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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