation of business cycles with England, France and Germany? We first
explain why a construction of business cycle indices based on Common Dynamic
Factor Analysis (CDFA) is preferable to one based on historical national accounts. In
our estimations, we then find that business cycle integration, both within SEE and visà-
vis the core economies, did not occur pre-World War I but did happen in the
interwar period. Business cycle integration continued during the Cold War period
even though the SEE countries found themselves on opposite sides of the iron curtain.

How do financial systems affect economic growth? How effective were international financial flows in promoting economic development in Southeast Europe in the Interwar Period? A large literature argues that financial systems evaluate prospective entrepreneurs, mobilize savings to finance the most promising productivity-enhancing activities, diversify the risks associated with these innovative activities and reveal the expected profits from engaging in innovation rather than the production of existing goods using existing methods. Important part of the theoretical literature also argues that foreign capital, in contrast to other available sources of funding – like domestic financial sector and state capital - is more effective in monitoring performance, in promoting better corporate governance, promoting technological improvements and ensuring access to export markets for developed and large scale enterprises - but less effective in alleviating asymmetric information problems and ensuring access to funds to small and medium sized enterprises. Recent advances in economic theory have emphasized the indirect benefits of foreign investment, like technological spillovers, which have long term effects for the structure and growth of a host economy. This paper presents a new dataset of firm level productivity, capital structure and corporate governance amongst Bulgarian joint-stock companies and banks during the Interwar Period. This allows us to test some of the theories above, for instance the pecking order of financial sources for firm activity and in particular the spillover effects of foreign investment presence. Broader conclusions involve the efficiency of sources of finance for a country in the process of industrialization as well as a bottom-up reconstruction of the industrial sector with firm level data.

The Rise and Growth of the Serbian Banking until World War I

Development of the 19th century Serbian banking was a gradual process that underwent two stages with the turning point in 1878 when Serbia became an independent state. During the first stage, political, economic and institutional preconditions for the rise of banking were unfolding and finally led to the creation of the first banks. The authorities of the vassal Principality of Serbia played the key role in organizing the first credit facilities. Thus Serbian banking rose as a result of both state-backed and growth-induced processes. At the end of the first stage, there were two types of banks: state banks and privately-owned banks. During the second stage, decisive programme of development and modernization resulted in the mushroom growth of banks. Apart from the PNBKS, as a bank of note issue, there were state mortgage banks, privately-owned banks mostly in the form of join-stock companies and farm cooperative societies. Majority of joint-stock banks were small, unit banks of the universal type. Analyses showed that creation of the PNBKS and growth of banks contributed to the decline of the lending rates of the banks (up to 12%), but market interest rates remained high and soared to usurious levels (100%). Farmers were especially beset by usury. From 1894 they started to create farm cooperative societies as institutions that, better than banks, met their credit needs. It could be concluded that Serbian banks more served the development of trade and industry than the interest of the main economic agents of the country – farmers (85% of population before the World War I). Lastly, paper examined some aspects of the relations between PNBKS and other banks. The analyses suggested that these relations were transforming into a national banking system with the PNBKS assuming gradually the traditional functions of the central bank. The absence of the legal regulation (such as fractional reserve system or similar regulations) and the obligation to maintain cover of 40% hampered the PNBKS in controlling efficiently banks lending and in performing fully the role of the “lender of the last resort”.

One of the main characteristics of the classical gold standard era was the high level of financial integration. Continuous capital flows -in the form of sovereign debt- from core countries to the peripheries led to accumulated debts in a very short period of time. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, peripheral countries faced with difficulties to meet the interest and capital payments of their debt. Under these conditions, most heavily indebted borrowers faced with moratoria, and creditors adopted different kind of sanctions to deal with them. One of the sanctions imposed to debtor countries was to establish international financial control organisations (IFCs), which were to be administered by the representatives of the creditors. IFCs, which were founded in the peripheral countries one after the other, were assigned with the task of administring and collecting specific tax revenues. Moreover, in some cases they implemented monetary and fiscal reforms in the debtor countries. This paper, by relying on the Ottoman and Greek cases, discusses the role of IFCs around the controversial question of «what guided investor decisions during the classical gold standard era». After presenting the process which ended up with the foundation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration and the International Committee for Greek Debt Management, the paper discusses the role of these organisations in determining the sovereign risk. By relying on the revisionist gold standard literature and primary historical data, the paper concludes that international financial control exercised by the representatives of the creditors on the Ottoman and Greek finances was an important determinant of the cost of borrowing / sovereign risk which was neglected by the gold standard literature.

