Programme

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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 of civilizations that Adam Smith foresaw. Both propositions force Giovanni Arrighi to get China (a totum pro parte for East Asia) into the world-historical equation, past and future. Most reviews so far have zoomed in on Arrighi’s political message and have criticized his characterization of China as a non-capitalist society and his views on the potential benign role that China could play in the wider world. We focus primarily on the analytical side of the story and show how Arrighi’s discovery of East-Asia has led him to supplement the analysis of historical capitalism he presented in The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and to un-think World-Systems Analysis. This brings about uncertainties and problems. On the one hand, Arrighi is clear in his view on the different paths of economic development that the European capitalist world-system and the Chinese-centered market-oriented world-system walked down deep into the nineteenth century. On the other hand, he is less clear on how the Asian market-oriented legacy survived its incorporation into the globalizing capitalist world-system, a crucial precondition for his political message. Characterized as a process of subordination, hybridization or fusion, it remains hard to get an unambiguous understanding of the place of China and East Asia within the world-system. It is just as hard to understand the nature of that “interstitial” system itself. There is a world in singular, denoted as “world capitalism”, “world market” or “world-trading system” and there are worlds in plural (such as the Global North and Global South). All these conceptual and theoretical uncertainties add up to the central question that hangs over Adam Smith in Beijing: What remains of the capitalist world-system as an analytical category that allows us to understand the economic history and future?

Panel member and discussant

Demography, growth prospects, and politics together determine which countries will have social spending crises by 2030. Some simple algebra suggests which countries will have the most trouble preventing a decline in real benefit levels while also preventing tax-rate increases. Those most at risk are not the welfare states of Northern and Western Europe, whose high-spending programs have avoided any clear growth effects. Rather the well-known age trends and approximate growth prospects predict the greatest trouble for much of Latin America and the Caribbean, Switzerland, New Zealand, four East European countries, and South Africa. The big-trouble club might also include Japan and the Asian Tigers if their growth rates fall as far as Angus Maddison is predicting.
Many OECD countries have already been adjusting their old-age programs to the curse of long life since the 1980s, though not yet enough to assure maintenance of real benefits between now and 2030. Political paralysis has gripped certain countries, making avoidable crises more likely.
The institutional evolution of health insurance and pensions points toward an erosion of the employer-based 'second pillar'. By 2030 these social programs will be dominated by basic public coverage plus individuals' self-saving. The inequality of consumption standards among the elderly will become more skewed.

One striking and alluring feature of Chinese economy is her sheer size. It is also the world’s single longest surviving civilization with a continuous history, unified by one common language and characterized by an unusually high degree of ethnic homogeneity for her size. This paper surveys and speculates on the broad questions of the institutional, geographic and historical origin of her size as well as the future implications for both China’s and the world economy. Historically, the scaling-up of China is a response to the invasion and absorption of the nomads largely from the North. This historical pattern of response led to a structure of political dominance centered in Northern China. However, by mid-19th century, the European colonial challenge initiated from the Southern coast drastically restructured the regional dynamics in China. Economic growth in East Asia had overall proceeded along an East-West axis (initiated from the spin-off political units of Chinese civilization such as Taiwan, HK, Korea and to certain degree, Japan). Economic reform in contemporary China along similar geographic and political trajectory led to rapid economic growth but with alarmingly large regional differences also along a East-West direction. While China’s highly centralized political system had done reasonably well in achieving hard growth target during the past three decades of reform, it may find it increasingly difficult to realize genuine welfare improvements difficult to measure by hard figures. Given the huge size and regional diversity, the model of peaceful political transition as had happened in Korea and Taiwan may also be far more difficult to apply to China．While a huge advantage for China, her size also poses a huge challenge to both the Chinese and World economy in 2030 in the two decades to come.

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Globalization is as much a political, and geopolitical, phenomenon as it is a technological one. It follows that the future of globalization will largely depend on geopolitical trends. This paper speculates about those trends, about possible scenarios for the future, and about ways in which the current crisis may influence which of those scenarios will arise. Contingency and the importances of political choices are stressed throughout.

When did Latin America fall behind? Has the gap between Core and Latin America widened over the long run? Is high inequality a permanent feature of modern Latin America’s history? Have trends in growth and inequality had a long-run effect on poverty reduction? What are the main challenges Latin America faces in the early 21st century?, are major topics in Latin American economic history. Some tentative answers can now be provided:
Modern Latin America experienced sustained per capita GDP growth since the early 19th century only brought to a halt during the 1890s, the Great Depression, and, over all, the 1980s. Inequality, in turn, rose steadily until a high plateau in which it has stabilized over the last four decades of the twentieth century. Absolute poverty has experienced a long-run decline in Latin America since the late nineteenth century, interrupted in the 1890s and the 1930s, and only reversed in the 1980s. Growth emerges, then, as the main element underlying the reduction in absolute poverty, and almost exclusively in the second half of the twentieth century, even though public redistributive policies (progressive taxes, transfers and other government spending) seem to have mattered for poverty reduction.
Per capita GDP growth has been accompanied by relative backwardness, in particular, since 1980 which renders the late 20th century as the period to be explored in order to understand Latin America’s retardation.
Is catching up to OECD countries feasible in the early 21st Century? The challenges ahead include solving the productivity slowdown since 1980 by increasing rate of activity, reducing dependency rates, closing the human capital gap, eliminating competitive barriers, reducing unequal income distribution, and eradicating absolute poverty

This paper contributes to the panel "The World in 2030. Educated guesses from a long-run perspective" by exploring expected changes in world-wide environmental conditions. It investigates anticipated changes associated with global warming including rising temperatures, sea levels, and the prospects for a large wave of extinctions. It also details recent discussions of "peak oil," the "end of food," and recurrent water shortages. Finally, it evaluates the historical accuracy of past forecasts regarding the environment and considers ways to go forward.

Japan’s economic history since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is characterised by alternating phases of less conspicuous growth performance in pre-war times, phenomenal growth of the 1955-73 period, and marked deceleration thereafter. The deceleration since 1973 is so dramatic and prolonged that Angus Maddison has recently placed Japan’s growth outlook for the future in one of the lowest performing groups in the world. Japan’s rate of growth of per-capita GDP from 2003 to 2030 is predicted at 1.3 per cent per annum as against 1.7 per cent for other countries in the ‘rich’ group and the world average of 2.23 per cent. This paper suggests that while post-war Japan’s ‘super’ growth was associated with an exceptionally high productivity growth in manufacturing, the recent rise of a service economy is not. In the 1955-73 period, Japanese manufacturing firms developed a system under which unprecedented capital deepening was compatible with a skill-using mode of shop-floor relations. We argue, therefore, that unless a new, promising regime of productivity growth would emerge in the expanding service sector Japan’s outlook for the early twenty-first century would not be very bright.

This paper documents a stylized fact: the Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates reached a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to accelerate downward trends from that peak. The paper estimates the economic and demographic fundamentals driving these emigration life cycles -- income and education gaps between the US and the sending country, poverty traps and the size of the cohort at risk in the sending country, and the foreign-born stock in the US. It then projects the life cycle twenty years hence. The projections imply that pressure on Third World emigration will not increase, but rather will most likely decline. It also suggests that future US immigrants will be much more African and much less Hispanic than in the past.

Economic history is dominated by two opposite approaches that can be roughly defined as either quantitative or qualitative. Each of these receives criticism from the other side. Not seldomly, the analytical results of either of these approaches differ fundamentally, which is a clear indication of the insufficient explanatory power of both the quantitative and the qualitative research techniques. Economists have long been aware of this discrepancy between the 'closed' positivist, a-historical neoclassical and the 'open' process-focused, history friendly evolutionary and institutional view. Ever since Veblen has asked why economics is not an evolutionary science, his views got considerable attention from economists and other social scientists; yet, we have to recognise that, after a century of Veblen's intervention, the positivist dogma still prevails in much of standard economics. Darwinian thinking (which Veblen has called for) is largely absent in contemporary economics. This, we argue, is equally true in contemporary economic history. In this paper we introduce an evolutionary approach to economic history. Building on a unified rule approach, major methodological, analytical and theoretical issues of quantitative and qualitative research will be discussed in general, and a historical data set on maritime shipping will be (re-)assessed in particular. We present an evolutionary analytical approach of doing historical research and we explain why this approach is necessary for the development of economic history as a scientific discipline.

Evolutionary economic geography (Boschma and Frenken 2006) is a new approach in economic geography that explains the location of industry from local processes of cumulative causation. In this, it differs from mainstream economic geography that explains the location of industries from price differentials across locations, and it differs from institutional economic geography that explains the location of industries from institutional differentials across locations. A number of recent studies on the car industry, the banking industry and the fashion design industry carried out at our institute showed that cumulative causation processes are not so much driven by agglomeration externalities (benefits that firm enjoy from co-location) but more so by spin-offs, which cause spatial clustering to take place as employees start new firms in the same location as the parent firm. This insight opens up a genealogical research programme at the firm level. In the paper, we review the studies done so far. We then argue that such an approach offers a platform for interdisciplinary research among geographers, economists, demographers, biologists and historians. We finally outline the contours of such a research program and list a number of research questions that may guide such an endevaour.

In recent years economists have become increasingly aware of the role of “culture” in economic development (Tabellini, 2007, 2008; Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2005; Greif 2009). Models of cultural transmission have been developed, in which culture is being imparted either by vertical transmission (from parents to children) or by horizontal or oblique transmission (Bisin and Verdier, 2002). The interest that economic historians should have in these processes seems obvious enough, yet despite the consensus that it is now “kosher” to speak of culture (Temin, 1997), there has been little direct work that tries to use this new interest by economists in culture to bridge between the work in cultural history and the many questions that come up in economic history.
There are many ambiguities in the literature that need to be cleared up. To start with, given the many definitions given to “culture”, what is needed is a sharp and clear-cut that will delineate with precision what is and what is not included and how “culture” relates to “institutions”. Second, there is an issue of whether culture is endogenous to the economy of a “fixed point” that determines the “wealth and poverty of nations” (Landes, 1998). This debate has been summarized and criticized by Jones (2006), but what is missing is a ynamic story of how culture evolves.
In this paper I shall attempt to use evolutionary models to trace the changes in culture. The basic idea that culture is determined in a Darwinian model has recently been proposed by Galor and Moav (2004) and Clark (2007), who consider the effects of differential rates of reproduction of different cultural subgroups in society, leading to a changing in the traits of the population as a whole through standard selection processes. In contrast, in this paper I shall argue culture is to some extent chosen by individuals in their life, so that the selection mechanism operates on the traits and not only on the groups or individuals carrying them.
Such a framework of cultural evolution, which has been available for many years (Boyd and Richerson, 1985, 2006), can lead to an improved understanding of many processes in economic history such as the emergence of cultures that are friendly to innovation, that enhance the formation of physical and human capital, and that enable the creation of private-order institutions that support markets and law-and-order without relying necessarily on third-party enforcement. Some progress has been made in this respect recently from a theoretical point of view by a seminal paper by Doepke and Zilibotti (2008), who have applied a formal evolutionary framework akin to the Bisin- Verdier story to the evolution of preferences in seventeenth century and eighteenth century Britain. What I will show in this paper, that an evolutionary model of this kind can be used to explain the culture of innovation and scientific progress needed to deal with the British Industrial Revolution and the beginning of modern economic growth in the West.
It is the prevalence of this Enlightenment culture that forms the basis of my new book (Mokyr, 2009), yet in that work I do not explicitly analysis why the cultural norms that become dominant in western Europe after 1750 actually win out. In this paper I thus will try to complete the analysis by providing such a framework. In particular, I will show that individuals selected certain cultural traits that supported an economic civil society in which law and order were to a great extent privately supplied, and in which a technological elite adopted the axioms of the Baconian program.

