Programme

The paper describes the Collaboratory project that aims at making an inventory of all types of labour relations worldwide, varying from slavery, indentured labour and share cropping, to free wage labour and self-employment from 1500 up until today. It will elaborate on the methods we have used, amongst others the taxonomy of labour relations we have developed and how this has been applied to all various parts of the world during five cross-sections in time, i.e. 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900 and 2000. Based on the data gathered so far we are now able to come up with a first sketch of the major shifts between different types of labour relations from 1500 to 2000. As an example of such a shift I will look at the work of women and children.

The IISH-project "The History of Global Labour Relations 1500-2000" tries to chart different types of labour ralations worldwide around 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900, 2000. Through the cooperation of many specialists an inventory of all types of labour relations worldwide, varying from slavery, indentured labour and share cropping, to free wage labour and self-employment is under construction. For dozens of countries statistical reconstructions for one or more cross-sections have become available over the last year. At this stage most data are available for different parts of Europe and Asia. First results will be presented, concentrating on shifts between free and unfree labour and self-employment and wage labour. That wage labour prevails by now will not come unexpectedly, but how this process took place, at which pace and via which crooked paths is more important in order to understand social and economic developments. The results achieved so far have a great impact on the way we may study global labour history, migration history, as well as economic history.

This paper presents a section of an ongoing research on the development of modern work concepts and emergence of laziness as a social problem in late Ottoman society. The larger project seeks answers to the following general research questions: how had a discourse and practice of modern work been established during the Ottoman reform period? How had the contents of work, work ethic and laziness changed by becoming social and ‘national’ issues? In contrast to the rather comprehensively studied history of labor movements, modern discourses of work and related cultural struggles in the nineteenth century are not examined sufficiently in the Middle Eastern historiography. The bureaucratic reforms of the imperial center attempted to eliminate a perceived idleness in the governmental bureaus and helped create a (re)definition of work space and work time by restructuring the offices, regulating the officials, and thus engaging them in a shared practice that redefined their temporal and spatial experiences. The bureaucratic expansion of the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century plays a pivotal role not only because it expanded/created work spaces that work itself became an issue of the governmental ordering, but also the educational reforms that were made to man these offices gave rise to an ideologically heterogeneous group of men who articulated their perspectives on their ‘nation’s work and on who to be labeled idle and useless. This paper investigates how modern concepts of work were moralized, socially practiced, and politicized in a non-western setting by exploring the bureaucratic reforms and the accompanying shift in the conceptualization of work.

The IISH survey year project registers the prevalence of different types of labour relations in a country in the survey years 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900, 2000. In the first three of the survey years North Western Europe was home both to a number of the world’s most developed economies (the Dutch Republic, England) and some countries in the semi-periphery, like Norway, with an economy based on self sufficient farming and exports of raw materials. The survey year project enables us to look at the labour markets of these countries in combination, and the paper will investigates if that leads to new insights.

This paper discusses methods for estimating the working populations of China, Japan and Taiwan. Following the taxonomy set up by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, the author explores population sizes for five cross-section years between 1500 and 2000. Based on estimations of age heaping and gender ratios, the workforce is divided into those who work independently for self-subsistence or for the market, as wage labourers, in bonded labour arrangements, in the service of the state or in the private economy. Since the quality of data collected by polities in surveys of total or taxable populations varies widely, the perspective of micro-samples that offer more precise data must also be considered. In this respect, the paper will deal with the question as to how representative data for specific micro-samples can be for larger territorial units, which has been exemplarily addressed for Japan by Akira Hayami and Osamu Saito, and for China by G. William Skinner, Li Bozhong and Kenneth Pomeranz.
Finally, a quantification of the major and long-term transitions from agricultural subsistence work to wage labour in the secondary and tertiary sectors, and the intermediate steps of cash-cropping and agricultural subsidiary work for the market will be presented. The paper investigates in particular the development, between 1500 and 1800, from bonded or quasi-bonded labour in agriculture and household service in the cities to relatively free wage labour, caused by changed concepts of the employee’s and the employer’s obligations in long-term work contracts.

The paper suggests, first, that in institutional terms, serfdom in the Russia and in the Baltic area and the strictly regulated terms of labour in the Kingdom of Sweden (then including Finland) not only had more parallels than is usually thought, but also represented a basically similar kind of approach, serfdom being just an extreme form of it. Secondly, that the two systems, or institutions, were so firmly established in Swedish and Finnish respective Russian legislative totalities and social practices that replacing them with an entirely different kind of logic – that of industrial capitalism – necessarily became a protracted process. This made Sweden, Finland and Russia late-comer countries as regards the emergence of modern labour market, both in terms of legislation and in practice. Furthermore, it is suggested that in Sweden in Finland women were among the first to successfully circumvent the strict labour regulation. By and large women (and children) were also the first to whom modern terms of wage labour were applied. If this kind of reasoning makes sense, then, when it comes to modern labour market, not bourgeois men but working-class women (and children) were in the front line of modernity.

Modern exposition, which originated in the western world, has played an important role in helping China and Japan absorb the advanced western technology and culture and forcefully promoted their modernization process. Zhang Jian and Shibusawa Eiichi, two famous entrepreneurs and pioneers of the modernization in East Asia, were deeply influenced by the fashionable world exposition cause and trend of thoughts then and contributed enormously to the exposition causes in China and Japan respectively. They became the most important pioneers of the modern exposition cause in their countries , as well as the active advocates for conducting civil diplomacy through exposition.
This paper attempts to dissertates Zhang Jian’s role in the expositions of the early years of 20th century so as to discuss the economical, cultural and civil diplomatic interaction among China, Japan and the United States from a certain perspective.

Abstract: In the1950s, plenty of exhibitions were held in China covering a wide range of areas such as polictics, economy, culture, education , military affairs and social affairs. Soviet Union and Japan also held exhibitions in Wuhan. These exhibitions vividly reflected the general tendency of Wuhan local society moving towards socialism in the1950s. Meanwhile, as these exhibitions were highly politicalized, they became means of the Chinese Communist Party to propel the sociey to move towards socialism and played a positive role in setting its social foundation and permeating its influence into the basic social levels through top-down administrative means after it seized political power in China. On the other hand, these instrumental exhibitions which had been endowed with stong political color and important politial missions tended to make people ignore the truth of the exhibits and the objective social reality while providing people with encouragement and socialist conviction; thus, resulted in blind confidence and adventurous advance that fuelled the “Left” tendency in the society then.
Key words: exihibition 1950s Wuhan Social transformation politicalize

Domestic goods fair is very important for the study of the history of Chinese exposition and the history of the movement of calling for domestic goods. The fair was deeply connected with the politic, economic development, social transition and city amusement during Republic China. To the party of Wuxi Guo Ming Dang, the domestic goods fair of Wuxi in 1929 was a success try for the movement of calling domestic goods, which was benefit for the scholars to study the three important parts of the fair, the exhibition, sale and amusement. Form the exhibition, this fair not only exhibited the domestic goods and called for the domestic goods movement, but also wanted to show a new Wuxi which was a new important industry part of Southeast. Furthermore, the amusement of this fair was not only the result of the spirit of finding the amusement during calling for the domestic goods movement, but also a good sign that fair provided a new place for modern city popular culture.

Abstract: Modern exposition has provided a platform for countries to display themselves at which different countries competed with each other and the advanced country exerted pressures on the backward countries and promoted the shift of the backward countries. Among the various expostions China participated in late Qing Dynasty, China presented a combined image of being a “dynasty China”, “cultural China” and “agricultural China” through its exhibition buildings and exhibits，which was backward and stupid in the eyes of western countries. Moreover, the Qing government did not attach much importance to attending the exposition, and entrused all the relevant affairs to the foreign customs official. Consequently, China was put into the category of “colonized” or “semi-colonized”nations at the expostions and suffered much humiliation. This stirred much unsatisfation and indignation among Cinese people in the late Qing dynasty. Between the late nineteenth and early twentith century, they launched struggles to protect the interest of China , which not only made the Qing government to take back the right of organizing expostions from foreigners, but also forced the host country of expositon to reduce its humiliation of China. In these struggles, as well as in the remarks and comments on expositions, a lot of words related to nation (guo in Chinese)could be found and the concept of “nation” sprouted in people then. This concept was a conditional reflex transplant of the western country at the exihibitions. Although it was accompanied by the concept of right, interest and development, it did not contain the contonation of a modern country. Western countries at the expositons have produced influence on shaping the image of China in the late Qing dynasty through external force. Yet, forming the concept of the nation and shaing the image of the nation by external force faced complicated and arduous task.