The paper reviews the existing literature on Hungarian economic growth between the communist takeover in 1949 and the launching of the New Economic Mechanism in 1968. Mainstream Marxist economists at the time and historical accounts thereafter were in accord over the notion that socialist industrialisation was initially capable of generating extraordinary rates of economic growth through labour and capital expansion, but failed to improve efficiency once factor accumulation began to run into diminishing returns. Based on data derived from independent western estimates, I challenge this view and argue that the growth of national income and industrial production was driven by the dynamics of post-war reconstruction until the end of the pre-reform period. Consequently, the gradual slowdown observable from the mid 1960s onwards was inevitable and should not be interpreted as the consequence of failed economic policies. In a standard growth accounting exercise, I compute growth rates of TFP for the economy as a whole and for industry groups. I apply both official Hungarian statistics and western data, and present new estimates on gross capital stock in the Hungarian economy and on capital accumulation in industry groups. The results demonstrate that until the mid 1950s the economy was allowed to grow within the constraints of available capacities. Economic growth and industrial expansion was driven by capital deepening only after 1955, but TFP growth did not exhibit any slowdown before 1968. Prior to the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism, growth did not run into diminishing returns, which indicates that the Hungarian economy was still catching up to its long-run productive potential. Finally, shift-share analysis helps to determine the importance of structural change between sectors and within industry in facilitating productivity growth. The static shift effect proved stronger than the dynamic shift effect during the 1950s, suggesting that centralised resource allocation made no significant contribution to productivity growth before 1961. In other words, socialist industrialisation was just becoming increasingly efficient, when the government decided to fundamentally reform it.

The service transition is usually presented in the literature as one of the factors that contributes to the decline of energy intensities of developed economies. We show that this is based on false beliefs about what the service economy is about. The shift to a service economy is somewhat of an illusion in terms of real production, and generated by the more rapid productivity growth in manufacturing than in services. Several of the recent studies that have investigated the impact of structural changes on energy intensity have still used sector shares in current prices, which ignore the different behavior of prices across sectors and we use the more reasonable method of sector shares in constant prices. We investigate the impact of structural and technological effects on the final energy intensity of 10 developed and 4 developing countries in a 4 sector context (Agriculture, Industry, Services, Transportation) and 2 end users (households and personal transportation) employing the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI). We find that structural changes had a positive impact on energy intensity both in developed and developing countries, over the last 50 years, because there is not much of a broad service transition in constant prices. Rather it is the energy- demanding transport (part of the service sector) that increase its share. The explanation for the decline in energy intensity in developed countries lies within the sectors, especially within the manufacturing sector. For fast growing developing countries it is the residential sector that drives energy intensity down, because of the declining share of this sector as the formal economy grows and as a consequence of fuel switching to more efficient fuels.

This paper investigates the energy transition and the relation of energy and economic growth on the basis of a comparable long term historical dataset for four national case studies. It analyses data on the development of energy use and the consumption of energy services during 100 years of industrialization in Austria, Japan, the United Kingdom and the USA. All four countries appear as fully industrialized countries today, but were at different stages of industrialization and the energy transition at the beginning of the 20th century: In contrast to the advanced economies of the UK and the USA, Austria and Japan were late comers to industrialization but were rapidly catching up.

The paper uses the exergy approach to assess changes in the energy system. Exergy is a quality measure of energy which quantifies the ability of energy to perform work. Not all thermodynamic work is useful, but useful work is the prerequisite for all energy services demanded by final consumers. The paper provides a comparative analysis of time series data covering the period 1900 to 2000 which include exergy inputs, useful work output, exergy-to-(useful) work conversion efficiency, carbon intensity and the exergy intensity of the economy. Based on this dataset it explores patterns of energy transition and the relation of useful work and economic growth during industrialization.

From the comparative analysis we conclude that industrialization is characterized by a typical pattern of energy transition. Economic structure and per capita level of exergy inputs and useful work outputs as well as the exergy intensity of the economy develop in a very similar way in all four countries and lead to a common pattern in fully industrialized countries. Differences, however, can be observed between the countries with high and low population density. Our results further support the hypothesis, that economic growth and exergy (and in particular useful work) consumption are strongly linked and that economic growth requires an increase in available useful work. This raises a two fold concern: A reduction of the high level of exergy demand in industrial countries can only be accomplished by increasing the conversion efficiency of exergy inputs into useful work. Ultimately, however, the potential to decouple economic growth and energy (exergy) demand seems to be strictly limited. For currently industrializing countries it is important to find alternative paths to development.