It is generally accepted now that innovations are a core element in explaining the long-term transformations of modern economies and their unprecedented growth over the past few centuries. Innovations generate advances in production technology by which the productivity of the resources is increased and production costs are lowered. Innovations also allow to improve and differentiate the goods and services supplied and to create entirely new ones. While the productivity-driven income increases generated at the supply side are quite well understood, the explanation of the demand-side conditions that make people spend ever more on consumption in real terms is at best fragmentary.
In part this is due to the fact that after a century of purging out allegedly objectionable conjectures about consumers’ needs, wants, and their behavioral foundations from the neoclassical theory of demand, there is little left to argue about what it is that people consume, and for what motives. There is abundant empirical work on the descriptive statistics of changes in consumption as per capita real income rises. Yet the reasons for why these changes occur are not clear and are likely to require a richer and less abstract theory of consumer behavior.
In this paper, some key elements of such a theory will be outlined, building on earlier work (Witt 2001). As will be argued, the theoretical extension is an important building bloc for an improved understanding of the historical evolution of consumption. It helps to come to grips with the connection between innovations in consumer goods and services on the one hand and the consumers’ sustained willingness to selectively expand consumption expenditures on the other. The theory focuses on, and provides a behavioral explanation for, satiation dynamics differing between goods and services, and the innovative responses to these dynamics in the consumer goods industries. A model of expenditure growth accounting will be derived and used to decompose the main trends in innovative qualitative changes in consumer goods and services.

This study attempts to examine the continuity and change from Ottoman Empire to Turkish republic in terms of economic policies and economic conditions through focusing on Izmir (Smyrna) province for the period 1918 and 1938. The aim of the study is to integrate Ottoman-Turkish urban history into the study of economic history.

"The economic pedominance paradigm" has been one of the prevalent generalizations in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire. According to this paradigm economic entrepreneurship, foreign trade and banking were almost exclusively in the hands of Greek and Armenian Ottoman subjects as well as foreign merchant houses and investors. It has been emphasized that Muslims did not have a share in the more dynamic sectors of the economy. During the twentieth century two additional generalizations regardind the economic role and position of Muslims evolved, namely "the ethnic division of labour paradigm and "the Politics of Notables theory". These paradigms/theories had great impact on Middle Eastern economic historiography in the last decades of the previous century.
In recent years research based on both private and public archives in the Middle East and Europe has shown a different picture, i.e. Muslim big merchants (tujjar) played an important role as economic entrepreneurs and they had a significant share in both foreign trade and banking in various parts of the empire.

Two main questions will be discussed in this paper:
(1)what were the circumstances in which the abovementioned paradigms evolves, and (2) how can the longevity of these false generalizations be explained.

The theory of “social structures of accumulation” was developed to explain long swings of alternating expansion and stagnation in Western capitalist economies, the United States in particular. The strength of SSA analysis is in interpreting the movement of economic history and social transformation as the product of the interaction between a changing external context and shifting internal dynamics. The analysis periodizes the blossoming of sets of institutions into frameworks for economic growth (or, more specifically, capitalist accumulation) that are viable for some years after a crisis has ruptured the previous framework. Within each SSA, however, internal contradictions gradually move to the fore and, often interacting with external pressures, feed into a new era of crisis. After some struggle among social forces, a successful reformulation of institutions into another framework for accumulation emerges, which resolves that crisis and manages those contradictions while planting the seeds for potential future contradictions internal to the dynamics of the new SSA.
Given this overarching scheme, this paper examines the economies of Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait in terms of the specific institutional structures developed before World War II and under the post-war SSA, addressing growth and accumulation, state/capital relations, capital/labor relations, and emergent internal and external contradictions. It examines the integration of these economies, and others of the Arab World, in terms of a regional SSA, of which these can be seen as both variations and integral parts. The paper then considers the erosion of those structures in the 1980s and the cases’ experience in adapting to, and resisting, the influence of neoliberalism as an alternative SSA after 1990. It concludes with a consideration of the nature of the ongoing struggle to conceive a viable social structure of accumulation appropriate to this region in the context of the current worldwide crisis of neoliberalism.

The article presents a new overview on economic transition in Egypt, emphasizing the role of culture in shaping its recent economic history. Since partial independence, and culminating in the heyday of the Nasserite regime, 'economic nationalism' became a predominant national identity mark and a concept central to a local sense of authenticity. The article discusses the meaning of economic nationalism and why it turned such a powerful symbol of Egyptianness. The prevalence of this idea slowed down a transformation to an alternative economic regime when the development effort associated with economic nationalism partially failed. Instead, a huge and unregulated ('hidden') economy emerged, together with a corollary local consumer society. Fiercely resisted in a public discourse captivated by an older economic imagination, both have still shaped the Egyptian economy ever since.

This paper will explore the place and impact of the Ottoman land regime in the land reform movements and property regimes established by different states in the former provinces of the Empire in the Balkans, in Anatolia and in the Middle East at the beginning of the 20th century. It will first analyse the long term consequences of the Ottoman land reform of the second half of the 19th century in these three regions. This will involve an explanation of the main aims of and expectations from the new land regime established gradually in the Empire in the second half of the 19th century, its implementation in different provinces of the Empire and the varying consequences of reform in these regions. Then secondly, it will contextualise the land reform movements and debates in the post-Ottoman nation-states through an analysis of the debates around the agrarian question and the legacy of the Ottoman land regime. In this it will look at the relationship of land reform to population movements; land distribution (and re-distribution) and registration policies followed by different states; and the new property regimes established by the independent states in the Balkans in the late 19th century and the mandate regimes in the Middle East in the aftermath of the First World War.
The paper will thus trace the continuities as well as the ruptures with the 19th-century Ottoman “legal revolution” in these three regions during the first half of the 20th century with respect to land issues. The contextualisation of the post-Ottoman land regimes within the long term consequences of the Ottoman land reform had been deliberately neglected by the state-builders of the early 20th-century, and has eluded the nationalist historiographies of the region for a long time. The paper thus aims at providing a corrective to this neglected aspect of the land reform movements in the Balkans and in the Middle East at the beginning of the 20th century.

After political independence in 1946, debates arose in Syria over which patterns of development the country should take, as well as which foreign experience could be accounted as a suitable reference: most of the political élites still related to the Western Europe. However, after recovering from the ruins of WWII and enforcing speedy patterns of growth and industrialization, the socialist states offered themselves as alternative models for development and postcolonial states. The German Democratic Republic played a significant role in the Middle East that was quite peculiar to it. Excluded from any direct military engagement abroad, it could focus foreign intervention on two key-fields: technological and capital transfer and vocational training for political and administrative elites. The rise in power of the Ba’th Party in 1963 favoured the GDR in transferring its organizational models for state-building. For the time being, centralization of power in state-building process and political rationality attached to industrial growth were some of the core features of the Ba’thist reforms. The GDR contributed by sending several advisors both at technical and ministerial levels: most of their suggestions were later translated into law and partially shaped the new Syrian regime and the related state power (Staatsmacht). However, their contributions were deeply affected by Syrian domestic dynamics: the nationalizations in 1965, the June 1967 defeat, power dualism (izdiwajiyyat is sultah) and the eventual success of Hafiz al Assad and his “Corrective Movement”. The paper will offer an insight on the theories as well as the actual practices concerning the GDR consultacy from 1965 to 1972 when reforms and counter-reforms followed quickly and set many of the most enduring features of the Syrian regime.
The paper will exploit the research that the author developed for his doctoral thesis. The primary sources are based on the German federal archives in Berlin (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amt, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisation der DDR), on German and Syrian published collections, on regional and international literature as well as on oral interviews with Syrian and former GDR officials.

We use evidence from the Australian and New Zealand wool industries to investigate the motives of industry associations. While conventional wisdom assigns rent-seeking motives to such organisations we find that associations can also play a broader beneficial developmental role, which in this case concerns the establishment and expansion of a local commodity market in wool from the late nineteenth century.

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This paper will explore the social capital generated by the New England Jewelry and Silversmiths Association between 1880 and 1914 and its outcomes

Until the 1990s, Switzerland could be classified as either a corporatist, cooperative or coordinated market economy where non-market mechanisms of coordination among economic and political actors played a major role in the organization of the economy. In this respect, business interest associations (BIAs) played a key role in terms of coordination and cooperation among the large Swiss companies. First, they favored the flow of information among enterprises, helping to consolidate self-regulation of economic sectors within a very broad legal framework. Second, given the context of a decentralized State and the weakness of political parties at the national level, business interest groups, being highly organized, were very involved in the political decision-making processes at the federal level. BIAs could thus be regarded as intermediary organizations, which functioned like brokers in networks.
The aim of this paper is to look at the historical evolution of the five main peak Swiss BIAs through network analysis for five assorted dates during the 20th century (1910, 1937, 1957, 1980 and 2000) and relying on a database including more than 12.000 persons. First, we study the logic of membership of these associations, which allows us to analyze their position and function within the network of the Swiss economic elite. Until the 1980s, BIAs took part in the emergence and consolidation of a closely-meshed national network, which declined during the two last decades of the 20th century. Second, we study the logic of influence of these associations by looking at the links they maintained with the political and administrative worlds, through their links to the political parties and the Parliament, and to the administration, via the extra-parliamentary commissions (corporatist bodies). In both cases, the recent dynamic of globalization called into question the traditional role of BIAs among economic and administrative elites.

Built on a traditional Jewish occupational niche and driven by the needs of the battle against Nazi Germany the know-how and craft practices of diamond-cutting were transferred in the late 1930s and early 1940s from Antwerp and Amsterdam to Netanya and Tel Aviv. The transplantation, in which British imperial interests and De Beers' cartel practices played a formative role, harbored a tension. On the one hand the colonial power, the cartel and Zionist entrepreneurs made certain that diamond manufacturing would be Jewish-only, organized as a monopolistic manufacturers association and based on an ethnic-trust system. On the other hand traditional diamond-production practices were adapted and harnessed to Zionist state-building interests of social engineering and regimentation, thus challenging a long-standing and borderless immigrants’ craft culture. Through the making of the diamond manufacturers association in Palestine the paper seeks to examine both the centrality of the colonial state in the empowerment of private capital, and the inseparability of association from Zionist state building during a period of war, national conflict and transformation of Empire.

Statistics on the world oil output in the latter part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th show an overwhelming domination by the USA. At the same time, there were three important producers of crude oil in Europe: Russia, Rumania and Austro-Hungary - specifically its northern province called Galicia which was the part of Poland annexed by Austria in 1772. Galicia was considerably less industrialized than the other regions of the Austro-Hungary Monarchy. The profound social and economic backwardness was the outstanding feature of Galicia. Unlike the rest of the pattern, Galician oil production was among the highest in the world. With the development of oil mining, Galicia also became one of the leading countries in the field of technology and technical progress in oil mining. Of special significance was the modernization of the so-called Canadian drilling method and brand new solutions in the so-called wash drilling.
In my research I found that the National Oil Society (Krajowe Towarzystwo Naftowe) , founded in 1881, played a very influential role in Galician oil industry development, what was very important, if one takes into account mentioned above economic backwardness of the province. The association was very active in many fields. Gathering owners of oil mines as well, engineers and technicians stimulated technological progress. At the same time the Association represented interest of oil producers vis-à-vis authorities as well as refineries, fighting for favorable prices, tax (especially during a crises time) and protection of the law. It was a kind of representative and organizer of the Galician oil industry on the turn of the 19th century.