Key words: exposition China in the late Qing dynasty “external-force shaped” nation

从1920年代香港纺织制造业开始萌芽，到1970年代香港工业飞跃发展，香港的工业发展过程可谓经历了一个漫长的岁月。在这个过程中，一群香港厂商坚持以“展览”(telling-through-showing mode)方式来推广香港的工业制品。从1933年香港举办第一次工业展览会(以下简称“工展会”)，直到2008年香港举行第四十三届工展会(1941年的第五届工展会已准备就绪，可惜因战事而中止)，香港工展会的历史已超过七十年。
香港的工展会，最早是由百货公司和女青年会发起，由于展期短和规模小，影响有限。直到1938年，香港厂商借助内地国货运动的声势，参考了先前在香港和新加坡举行国货展览会的经验，成功地举行了首次较大规模的“香港中国货品展览会”，成为日后香港工展会的蒿矢。
据统计，由香港中华厂商联合会主办的工展会共举行四十二次，总入场人次达四千八百多万。无容置疑，工展会是极受香港市民欢迎的，由工展会产生的“香港名牌”(指货品) 效应，可谓深入民心。不过，碍于种种原因，工展会并不能于每年举行。1974年，由于厂商会与政府就提供场地问题谈判破裂，工展会因而中止举办，期间长达二十年之久。到底，工展会是如何成功的？对推销香港产品有何帮助？停办原因又如何反映政府对工展会的政策？本文将尝试利用各种公私档案，解答这一连串的问题。

At the beginning of the 1590s, Northern Italy was struck by a famine whose scope and gravity soon appeared to be unprecedented. Especially in 1591-1592, finding grains became a kind of nightmare for the provision authorities who often found themselves to be completely unable to collect food for the urban populations. Their failure fuelled what can be defined as a general “system shock” for the social, economic and demographic structures of Northern Italy, leading to protest, violence and general social and economic disorder.
Thanks to a large database of demographic time series related to cities, towns and villages scattered in the area, this article identifies who was struck by the famine in order to evaluate the capacity of different environments to react to a shortage of grain. In particular, the analysis sheds light on the functioning of urban provision authorities (the Annone) during such a severe shortage, also taking into account the interaction city-countryside. To this end, the article focuses on Emilia, one of the main wheat-producing areas of Northern Italy, in order to analyze the effectiveness of urban provision authorities in times of extreme stress. It then develops the case study of the rural town of Nonantola, offering a “countryside” perspective on the demographic and social-economic consequences of the famine.

One of the features of the wheat market in 18th and 19th centuries was the existence of marked regional differences. Essentialy, wheat prices in Coastal Spain were steadier than Inland region. The aim of this communication is to explain them.

Its thread will be the so-called 'condition of homogeneity' and the Fogel’s method. According the first the sum of elasticities of prices, of income and of substitute goods must be equal to zero. Consequently, a low elasticity of prices could be explained by the lack of consumption alternatives or by the regional differences in the personal incomes. For estimating the price elasticities we will use the Fogel’s method, is to say, an approximation by the relation between variations in product and prices.

The main conclusions of this paper are: 1st wheat price elasticities in Spain are not very different from Europe. Inland Spain has just got a curve of demand a little more rigid. 2nd There are not evidence of a hypothetical 'extraction effect'; is to say, a hardening of life condition in Inland Spain due to the sales of wheat to coastal regions. 3rd Substitutes food had a relevant role in the formation of prices in 18th century (except Inland), and also in the 19th century in the North of Spain. 4th Income elasticities grew from 18th to 19th century. This preference for wheat reveals an improvement in the market conditions and the standars of life

This paper examines the repercussions of the Great Depression of end of the 19th century on the Catalan rural society from the analysis of the one that can be seen as one of the most characteristic symptoms of any agrarian crisis: the loss of property rights on the land or on other real estate of rural nature as a consequence of claims of debts carried out by individuals or by the State that culminated in public auctions.

The text has been divided in two sections. In the first, the dispossession because of administrative executive procedures by unpaid taxes that took place in Catalonia in this period is briefly analysed. In the second, we have studied the judicial activity that finished in public auction of real estate goods and we have tried to relate it to the agrarian situation, especially in the wheat and the wine sectors.

Discussant

L’objectif de cette communication est double :

- Premier objectif : démontrer que s’il y a eu crise de subsistance au milieu du XIXe siècle, elle a lieu entre 1853 et 1857.
L’historiographie française est marquée par la supposée concomitance entre la crise de subsistance de 1846-1847 et la révolution de février 1848. Or le schéma causal pose trois problèmes. En premier lieu, 9 mois séparent le pic du prix de l’hectolitre de froment, qui intervient en avril-mai 1847, et la révolution de février 1848, qui survient alors que le prix de l’hectolitre de froment est passé sous la barre des 20 francs. En second lieu, rien ne permet de démontrer, que la crise de cherté de l’hiver et du printemps 1846-1847 a remis en cause les équilibres économiques et démographiques fondamentaux des campagnes françaises, on peut même se demander comme Nadine Vivier et Jean-Michel Chevet, s’il y a eu réellement une crise de subsistance. En troisième lieu, la hausse vertigineuse des prix des grains durant la période 1853-1857, à la fois plus forte et beaucoup plus longue que celle de 1846-1847, n’a entraîné aucun trouble notable. A notre connaissance, seul le travail de Toshoi Horii publié en 1984 traite de cette crise. Il analyse le fonctionnement de la caisse de la boulangerie à Paris, créée à la fin de 1853 en vue de taxer le prix du pain dans le Département de la Seine. Il démontre à quel point la crise fut profonde et durable. En fait, très tôt, les élites politiques, urbaines et rurales, affirment explicitement que la cherté de l’hiver 1846-1847 a été le principe moteur des troubles de 1848. Cette conviction, largement partagée, va pousser le nouveau pouvoir à intervenir très vite pour réguler les prix à la consommation, à Paris bien entendu, mais aussi, indirectement, en Province.

- Second objectif : analyser les politiques mises en place au niveau local pour faire face à la crise (un cas d’espèce, la Seine-et-Oise, qui n’est peut-être pas un cas exemplaire) et s’interroger sur leur portée.
La mise en place du système de compensation dans le département de la Seine pose problème aux départements gros producteurs de grains proches de Paris. Compte tenu de son coût, il est impossible de l’étendre aux villes (et aux villages) de ces départements. De plus, le principe retenu par l’administration pour réguler les prix à la consommation à Paris, crée un appel d’air, qui siphonne, en quelque sorte, les consommateurs. Il suffit de faire dix kilomètres, parfois plus, parfois moins pour se procurer du pain à un prix inférieur à celui du marché local.
Dès que l’on quitte la proche périphérie de Paris, non seulement les consommateurs ne sont plus protégés par la taxe, mais les producteurs peuvent éprouver des difficultés à écouler leur production, ce qui ne peut que les inciter à approvisionner prioritairement le marché parisien. Dans les villes, et plus encore dans les villages, de Seine-et-Oise, trop éloignés de Paris pour profiter du différentiel de prix, les autorités locales tentent, avec de maigres ressources, de répondre aux exigences de l’administration centrale, qui les enjoint de pallier les effets de la cherté. Globalement, en dépit de l’inanité des moyens employés et de la profondeur de la crise, les campagnes de Seine-et-Oise n’explosent pas. On peut se demander si la plupart des ménages ruraux ne sont pas tout simplement mithridatisés contre les effets des crises de subsistance, comme ils l’étaient probablement dès 1846-1847.