In 1950, nearly 50years after the introduction of the motor tractor and more than a century after the adoption of steam power, an estimated 85% 0f all draught power on European farms was supplied by animals. In W Europe motorisation occurred in the period 1950-80, where in parts of S and E Europe animals were still predominant in 1980. This paper examines the power economy in the two halves of the century. It explains the late survival of animal power. It looks at the changing composition and geography of the working herd as between different types of cattle (oxen, cows, buffalo), and equides.(horses, mules, donkeys, asses). Likewise the mechanical power-steam, electricity, oil/gasoline. The second section centres on power output and utilisation, inefficiencies, and high level of wastage Key issues include:the low rates of substitution of tractors for horses, the '0x-Horse Controversy', and why actual work rates were in the main so much lower than nominal horse-power ratings.

The current focus on a possible transition to a low-carbon economy has created an interest in past experiences. Energy transitions in UK´s rich history offers many lessons. Rather than looking-at the aggregate picture, this paper highlights the importance of investigating individual sectors and services. For each sector and service, energy transitions occurred at different times and at varying rates. In some cases, the search for solutions to technical or institutional issues delayed the energy transition by decades or even centuries. Based on these experiences, a rapid full transition to a low-carbon economy cannot be expected.

The paper discusses the use of energy by Dutch households, in particular space heating. To what extent did generations live a cold life in the past and to what extent was the 'gas revolution' a fundamental change?

The processes of energy transitions, in particular the fossil energy transition,have been studied or at least described in most industrialised countries, but not in relatively less developed countries. This paper analyses the phenomenon of the energy transition in fossil energies (the shift from coal to petroleum) in Latin America and contrast it with the classic model of energy transition. This is was not possible before now since the data was not available for these countries prior to 1950 when the transition was already complete. Here we make use of a new reconstruction of data on energy consumption for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1890 to 1950.
We show that the energy transition model of the Western World cannot be considered as the paradigm of fossil energy transition. From the Latin American experience it appears clear that the succession of energy sources is not governed by a universal law of progress or of technical change. Instead, it is the result of a set of historical determinants among which the most remarkable include the structural conditions in each country (geographical location, resource endowment, economic structure, technological dependence, institutional framework, etc.) and the junctures and long term evolution of the international energy and fuel markets. According to the combination of all these factors, each country trace its particular path of energy transition.

Economic theory says that price-taking producers maximize their profits by choosing output, so that its unit price equals it marginal cost. However, in an environment where the output decision must take place prior to the sales date at which the price becomes known, and when historical prices are subject to volatility, theory says that producers, when risk-averse, respond by reducing output to a level below that of the price certainty case. Indeed, theory predicts that the higher is price volatility, the more output falls below the price certainty level. The current study makes use of this hypothesis in an attempt to quantify the impact of climatic variation on industrial output for England in the run up to the industrial revolution. Specifically, the aim is to analyze whether climatic volatility, as reflected in price volatility, tends to slow down the process of industrialization. We conduct two regression analyses. Firstly, we try to explain real industrial output using a measurement of dispersion of real industrial prices. These prices are constructed by deflating an index of nominal industrial prices by a consumer price index. As a side story, we also estimate for how many years prior to the output decision producers take price volatility into account. Secondly, since the consumer price index we use is dominated by food prices, and because food prices variation, in turn, is linked to climatic variability, we then attempt to measure the impact of climate volatility on price volatility, and then on to industrial output. All findings will be presented at the Utrecht session.