This paper draws on recent international scholarship a. stressing the multifonctional nature of industry association, and especially their role in mitigating overcompetition and providing services to small firms; and b. discussing conditions leading (or not leading) to the creation and success of such collective institutions.
The first part discuss the influence of the French and Parisian legal and political context on the shape taken by trade associations. The second part sums up a few case studies, esp. on the associations of flower-makers and bronze-makers , and makes proposals for a more systematic study of the patterns of association in Parisian industries.

Chinese managers and business leaders before 1949 were far better informed about the latest advances in Western management knowledge than past scholarship would have us believe. Professional and industry associations played a major role in the diffusion of knowledge about accounting, economics and industry management. By the early 1930s there were associations for accountants, economists, engineers, personnel managers, and specialist lobbies such as the China Institute for Scientific Management. In Shanghai these associations brought together entrepreneurs, managers, business academics, government officials, along with leading publishers, authors, editors and translators of major foreign works on all the major business topics of the day. The paper draws on a bibliographic database of business publications and membership lists of selected associations to map the network ties and social relations of those involved in publishing and promoting ideas about management organization and practice in China. In particular, it seeks to explore the formation of social capital through the dense network of ties that created a community of what the paper calls ‘management intellectuals’, a group whose mission was to promote the modernization of China through the improvement of the management of its industry and commerce.

Second half of the 19th century was the time of creation of numerous industrial associations in Russia. Entrepreneurs, engineers and technologists constituted the most active group in the process of coordination of efforts by several social strata to achieve economic prosperity of the country. Business circles created acceptable forms of union — voluntary non-profit societies for the development of industry and commerce or conventions of representatives. There were about 143 associations, and approximately 120 of them were truly public and independent. These organizations had a wide spectrum of functions: representative, innovative, cultural and educational. Main efforts aimed at creation of favorable conditions of industrial development. Entrepreneurial unions played great role in the rapprochement of production process and science, introduction of new technologies, promotion of institutions of higher learning and secondary technical training. Russian voluntary industrial societies developed from simple spokespersons of interests of entrepreneurial groups to active participants of elaboration of principles of domestic economic policy. On the one hand, they should be considered as an element of institutional framework of economic development, and on the other hand, as a sign of formation of civil society in modernizing Russia.

This paper explains why the Associated Press beat the United Press for control of the American news market. It explores the advantages and disadvantages of an associational, as opposed to a joint-stock, business model. It also investigates the relationship between organizational form and property rights in news. The reason for the success of the Associated Press was that its method of organization better protected monopolistic rents than that of the United Press. This protection, however, limited the ability of the Associated Press to innovate.

The aim of this paper is to show how the Assolombarda helped its members in a period including important phases of the European economic history, that is: a) the post-war reconstruction and the Marshall Plan; b) the first steps of the European Integration; c) the Italian “economic miracle” (1958-1963) and the definitive removal of all existing tariffs among the six first countries making the European Common Market (1968).
This paper is based on the analysis of the “L’Industria Lombarda” (the weekly newspaper published by the Assolombarda) and the few available records in the archives of the Assolombarda. Please note that the Assolombarda is the industry association grouping the Milanese enterprises, that is the most important local industry association related to the Confindustria (the Italian Industry Association). From the end of the second world war to 1968 the leaders of the Assombarda had also represented the industry associations of the other Lombard provinces and this explains why their strategies involved all Lombard enterprises and not only the Milanese ones. Besides that most of the leaders of the Assolombarda were members of the board of the Confindustria and so they also influenced the strategies and choices of the Italian Industry Association. Finally the analysis of the relations between the leaders of the Assolombarda and the Italian government, the public local authorities and the trade unions allows to observe the aims of the most important Italian industrial sectors and corporations too. Moreover it is possible to observe the effects of the achievement of these aims on the Lombard economy and society.
The analyzed sources illustrated that the leaders Assolombarda tried to achieve both “self-seeking” aims and “developmental” ones. This obviously happened when there was a coincidence between the aims of the members of the Assolombarda and the social and economic interests of the communities where Lombard factories operated. For example it is evident that the reduction of the interest rate on the Lombard credit market or the increasing of the public investment in the infrastructures helped the Lombard enterprises, but in the same time they increased the employment and helped the development of the Lombard economy and the improvement of the quality of life of Lombard citizens. However the “developmental” aims did not have the priority: the Assolombarda tried to achieve them only if they coincided with the interests of the Lombard enterprises.

It is well understood that the fluctuations of prices function as the core of the market economy, sending signals to guide a country’s economic development. The complexity of price indexes has forced us to adopt a simple arithmetic average or a simple geometric average as price proxies.
This paper looks at original wholesale prices of long-term time series from three commercial centres, Tianjin (1913-1947), Shanghai (1921-1944) and Guangzhou (1912-1937), and classifies all the commodities for either capital goods or consumer goods. The wholesale prices will then be examined with China’s national income of 1930s as one weight and local population size as another weight to trace China’s growth.
The findings indicate that first of all, there is a great price difference between Tianjin’s and Guangzhou’s from 1913 to 1925. But the price level converged in three cities in 1926 to 1936. Secondly, the price level increased slowly. Thirdly, prices of capital goods fluctuated more than consumer goods. This is consistent with the economic development of modern China. Fourthly, the trend of wholesale prices matched output index of industrial sectors.
This study concludes that although China’s modern sector grew rapidly its share in the economy was insignificant before 1936.

By using China’s own growth rate in the early 19th century, the findings of this paper reveal that economic growth in China since 1830 was sluggish until 1980. This is the benefit of a long-term approach where the starting point is less arbitrary. In light of this, economic performance of sub-periods (1840 to 1912, 1912 to 1937, 1937 to 1949, 1949 to 1978, and 1980 to 2000) needs re-assessment.

China has a large population and hence abundant supply of cheap labour. This factor determines that China’s capital and technology are relatively more scarce than otherwise. Hence, it makes sense to push the growth of capital formation which is vital for China’s industrialization. This paper analyses conditions and structures of China’s industrialization by looking at China’s labour productivity gap, impact of foreign sanctions after the Korean War and the feasibility of self reliance in capital formation. It also looks at the strategic need for China to adopt a military-industrial growth duet.
China’s approach did not come without its problems. In the 1950s and 60s, China suffered two growth downturns both having its root in over saving and over investment. This is a good lesson for China’s current and future growth.

China’s foreign trade and FDI inflow took off since 1978. The growth occurred not only on scale, but also on scope. This paper looks at how foreign trade and FDI complement each other. At the first stage from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, reforms facilitated FDI-cum-trade. At the second stage, FDI took the lead with a demonstration effect on China trade model. At the third stage, FDI pushed China to integrate with the global economy and became a dominate factor which influenced China’s government policies. The current bid on domestic consumption aims to strike a balance between FDI and China’s own growth trajectory.

Since the period of Xianfeng (1851-1861) and Tongzhi (1862-1874), affected by a constant series of important historical events, the financial system of the Qing Dynasty changed a lot in both its administration mode and the contents of income and expenditure. This paper reveals the financial changes taking place under the background of the late Qing’s Westernization Movement, especially focuses on those brought by local governments’ investment in establishing new enterprises such as arsenals, factories and shipyards according to Western models. The main opinion put forward in this paper is that the establishment of a number of new enterprises in provinces during 1860s-1890s by local governments not only changed the content and structure of the Dynasty’s financial income and expenditure, but also produced marked effects on its traditional administration mode. According to the author’s opinion, the late Qing’s Westernization Movement greatly strengthened local governments’ economic and financial position in provinces and played an important role in the process of transformation of financial administration from centralization of authority to the division of power by provinces to a certain degree, which at last formed a relatively independent local financial system in addition to that of the central government.

从咸丰、同治时期开始的一系列重大历史事件使清王朝财政从管理体制到收支内容都发生了诸多变化。本文考察与洋务运动相关联的清王朝财政变化，特别是各省投资建立西式近代企业所引起的财政变化。本文的主要观点是：1860－90年代由地方政府推动的各省一批近代新式企业的建立不仅改变了清王朝财政收支的内容和结构，而且对它的传统管理体制也发生了重大影响。依照作者的观点，晚清洋务运动极大地增强了各省的经济及财政实力，在清王朝的财政管理由中央集权到各省分权并最终形成相对独立的地方财政体系的过程中起了重要作用。

This paper tackles the phenomenon of juan (“contribution” or “donation”) in the late Qing. From the Taiping Rebellion of 1851-1864 to the eve of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, some provinces collected their own taxes called juan in addition to the lijin or likin tax and customs duty. Gradually, juan became a formal tax instead of informal and spontaneous donation. The juan revenue also became important in supporting official operation at the prefecture, district and county levels. With the juan, the Qing tax resource became localised.

Formation of a modern financial system is a major factor for modernization. This paper discusses the process of China’s financial development and its structural changes from 1887 to 1936 with quantitative indexing. This study suggests that China financial development during 1920s-1930s was still far behind the main capitalism economies. Any further growth faced the financial bottleneck until WWII.
This paper has 5 parts: (1) estimation of financial assets and their changes over time, (2) financial instruments used and GNP performance, (3) non-financial devices and GNP performance, (3) financial correlations ratio, (5) Conclusion.

Capital can be divided into financial capital, human capital and social capital separately relating to material, knowledge and network needed by industry development. More research on invest and Chinese economy before 1949 were carried on from the aspect of financial capital. This paper explores what and how social capital influence on market integration and industry development. Merchant network is combination of personal networks and organizational networks. There exist different link-patterns based on blood-relationship, geography and common interests among these networks. The more developed market, the more likely the network breaks through the natural ties restrictions such as blood-relationship and geography restriction. Some people argue that those natural link-patterns constraint the market expansion and transformation in modern China. This paper explores the cooperation and conflicts relating to the quality-control and transaction rules among different members of the merchant network in silk industry. The paper finds that “geography” is a crucial factor contributing to strengthen the stability of merchant network and expand the merchant network in a high risky, competitive and separated market. More importantly, those merchant organizations mainly linked by common interests achieve less efficiency than those linked by geography-relationship on cooperating with merchant organization in product place. That is, the latter plays more efficient role in market integration than the former.

China’s trade credit system as a whole is composed of the open account system and the commercial bill system. Until the early of 1950’s, the main body of trade credit in China was the open account trade system. China’s government’s trade credit policy had changed since 1949 to 2000. In the early of 1950’s most trade credits were open accounts, and trade credit system was integrated. In 1954, the Chinese government banned trade credit in order to establish a planned economy. In the early of 1980’s, the government market reform revived the credit system. But there was path dependence on the old system. And, commercial bills were not used extensively. This paper applies new institutional economics to examine why the transformation credit system was so slow.

A real estate market existed in China’s treaty ports in mid-19th century, and became prosperous in the 1930s. Several factors contributed its growth, including immigration as well as the foreign trade.
Treaty ports and foreign concessions determined foreign direct investment as a main force in the formation and growth of the real estate market. Participants were both foreign firms and individuals. In terms of shares, the British owned the biggest percentage, followed by the French and the Americans.
Geographically, Shanghai attracted the most foreign investment, followed by Tianjin. Institutionally, the Shanghai Real Estate Agency, E.D. Sasson Co. Ltd, S.A. Hardoon Co., Shanghai Land Investment Co. Ltd, China Realty Co. Ltd were prominent. In Tianjin, the Tientsin Land Investment Co. Ltd, Credit Foncier D’Extreme Orient, Societe Fonciere Francd-Chinoise Detientsin were very famous. Foreign dominance in the real estate market can be attributed to their abundant capital and their political and commercial privileges on China’s soil. But one should not under-estimate the Western business models ranging from title-deed transactions, secured loans, rent to build, and entrusted management.
This paper examines the pattern and its change in this particular sector.