This paper revisits the non-crisis of the 1690s in England. As will be recalled, there were years of severe famine distress in both Scotland and northern France, but there is little evidence for famine in England. Appleby, in an influential paper of 1979, explained this in terms of the differential movement of grain prices. In France the prices of all the grains moved in parallel, symmetrically, so that the price of even inferior grains was so high that the poor could not enter the market to purchase. In England, by contrast, the movement of grains was asymmetrical with the poorer grains not increasing in price. The poor were therefore able to enter the market even if this involved trading down to ‘inferior grains’. Appleby located the source of this behaviour in the larger area devoted to spring grains in England.
This argument is reviewed. It is pointed out that the by the 1690s English agriculture contained a considerable margin, with barley being grown on a large scale, especially for malting. A more limited quantity was being exported. Even in poor harvest years there was therefore a considerable margin of grain available which could be diverted into food. The reality of trading down is demonstrated. Using a number of new runs of price data, it is shown that English prices are not as asymmetrical in the 1690s as Appleby maintained. New evidence from south Cambridgeshire is introduced which allows us to quantify the shortfall in production. It is shown using this data that in the hardest years, there was a tendency to grow more oats, and there is evidence from here and elsewhere to suggest that people fell back on oats for their basic sustenance. It is acknowledged that in England demand was maintained through the support of the poor law and so in conclusion it is argued that it was more than purely agricultural factors which allowed the English to escape famine.

POPULATION, SUBSISTENCE CRISIS AND AGRARIAN CHANGE IN THE ISLAND OF MAJORCA (1560-1650).

Gabriel Jover-Avellà
Universitat de Girona-Centre Recerca en Història Rural

The relationship between population and subsistence in the pre-industrial societies has been subjected to two types of research. On one hand, a traditional historiography has dealt with the study of the nature and dynamics of subsistence crisis, especially the relationship between famine and mortality. This argument has been reviewed recently based on the study of contemporary famines. On the other hand the relationships between demographic variables and prices in the long term have been studied. The objective was to elucidate which factors attenuated historical price volatility, fluctuations in production and the demographic crisis associated with them, especially the crisis of mortality related to famine. These studies have established that the regularity of harvests, decrease in the intensity of fluctuations in prices and the easing of demographic fluctuations are strong indicators of economic development and social welfare in pre-industrial societies.

The subject of our communication links with the latter general observations. The aim of this communication is to conduct an initial exploration of the origins of these changes from the analysis of the relationship between demographic variables, prices and production of food in the Majorcan Island in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The question that will try to answer is whether the economic transformations that occurred in the seventeenth century in the Majorcan Island led to an attenuation of the fluctuations in prices and food production, and a lower frequency and intensity of crises of subsistence.

This paper focuses on local agency in two ‘near-famines’ in 18th and 19th century Flanders. In a comparative exercise we aim to map and understand the reorganisation of private and public social relations in two periods of sudden social distress. Our analysis of the food crises of 1740 and 1845-1847 in Flanders exposes the local mechanisms of coping and protection, both in an informal and in a formal way. How did collective exchange and credit networks cope with the sudden stress of a (possible) hunger crisis? What were the actions taken by the local and supra-local authorities against the threat of a famine? Two hypotheses back this research. One, the disappearance of grand hunger crises in Flemish peasant society is related to the level of stress absorption within the local village community. Two, between the middle of the 18th and the middle of the 19th century, the centre of gravity in local crisis management shifted from predominantly informal to predominantly formal management strategies. Our findings contradict the traditional vision of a more or less straightforward shift in famine crisis management from rural, local and informal to urban, supra-local and formal. The success of surmounting a food crisis always has local roots.

The aim of this work is to identify common traits and local peculiarities of the widespread agricultural crisis that unleashed after the end of Napoleonic wars. In the first part, there is an outline of the deflation profiles and reasoning about its causes. In the second part, there is a contrast between deflation of prices and evolution of production costs, and evidence is presented about the differential impact on family farms and those with wage-earners; the latter being the most damaged. Finally, the three main lines of action available to farmers for overcoming the situation are reviewed and weighed: i.e.: organizational change, technical change and institutional change. The first and third options were the most relevant to the region under study; nevertheless, modest signs of technical change were also found.

This paper sets out to discuss the relevance of the concepts “Ancien Régime” and “Noveaux Régime” for the Swedish case and how “crisis” has been understood and perceived in these contexts. It goes on to discuss living standards and the ability of society to withstand crisis in the 18th and early 19th century. Three watersheds in the pre industrial Swedish economy is identified, the first starting a period of recovery and growth after the famine-war-pestilence-population crisis that hit the country in the early years of the 18th century, during the Great Nordic War. Despite some long term per capita growth in food production, living standards remained low in the rest of the 18th century with clear demographic responses (by contemporary writers most visible by mortality peaks) following on the recurrent harvest failures. Agriculture was increasingly geared towards increased grain production and diets became more outspokenly vegetabilized and one-sided as the century lingered on. Contemporary writers were seriously aware of the situation. The second watershed occurred around 1810-20. Mortality dropped (due mainly to falling infant mortality), population growth accelerated, and still per capita production of food – and general consumption levels - increased somewhat. New data points at rather high average per capita consumption levels in 19th century Sweden. Still however, for parts of the population standards remained low. Due to the very agricultural transformation that shaped the condition for production growth, some of these people became more dependent than before on wage labour and at least some such groups were precariously vulnerable to fluctuations in food prices: mortality and fertility responses to such fluctuations has been shown to be even strengthened. A contemporary discourse on rural pauperism emerged. Thus at large the society was still not able to resist crisis phenomena of the same type as had been prevalent in the 18th century. The third watershed appeared around 1860. From then on all indices: stature measure, real wages, mortality data, lack of demographic responses to economic stress and literacy levels points at rising living standards. However, mass emigration to the Americas emerged in the 1860´s from Sweden as from many other European countries. This phenomenon has sometimes been connected to rising rural poverty and absolute detriment of living conditions. In the light both of the timing of these events and of new preliminary data showing higher production and consumption levels than previously perceived, this interpretation has to be questioned as far as the Swedish case is concerned.

Nous analysons ici l'évolution temporelle des naissances, mariages et décès d’une petite ville, Vendôme, afin d’identifier les "crises locales". Mais la variabilité annuelle naturelle du nombre des événements démographiques brouille en partie la détection de celles-ci. De plus, malgré l’importance de notre corpus, celui-ci se réduit très rapidement dès que l'on affine les périodes (si le plus ancien acte date de 1536, il faut attendre 1600-1620 pour avoir des séries utilisables jusqu’en 1880 ; au total, 197708 actes dont 101143 naissances, 19154 mariages et 77411 décès.).
Précisons que les mercuriales de Vendôme étant introuvables, nous avons donc utilisé celles de Montoire, petite commune voisine et celles du Vexin de J.Meuvret nettement plus lointaines mais bien documentées.
Des « crises », nous en avons repéré, mais elles sont de diverses natures : épidémique, climatique, de subsistance, administrative, militaire, mais nous n’avons pu, sauf pour les grandes crises nationales de 1694 et 1709 mettre en évidence une corrélation entre le prix des grains et le nombre de décès.



We analyze here the temporal evolution of the births, the marriages and the deaths of a small town, Vendôme, to identify the " local crises ". But the natural annual variability of the number of the demographic events blurs partially the detection of these. Furthermore, in spite of the importance of our corpus, this one is very quickly reduced as soon as we refine the periods ( So the oldest act dates 1536, it is necessary to wait for 1600-1620 to have useful series until 1880; all in all, 197708 acts among which 101143 births, 19154 marriages and 77411 deaths.).
Let us clarify that the market price-list of Vendôme being untraceable, we thus used those of Montoire, a nearby small municipality and those of the Vexin of J. Meuvret sharply more distant but well informed.
"Crises", we tracked down it, but they are diverse natures: epidemic, climatic, of subsistence, administrative, military, but we were not able to, safe for the big national crises of 1694 and 1709, to bring to light a correlation between the price of grains and the number of deaths.