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Abstract
The fluidity of nature, in the present instance of the river Ganges, impinges upon society. The political and economic organizations along the Ganges reflect their special character, closely aligned with nature and geography and they, therefore, assume one of the main trajectories in the process of state formation. The Ganges functioned as the highway of the empire and as such, it constituted an arena of economic and political activities along its water course. It facilitated mobility of the people with varied and variegated aims. The very act of traversing the fluvial course of the Ganges presents us with a case of close interaction with natural environment, where a sailor had to face the weather, wind patterns, currents, shoals and, as a result, also the hazards of shipwreck. How travel was organized on this aquatic highroad of the empire and to what ends? How landscape influenced social and economic organizations? This paper aims to underscore the functional aspect of the river Ganges, treating it as a geographical unit with which people closely interacted to fulfill their material(economic) and supra-material(political) interests. Thus, to analyze the nature of human activity in the mid-Gangetic basin, or eastern Hindustan, first of all, this paper sketches the physical geography of the region underlining the landscape consisting of rivers, mountains, jungles, plain and plateau, and routes in the stretch between Patna and Rajmahal. The second section of the paper situates the river Ganges in historical perspective and looks at some political and economic patterns in la longue dureé. The third section traces the history of the routes and the towns which emerged along the river in this region. And finally, in the fourth section, it gives a detailed description of the sailing rhythms in the Ganges, as it was organized by the Dutch captains of the fleet between the Hugli and Patna factories. The Dutch sources privilege us to closely view the sailing patterns in the river. There is no reason to assume that the indigenous people or the other Europeans sailing in the Ganges would have followed completely different sailing patterns and would have encountered a new set of challenges than the Dutch sailors actually did and shown here in fascinating details. Thus, we can safely generalize the Dutch sailing experiences in the Ganges for others who were making use of this fluvial highroad. The historical reconstruction of the brisk economic and political activities carried out in and around this river enables us to analyze the nature of state-formation in the mid-Gangetic basin during the early modern period.

The Scottish mercantile presence in Asia in the decades to 1840 had three principal features:
First, its relative prominence – although England’s population was six times that of Scotland, the Scots represented about a third of the British merchant community in Asia by 1813, rising to 40 per cent by 1840.
Second, the Scottish-Asian merchants were marginal figures within the business power structures of London, in which the East India Company was embedded. Few had any strong reason to defend its privileges or practices.
Third, these Scottish merchants had more or less imbibed the theories of Adam Smith with their mothers’ milk. Smith’s attack on the mercantilism of the British state, including his opposition to the East India Company’s trade monopoly, was part of their intellectual baggage. Ideology as well as commercial opportunism led them to oppose the Company's trade monopoly.

My paper explores the interplay between these three features, while being principally concerned with identifying the scale and character of the Scottish commercial penetration of Asia. This comprised two distinctive waves or strands: First, the rise of the 'merchants-in-exile' who participated in intra-Asian trade, and over time in trade between Asia and London, with little connection to the commerce and industry of their homeland, and second, the rise of the 'commission merchants' who pushed sales of Scottish and Lancashire cotton goods, and other manufactures, in Asian markets after 1813. Although some overlap in function developed between the two types of Scottish merchant houses, by 1840 there still remained important differences between them – notably in attitudes towards the opium trade with China.

When the English and the Dutch East India Companies began trading with western India (Gujarat) in the early seventeenth century, their authorities were most attracted by the prospects of profit in indigo trade. By the third quarter of the seventeenth century, however, a variety of cotton and silk textiles gained primacy in the Companies’ exports from Gujarat. Indigo export to Europe dwindled primarily because of a large supply of trans-Atlantic dye at relatively less costs than the one from South Asia. Its production in India subsequently declined. In the late eighteenth century, the European demand for Indian indigo once again improved substantially. This was largely due to a decline in the supply of American dye to Europe on account of Britain’s loss of colonies in America and the Napoleonic wars and his ‘continental blockade’ of British trade. The EIC, which had taken over the political control of Bengal and had a cleavage in the domain of political authority in western India, took upon it the opportunity to benefit from the rising demand for indigo at home. In order to be able to do so, the Company desperately tried to push up the output of indigo in South Asia.
In the Company’s records pertaining to late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century western India, the concern of the English Company’s authorities at Bombay and Surat to enhance indigo production is discerned. Based on the information culled from the Company’s correspondences, letters, and reports, this paper seeks to examine the efforts of the Company’s authorities to introduce indigo cultivation in their Bengal and Madras Presidencies and analyse their implications for the political economy of South Asia. The early colonial experiments with indigo production had great consequences for the Company, its servants, merchants and financiers, and more so for indigo cultivators. In the nineteenth century, the Company’s servants and private English merchants exported indigo largely as a means of transferring funds to Europe. Business firms began to take great interest and injected large funds into the processes of indigo production. Peasants were induced to grow indigo but they had to bear adversities resulting from a highly unpredictable demand from Europe. The paper examines these dimensions of the indigo industry and trade in the local context of changing political regime in South Asia i.e. the rise of colonial state as well as in a global context of changes taking place in the socio-economic and political relationship between South Asia, Britain/Europe and the New World.