Development of the Russian pulp and paper industry began later that in other countries in Europe. The first pulp and paper mills in Russia were built in the 19th century, and a significant expansion of the sector began during the Soviet time in 1920s and 1930s. However, pulp and paper industry was never a strategic industry in the Soviet Union. Nowadays, it is getting much more attention, but there are several challenges that it faces in its current phase of development.

The paper analyses historical evolution of the pulp and paper industry in Russia, highlights the main time periods (early development, Soviet period, market transition, and a post- transition period). The paper also focuses on the geographical specificity in the evolution of Russian pulp and paper, as historically, Russian paper industry was located in Northwest of Russia, but by 1960s it started to spread actively to Siberia. This resulted in substantial regional differences and in different development paths of Russian pulp and paper mills also after privatization in the 1990s.
Economic transition from a planned economy to market brought up new rules and new actors into the pulp and paper industry in Russia as well as many challenges. The economic transition is a milestone which is very important for understanding the evolution process of the Russian pulp and paper. This paper looks into how the Soviet legacy is shown in the present development of the industry. Also, the paper attempts to determine whether such development path is common for other transition countries

NORDIC PAPER INDUSTRY

Nordic paper and pulp industry companies have managed to catch up traditional market leaders in industry from the late 19th century onwards. Though Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden and Norway) had only limited domestic markets, they have had significant raw material resources that enabled the growth of their forest industries. Nordic companies increased their relative share in this line of business already in the late 19th century, when wood emerged as dominant source for paper making. The paper aims to analyse and compare the major factors behind the evolution of Nordic paper industries; the story was not the same in all countries, Norway, for example, lost it's relative share earlier than Finland and Sweden. Today, forest industries are facing challanges in all Nordic countries.

The paper analyses the evolution of the Dutch paper and board industry between 1800 and 2000. After an introduction of the pre-industrial era and the slow process of industrialisation during the 19th century, the paper focus on the development of the industry and the corporate strategies that became apparent during the 20th century.

This paper focuses on the rapid catch-up process of the Japanese modern pulp and paper industry, which was formed in a completely different course from the traditional handmade paper industry. Japan only started to produce machine paper as late as 1874, but by the 1970s it became the second largest producer in the world. Of course today Japan is a major producer and consumer of paper. As one of the transplanted industries in modern Japan, the pulp and paper industry, mainly established by the private sector, witnessed rapid import substitution, the introduction of advanced foreign technologies, and cartelization from an early stage. The industry experienced export growth during the First World War, and a mega firm occupying 80% domestic paper production was born by amalgamation in 1930s. A main reason for such rapid growth was the enlarged demand for paper in the modernization process of the whole economy. Compared with many other developing countries that used to read books made by washi, a traditional, hand-made paper, the Japanese demand for paper is much higher due to its traditionally high literacy rate. The growth after the Second World War was based on the introduction of advanced technologies, changes in material, diversification of products. The mega firm was dissolved into three firms by GHQ policy. However, today a new wave of M&A has come to this industry.

The story of the French Pulp and Paper industry from the 18th century onward. How one of the most ancient paper industry in Europe couldn't modernize during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. And how it became a modern and competitive branch after lots of acquisition by foreign companies.

No one can doubt about the existence of a Scandinavian model in the historical development of papermaking and pulp industries. However, it doesn’t exist any analysis about a general pattern of Southern Europe countries. The aim of this paper is to portray this model trough the analysis of Italy, Spain and Portugal cases.
Southern Europe countries shared some common characteristics in the historical development of their papermaking and pulp industries. First, they have a strong papermaking tradition (probably with the Portuguese exception). Even, Spain was the door entrance of paper to Western World during Middle Ages. In consequence, the axis of this manufacture was around Mediterranean basin for quite a long time. Italy and the Iberian Countries began to loose ground from the 17th century. On the other hand, during this phase they were built strong links among these countries (jointly France). This close relationship has different stages: commercial, technological, etc. The process was intensified during the 19th Century. Two factors contributed to this decline: the mechanization and the growing importance of wood pulp as a raw material in papermaking. The three countries incorporated slowly the Fourdrinier machine (in a context of very low per capita consumption) and they did not developed a pulp industry. The other side of the coin, in the three cases, was the long continuity of handmade paper until later than other European countries. In some cases this continuity was not any sign of atavism. Instead of that some of the handmade paper firms were important exporters, especially those from Spain and Italy. Even some of them are right now world leaders in their respective markets. The decline stopped during the 20th century, especially during its second half. During this period Southern Europe countries improved extraordinarily their levels of consumption. This was the basis of an impressive growth. In addition to that they developed a very important and export oriented pulp industry (mainly from eucalyptus fibre in the Portuguese and Spanish cases). As a consequence the Southern Europe firms have increased its presence in international markets. On the other hand, they have its preferential markets and destination of their investments into the own Southern Europe (the Italian assets in Spain or the Spanish ones in Portugal are very good examples).

In this chapter, it is discussed the evolution of the South American pulp and paper industry (PPI), with special emphasis on Brazilian and Chilean companies. In these two countries, the industry is well established in terms of operations integration, from forests to pulp mills, and support to innovation activities. The evolution of the industry in other countries, for example in Uruguay and Argentina, will also be discussed, especially because of the profile of new investments carried out in Uruguay and the rise of environmental, which should also be considered as political, claims in the region, due mainly to disagreements between these two last countries concerning the pulp operations and their environmental impact.
The analysis presented is based mainly on secondary sources and shall demonstrate how the industry has evolved from its establishment to its present organization, the development of mechanisms and institutions to support innovation, the organization of supply chain, and the political economy, including environmental regulation and ethical and social responsibility demonstrations. This analysis is justified because of the importance the region has gained in the scenario of PPI worldwide.
The growth of investments in the region follows trends of reorganization and expansion of the PPI. Whereas companies used to operate on a vertically integrated basis, they now separate their pulp from their paper operations, with pulp being converted to market pulp, i.e., specifically to be sold in markets abroad. In order to deal with an increasing demand from both developed and developing countries, many pulp producers have established or plan to establish operations in places with land available for plantations of fast growing trees and with cheaper labor costs. There has also been a change in the profile of new mills compared to the model commonly followed up to the beginning of the new millennium. They now tend to be huge operations, in the order of 1 million tons/year, resulting in ever increasing pressure on natural resources. Starting with its comparative advantages of climate and land availability, South America is to become a net exporter of pulp.
Overall, the comparative and competitive advantages presented by the countries analyzed in this chapter overcome the challenges FDI might face, those regarding the business environment and those of social, political and environmental nature, when establishing operations. These challenges demand a more strict observation of ethical and socially responsible behavior from multinational companies, which they might have already defined in their original location. In this regard local companies have developed, even though in some cases not yet so uniformly, mechanisms of surveillance in order to guarantee the continuation of their operations.

The history of the British paper industry, for the purposes of this paper, begins in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before that period paper was produced by fairly simple hand processes. In the 1800s started an epoch of mechanical improvements leading multiple changes in the British paper industry. Britain was first country in the world that possessed the capital, the enterprise, and the skill necessary to develop industrial mechanisation. How was then the mechanised production of writing- and printing-paper made a workable economic enterprise in Britain? Such a development would have been impossible without improvements in paper-making techniques and the introduction of paper-making machines. Britain continued to hold a lead in the field of paper-making up until the 1890s after which the momentum of being the first nation successfully to mechanise the production of paper was gradually lost to the overseas competitors.
Between 1860 and 1914 the paper industry was one of the most rapidly growing industries in Britain. The main importers were Germany, Norway and Sweden. Canada, endowed with water power, raw material and network of lakes and rivers, became slowly a major exporter. Despite the increased use of wood pulp, there was still an overseas market for British paper made mainly from rags or esparto grass. The main bulk of exports went to the British colonies such as British India, Australia and South Africa. After the Second World War slack demand, combined with over-capacity and rising costs, began to reveal the British paper industry’s weakness. The paper and board industry, with the exception of newsprint, had been protected since 1932 but in the early 1950s this protection was reduced. The absence of a tariff left the British market open to importers backed by natural advantages. British entry to EEC in 1973 once again worsened the prospects for the paper industry. By the 1980s British business culture had changed dramatically, and the paper firms developing strong international dimension led the way breaking the old business mould.

This article offers a synthesis of the dynamic forces and political economy, which shaped the evolution of pulp and paper industry in the United States since the mid-19th century. In particular, I will attempt to clarify my claim that industry’s evolution in the U.S. should be understood in three successive and distinctive, thoug overlapping, periods, during which different economic, technological and political factors framed firms’ strategic choices and organizational capabilities.
I argue that the dramatic growth of the industry between 1860 and 1960 was driven and punctuated by distinct, sustained, and successive spectacular waves of innovation. Beginning in the 1950s and ending in mid-1990s, political economy placed increasing constraints on U.S. firms ability to specialize in terms of technological innovation or geography, leading to a period of organizational convergence among industry’s leaders. While too recent for historically sound interpretetation, it appears that the U.S. industry entered descending path in the mid-1990s. While the overall picture for the industry is gloomy, it is also evident that leading U.S. firms pursue vigorous “global champion” strategies and are increasingly relying on specialization, predicting possible new era of innovation.
Between 1860 and 1960, radical technological departures enabled managers of specialized firms to create new markets and pursue aggressive strategies of corporate growth. As these waves of industrial change passed from a nascent phase to maturity, the reciprocal dynamics among organization, corporate strategy, policy, and technological learning co-evolved, and established the evolutionary path of the North American pulp and paper industry.

The first German paper mill was founded in 1390 by Ulmer Stromer in Nürnberg. Once Gutenberg had introduced mechanical printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, humanism and the Protestant Reformation took care of the demand for books and pamphlets creating a flourishing paper industry from the sixteenth century onwards. Now Germany is the top paper producer in Europe and fifth in the world. Due to scarcity of raw material, it is a minor pulp producer and the biggest importer. It consumes almost one fourth of the paper in Europe. Germany developed its distinctive model of capitalism with cooperation, cartels and regulation. In literature, this development is seen through the big business (metal and electric), whereas paper production never concentrated into huge companies like AEG or Siemens. This article focuses on giving a comparison enabling outlook over the German paper and pulp industry in terms of natural and institutional environments, in terms of transition to global economy as also in terms of classical business history claims. Does the development of the German paper and pulp industry conform to the common conceptions about German capitalism? What was the role of technology and science? How did the constantly changing natural and institutional environment shape the German paper industry, which secured its European top position in the early nineteenth century and has since struggled to hold it? Furthermore, the central figures on production, imports and exports, firm population, firm size and prize and accessibility of raw materials are given.

The distribution of consumer goods in early modern towns was by no means a simple affair. Recent research has shown that a complex system of multi-layered distribution networks existed. Commodities were sold at fairs and at daily or weekly markets, in shops, stalls and in small outlets attached to houses or workshops, and on the streets by sellers who went from door-to-door or simply hawked their wares on the main streets and squares. Although each of these commercial circuits could serve a different clientele, it has appeared that very often the various types of vendors competed for the same customers. Tensions amongst the different groups of retailers were therefore not uncommon and could rise very high.
This paper deals with the tensions between the local retail establishment – shopkeepers and stallholders with a permanent outlet – and the outsiders, the street sellers. Although in most works on early modern retail practices the strife between the shopkeepers and street sellers is mentioned, we still know remarkably little on the subject. This paper will try to come to a better understanding of the dynamics between the various groups in the marketplace by looking at conflicts among retailers in a number of Dutch towns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It will analyse the way in which shopkeepers and street sellers shared the market, which conflicts arose between them, why they arose and how they were solved.