Purpose of the paper is the analysis of the effects of demographic trends on prices and salaries in the fourteenth century.
The study starts from historic data sets concerning the prices of two primary foodstuffs (grain and wine) and the salaries of builders and peasants who worked by the day; the data are drawn from 69 books of Entrata e Uscita held by the Archive of the Misericordia e Dolce Hospital of Prato (Tuscany), which constitute an almost uninterrupted series from 1324 to the end of the century.
Averages (annual average, moving quinquennial average) and indexes show only small fluctuations (caused by meteorological events) until 1347. After 1348, however, the trend is much more fluctuating. Between 1356 and 1365 prices were lower than in previous years, whereas from 1365 to the end of the century there was a clear and rapid increase: the scarce crops of these years only partly explain this trend, because in theory their influence should have been compensated by the Malthusian effect on population.
Salaries fluctuated too and had a sudden rise in 1351-54: the level attained in those years became the basis for future wage negotiations and, despite a gradual decline from the 1360s, it remained high until the end of the century.
In order to build an index of the cost of living and to determine the trend of real wages, it is possible to take the consumption of bread and wine (the basic diet of the Late Middle Ages) as a starting point. The data show that in Prato the standard of living improved after the Black Death and remained high throughout the century, despite a gradual decline – due to the increasing price of foodstuffs – from the 1370s.

Abstract
Previous research has consistently found demographic responses to grain price fluctuations in preindustrial Europe, both at macro and micro level. Grain prices serve as a summary measure of the workings of the preindustrial economy, reflecting not only local harvest conditions but trade patterns and market integration. All over preindustrial Europe the manorial estate was an important institution in the rural economy. It offered opportunities to insure tenants against extreme events such as harvest failures, impossible to achieve for independent peasants in a society without well-functioning markets for capital or insurance, and in the absence of state subsidies. In this paper we look at the impact of regional economic fluctuations on demographic behavior and study whether the presence of estates lowered the demographic impact of economic crises on the population. We will do this by utilizing a newly developed database on agrarian output together with county-level grain price data and parish level information on vital events and land tenure for about 400 parishes in the province of Scania in southern Sweden. The results show a clear response in births and deaths in ages 1-25 to fluctuations in grain prices and output levels. Manorial parishes show a considerably lower response in the year of the economic change, but the same response as in other parishes in the year after. This indicates that the manors, at least partially, functioned as insurers against risk, which had beneficial effects of its inhabitants by smoothing consumption.

This paper focuses on local agency in two ‘near-famines’ in 18th and 19th century Flanders. In a comparative exercise we aim to map and understand the reorganisation of private and public social relations in two periods of sudden social distress. Our analysis of the food crises of 1740 and 1845-1847 in Flanders exposes the local mechanisms of coping and protection, both in an informal and in a formal way. How did collective exchange and credit networks cope with the sudden stress of a (possible) hunger crisis? What were the actions taken by the local and supra-local authorities against the threat of a famine? Two hypotheses back this research. One, the disappearance of grand hunger crises in Flemish peasant society is related to the level of stress absorption within the local village community. Two, between the middle of the 18th and the middle of the 19th century, the centre of gravity in local crisis management shifted from predominantly informal to predominantly formal management strategies. Our findings contradict the traditional vision of a more or less straightforward shift in famine crisis management from rural, local and informal to urban, supra-local and formal. The success of surmounting a food crisis always has local roots.

The historical approach which had prevailed in France since the invention of economic history by the Annales in 1929, focused on modern crisis which had political outcomes, and this was emphasized by Ernest Labrousse who deeply left his mark on research from 1945 up to now.
Questions are to be raised here: Is the Labrousse presentation of the crisis to be accepted: in their origin – the importance of harvest failure-, their outcomes – the revolution-; is the link between a poor harvest, high bread prices and mortality still relevant for the 19th century?

The transition in Eastern Europe in the 1990s has triggered many studies into the sources of economic growth, most of which focusing on the transition period. The majority of those studies, which ignore human capital, argue that Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth was small between ca. 1960-1989 and increasing afterwards. Acknowledging that many growth theories see an important role for human capital, a tendency of including human capital in growth regressions has started for Eastern European countries as well.
Estimating a long-run series of average years of schooling for Hungary, Földvári and Van Leeuwen (2009), however, find that share of human capital in economic growth increased considerably after transition, considerably reducing TFP growth. They claim that the value of human capital stock increased after transition, since the market economy ensured a more efficient allocation of human capital than the state-socialist planning. This increase in efficiency results in an improvement of the value of human capital as marked by an increase in the rate of returns to education.
A comparison of Eastern European countries with South or Central European countries may serve as a natural experiment. Up to World War II both regions had similar levels of human- and physical capital and per capita GDP – lower than North-Western Europe, but higher than the Arab World or Russia. In both parts of the Europe, economic growth during the 19th century was relatively slow, and both regions were also badly hurt by the economic and political upheavals of the interwar period. The similarities end in the post-war years, when the south remained part of the ‘capitalist’ half of the continent, whereas major institutional changes (such as central planning, state redistribution) were introduced in Central
Europe. This had consequences for human-and physical capital formation as well. One of the rationales of the centrally planned economies was to invest heavily in broad capital, but apparently this did not lead to a dramatic catching up in terms of economic growth. Indeed, while the growth in per capita human– and physical capital over the period 1930-1990 were almost equal (and hence the levels of education and physical capital in Central and Southern Europe in 1990 were comparable), per capita GDP in 1990 was substantially higher in the South (Lains 2003; Maddison 2003; Altug, Filiztekin, and Pamuk 2008; Prados de la Escosura and Rosés 2008a; Prados de la Escosura and Rosés 2008b). If capital, and more specifically human capital, is indeed a main factor behind long-run economic performance, this suggests a considerable decrease in productive efficiency of education and/or physical capital in Eastern Europe during socialism (i.e. Simkus and Andorka 1982; Easterly and Fisher 1995).
The objective of this paper is therefore to analyse the role of both types of capital in economic growth in Central before, during, and after socialism.

In this research we aim to analyze the relationship between changes in levels of inequality that occurred in the mid-twentieth century in Uruguay and its linkage with the development of human capital. In previous research and from different indicators relating to education, health, wages and other income that we have reached, our results show that in the decades of the forty-fifty is a significant improvement in quality of life and decreasing inequality.

What was the contribution of achievements in human capital in reducing inequality? We propose to analyze evidence on wages from various sectors and different levels of education, to quantify the skill premium. Also, this evidence will be analyzed separately for men and women.

The methodology to be followed involves the construction of an indicator of human capital based on formal educational coverage for cases in which information is available and an indicator of learning for industrial workers, taking into account its occupation and the time at work. Sources to examine files belong to companies and public budgets.

This first step of construction of indicators on education and wages in the future intends to enable comparative research with other countries.

The paper discusses the causal links between the knowledge sector share in the national economy (which is based on accumulation of human capital stock), its pattern of income inequality and economic growth rates. These issues were previously examined by the scholars with references to empirical studies of the Western-type economies during their industrial and post-industrial development. The author's research on the Russian knowledge workers’ wage dynamics during the Soviet era (1920-1980s) provided additional grounds to argue the positive (though not regularly strong) correlation between such indicators as the knowledge sector share in the national economy, wage differential and economic growth rate. The paper argues that the Soviet era Russia failed to follow the international trend to extend the knowledge sector share in its national economy despite impressive growth of its country-specific human capital stock. However the wage differential dynamics in the XX century Russia did follow its international trends. This empirical study of the Russian case in the internationally comparable frame-work provided the opportunity to compare its findings with the economic hypothesis usually referred to as the “Kuznets curve”. This hypothesis is revisited and its up-to-date interpretation is proposed. The general trend is that income inequality tends to increase during transitional stages of economic and social systemic transformations. At the same time during evolutionary stages of steady development income inequality tends to decrease.

East Asia in the postwar period achieved a miraculous success in economic catching-up by technology-borrowing from the West. Many intuitive arguments hint that the rich endowment in education in East Asia was critical for its miraculous success. However, empirical studies on the macroeconomic role of education for East Asian countries have been so limited so far that researchers in economics are still uncertain about even basic questions such as whether and how education contributed to the East Asian Economic Miracle. This paucity of the empirical analyses can be attributable to the lack of detailed dataset for education stock. This paper presents nearly-100-year-long annual estimates of education stock for Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the US, which the author newly estimated. The data in this paper provide detailed information such as average years of schooling by age groups, by gender, by levels of education, and by types of education. Based on this dataset, this paper investigates similarities and differences in the pattern of educational development among those four countries. In order to describe the characteristics of the East Asian Miracle, this paper invents a new terminology of ‘military-style heavy industrialization.’ This word refers to the situation in which a mass of homogeneously not very highly educated (so-so educated) people collaborate methodically in factories (instead of military camps). This paper argues that Japan, Korea and Taiwan succeeded in forming uniform societies, which were suited for ‘military-style heavy industrialization.’ This paper also presents the following four working hypotheses, which should be further examined with more information in future studies: (1) the accumulation of education precedes industrialization, (2) the screening effect of education helped Japan, Korea and Taiwan to endure the heavy burden of the long “maternity” period of educational investments, (3) tertiary education is less important than secondary education in the midst of rapid heavy industrialization, and (4) prewar Japan’s heavy investments in vocational education bore fruit in the postwar high economic growth.