The cotton textile mill industries has been accredited as the fore-runner of industrialisation in India. They occupied a vital place in the Indian economy and contributed substantially towards employment generation and revenues. With the introduction of modern cotton mills in 1854, India entered a new phase of industrialisation . As the economic and political destiny of India was then governed by colonial rulers, the state of economic development was subject to imperial aims. This paper aims to shed light on how the establishment of cotton textile mills marked a departure from the earlier colonial policy of not allowing machine industries in India. In examining the circumstances under which the cotton textile mills were set up in western India during the second half of the nineteenth century, the paper focuses on the impact of globalization, and the opportunities and challenges faced by Indian entrepreneurs, the role played by British capitalists and colonial economic policy. It also discusses the contribution of English entrepreneurs and technicians in the growth of the cotton textile mills during the four decades covered in this paper. Under colonial rule the industrial development in India was stunted and subordinated to the interests of the British capitalist class. The paper examines whether the formulation of British commercial policy vis-à-vis the setting up of the cotton textile mill industry in India was purely dictated by Lancashire interests or if it was at times modified by the prevailing political situation in India.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Japan had significant economic links with India. It was realized by the trading business of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The VOC succeeded not only in the Euro-Asian trade but also in the intra-Asian trade, both of which contributed to the huge amount of the profits for the Dutch Company. The paper examines the significance of the triangular trade between Japan, India and South East Asia, which was the largest trading pattern in scale and profitability in the intra-Asian trade of the VOC. The analysis of this research is mainly based on unpublished data sources collected from the archives of the VOC kept in the national Archives of the Netherlands in combination with Japanese records.

This paper mainly discusses the loss of the monopoly of Indian Trade in 1813 by the East India Company, the entity which was undergoing a major transition period in the early 19th century. The paper examines how British people in the area perceived Indian society controlled by the company, how they attempted to solve problems appearing in that society and how they eventually concerned themselves with the abolition of the company’s monopoly in 1813. The paper, therefore, focuses on the following two issues. First, it studies the reaction of the central government of the United Kingdom, where all the policy decisions were made. The paper examines for what purposes the parties concerned with the central government conducted political activities concerning the monopoly issue, referring to preceding studies. Second, the paper discusses Robert Rickards, a British government official stationed in India. He was not directly engaged in Indian trade, and was away from his home country. Why he became involved in the issue of monopoly will be clarified in this paper through the examination of his Memorials and papers.
The deterioration of the British economy in the early 19th century, which was initiated by the Napoleon War, led to the liberalization of Indian trade in 1813. During this process, the parties concerned in the United Kingdom, namely, industrial capitalists, private merchants, the Board of Control, the Board of Directors of the East India Company and the Governors General, conducted their activities to abolish or maintain the monopoly right, all for their economic reasons or from their political standpoints. On the other hand, also in India, often overlooked in conventional studies, there was a British person, who, living in India for many years, advocated the liberalization of its society and became deeply involved in the monopoly issue. He severely criticized the East India Company for the poverty of Indian society, arguing that the company’s rule of India caused the problem. Although he was dismissed from his post as a government official for this accusation, he never ceased to argue for the necessity of the liberalization of Indian society. In the end, after the abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly on Indian Trade in 1813, the Board of Directors accepted his argument in 1815.

El trabajo que no ocupa tiene por objeto revisar las características de la actividad desarrollada y el papel jugado por algunos empresarios de origen estadounidense en los procesos de innovación y modernización de la producción agrícola en el norte de Sinaloa, en los finales del siglo XIX principios del XX. Intentaremos responder a las preguntas de cuándo, cómo y porqué estos hombres de negocios no sólo se arriesgaron ante la perspectiva de pérdidas en proyectos productivos, sino que asumieron la incertidumbre de obtener ganancias que ellos conllevaban, al establecerse por primera vez en una región sobre la cual se tenía aún poco conocimiento de casos similares. Podemos afirmar que estos empresarios fueron promotores y protagonistas de un desarrollo económico regional indudable, cuyas consecuencias se pueden apreciar aún hoy en día.