What were “streets” in street selling? In dealing with street selling and street sellers, it is unavoidable to investigate how streets were historically formed. This paper explores, through comparison of two Early Modern cities Edo and Amsterdam for the longer periods between 1600-1850, the development of streets as urban commercial space and the role of street sellers in relation to it.
Our method is to explore “streets” and “street selling” by highlighting them defining their contrasts, namely “the non-streets”. We will point out following three contrasts that were forming as topographical and social antithesis of streets: 1)STREETS versus QUARTERS, 2)STREETS versus HOME, and 3)STREETS versus OPEN SPACE.
First, contrasting streets with the formation of urban quarters, highlights how streets functioned initially in Amsterdam and Edo in relation to the smaller community units within the city. We will argue what structural developments were necessary for these streets to become urban commercial space respectively. In addition, a new extended layer grew rapidly within these planned urban quarters, literally at the back and behind the shops and houses. “Back-houses (Achterhuis)” in Amsterdam and “the reversed side of shops (Uradana)” in Edo eventually held half of (civil) inhabitants of both Edo and Amsterdam. Naturally, streets have developed with the growth of these spaces, providing their inhabitants both work and living places.
Second, in showing the contrasts of STREET versus HOME, we attempt to investigate the relationship between SHOPS and street selling. Both cities, at this period, underwent major change in terms of SHOP kept apart from being HOME. How did this change happen and influence on the growth of streets as urban commercial space in both cities?
In the third contrast of STREET versus OPEN SPACE, we will explore the relationship between streets and markets. We will show a detailed example of a “street market”, the Yanagihara “second hand” cloth/kimono market, which grew enormously at the outskirt of Edo. Tracing the development of this informal, but nonetheless publicly admitted market , we will position street markets in the contrasts of formal/informal, institutionalized/non-institutionalized, and externally introduced or forced/ voluntary or spontaneous , daily/festive markets. Moreover, by investigating the connection between newly emerged street markets and later permanent commercial institutions , the paper discusses whether streets as urban commercial space turned eventually into the visible and mapped components of the city.
Throughout the paper, we attempt to distinguish buyers and the sellers of street selling, and question whether street as commercial space kept bounded to specific urban community.

The history of ice-cream in the early modern period has been dominated by narratives about its origins and its link to luxury consumption in the early modern period. By looking at the practice of selling ice-cream on the streets of Naples, however, it is clear that ice-cream (or sorbetto) was being eaten by a great number of Neapolitans by the end of the eighteenth century. Naples has been closely associated with ice-cream from at least the late seventeenth century as the place of publication of the first book in Europe solely devoted to making sorbetto. Grand Tourists, in turn, made this association, often commenting on the Neapolitan obsession with iced desserts and drinks – so much so, they claimed, that Neapolitans would be more likely to revolt if there was no ice than if there was no grain available in the city. Contemporary engravings suggest the ubiquity of ice-cream sellers on the streets to feed the city’s needs, and, these images of sorbettari have contributed to a picturesque image of the city -- in paintings, porcelain and, later, in photography and urban reportage in the nineteenth century.

Behind this image, however, lay a complex micro-economy which provided the ice for making and storing the ice-cream and which was controlled and monitored within the fiscal system of the Kingdom of Naples. Recent archival research has revealed how the ice was harvested and transported from the mountains along the bay of Naples as well as suggested how the ice was distributed and sold once it reached the city. Although the most ephemeral of consumables, ice, as Grand Tourists had suggested, was considered an essential commodity in the city, and debates about its importance concerned the Bourbon monarchy and, later, the Napoleonic administration.

Ice was used to make the ice-cream but also to store it in special containers (or sorbettiere) to keep it cold as the street-sellers walked around the city. Ice cream was also eaten in ice-cream shops which, contemporary accounts suggest, were, like coffee-shops in the city, places of enlightened sociability. There were also public squares and gardens in the city where a wider range of people watched street entertainers and ate ice-cream sold by street-sellers. There is evidence that coffee too was sold by itinerant vendors in the city, and so the assumption that drinking coffee sitting down and eating ice cream standing outside were part of different social worlds as well as the paradigms around ice cream as a luxury good in Europe – in the north and the south -- have to be challenged. This paper will attempt to map out the social, cultural, and economic topographies of the selling and buying of ice-cream in the streets of Naples and, in doing so, hope to broaden existing models of consumption and enlightened sociability in Europe in the eighteenth century.

Urban trade in the modern age was generally controlled by guilds.
Product differentiation, prices, minimum distances between shops and the quality of goods were usually all under the jurisdiction of corporate
statutes. The aim of these complex and often overlapping regulations was almost always to limit competition and make the market transparent. In this context, peddlers were often ambiguous figures, but as their customers were mainly in lower bands of consumers they played a role in keeping prices down. The relationship between guilds and peddlers thus often involved conflict.
Another issue was that the market divided into highly specialised segments, while travelling salesmen almost always dealt in diversified goods and would buy and sell practically every type of product. Conflict was often deliberately caused and was in fact a tool for redefining the rules and the boundaries between product categories.
This paper examines the situation of a medium-sized town, Mantova, between the 17 and 18 Centuries, with reference to the sales of textiles and second-hand clothes, a sector where there was particular and frequent conflict between shopkeepers and travelling salesmen.

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Margaret Spufford and Laurence Fontaine have both emphasised the important function of itinerant booksellers as distributors of cheap books in Early Modern Europe. Fontaine concluded that the pedlar, contrary to common notion, was not marginal at all in early modern France. On the contrary, peddling was a vital phenomenon in past communities. This does not only count for the countryside. Paula McDowell has demonstrated the commercial importance of itinerant booksellers in large cities like London in her book The Women of Grubstreet.
Itinerant trade was not only crucial for the dissemination of the printed word, but also for all kinds of other consumer and cultural goods, especially in the eighteenth century. Harald Deceulaer argued that ‘the growth in consumption in […] England, France and the Southern Netherlands, went hand in hand with an enormous growth in fraud, smuggling and peddling.’ According to Cissie Fairchilds, an advanced distribution system was a necessary condition for the growth of the French and English consumption of cheap copies of aristocratic luxury items like fans and umbrellas. These types of goods were ‘sold freely in both country and town by wandering chapmen, peddlers unfettered by local restrictions on shops and market days.’ The economic historian Jan de Vries also observed in his groundbreaking study The Industrious Revolution a major shift in the period 1650-1750 from ‘markets, fairs and direct, guild-controlled artisanal sales towards retail shops and peddlers.’ This new retail network guaranteed a much larger supply of consumer goods than the old market system. Also for the strongly urbanized Dutch Republic, ample proof has been found of a highly developed itinerant distribution system. And just like in London, hawkers with printed wares were omnipresent in the streets of Amsterdam.
Although our insights in this complex distribution network are growing, many questions still need to be answered. Talking about a network for instance implies a certain level of organization and interplay, and just here our knowledge is lacking. What do we actually know about the necessary conditions before an itinerant networks came into existence? How were these networks organized, and to what extent did printers, publishers, booksellers and pedlars work together? Answering these questions is a precondition for another, even more intriguing question: Do these itinerant booksellers represent a traditional economy on its return, or do they symbolize the advent of modernity? In this paper I will address these important research questions.
My first aim will be to categorize itinerant networks in urban environments. To discover the differences between networks in different countries under various conditions, I will compare some major cities in England and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The criteria I will use to categorize different networks are distance, duration, products, relations, location and regulation. With the help of these concepts, I will try to distinguish at least five types of networks: 1. The family network, 2. The ethnic network, 3. The text network, 4. The spatial network, 5. The legal network.

Turku was the biggest contemporary city in 18th century Finland with its 10,000 inhabitants. The livelihood of urban males was based on burgess professions and the associated navigation, on crown and city offices as well as on physical labour performed under the protection of the city. As a rule, an urban woman could manufacture and trade only in goods and services, the sale of which did not require burgess rights; petty retail, textile manufacture and cloth care, as well as accommodation and restaurants. The ”size of company” was small: most of the women only employed themselves.
In this context, it seems that the majority of the self-employed women in the pre-industrial city earned their living in small-scale business operations: dispensing alcoholic beverages and serving food; providing accommodation; spinning, weaving, sewing, providing textile care and cleaning services. Peddling or petty selling of knick-knacks, second-hand furniture and clothes, fruit, vegetables, dried fish, sausages, bakery goods, tobacco, ribbons, needles and various accessories was also a female business. The late 18th century petty trade tax collection lists, included in the city of Turku accounts, contain the names of some 18 to 26 women peddlers on an annual basis: wives or widows of seamen, carpenters, coachmen, shoemakers, journeymen and resigned burgher officials and soldiers. In my paper I will discuss the business of these urban women who sold mostly food at the marketplaces and in the streets of Turku.

It is sometimes implicitly suggested that retailing underwent a specific evolution with dramatic turns – or even ‘revolutions’ – changing the basic interactions between buyers and sellers. Already in 1972, the sociologist L.P. Bucklin constructed an almost teleological model where retail institutions are dramatically transformed in response to population pressure and rising consumption budgets. Thus, markets of merchants and ateliers of craftsmen are supposed to be the dominant features of a medieval retail system; the rise of shops becomes specific for the early-modern times; and, finally, retailing is assumed to reach its apex with the rise of modern department stores, chain stores and supermarkets in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
However, recent empirical research – covering various places and periods – contradicts such linear, straightforward causations. From very early on, in the most urbanised and commercialised places of Europe (as Italy and the Low Countries), different retail circuits co-existed next to each other. Transactions could take place on markets, halls, at auctions, in shops, ateliers, on private ‘markets’ (like ins or merchant houses) or simply on the street. This diversity reflected itself in a complex, highly segmented retail infrastructure, ruled by different institutions, conventions and norms. Even the basic divide between producing and trading was not always that clear, with artisans assuming retail functions on the one hand, and merchants, wholesalers and retailers meddling in production on the other.
The existence of such multi-layered retail system certainly obviated typical consumer problems regarding temporal product scarcity, time and credit (liquidity). Yet, it does raise questions as to how the different commercial circuits competed against each other in gaining trust and respectability of consumers. Certainly, strategies of reputation management, mediating information asymmetries and drawing social distinctions were all essential in this aspect. But how exactly did early modern retailers use such strategies in practice – if at all – to reach their clientele?
In the following paper I will try to detail this question by focusing on second-hand dealings, using archives from local and central authorities, augmented with documents from corporate organised second-hand sellers. The handled products in this second-hand sector were typically diverse, ‘unclear’ of origin and quality, and usually crossed detailed gild definitions regarding the product and labour markets. Thus, for a potential customer of second-hand wares, trust and confidence in the retailer of these goods, was more important as a clear product-identification. Probably the role of the retailer in lowering information barriers became even more important in the studied timeframe. Late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries especially, saw a rise in new and fashionable products, falling outside maladjusted gild regulations – an evolution often associated with a ‘consumer revolution’. More specifically, by comparing different second-hand circuits in the cities of Antwerp and Bruges – important regional centres for Brabant and Flanders respectively – the often-neglected second-hand dealers on the street are brought to the fore. How did they fit in the overall retail system? Which products did they sell? And were they always scorned with low esteem, and hence low trust and respectability?