This paper examines whether the considerable input in education has had a connection to Finland’s fast GDP per capita growth. For analysing empirically the impacts of investing in and accumulation of educational capital on GDP and GDP per capita, human educational capital is assessed in the systematic framework of National Accounts. A modified system of production in the National Accounts is proposed where final education consumption expenditures per year are separated from final consumption and can be treated as investments in educational capital without changing GDP. In this system educational capital is accumulated through invested monetary flows in education at the time when a person has entered labour market. The obsolescence and renewing costs of the income generating capacity are taken into account in the form of depreciation. As a result investments in and the stock of educational capital are valued in monetary terms as GDP and physical capital stock. This analysis was carried out for Finland in 1877–2000. The results of the analysis show that the direct impact of investments in education on current price GDP has varied between 2% and 5% in Finland in 1877–2000. The average growth of these investments in educational capital has been 3.9% a year, which is a higher average growth rate than that of investments in physical capital (3.3%). However, the level of annual investments in physical capital has been substantially higher compared to investments in education. According to the results, there has been a long run co-integration relation between educational capital per capita and real GDP per capita in 1910–2000, 1920–2000 and in 1946–2000. After WWII GDP per capita has adjusted to the shocks in educational capital per capita with a pace of 23% a year of the disequilibrium between the variables. In the same time frame educational capital was adjusting to the shocks in GDP per capita as well but much more slowly. The results suggest an endogenous economic development with human capital and GDP per capita interacting with each other in an advanced stage of development. In the early stages of development growing GDP per capita has enhanced the growth of human capital, but not vice versa.

It is difficult to measure the economic output of education, at least when education is offered as a non-marketed public service with no price tag and no well defined economic quantity. Hence in national accounts education is measured by its input and as a convention only labour, and not capital, produces the value added that contributes to GDP. In analyses of economic growth GDP must be converted to constant prices, and constant prices of education in national accounts mean constant prices of labour cost. That is, an index of salaries in education is used for the conversion of education into constant prices and consequently the output of education will only change proportionally with the labour input. In other words, no productivity change will by definition occur in education or in other non-marketed services. This paper compares conventional measures with several alternative measures of the education sector in a national accounts framework on the basis of detailed data for the Swedish education sector. In contrast to the conventional NA estimates it is shown that productivity, based on social returns, of the education sector has shown a modest growth. Based on private returns productivity growth has, however, been negative since the early twentieth century – but so far this latter estimate is limited to higher technical education.

Between 1850 and 2000, Spain’s real output and labor productivity grew at average rates of 2.5 and 2.1 percent. We investigate the effect of human capital accumulation on Spanish growth rates using two alternative approaches based on the concept of ‘labor quality’ and on the idea of education. We, then, discuss the implications of the different measures for Total Factor Productivity growth. Physical and human capital accumulation and efficiency gains appear as complementary in Spain’s long-term growth. Factor accumulation dominated long-run growth up to 1950, while total factor productivity led thereafter and, especially, during periods of growth acceleration.

We study the human capital development in 19th century Africa, Asia, and the Americas. We combine this new data set with the evidence about settler mortality and long-term economic growth, in order to test systematically the views of the colonial legacy literature. Preliminary results indicate that the evidence is supporting the Glaeser et al. (2004) views on human capital growth effects, rather than the Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002) view that settler mortality impacted on the quality of institutions.

Unlike what occurred in the central zones of the Spanish Empire in America, the economies of Cuba and of Chile grew and modernised as from the end of the 18th century. The expansion rate of production oriented to export markets seems to have been a stimulus for the modernisation of productive structures and institutions. The consumption of fossil fuels, mainly coal used in steam engines, adapted from early on to the economic activities of Cuba and Chile. In the early 19th century, this was a powerful signal of the adaptation of modern technologies in peripheral economies. Cuba and Chile’s lead position in the consumption of modern energies (coal, oil and hydroelectricity) throughout the 19th century, was also related with the existence of an elite which was capable of generating a stable political order which favoured business and promoted institutional modernisation, though without losing its oligarchic character. It was probably the oligarchic character of the political order which proved to be an obstacle to the conversion of economic growth into long term economic growth.

Although there are different theoretical approaches to the real meaning of an “optimum fiscal performance”, it is generally accepted that a consistent macroeconomic management is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic growth. Besides, in terms of social well-being, neither the poverty reduction or the improvements in income distribution are detached from the management and composition of the public expenditures and their financing. Through a comparative perspective, this article discusses the sort of mechanisms which have governed the macroeconomic management of the Uruguayan fiscal policy during the XXth century. Its results are analyzed in terms of their impact on the public resources devoted to social protection.

On the first place, taking into account recent studies by Comín, Díaz-Fuentes y Revuelta (2009) we estimate the income-elasticity of the Central Government expenditure in Uruguay in the long term. Our results are compared vis- à-vis those obtained by these authors for Argentine, Brazil, Mexico and Spain. On the second place, we study the total and social expenditure, which means its composition, cyclical performance and financing, in order to understand up to what extent the country has “protected” its social expenditure from adverse fiscal shocks.

Considering the regional evidence regarding to this topic, this look into the fiscal management during the economic cycle and the discussion of its impacts on the public expenditure in social areas in the long term, is expected to shed new light on the incidence of these factors on the economic backwardness of Uruguay and similar Latin American countries.

1

The existing literature on Latin America's economic history has point out that the period of the first globalisation was characterized by the active participation of the region in the expansion in the world-wide trade. While this may be true for a set of countries, the diversity of cases and patterns of behaviour among them requires a more detailed analysis.
Traditional historiography has conveyed the idea that until World War I, the region would have been under a clear British commercial predominance, whereas in the post-war period the domain would have changed to the U.S., since that time the main trade partner in the region. But is this true for all the countries of the region? To what extent, the U.S. dominance is observed in some countries prior to World War I?. The new evidence shows that the role of the U.S. before the IWW was much more active and broader geographically than the one assigned by the historiography. Similarly, 1913, do not suppose as a sudden change as long as Britain persisted in the region even longer and it was not until after the Great Depression when it no longer play an important role.

We study the impact of fiscal expenditure on the duration and the intensity of economic crises in 20 Latin American countries in the period 1900-2000. To study the impact on the duration of economic crises we rely in models of count data while to study the impact on the intensity of economic crisis we rely on dynamic panel data methods. Our result show that fiscal expenditure might have not enough power to shorten significantly the duration of economic crises but it might act as an effective instrument to reduce the downfall of economic activity during the economic crisis.

Since Prebisch and Singer first formulated his famous hypothesis about the historical deterioration of terms of trade for the periphery, there has been a lot of debate and analysis trying to establish whether it is or not supported by the data on international trade. However, this debate get focused in the evolution of the Net Barter Terms of Trade, that is, the simple relation between the prices of exports and imports among nations with different degrees of development, ignoring that ‘the core’ of the P-S hypothesis made reference to the Double Factorial Terms of Trade, which consider the evolution of the export sector incomes in countries not only in relation with prices but also with the labor productivity in those export sectors. In the first two sections we reconsider the P-S hypothesis, draw some of the main lines of its evolution and analyze briefly the empirical debate that had surround it since mid-20th century. In the last section we analyze the terms of trade of one peripheral country (Colombia) with United States, its main trade partner, considering both, the NBTT and the DFTT. However, due to data availability on labor productivity for Colombia, this could be done only for the manufacture sectors. Hence, this exercise is closer to 1970’s Singer hypothesis in which he stated that terms of trade for the peripheral countries would deteriorate no matter the type of products (i. e. primary products or manufactures) they export. In general terms the P-S hypothesis is not confirmed for the particular case we examine whether we consider the NBTT or the DFTT. However, it shows the type of analysis should be done for the whole of the periphery, which is the appropriate unit of observation to corroborate or refute the P-S hypothesis.