La española en México, con ser desde su independencia la que conformaba la comunidad extranjera más nutrida y política y socialmente más influyente, ha sido desatendida por lo historiografía a uno y otro lado del océano, en el caso de la mexicana, seducida por otras minorías con logros económicos más vistosos, y en de la española, disuadida de su estudio por la menor importancia cuantitativa de la emigración a ese país. Es más, el análisis en perspectiva histórica de la presencia española en México se ha vertebrado en torno a la premisa de la “inmigración privilegiada”, formulada sin sustento cuantitativo alguno. En virtud de este apriorismo, al español le esperaba a su llegada a México un éxito económico seguro (en el peor de los casos, como abarrotero). La ausencia de proletarización entre los españoles y la nula integración de la mujer en el mercado de trabajo son los correlatos de tal tesis, tan extendida como falaz. Mi propósito en este trabajo es refutar tal tesis y proporcionar, al tiempo, una primera aproximación cuantitativa de la composición de la fuerza laboral española en México. Para ello, he empleado fuentes españolas y elegido como ámbito de estudio el Estado de Puebla, como tendré ocasión de demostrar, uno de los de mayor presencia hispana. He elegido el año de 1930, a medio camino entre el fin de la guerra de la guerra cristera y el comienzo de la depresión que sufrió la economía mexicana durante la primera mitad de la década de los treinta. Este es justamente el año escogido por Gamboa (1994) en su pionero estudio sobre los españoles afincados en Puebla, que asume algunas de las consideraciones en torno a la situación económica de los inmigrantes de este origen que pretendo matizar. Al tiempo, pretendo sopesar y determinar las causas del éxito económico de algunos ciudadanos españoles que sí alcanzaron la prosperidad gracias a la creación de empresas en Puebla.

This article studies the history of Compañía General de Fósforos, one of the first industrial stock companies in Argentina, during its forty years of existence, from 1889 to 1929. We aim at analizing the company's productive and finantial strategies, based on a research using the company archives.
Compañía General de Fósforos started its operations at a time when modern industry started to develop in Argentina, based on the substitution of imported commodities, like matches. Our research intends to produce new evidence on the role of big companies in the industrial development before 1930, paying special attention to issues like the formation of capital, industrial profitability and corporate strategies.

The impact and influence of the French in the development of Mendoza, Argentina's wine industry at the end of the 19th century. This topic represents a portion of my phd research. How can a minority play a role in business development? This is the problem I address by examining the French's creation of a modern and capitalist vineyard, achieved through regional specialization, business development, and influence of a minority: French people (knowledge, entreprenneurs, capital)

En esta ponencia se identifica y caracteriza el grupo empresarial que se forjó en una región del occidente de México y que tenía en común, en principio su extranjería; europea. Las ideas centrales que guían esta propuesta son las siguientes: a) la actividad empresarial desarrollada por los extranjeros llevó a una mayor articulación de la economía productiva de la región, b) la actividad empresarial imprimió un ritmo a la economía local a un nivel que no tenía precedente, y c) ese grupo empresarial definió un proyecto de autonomía política en la región que lo consiguió con éxito.

En el trabajo se analizan las actividades empresariales llevadas a cabo por los inmigrantes griegos en el Valle de Culiacán, ya que estos se dedicaron fundamentalmente a la explotación de la agricultura comercial en la región. Sin ser una comunidad numerosa desempeñaron un papel sobresaliente en la producción de hortalizas. En 1948 el 38 por ciento de la cosecha de legumbres en Sinaloa fue exportada por extranjeros, en sus cuatro quintas partes de origen griego.

El objetivo del presente trabajo es analizar las diversas actividades que se desarrollaron en Sinaloa, a partir del periodo de gobierno del Gral. Francisco Cañedo, mismo que dará continudad en el periodo de revolución armada de 1910 - 1920. El arribo de diversos capitales extranjeros posibilitaron la consolidación de tres importantes polos de desarrollo económico (Ahome, Culiacán y Mazatlán), impulsándose actividades como el comercio, la industria, agricultura, mineria, mismas que marcaran los ejes centrales de la economía
sinaloense.

Canarian emigration to Cuba during the modern era has been commonly regarded as a phenomenon dominated by the farmer, a man who emigrated to work in the country either as a tenant in a large property or as day laborers, contributing decisively to social and economic development of the island. This is an incomplete intrepretation, Canarians performed in a wide range of activities in Cuba, both in the country and in the city, and they were not strange to company ventures. In this article we will approach the latter aspect that thanks to recent studies provide new nuances on the great migration of canarians, a side that had already been well studied for other groups such as Asturians or Catalans in Cuba. Islanders entrepreneurs contributed to the building of the Cuban business community with the creation and development of a wide range of businesses from small farmers to owners of sugar refineries and multinational trade enterprises. First we will look at the socioeconomic context of the canarian migration and then continued to expose the most important aspects of business development involving Islander migrants.