The Banco de la Nación Argentina, created in 1891, over the ashes of two great classic public banks (Banco Nacional, Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires ), had at first a discreet existence, dimmed by the enormous weight of private banking, and shackled by the need to differentiate itself from the behaviour of its predecessors following the 1980 crisis. From that date on, a greater freedom of action was possible thanks to the reform of its organic charter and of an increase of its capital, and in a few years it achieved a dominant position in the system, due to the magnitude of its deposits and of its large territorial extent. On the basis of the material available in the same institution (memories, board minutes, etc.), its performance is evaluated beyond those monetary functions pointed out by the specialized literature. Due to credit demands of different productive sectors, previous paths followed in a more "heroic time" by its predecessors of the public banking were resumed. It also played a considerable role in direct or indirect financing of the National State and some of the new public enterprises. Finally, the Banco de la Nación performed a "de facto" regulatory action of the banking system, prior the creation of a Central Bank in the 1930’s.

Banco de Comercio fue fundado en 1932 y en pocos años se convirtió en el segundo banco más importante del México. Hoy es el mayor banco del país, y la filial más importante del grupo multinacional español BBVA. El crecimiento original del banco estuvo fundamentado en una estrategia de expansión regional a través de la formación de una red de filiales regionales, uno modelo tomado de experiencias europeas. Este modelo constituyó una innovación en los mercados bancarios mexicanos y transformó a la industria bancaria. En sus orígenes Banco de Comercio estaba controlado por un grupo de accionistas que mantenían un equilibrio en el control corporativo. En 1957 el banco sufrió un takeover hostil por parte de uno de los accionistas, un caso sin precedentes en México. El control quedó centralizado en el nuevo presidente del banco, y se unificó la red de filiales como un sistema integrado. En 1975, con la ley de banca múltiple los 35 bancos que formaban la red se fusionaron en una sola entidad, constituyendo el mayor banco de América Latina.

The 2008 crisis has renewed interest in the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 30s
The main argument of this paper is that the main goal of the policies adopted during the early 30s was to overcome the enormous fiscal problems of the government, although indirectly those measures helped to avoid monetary contraction and the deep depression that could have followed.

A prominent issue in theory and history of finance is about the convenience or not of a tight bank-industry relationship. Should the banks be promoters of industrial firms? Are there any advantages in the control of those firms by the banks? This kind of operations favours the strategic interests of the industry or the short-term interests of the banks? At the end, is it indifferent that the firms were financed with internal resources (capital) or with the external ones (credit), as the simplest classical model supports?

In this paper, first, we will revise the theories on the bank-industry relationship that are more relevant for economic historians. Second, we will present the evolution of that relationship in Spain during the 20th Century, with the help of a selected bibliography on the subject. A third part will be devoted to the case of the Madrid banks, a true paradigm of the Spanish big banks in the past century. We will concentrate our attention in the Banco Hispano Americano, a symbol of the “commercial banking”, and the Banco Central, the emblem of the “universal banking”, trying to obtain lessons from a comparison between the two modalities of banking. The study will stop around 1980 to avoid the difficult years of the banking crisis that change completely the landscape (i.e. it was the end of the leadership of the traditional Madrid banks). We will add some concluding remarks.

The paper studies the strategy and the role of French banks in comparison with the German and English banks. It is grounded on the balance sheet data of a large sample of banks collected by French and international institutions .
It shows first that at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century French banks were the most involved in the financing of the economy while keeping a very high ratio of liquidity.
It shows second that the forms of economic involvement of French banks differed from that of other European banks. While in England and Germany, credits through loans and current accounts advances tend to replace the discount of bills, in France it is the opposite figures that prevails. While until the early 1880s French banks offered a wide range of financial services (including loans and overdrafts), they reverse their strategy from this date and they focus more and more on discount. Even when taking into account the assets structure of local and regional banks, more prone to offer loans and credits to local firms, the French banking system as a whole is more discount-oriented than other European systems.
The paper examines third the reasons for such an evolution. It suggests that the shift from universal banking to specialized banking that occurs in France between the 1880s and the eve of the WW I doe’s not provide the whole explanation of the story. Even though all large French banks can be said universal banks until 1880, they were not shaped on the same pattern. Crédit Lyonnais was the single bank with strong regional roots, striving from the start to develop its business of both deposits and lending in local places. Other banks were Parisian banks (Société Générale, Comptoir d’Escompte, CIC) without regional roots so that they limited the scope of their provincial business to the collect of large deposits, located in important commercial places, in complement of their financial business. When these banks decided to give a new impetus to the extension of their network in the 1890s, they were not in a position to involve deeply in local lending: the discount business (a form of self-liquiditing credit based on the knowledge and the guaranty of the drawer) was a much less risky issue than loans and overdratfs. Surprisengely, Crédit Lyonnais, often described as a rather conservative bank since 1881, benefitted on its ancient lending experience and on its more decentralized structure to exhibit more aggressive policy.
The paper shows, fourth, that the growing dependency of most French banks on discount may have led to a misallocation of capital. As a result of the growing competition among banks to get bills, some part of the bills discounted by large banks at the end of the 19th century seems to have been of bad quality and of weak productivity. This dependency may have also curbed the growth of the banking sector.

WHY FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS GO ABROAD: THE CASE OF THE BANCO DE SANTANDER IN LATIN AMERICA

In a 1977 seminal paper H.G. Grubel suggested that banks go international for three reasons. First, because the pretend to operate in the wholesale foreign exchange and money markets, which compelled them necessarily to open offices in the major financial center. Second, because they pretend to serve their corporate clients - customers that move abroad in search of new business opportunities. They may also try to capture a market share in countries with underdeveloped banking system -low levels of financial intermediation. And third, banks go abroad to respond to the challenge of domestic rivals. In this case internationalization is the result of a business strategy that depends on the behavior of the competitors. The Banco de Santander (or Santander) was founded in 1857. In its first century of existence rose from local to regional and then to national level. In the last fifty years, and more particularly after the entrance of Spain in the (today) European Union in 1986, Santander has become a multinational bank and one of the largest financial institutions of the world, with subsidiaries and offices in more than forty countries across Europe and America. Santander began its foreign expansion in the 1950s when it opened several offices of representation in Mexico DF and London. In the 1970s expanded its network of offices to other Latin American nations at the same time the Bank made different purchases of small and local entities, and made also strategic investments in equity of leading regional financial institutions. But it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Santander consolidated its position as one of the major financial player of the subcontinent. In 2007, almost half of its overall banking operations were concentrated in Latin America and more than third of its total earnings came from the region. The aim of this paper is to describe and explain the expansion of Santander in the Latin American market. The unique phenomenon of Santander is taken also as a historical case to illustrate some central issues about the development of multinational banking, such as why, when, where and how financial institutions internationalize. The first section explains why Spanish banks have expanded in Latin America. The second section focuses in the experience of Santander. The third section asks why Santander went to America. Section four examines the profitability of Santander. The paper finishes with a short section of conclusions.

FINANCIAL CRISES AND FINANCIAL REFORMS IN SPAIN: WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

The current international financial crisis, initiated in the United States market and followed by worldwide turbulence, has raised concern about the fragility of the financial system, and reveals the difficulties in implementing measures and legislation to prevent economic turmoil. The works of Bordo (2007, 2008), Reinhart and Rogoff (2008), Eichengreen (2008) or Felton and Reinhart (2008), among others, have tried to use economic history to understand financial crises, the causes behind them and their consequences, an also to find answers to the questions of how to prevent financial crises in the future, and how to counteract financial turbulence when it appears. Can history help policy makers to design a better regulatory system? Can the past provide guide to enhance the effectiveness of prudential regulation?
The main purpose of this paper is to review the major financial crises in Spain from 1856 to the present and to study the main financial reforms adopted after the crisis. With this aim we identify the major Spanish financial crisis over approximately the 150 years span covered by our paper by using quantitative and qualitative information. Moreover, we study the different regulatory regimes in this long period: 1856-1920, 1920-1939, 1939-1975 and 1975-2000. We analyse whether financial reforms have contributed to banking stability and if regulatory changes have been a reaction to financial crisis or predated them. An attempt is made to confront regulatory history with the framework of regulatory and supervisory instruments.

This paper explores the relationship between central bank independence and inflation in Latin America using the experience of Colombia in the period 1923-2008 as a case study. Colombia is interesting in this respect, since it has one of the oldest central banks in Latin America, which since its creation, in 1923, has gone through several major reforms that have changed its objectives and degree of independence. During the period 1923-1951, the central bank was private and independent, with a strong legal commitment to price stability. However, in the period 1951-1991, that commitment was reduced through several legal reforms. For example, in 1963 the monetary responsibilities were divided between a government-dominated monetary board, which oriented monetary policy, and the central bank, which carried them out. In the early 1990s, the bank recovered its independence and its focus on price stability. Inflation varied substantially during the different subperiods of the bank´s institutional history. The review of the Colombian experience shows that independence of the central bank combined with a commitment to price stability renders the best results in terms of price stability.
By using structural break tests applied to the inflation time series for the period (1980-2008), we also provide statistical evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the reform of the central bank in the early 1990s marked a structural break in the rate of inflation. Not only did inflation decrease substantially after the reforms, but its variability also fell.

The current international financial crisis, initiated in the United States market and followed by worldwide turbulence, has raised concern about the fragility of the financial system, and reveals the difficulties in implementing measures and legislation to prevent economic turmoil. The works of Bordo (2007, 2008), Reinhart and Rogoff (2008), Eichengreen (2008) or Felton and Reinhart (2008), among others, have tried to use economic history to understand financial crises, the causes behind them and their consequences, an also to find answers to the questions of how to prevent financial crises in the future, and how to counteract financial turbulence when it appears. Can history help policy makers to design a better regulatory system? Can the past provide guide to enhance the effectiveness of prudential regulation?
The main purpose of this paper is to review the major financial crises in Spain from 1856 to the present and to study the main financial reforms adopted after the crisis. With this aim we identify the major Spanish financial crisis over approximately the 150 years span covered by our paper by using quantitative and qualitative information. Moreover, we study the different regulatory regimes in this long period: 1856-1920, 1920-1939, 1939-1975 and 1975-2000. We analyse whether financial reforms have contributed to banking stability and if regulatory changes have been a reaction to financial crisis or predated them. An attempt is made to confront regulatory history with the framework of regulatory and supervisory instruments

In this paper, we present the results of the first step of a study which try to measure the efficiency and the limits of the Banque of France’s intervention on the bank system’s liquidity between 1958 and 1973. Ability of central banks to control and regulate is among the key questions concerning the banking systems. Monetary policy operating procedures have continuously changed in the light of modifications in the structure and workings of financial markets as well as in the broader economic and political environment. intervention on the bank system’s
The great hardships of wartime, and of the immediate post-war period, were followed by a period of steady economic development, now often called in France "Trente Glorieuses". France benefited then of an economic climate superior to that of the best interwar years. Between 1947 and 1973, the economy went through a booming period (5% per year in average). Through most of the 1960s and early 1970s, it expanded steadily, with per capita GDP almost doubling between 1960 and 1970. The economic growth was mainly due to productivity gains and to an increase in the number of working hours. Indeed, the working population was growing very slowly, the « baby boom » being offset by the extension of the time dedicated to studies. Productivity gains came from the catching up with the United States. In 1950, the average income in France is half as big as that of an American (0, 55), and reach four fifth in 1973. France secured its position among the highly industrialized nations, taking advantage of the international environment by evolving a strategy for economic development. As this strategy evolved, change occurred not only in the structure of the economy but in financial structures, monetary institutions and patterns of economic behavior as well. As far as the financial system is concerned, the French post-war banking system was strictly specialized. Its reorganizing, inherent to the WWII, oriented itself to the promotion of the state control of the banking system. Therefore, through the banking law issued on the 2nd of December 1945, the nationalization of the Bank of France has been decided, as well as the nationalization of the deposit banks that dominated the French banking market. Through the same law are established the limits between the deposit banks and the business banks which avoided nationalization and which could carry long term commitments. The specialized banking dominated the French financing system until the beginning of the eighties, even if it proved to create more problems than the one it resolved. Beneficent for the French economy immediately after the war, it became a brake in the way of financing the industry. This was the reason for which the sixties are the years when the resettlement process, respectively of giving up the strict banking specialization started. Progressively the separation between deposit and merchant banking became obliterated and disappeared with the banking reform of 1966-1967. At the same time the banking system began to concentrate, mainly by amalgamations. At the end of 1964 the commercial banks registered by the Banking control commission numbered 338. Of these, 39 were foreign banks operating in France. Compared with a total of 444 in 1946, the reduction of 23 per cent is indicative of the downward trend in individual institutions since the Second World War. The weight of the different factors of the bank’s liquidity has changed in that period. Whatever the ideas developed by historians about the time of birth of the overdraft economy in France, there is no doubt that it was reinforced during the period under review. The respective place of the autonomous factors and the political and institutional ones, of which depends the Banque de France’s capacity to intervene has changed. Most of time, scholars study the question of the liquidity’ factors in a static and aggregate way. On the contrary the aim of this paper is to examine the historical evolution of these factors at a microeconomic level in studying the banks’ liquidity by type of banks, by nature of activities, by size and even by region. We also outline a comparison with some others European banking systems. This more accurate approach may allow, through some examples, a more concrete explanation of the way the Banque de France’ techniques succeeded or failed in controlling the banking liquidity and therefore the liquidity of the whole economy.