Mainstream "scholarship", following Engerman and Sokoloff (1994, 2002, 2005) and Acemoglu et al. (2002), claims that contemporary inequality in Latin America has colonial origins. Even if very popular, this claiming is not based on any evidence.
In this paper in work we offer substantial evidence on wages and heights for several Spanish colonies in America during the late colonial period. This evidence shows a picture that departs from the one commonly assumed. Real wages were higher than in most parts of the world while heights were similar to those of many Europeans. On the contrary, estimates of GDP per capita are comparatively low. It is unlikely, then, that late colonial Spanish America were really a conspicous case of extreme economic inequality. In fact, rather the contrary seems to be true.

The present study reports new evidence on the contribution of capital formation, and specifically machinery equipment investment, on economic growth. For the case of Chile, using new data for the period 1890-2005, the relationship is studied. Applying a causality test a positive correlation between the growth rate of machinery investment and the long run GDP growth rate, will be verified. Prior empirical studies generally used country cross-section data and worked with a relatively small number of years. The empirical approach, based on long run series (1890-2005) for a case study, Chile, can better help to understand the effect of machinery equipment investment on economic growth.

A relatively large number of studies have examined the contribution of capital formation to economic growth of countries. The seminal study by De Long and Summers in the 1990´s reported evidence on the strong correlation between machinery investment and GDP growth using data of 63 countries for the period 1960-1985. This work generated a lot of discussion and served as a valuable input in illuminating the debate of the impact of capital formation on the economic growth. This study seeks to contribute to this debate.

The conclusions emerging from the empirical analysis will allow answering some questions: Is the lack of investment the cause of the relatively weak growth of the GDP in Chile in the long run? And more important: Is the lack of machinery investment specifically the cause? If the answer is positive: What kind of machinery investment is most significant?

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

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

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

Although there are different theoretical approaches to the real meaning of an “optimum fiscal performance”, it is generally accepted that a consistent macroeconomic management is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic growth. Besides, in terms of social well-being, neither the poverty reduction or the improvements in income distribution are detached from the management and composition of the public expenditures and their financing. Through a comparative perspective, this article discusses the sort of mechanisms which have governed the macroeconomic management of the Uruguayan fiscal policy during the XXth century. Its results are analyzed in terms of their impact on the public resources devoted to social protection.

On the first place, taking into account recent studies by Comín and Díaz (2008) we estimate the income-elasticity of the Central Government expenditure in Uruguay in the long term and discuss the fulfillment of the Wagner Law. We evaluate our results with those obtained by these authors for Argentine, Brazil, Mexico and Spain. On the second place, we study the total and social expenditure, which means its composition, cyclical performance and financing, in order to understand up to what extent the country has “protected” its social expenditure from adverse fiscal shocks.

Considering the regional evidence regarding to this topic, this look into the fiscal management during the economic cycle and the discussion of its impacts on the public expenditure in social areas in the long term, is expected to shed new light on the incidence of these factors on the economic backwardness of Uruguay and similar Latin American countries.

Latin America has long been regarded as a high volatile and strongly unequal region. This paper analyses whether macroeconomic instability affected income distribution in the period 1880-1913, and whether these effects were stronger than elsewhere. We find that while volatility is negatively correlated with diminishing income inequality, we did not find any robust causal relationship between both variables. We also find that macroeconomic volatility was mainly driven by volatility in the terms of trade, but this kind of volatility did not affect income distribution. Our results rather suggest that inflation negatively affects income equality, and to a less extent the depreciation rate. Financial crises seem to have no significant, permanent effect on income distribution.

This paper aims at displaying a long-term and “structural” approach on the current global tributary challenges related to equity problems.
Over most of the past two centuries, the economic reform processes were–mainly–endogenously generated in the West and other parts of the world. These took place in a global frame of growing interlinking, which did not seem to pose relevant restrictions to the national processes of the modern nationalities conformation–at least for the advanced countries. These processes spurred economic growth and, in the last phase, they brought about high levels of internal equity (specially, between the post-war periods of the First and Second World War). This long process has been “managed” within each Nation-State.
A major part of the "developing” world, belatedly and in different ways, sought to partly emulate these approaches to national construction, economic growth and the achievement of greater equity. Latin America is an example of this.
After the last third of the past century, the economic and financial globalization process introduced, in the first place, great restrictions to these processes of national construction; then, caused different degrees of regression in the levels of equity that had been previously achieved (specially, since the 80's). This finally “raised questions” about the capacity of the Nation-States to tackle, with certain autonomy, their economic and social processes.
In short, in the current phase, the Nation-States have been left little room for maneuver, particularly the relatively small ones. Likewise, for the same reasons, what turns out to be equally important is the joint action carried out by nations which act, mainly, as a “protective shield” and, desirably, as a collective participant who acts on its own initiative: a second stage that has not yet been perfected. The third potential level of action required by the present context is the global one. At present, its hegemony is held by the central countries (specially the US, despite the apparent beginning of a period that shows an accelerated decadence of its hegemony).
The Nation-State, and the entire Latin American region also, are then subject to major challenges on behalf of the globalization process and the increasingly concentrated economic forces. Where will these challenges lead to? We cannot certainly know that. What is visibly true is the fact that they are already eroding the strength of the Treasury and making our world even more unfair.

Levels of economic development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era. Colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country, depending on local conditions. Some activities, such as mining and sugar cultivation, were "bad" in the sense that they depended heavily on the exploitation of labor and led to a low development path, while "good" activities led to a high development path. We show that areas with bad colonial activities have lower output per capita today than areas with good colonial activities. Areas with high pre-colonial population density also do worse today. Moreover, the positive effect of "good" activities goes away in areas with high pre-colonial population density. We attribute this to the "ugly" fact that colonizers used the pre-colonial population as an exploitable resource, thereby also leading to a low development path. Our results suggest that differences in political representation and in the current ethnic composition of the population (but not differences in human capital or income inequality) could be the intermediating factors between colonial activities and current development.

The present study reports new evidence on the contribution of capital formation, and
specifically machinery equipment investment, on economic growth. For the case of Chile, using
new data for the period 1890-2005, the relationship is studied. Applying a causality test a
positive correlation between the growth rate of machinery investment and the long run GDP
growth rate, will be verified. Prior empirical studies generally used country cross-section data
and worked with a relatively small number of years. The empirical approach, based on long run
series (1890-2005) for a case study, Chile, can better help to understand the effect of machinery
equipment investment on economic growth.

In this paper using the variables that explain the equation Commoner-Ehrlich-Holdren, for the period 1950-2004 and a sample of 97 countries (22 of whom are Latin American and Caribbean), finds that Latin American and Caribbean countries have a behavior in the consumption of modern energy and energy intensity, which does not differ from any country in the sample with similar levels of GDP per capita.
The behavior average of the sample of Latin American and Caribbean countries for all the period shows that the energy intensity, calculated with the traditional and modern energies, of the entrance countries per capita half is decreasing and that its contribution is negative in the explanation of the apparent consumption of energies. However the contribution of population growth and GDP per capita growth in consumption of energy is positive and over 50%. For the rest of countries grouped according to its level of entrance per capita, with the exception of Peru, Cuba and Dominican Republic, the contribution of the energy intensity in the growth of the apparent consumption of modern energies is positive.
In the sample of Latin American and Caribbean countries, with the exception of Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, the rate of population growth explains about 50% of total energy consumption, this behavior is different to that reported for countries such as Sweden, Holland, Italy and Spain.
In the 55 years covered by this study, the sensitivity of total energy consumption to changes in population, GDP per capita and energy intensity is unitary for majority of the Latin American and Caribbean countries in the sample, and these results remain unchanged when the analysis only considers the consumption of modern energies.
Finally, the energy intensity changes over time in each country and between countries. However, changes in the composition of the energy matrix, the increased involvement of manufacturing and mining in GDP, the first oil shock, the impact of internal crises and the results of the structural adjustment programs alter the trend, the growth rate and the persistence of energy intensity.