This paper will examine the efficiency of regulation in the electrical sector of three emerging countries, Brazil, China and India. Since the last two decades, there have been new sets of regulation (in the electrical industry, the concept “deregulation” is usually used to mention the changes which occurred; however, it doesn’t describe adequately the nature of these changes) in these countries in order to make their respective electrical sectors more compatible with similar regulation adopted in the developed countries. Two goals are pursued with this new regulation: 1- to increase efficiency in the production and especially the distribution of electricity; 2- to create a more favourable environment for FDI.
We will examine the regulations of the three countries and confront them with the statistical data of production and consumption in order to examine their effects, particularly on the presence (or absence) of multinational firms. More specifically, we will analyse how efficiently the emerging states can implement regulation. In countries were existing institutions aren’t able to make sure regulation is respected, abuses might occur. This situation will indeed push some multinationals (such as Enron) to adopt risky, not to say dangerous, policies. Could we advance that regulation, or, should we say, a tradition of regulation in a given country, remains the surest bet for FDI to become successful?

Policies to liberalize, deregulate, and privatise the telecommunications sector by most governments around the world from the 1980s dramatically changed the comfortable post-war environment in which incumbents had previously existed. The opening up of formerly closed domestic markets enabled incumbent players to evaluate the attractiveness and feasibility of an internationalization project. Many European incumbents opted to venture abroad. But why did some firms have more success in their internationalization efforts whilst others failed? This paper seeks to explain the extent of internationalization of these firms.

Internationalization theory predicts that differences across countries (labour, natural resources, prices, efficiency and so on) are key determinants explaining traditional internationalization in manufacturing. In addition, regulatory asymmetries could be an important determinant explaining the internationalization patterns of heavily-regulated industries such as telecommunications. Regulatory asymmetries could be an important means by which a firm extracts higher profits that it might at home.

This paper enquires how useful the concept of regulatory asymmetries is in explaining incumbent internationalization in Western Europe from the 1980s. Data on the timing and extent of privatization, liberalization, deregulation and firm internationalization are contrasted. It is found that regulatory asymmetries are highly significant in explaining international patterns of telecoms incumbents.

This paper examines the attempts of governments in Britain to improve the efficiency of resource allocation to and in the main utility industries since 1945. As well as exploring the growing interest in the 1950s and 1960s in developing the use of Required Rates of Return and then Test Discount Rates in the nationalised industries, it also traces the growing interest in breaking these industries into their competitive and natural monopoly components. In analysing the familiar disappointment at the favouring of the transfer of ownership over the introduction of competition in the early privatisations, the paper also examines how regulators sought to address a new problem faced by utilities eventually subject to competition, namely how to provide sufficient incentives and assurance of future returns so as to stimulate long-term investment programmes in these industries.

Regulation is a determining factor as regards the progress or otherwise of an economy. Though regulation is not the only variable that influences the economy, good regulation favours economic growth, whilst poor regulation can slow the economy down. Analysing regulation is complex due to the fact that various sectors of an economy have different characteristics, whilst the agents involved in the design and implementation of regulation are motivated by self-interest. In addition, there is a scarcity of objective indicators to measure regulation and compare its evolution across economies.
This paper analyses the evolution of regulation of three public services – telecommunications, electricity and postal services - in Spain across the last two centuries. Four major phases can be differentiated. The first, up until the 1880s, was characterised by liberal ideas, which also contributed to replacing the Ancien Regime for the liberal one. The liberal principles of regulation were changed during the age of protectionism. Protectionism marked the second phase of regulation between the 1880s and 1959. Spain’s opening to the world and passing of the Stabilization Plan in 1959 facilitated a change in the regulatory system, comprising the third phase to 1978. Finally the fourth phase, from 1978 to the present, was marked by the democratic transition, integration into the European Union and the development of the Welfare State. During this period, and according to European Directives, services, including those under analysis here, underwent a process of liberalization and privatization, breaking drastically with the third phase. Using homogenised international data on regulation, privatization and liberalization since 1975, it is enquired to what extent Spain has converged to the OECD during this final period.

France of the 1950-1960's offered a very interesting example of an implementation of a housing market, almost completly regulated by the State and the public institutions. After the II World War, very voluntary legal and financial measures organized this market, without taking ideology in consideration.