In this paper, we would present the results of the first step of a study which try to measure the efficiency and the limits of the Banque of France’s intervention on the bank system’s liquidity between 1958 and 1973. Ability of central banks to control and regulate is among the key questions concerning the banking systems. Monetary policy operating procedures have continuously changed in the light of modifications in the structure and workings of financial markets as well as in the broader economic and political environment. In this paper we present the first results of a study which try to measure the efficiency and its limits of the Banque of France’s intervention on the bank system’s liquidity between 1958 and 1973
The great hardships of wartime, and of the immediate post-war period, were followed by a period of steady economic development, now often called in France "Trente Glorieuses". France benefited then of an economic climate superior to that of the best interwar years. Between 1947 and 1973, the economy went through a booming period (5% per year in average). Through most of the 1960s and early 1970s, it expanded steadily, with per capita GDP almost doubling between 1960 and 1970. The economic growth was mainly due to productivity gains and to an increase in the number of working hours. Indeed, the working population was growing very slowly, the « baby boom » being offset by the extension of the time dedicated to studies. Productivity gains came from the catching up with the United States. In 1950, the average income in France is half as big as that of an American (0, 55), and reach four fifth in 1973. France secured its position among the highly industrialized nations, taking advantage of the international environment by evolving a strategy for economic development. As this strategy evolved, change occurred not only in the structure of the economy but in financial structures, monetary institutions and patterns of economic behavior as well. As far as the financial system is concerned, the French post-war banking system was strictly specialized. Its reorganizing, inherent to the WWII, oriented itself to the promotion of the state control of the banking system. Therefore, through the banking law issued on the 2nd of December 1945, the nationalization of the Bank of France has been decided, as well as the nationalization of the deposit banks that dominated the French banking market. Through the same law are established the limits between the deposit banks and the business banks which avoided nationalization and which could carry long term commitments. The specialized banking dominated the French financing system until the beginning of the eighties, even if it proved to create more problems than the one it resolved. Beneficent for the French economy immediately after the war, it became a brake in the way of financing the industry. This was the reason for which the sixties are the years when the resettlement process, respectively of giving up the strict banking specialization started. Progressively the separation between deposit and merchant banking became obliterated and disappeared with the banking reform of 1966-1967. At the same time the banking system began to concentrate, mainly by amalgamations. At the end of 1964 the commercial banks registered by the Banking control commission numbered 338. Of these, 39 were foreign banks operating in France. Compared with a total of 444 in 1946, the reduction of 23 per cent is indicative of the downward trend in individual institutions since the Second World War. The weight of the different factors of the bank’s liquidity has changed in that period. Whatever the ideas developed by historians about the time of birth of the overdraft economy in France, there is no doubt that it was reinforced during the period under review. The respective place of the autonomous factors and the political and institutional ones, of which depends the Banque de France’s capacity to intervene has changed. Most of time, scholars study the question of the liquidity’ factors in a static and aggregate way. On the contrary the aim of this paper is to examine the historical evolution of these factors at a microeconomic level in studying the banks’ liquidity by type of banks, by nature of activities, by size and even by region. We also outline a comparison with some others European banking systems. This more accurate approach may allow, through some examples, a more concrete explanation of the way the Banque de France’ techniques succeeded or failed in controlling the banking liquidity and therefore the liquidity of the whole economy.

Socioeconomic differences in health and mortality is a crucial indicator of inequality in well-being. While it is widely recognized that such differences in mortality today are substantial most evidence indicate that they were only modest in the past. This paper examines the emergence of socioeconomic differences in age-specific mortality during the period of mortality decline in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It uses multilevel Cox regression controlling for unobserved heterogeneity at the family level, and also estimate the quantitative importance of this heterogeneity. Longitudinal micro-level data for an economically transforming rural area in southern Sweden during the period 1815-1940 is used, and occupations are coded and classified using international standards (HISCO, HISCLASS). Together with information of landholding and from the beginning of the 20th century on income at individual level, this provides high quality information on social position.

In this paper we analyse social differences in mortality in the Sundsvall region during the 19th century. Our study relates to scholarly discussions about the role of social inequality as determinants for health in historical contexts. A common assumption is that such differences have persisted throughout history even at different levels. Others have suggested that there has been a transition from an old mortality pattern where geography was the main determinant to a situation where social class has become the most important variable. Empirical studies on this are however few and point in different directions.

Social inequality is in this paper defined as belonging to social class based on occupations given in the sources. A basic assumption is that the different social classes have different access to vital resources which provides them with unequal access to social power or life chances. The study is performed on digitized and linked Swedish parish registers from the Demographic Data Base, Umeå University. From these registers, it is possible to follow individuals through their lives continuously as long as they stayed in the digitized parishes. The data is analyzed with a Cox regression model. Life biographies are created for every person being present in the parish as adult. For every person, the central variables in the analysis are age, sex, marital status, occupation/social status and place of living.

The results show that even in this society of large social inequality, the spatial aspect still had strong impact on health and that social differences influenced mortality differently depending on gender and age groups. In the early 19th century, we find no social gradient, a pattern that remained for men but not for women in the later part of the century. There were clear differences in the pattern between men and women, in particular in relation to the impact of social class. We furthermore suggest that social advantages were not always turned into general health advantages, maybe because of other requirements of the different expectations and status demands in different social groups, and that these differences were strongly gendered.

According to Link and Phelan’s theory of the “fundamental social causes of disease,” inequalities in access to resources such as knowledge, money, prestige, and social connections would always lead to inequalities in health and mortality. No matter what diseases or what risks happen to exist at a particular time, the wealthiest would always use their advantage to avoid risks and to adopt strategies that enhance health and longevity. This paper seeks to test this theory with data from a population going through the industrial revolution, the 19th – 20th century Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region in Quebec. The data consist of birth, marriage, and death certificates extracted from the BALSAC database (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi), which comprehensively traces the demographic history of the region since the beginning of its peopling in 1840 up to the early 1970s. We use a categorisation of social position consisting of five occupation-based statuses, which summarizes the nearly 4,000 different occupations mentioned in the registers: 1-White collars (including executives, industrialists, and liberal professions); 3- Farmers; 3- Artisans (craftsmen, specialized workers); 4- Lower-skilled workers (carpenters, etc.), and 5- Unskilled Workers (laborers, factory workers, etc.). In the first part of our analysis, we use a person-period data structure with a time-varying codification of occupations in order assess the impact of occupation on mortality until the age of 60. Controlling for year of birth, age at marriage, residence patterns, and literacy, we found lower mortality among farmers and artisans than among all the other categories. If anything, white-collars had the highest mortality of all. This contradicts the numerous reports of a lower mortality at higher levels of the social hierarchy. The critical factor could be the exposure to toxic environmental conditions that were shared by white collars and their employees during the active life stage. Away from the factories and industries, artisans and farmers would have benefited from a “better air.” In the second part, we study mortality from age 60 to cohort extinction for individuals born before 1875. We used the modal values of the variables of interest at age 60 to assess cumulated experience in a given status, with results that largely parallel mortality before age 60. However, when using the last occupation prior age 60 (instead of the modal category), no significant difference was found between white collars and farmers, and lower-skilled and unskilled workers were now found to have the highest mortality, as one would expect. Upward social mobility could account for this striking reversal of effect. Our results also emphasize the role of literacy as an important predictor of mortality. Those who could not sign their name on the parish register early in their adult life had mortality rates that were 2.5-3 times higher than those who could, whatever their occupation.

This work deals with the role of socioeconomic conditions on health status and mortality between birth and full maturity in the Sardinian community of Alghero. Data come from civil sources as well as from military conscription registers and cover the 1856 and 1925. Reconstruction of individual life-histories for three generations from birth to 25 years was carried out. In view of information richness of the military documentation (occupation, anthropometric data, health status and education level), the analysis was focused on the male population. Besides the analysis of the selection process from birth to full maturity, these data allow to assess the death risk between 20 and 25 years taking into account health status and socioeconomic conditions at conscription as well as information on father’s health status at his own enrollment.

Social mortality differentials in Geneva. A comparison over four centuries

This study uses data from a random sample of births in the Netherlands during the period 1850-1922 to examine the relationships between social class, social mobility and mortality at middle and old age. Population registers and personal cards covering the period from 1850 to 2006 for all Dutch provinces were used to reconstruct individual life histories of more than 15,000 births. We study the effects of the social class of origin and own social class (using two different SES-classifications) on mortality after age 18 for men and women.

People use to move silver around the world for profit. In countries where the metal passes by, all the existent silver (including the stock of silver coins) tends to be exported and to follow the silver flow. In times of metal coin standard such a state was deprived of the coins that were necessary for most daily transactions.
The only way to solve this problem was the introduction of fiduciary silver coins. So far two ways are known to realise this: by reducing the silver content of the coins preserving their nominal value, or by raising the rate of the existing silver coins.
However it appears that silver coins could also be protected against export simply by having them made of low alloy silver, without reducing their silver content.
The use of this concept can be observed from antiquity. A good example is the Alexandrine tetradrachm as introduced in Roman Egypt in the reign of Tiberius.
The low alloy made the silver less wanted by the ultimate buyers of the metal, and so by the intermediate merchants. These could have raised the alloy of course, to make the material after export fit for coining and other purposes, but such a refining procedure was not without expenses.
The legislation concerning the coinage in the Burgundian Netherlands in 1467 even reveals that low alloy silver was granted a lower legal silver price than the same amount of silver in more pure form.
Eventually the application of new, cheap silver refining techniques by 1830 put an end to this kind of fiduciary coins.