This article aims to examine possible explanations for the backwardness in the expansion of primary education in Brazil between 1930 and 1964, despite the fact that Brazil presented high rates of economic growth through promoting import-substitution industrialization. In particular, the role of the distribution of political power in the expansion of primary enrollment rates is addressed. Contrary to what happened in developed countries, our qualitative and quantitative evidence indicates that Brazil’s experience is more similar to what happened in India. Education in both countries developed in the context of a highly elitist democracy, in which the expansion of suffrage had little effect on the expansion of education, with a negative impact on long-term economic growth.

This research attempts to explain the poor performance of the Colombian economy in the world markets during the late nineteenth century. Based on data on exportable production at the municipal level in 1892, coffee production in 1925 and of public land allocation and land conflicts during the nineteenth and twentieth century, we found that one of the greatest obstacle that faced Colombian export development was the weakness of settlers’ property rights in the frontier lands. The quantitative results show that in the absence of land conflicts, the municipality’s exportable production would have been at least twice as much as that observed.

This paper presents new series of factorial distribution of income between 1950 and 2000 for 14 Latin-American’s countries from a harmonization of the data of the labor share in the national accounts statistics. Besides, estimations of self-employed workers’ remunerations are presented for 10 countries of the region, after discussing different methodological approaches to estimation and the data limitations of these.
The analysis of these coherent estimations allows us to reach some preliminary conclusions. First, there are important variations between countries. Second, at a national and regional level, the series show important variations in the short and long term, supporting studies which question the stability of the factorial distribution of income in the long run. Third, our estimations of labor share remuneration –once corrected to include an estimation of self-employed workers’ remuneration- are still significantly lower than in the developed countries, thus questioning studies which indicate that these variations disappear once this correction is applied.

In current Central American historiography not much attention is paid to what happened to the region’s economy during the First World War. The impact of the war is virtually unknown, other than that Central American trade temporarily shifted from Europe to the United States, because of the naval blockades of the former during the conflict. For the period before the 1920s, no yearly GDP estimates exist, so in order to find out about the economic impact of the war, we need to consult other economic indicators. Fortunately, the five Central American republics published foreign trade statistics on a regular basis from the first decade of the twentieth century onwards. As the Central American countries depended exclusively on imported capital goods and energy, we can find out the levels of apparent consumption of these products per country just by studying their yearly import statistics.
In this paper we will analyze the import curves of machinery, means of transport, energy, cement, foodstuffs and textiles. The behavior of these different import cycles can give us indications about the economic performance of each Central American country, before, during and after the First World War. Not only will I measure the impact of the war, I will also give explanations for the different economic performances of the Central American countries during the period under investigation, rooted in different historical economic processes, dating back as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. This way we obtain a fairly precise impression of the influence of this war on the economies of the region, concluding that Costa Rica suffered most from the conflict, losing more than a decade of economic growth, because, compared with its neighbors, it was extremely well-integrated in the global economy.

Latin America is an economic diverse region. On terms of Economic History research the lack of quantitative data restricts many times the possibility of take into account all this complexity. The scarcity of economic long term series is particularly severe in the Bolivian case. This work goes one step forward in the improvement of this situation. It presents three long term fiscal series based on primary information: the fiscal income of the Bolivian Central State (1900-1931), the mining fiscal burden (1900-1929) and the departamental income (1900-1920). It also propose ideas to recognize the potential and limits of the Bolivian Public Finances at the beginning of the 20th Century. The work search the rationality behind the dependence on external trade taxes. Then, it shows that the State was not necessarily unable to tax the mining sector. So, know how to expend is so important as tax. The impact of this expenditure is related with the institutional environment. Given the long permanence of colonial institutional arrangements, the potential impact of the Public Finances was probably low.

This article presents new data about labor productivity, technological content of exports and selected firms and industries in order to assess the performance of Brazilian manufacturing industry in post-World War II. We deal with evidence from both macro and micro levels in the assumption that a one-sided focus on macroeconomic aggregates misses important aspects of industrialization and technological development. Our data show that Brazilian industry achieved high growth rates of labor productivity during the post-war years and became more technologically sophisticated, as measured by manufacturing exports. There is also evidence that a number of firms engaged in assimilating, adapting and improving products and processes, achieving high productivity and efficiency during the classic period of Import-Substituting Industrialization (ISI) in Brazil. However, we also found that Brazil's labor productivity growth lagged behind what was achieved by other industrializing and developed countries after the mid-1970s. Technological upgrading was slow and limited, and most firms used antiquated equipment, lacked technical expertise and turned out low-quality products. Overall these results suggest that a highly heterogeneous structure became a major feature of Brazilian ISI in the post-war years, with successful cases and mixed results, rather than widespread inefficiency and technological stagnation, as argued by the dominant interpretation of ISI in Latin America. In the end, we formulate tentative hypotheses about the market and institutional conditions that shaped Brazilian industrialization in the long run.

This is an exploratory paper which aims at analyzing consumption patterns in the long run, and to present some evidence for Argentina and Uruguay along the 20th century. We consider consumption patterns as the distribution of personal expenditure among different categories of goods and services. This paper examines changes of consumption patterns and the factors that affect them in the long run. The paper pursues three specific objectives. Firstly, we discuss the theoretical factors that influence changes in consumption patterns in the long term. Secondly, we present some empirical evidence on personal consumption expenditure for Buenos Aires and Montevideo for some selected years throughout the 20th century. Finally, we propose some interpretations about the changes in the consumption structure (especially food and luxury goods) and its relationship with the evolution of real income.

In this paper we extend our earlier research on the energy consumption of Latin America and the Caribbean backward and forward in time to cover 150 years of energy data. Whenever insufficient quantitative basis hampers the adequate evaluation of the relative economic progress of the different countries, the energy consumption is used as a proxy of economic modernisation to answer some interesting long term questions. When economic data exists -mostly the last third of our period- then is possible to observe the different relatioships stablished between energy and economy in the Latin American republics. Overall, the paper provides the logest series of energy consumption for Latin America ever.

The traditional exception to the welfare reducing character of protectionism is based on the optimum tariff argument. If in addition the market power can be traced back to control of a necessary, cero substitution natural resource type input, then the corresponding trade tax and the shadow price of the resource are on common ground, eventually the former is also an instrument for charging the latter. In the political economy context such an export tax is also a device for nationalizing the income stream the scenario promises; but also, once this revenue takes over a significant fraction of fiscal income the country’s Treasury may turn into a conservative force impeding tax innovations dictated by dwindling monopoly power. Specially so if government comes to display an agency type of behavior and the revenue reductions to be derived from the adaptation of the tariff to changing demand conditions concentrate in the present, meanwhile expected benefits of such an action extend into the future. Based on a simple analytical framework and exploring the issue with a set of simulations,the optimality of the export tax on nitrates is evaluated for its complete lifespan extending over half a century. Its nil capacity for adapting to changing conditions is then interpreted in terms of the assumed incentive structure of governments, but recognizing the inherent difficulties in predicting future market power and therefore of tax design.

A main issue in the current debate in the economic literature explores the effects of financial crises on income distribution, though no consensus exists on the real consequences of financial meltdowns on the distribution of income within affected countries. None of these works, however, deal with a long-term perspective, due to data constraints and to the fact that the frequency and relevance of financial crises have really increased since the 1990s. This paper focus on the relationship between financial crises and income distribution in the first era of globalization. During this period, financial crises affected emerging markets as they do today, and economists were aware of the risks of such events on the economic conditions of the suffering countries. We analyze new and systematic data for the main capital recipient countries in Latin America and Europe, and provide detailed case studies from Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. This paper finds that, after a financial crisis, income distribution deteriorated mainly through two channels: economic activity slowdown and relative price changes.

The new trade data used here documents that Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico underwent significant industrialization after 1870 and, based on evidence from around 1910, they led the rest of Latin America and most of the poor periphery. How much of this industrial performance was due to fast productivity growth in manufacturing, yielding catch up on the US and Europe? How much was due to a cessation in the seven-decade rise in the net barter terms of trade, trends that reversed de-industrialization and Dutch disease forces? How much was due to cheaper foodstuffs keeping industrial wages more competitive? How much was due to more pro-industrial real exchange rate and tariff policy? Which of these forces contributed most to early industrialization among the Latin American leaders? Changing fundamentals, changing market conditions, or changing policies?