The building of huge reservoirs in the 19th century by industrial towns such as Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham, did raise many questions concerning the regulation which should be applied to these undertakings. The movement of municipalisation admittedly dramatically improved the quantity and quality of water supplied, but it did not exclude market mechanisms and had thus to be submitted to a national regulation. Indeed, a competition between towns took place, which Parliament did its best to supervise and refrain. Conflicting public interests were often at stake, and Parliament had to arbitrate between them, notably on broad environmental questions such as compensation, commons rights or landscape preservation, on which the study will focus.

I have argued in recent publications that it is a mistake to attribute differences across countries (Europe, USA and Japan) in business-state relationships simply to ideological stances: strategic and technological factors are also important. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the natural monopoly features of infrastructure industries have been an important element and often a common feature of state intervention. The aim of this paper is to evaluate what relative weight was attached to such market failure problems on the one hand and geo-political factors on the other. For the period 1830-1939, how far were geo-political factors stronger than natural monopoly problems in accounting for the scale of intervention in the various countries of the Western World? How far did the policy instruments for security and market failure overlap? Whilst most of the infrastructure sectors are covered – including internal telecommunications, coal, gas, shipping, electricity and water – special attention is devoted to international submarine telegraph tables and railways. The paper concludes by demonstrating strong differences between Britain and USA on the one hand and Continental Europe plus Japan on the other.

The aim of this study is to elucidate the co-evolution of the national policies on energy, environment and competitiveness in global markets in Nordic Countries after the First Oil Crisis. After the oil crises of the 1970s, the use of peat fuel as a substitute for crude oil was championed by the Finnish and Swedish governments. Notwithstanding the high CO2 emission factor of peat fuel, the Finnish, Swedish and Estonian government’s future strategies for both district heating and electricity generation rely partly on the use of peat as a fuel. It is difficult to alter policies that have been dictated by previous complex circumstances.

In this study I am particularly interested in the public regulation (to be separated from the self-regulation practiced by corporations) and changes in it from the 1970s to the 21st century. I am also interested in the opposite trend, deregulation, which has its intellectual background in the neoclassical economics, especially its resurgence in the 1970s in the work of Milton Friedman, Richard Posner, Joseph Stiglitz and others.

Contemplating the patterns of energy policy, public regulation is a powerful tool for changes as far as supply-side is concerned. In the light of this study, it can even bring forth the breakthrough of new technologies and the utilisation of ignored energy resources.

Abstract. Price regulation has been a traditional device of Italian government intervention in production and distribution of electricity. The pillars of this intervention were essentially two: i) to make prices correspond to the generation and distribution costs on the basis of end-users’ different consumption and ii) to use electricity tariffs as a tool for macroeconomic interventions: for instance tariffs were frozen several times in order to curb inflation.
The structure of electric rates did not change up to the 1990s: it was a two-block tariff based on power and energy consumption of different classes of consumers – in other terms, it was calculated on the average price instead than on the marginal one, like it used to be done since the Sixties in other European countries. Government intervention got larger after nationalization (1962): on the demand side, already in 1959 a single national tariff for similar consumers’ profiles was introduced; later in the Sixties and in the Seventies, poorer consumers were supported through reduced rates. On the supply side, government used fares to favor investment in innovation by cross subsidizing energy produced by more efficient plants. In the Nineties, the policy of regulation moved towards a more market oriented approach - price cap - with the aim of opening the market to new competitors and having them exploit the gains induced by innovation. Actually this intervention stimulated the entry of new firms even though it did not affect much the rate structure, still biased towards the cost-price paradigm, as the Italian market was still strongly influenced by ENEL, the electric SOE on its way towards partial privatization. On the contrary in the US and most of North-European countries the economic standard for electrical tariffs changed in accordance to the argument that the non-transferability of property rights in public enterprises eliminates the advantages from ownership and inhibits the capitalization of future market consequences into current property rights of the firm.

This review essay evaluates the new road Giovanni Arrighi is paving in Adam Smith in Beijing (2007), both with regards to his own intellectual trajectory within the field of World-Systems Analysis as to the scholarly debate on Europe's nineteenth-century Great Divergence from the rest of the world and the present outcomes of this process. The central analytical argument of Adam Smith in Beijing is that the probability has increased that we are witnessing the formation of an “East Asian-centered world-market society” rivaling the historical “capitalist world-economy”. The central political message is that this change in the nature of the global world-economy might bring about a Great Convergence to the commonwealth