It is common knowledge that the European Companies had to bring in bullion, whether in bars or coins, to India for procuring the export commodities for Europe as Europe then had nothing to offer which could be sold profitably and in large quantities in the Indian market so as to earn profits with which they could have paid for the purchases for Europe. But even in doing so they had to face lot of challenges and difficulties in converting the bullion into local currencies as neither silver bars nor various coins exported by the Companies were accepted by the merchants or primary producers for the goods sold. Here in this paper I shall try to examine the challenges and difficulties faced by the Companies and their responses as also how the money markets behaved in the face of huge influx of bullion in the train of European trade. For such analysis I shall mainly focus on the scenario in Bengal as it was the chief partner of the European trade in the early modern era.. It will be shown that the Companies were at the mercy of the House of Jagat Sehts, the biggest banker of the then world, as they had to depend largely on the this house for converting the bullion into local currencies. The Mughal mint was free in principle which meant that anyone could coin/convert money in the mints. Bur what happened in actual practice was that by virtue of its great hold on the ruling authority of Bengal, the house had a virtual monopoly of the use of the mint. Thus it could easily thwart the Companies’ attempt to coin in the mint which would force them, as they were always in chronic shortage of liquid capital, to sell their bullion in the money market, which was again dominated by the Jagat Seths, at a price much lower than the market price. It will be shown with evidence from Company records how they tried to face the challenge and how they responded to the situation but mostly with little success
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It is best to approach monetary by disaggregating individual monies to the maximum extent possible. It is a mistake to lump diverse monies together. Moreover, individual monies need not fulfill all three monetary functions (medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value). This essay takes disaggregation a step further, and argues that there are two distinct types of unit-of-account-only monies: (1) the imaginary monies used for accounting purposes, and (2) a ratio-unit-of-account money that serves a crucial role in a proposed Price Theory of Money. This Price Theory of Money (PTM) differs fundamentally from all Quantity Theories of Money, and is far more useful than normal QTMs for understanding monetary history and economic theory generally.

The usage of un-coined silver in traditional China was based on imaginary monetary units in terms of silver weight. In other words, the weight did not directly represent any weight of actual silver ingot. The word, silver tael or liang, was used in both ways of actually weighing ingots and imaginarily calculating values. Account books by Chinese merchants reveals that, in most cases, silver tael functioned as standard of value, while, silver ingots were rarely handed in transactions. Meanwhile, regardless of foreign or domestic, silver coins were valued by an imaginary tael, and their prices fluctuated according to demand/supply day by day, as same as other currencies including copper coins. Most studies on Chinese economic history failed to distinct imaginary silver unit from actual silver currencies.

The author observes shifts in silver trade, which took place in the region of Central and Eastern Europe due to then passing political and economic changes. He compares the function of two diferent coinage systems in monetary circulation of Central and Eastern Europe in 16th and 17th century, namely the Kingdom of Bohemia and Kingdom of Polonia. Up to the half of the 16th century Bohemia was a very important exporter of silver. The majority of silver traded by Bohemia was supplied to the market in form of thaler coinage. These coins were subject of direct long-distance trade with Eastern Europe and were also used as a commodity for production of local means of payment used in baltic trade, Poland and Russia. The Bohemian currency (groats and bits) had no significance for European monetary circulation as opposed to the Polish currency in the 17th century. The silver imported from overseas in form of dutch coins begins to dominate the Baltic and East European silver market since the beginning of the 17th century. These coins were commonly used in large quantities as a commodity for coining of local Polish means of payment, which were further exported to neighbouring areas of Central Europe and Ottoman Empire. The author is explaining diffences between the Bohemian exportable system of coinage based on own sources of precious metal but with limited use of its currency outside the country on one side and the Polish distributional coinage system without these sources of precious metal but with a good usability of its currency abroad on the other side.

In the second half of the 19th century the multilateral exchange system, based on the use of the bill of exchange (established in Europe in the 17th century), had been extended to the trading ports and towns in Asia. The value of coins and the price of silver in these places was determined by the premiums and discounts on exchange rates, with the London rates as the ultimate reference point. The paper will discuss the different circuits and different modes of money transfers, focussing on two countries: Netherlands India and the Philippine Islands. In the 1850s and 1860s the Netherlands government sent large amount of silver coins to Batavia, from where these coins quickly disappeared to neighbouring countries, viz., British India and Singapore. In the late 1870s and early 1880s the Spanish government in the Philippine Islands saw the gold currency disappear from the islands. In the last decades of the 19th century large flows of silver coins (mainly Mexican dollars) were imported to or exported from the Philippine Island, in contravention of the exchange rate logic. The paper will explore the question to what extent it is useful to distinguish different money circuits or spheres of exchange during this period.

The Venetian golden ducat, zecchino, had acquired in the course of several centuries the status of "international currency", circulating and exchanged in territories outside the control of the Venetian Republic. The analysis of seventeenth-century sources, from travel accounts (Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s Les six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Ecuyer Baron D’Aubonne, qu’il a fait en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes … Paris, 1676) to treatises on money (Geminiano Montanari’s Breve Trattato… Venice, 1683), reveals that the zecchino despite the decline of Venice commercial presence and power in the East still commanded a high premium in Asia, from Turkey to India. On the basis of seventeenth-century sources, this paper analyzes the dual role of zecchino, money and commodity, and the policy implications for Venice.

Domestic wheat production remained fairly stable in France in the late 19th and early 20th century, but cultivated acreage and output volumes declined sharply around the Mediterranean during the 1870s and early 1880s. In this region, wheat output never recovered to its previous level in the following years despite the introduction, from 1885, of repeated and enhanced tariff barriers, such as the 1892 Méline Tariff, which imposed duties on imported agricultural products. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the response of Mediterranean wheat producers to changes in local rainfall and variation of duties on imported grains. We use regional level data for 9 administrative divisions (départements) located on or near the Mediterranean (Pyrénées Orientales, Aude, Hérault, Gard, Vaucluse, Bouches-du-Rhône, Var, Alpes Maritimes, and Corse). We assess the impact of rainfall on yields and investigate whether protectionist policy interplayed with environmental conditions as a determinant of acreage under wheat cultivation.

Domestic wheat production remained fairly stable in France during the late 19th and early 20th century, but cultivated acreage and output volumes declined sharply around the Mediterranean during the 1870s and early 1880s. In this region, wheat output never recovered to its previous level in the following years despite the introduction, from 1885, of repeated and enhanced tariff barriers, such as the 1892 Méline Tariff, which imposed duties on all major agricultural staples. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the response of Mediterranean wheat producers to changes in local rainfall and variation of duties on imported grains. We use regional level data for 9 administrative divisions (départements) located on or near the Mediterranean (Pyrénées Orientales, Aude, Hérault, Gard, Vaucluse, Bouches-du-Rhône, Var, Alpes Maritimes, and Corse) in order to assess the impact of rainfall on yields and investigate whether protectionist policy interplayed with changes in environmental conditions as a determinant of acreage under wheat cultivation.

Through much of 1939-early 1940 large areas of Northeast Asia experienced rainfall significantly below the normal level. Some contemporaries said that the persistent drought was unequalled in its severity since the late 18th century. The main impact of the drought in Korea was on agricultural production and the livelihoods of the farming population. The shortfall in rain did not lead to famine in Japan, or even malnutrition, but it nevertheless had a significant impact on the operation of parts of the Japanese economy, in particular the markets for some key commodities. The presentation will consider these impacts, and also the response of the state to the problems generated by the drought. It will be suggested that analysis of the drought demonstrates some unexpected linkages between markets, while the response of the authorities exposed a lack of contingency planning for such natural disasters, as well as a willingness to use them to cover for other problems. In the process, the drought also accelerated the move of Japan’s economic system towards a managed economy.

The first major debate regarding the economic and social forces that shaped the dynamic of the feudal system was initiated with an article by Robert BRENNER (“Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past and Present, 70, [1976]). It presented an argument that was inspired by Marxist theory and came to challenge Michael M. Postan’s population-resources or Neo-Malthusian argument. POSTAN responded, with John HATCHER (“Population and Class Relations in Feudal Society,” Past and Present, 78, [1978]). The interest sparked by this exchange continued with a number of additional contributions, including a final response by BRENNER (“The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present, 97 [1982]). The latter, along with the two original articles, were published as a collection of essays (Trevor H. ASTON and C. H. E. PHILPIN, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, 1987). A third interpretation was formulated by Bruce Campbell in a series of publications, beginning in the 1990s, that came to be known as the Commercialist or Thunenesque approach. The review that follows will provide a critical summary of these three competing theoretical paradigms by contrasting their claims against the existing empirical evidence.

A series of blows, ranging from diseases and disastrous weather to greatly expanded imports, struck French agriculture in the late 19th century, ending a period of prosperity. Farmers reacted to preserve their livelihoods in a variety of ways. Some focused on the damage brought by imports and sought protection through tariffs. Others shifted to new products that would face less competition. Still others relied on the flexibility provided by their tenure system to soften the blows of the crisis. Many used several approaches to ensure their survival.
Evidence for this paper comes from a wide variety of sources. On a national level, they include agricultural censuses and books describing different types of tenure. In such a diverse country as France many of the sources are local, including account books, leases, budget studies, and returns from a parliamentary inquiry of 1884. Some of the sources allow the tracing of national trends; others focus on regional responses or the behavior of individual farmers or landowners.

Fish-canning industries are closely-linked to, and have an impact on environmental conditions, bringing great challenges to optimality. While entrepreneurship perspectives focus on the survival and profitability of firms, social utility perspectives focus on collective welfare and long-term sustainability. This paper illustrates the theoretical puzzle of the fish-canning industry in examining the historical experience of Portuguese public policies from the point of view of industrial economics and collective welfare.

The lower Bengal delta, which has among the most fertile soil conditions in the world for paddy cultivation, is also susceptible to violent October cyclonic storms, accompanied by tsunamis. Some of these episodes destroyed habitats over very large territories, which were repopulated relatively quickly despite the huge risks. How did states and societies perceive and adapt to these risks? Archival and documentary evidence from the nineteenth century suggest two distinct patterns of response, a relatively new one that took shape within the context of the Indo-European state and settlement in the region, and a traditional one that had been present already in the context of the Indian regimes and peasant societies. The former sought to discover the ‘law of storms’ (the title of an early scientific treatise on climatic patterns in the Bay of Bengal) and thus measure the risks, and the latter involved large-scale embankment projects to stave off storm surges. How do we understand the difference?
The difference can be understood at three levels. There were at work here two orders of knowledge; one taking the form of scientific theory and another embodied in local practice. The contrast furthermore carries the hint of two approaches to the natural world. But above all, there was a simple economic logic to the difference. The European knowledge initially was allied to maritime commercial interests, and served navigation in the Bay of Bengal. This knowledge wanted ships to better avoid violent storms by means of a technology of prediction. The Indian knowledge served the economic interests of the peasants and sought to protect land from damage. With the consolidation of the colonial state in Bengal, and its transformation from a mercantile to a land-based state, both embankments and meteorology became the duties of one administration. This convergence of duties involved loss of local informal knowledge on embankments, and decay of local institutions engaged in making and repairing embankments, even as weather prediction emerged as a scientific establishment of great importance and promise.
The paper presents a descriptive account of the dual response, the eventual convergence of duties, and the consequences thereof for the economic history of lower Bengal delta in the nineteenth century.

We present a comparative analysis of the impact and outcome in Catalonia of the wine rush and crash unleashed by the spread of the Grape Phylloxera plague in Europe (1865-1890). In order to explain why many rural districts in the provinces of Barcelona and Tarragona were able to resume winegrowing after the plague, while most in the provinces of Girona and Lleida were not, a statistical model is used to check the economic resilience of the Catalan districts to the external ecological and economic shock. The model combines the population densities as a proxy of the opportunity cost in labour allocation, the demand pull of commercial growth measured by the time-distances to the city of Barcelona, and the agro-climatic land’s suitability for growing vines, as measured by the Hugling and Winkler indices or the mean slopes of land. After comparing the vineyard allocation in every district in 1860, 1889 and 1920, these variables are used to explain the differing capacities to endure the Phylloxera plague in Catalonia.