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, argued controversially that in pre-industrial England the rich replaced the poor demographically, and that this helps explain why England became more “bourgeois” in these years: less violent, thriftier, more literate, more numerate. Here evidence from a different source, surnames, confirms the takeover of English society by the economically successful between 1600 and 1851, and the disappearance of the criminal and the poor. A man’s economic success in pre-industrial England predicts a permanent increase of his surname frequency, and hence his gene frequency, by 1851. But the surnames also shows that pre-industrial England was a society of both downward and upward social mobility all the way from at least 1300, with no permanent upper class. In this respect it shows greater social mobility than modern societies such as the USA and Brazil.

In this paper, I consider a body of observational evidence not commonly studied by economists, namely the behavior of men and women (mostly men) in the military. I focus here on three issues: first the behavioral foundations for creating an effective military unit; second, evidence that infantrymen have historically been reluctant to fire on the enemy and how this reluctance has been overcome in the last half century through changes in military training, and third, the modern practice and conventions surrounding the taking of prisoners of war. The evidence in all three of these areas reinforces the appeal of the idea of cognitive modularity, the view that thought and behavior are influenced by different “mental organs.” With respect to behavior, these usually align in the counsel they provide. But not always, and focusing on circumstances where guidance conflicts – Prisoners Dilemmas are examples – offers a route towards building a more coherent behavioral science.

Economic Development and Homogeneous Middleman Groups as Adaptive Units: Establishing links between Economic History, New Institutional Economics, and Evolutionary Biology

Janet T. Landa
Department of Economics, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 (jlanda@Yorku.ca)

ABSTRACT

In his book, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, economic historian Phillip Curtin (1984) provided a comparative study of the phenomenon of foreign minority homogenous middleman groups (HMGs)--trade networks or trade diasporas --which were ubiquitous in the Middle Ages and in less developed economies. Examples of HMGs include the Radanite Jewish diaspora in the 8th and 9th centuries linking Europe and China; the Mizabi trade diaspora in Algeria, the Armenian trade diaspora from the 14th to 16th centuries; the overseas Chinese trade diaspora in Southeast Asia, etc. Merchants embedded in these HMGs were linked to each other by bonds of trust and solidarity such as kinship, ethnicity, common culture, language, and religion. In describing these HMGs, Curtin emphasized the need for these foreign merchant groups to segregate themselves culturally and spatially in order to successfully perform the function of “cross-cultural brokers” in their host country. In addition, Curtin discussed the special institutional arrangements developed by these foreign HMGs for adapting themselves to the environment in which they found themselves. Scholars who specialize in studying the role of merchant networks in promoting economic development are indebted to Curtin for his valuable insights.
There are, however, some notable gaps in Curtin’s book, including for example the following questions:(a) How did these HMGs emerge? (b) How to explain the
persistence of some of the HMGs? (c) Why is ethnicity used as a boundary maintenance device? d) How to explain the ability of these foreign middleman groups to out-compete indigenous groups to appropriate middleman roles? and (e) What happen to the homogeneity of these merchant groups as the institutional infrastructure including formal institution of contract law becomes well developed with economic development?
This paper will answer these questions drawing on: (a) my new institutional economics (NIE) theory of the “ethnically homogeneous (Chinese) middleman group” (EHMG) in which informal social norms embedded in the EHMG substitute for formal institution of contract law in enforcing contracts (Landa 1981); (b) the bioeconomics (integration of economics with biology) of HMGs as “adaptive units” viewed from a multilevel/group selection theoretical framework (Landa 2008), as well as my ongoing research on HMGs as adaptive units (Landa, forthcoming 2009). Central concepts discussed in this paper include: (a)NIE concept of institutions--the formal and informal rules of the game for achieving social/law and order-- and the Coasian concept of transactions costs; (b) symbols of individual and group identity as signaling devices; (c) group selection; (d) dual inheritance theory; and (e) genes-culture coevolution. The paper shows that economic history, new institutional economics, and evolutionary biology can enrich each other by cross-fertilization of ideas.

“Institutions” are among the most complex phenomena in the social sciences. Their historical forms seem to change continually, as do the circumstances under which these changes occur. Three core questions may therefore be raised: (i) Are there any generic features by which institutions can be characterized in more general terms? (ii) Are there any recurrent patterns in the emergence and supersession of these institutions? (iii) Is the historical sequence in which they occur – the genesis of institutions – explicable in terms of more general principles?

In recent times, question (i) has attracted particular attention. In the light of game theory, institutions were interpreted as the result of strategic interactions. Accordingly, the generic features of institutions were equated with the rules and equilibrium points of prototypic games which were supposed to capture, at an abstract level, the particular strategic situation. Question (ii) has also been subjected to that approach, particularly the question of the emergence of “informal” institutions. Question (iii), center stage on the agenda of ‘old’ institutionalists like Veblen, has so far widely escaped the attention of game-theorists. The present paper therefore attempts to make progress in this question.

The paper suggests an approach to institutional change whose point of departure is a Darwinian perspective on early human survival conditions – the likely origin of human institutions. This means to apply the analytical tools of (evolutionary) game theory to explain the biological evolutionary origin of – informal – institutions and to contrast them with cultural influences. Cultural influences are argued to modify both these institutions and their role in regulating rivalry, dominance, and subordination among humans. With these modifications in place, it is shown that the crucial cultural modification of institutions indirectly subjected to natural selection is the emergence of impersonal, organized coercive power. This, in turn, laid the ground for implementing and enforcing formal institutions. The suggested approach is then used to analyze how formal institutions continue to evolve under the varying forms of organized, coercive power.

In this panel, “Changes of Local Market Institutions in the Age of Global Trade Expansion: Asia and North America in the 19th and 20th Century,” seven researchers analyze the transformation of market institutions in Japan, Taiwan, China, India, and the United States from the 19th to the 20th century. Investigating the integration of the world economy, the members of this group project share the key hypothesis that the local market institution was the crucial determinant for each region to get involved in the increasing cross-border flow of goods, labor, and capital. This paper provides the academic background of our analyses and previews their theoretical implications in terms of the three main problems; transformation of the imperial trade orders, reorganization of the relationship between the commercial city and its hinterland, and trade expansion and its impacts on industrialization.

This paper explores the transformation of the indigenous economy in Eastern India (Bengal and Bihar) during the period between 1820 and 1860, through a case study of the salt trade. The period under consideration is that of the consolidation of colonial rule by the English East India Company and the expansion of the world trade under the free trade regime. It is generally believed that the indigenous economy began to be linked to global trade through these two fundamental changes. However, the indigenous economy was not isolated from this global change in the salt trade, and was itself in fact the indigenous economy too was an active agent of this change. This paper examines the nexus between the three levels of trade: global, wider regional (the Bay of Bengal region in this case) and local is examined, and shows how these different levels of trade were interrelated with economic, political and social changes in Eastern India in the mid-nineteenth century. In this paper, ‘taste’ as social and cultural norms are focused. Since, it was difficult to bring about a drastic change in ‘taste’, which had been deeply embedded in the society, policymakers, and traders, indigenous and foreign, always had to seek negotiations with the indigenous society.

My essay presents first, a “global” perspective on trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by outlining how several actors in the Western Pacific region, Britain, Russia, and Japan, all created entrepôt to optimize maritime trade with the China market without using precious silver. In turn it offers a “local” view by considering the ways in which the Tokugawa shogunate and the Satsuma domain, two of the more active players in Japan’s foreign trade, competed using the entrepôt model in the early nineteenth century. It suggests that the entrepôt model, and the continued strength of the China market, provided an established context for foreign trade which in important ways shaped Japan’s adoption of Western- style “free trade” in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Western modern imperialism created the economical institutions, such as the free trade system, fixing currencies to the key currency at a high valued rate and forming radial railway systems to transport primary goods from inland. These institutions resulted in the expansion of overseas merchant networks in the nineteenth century. The free trade system encouraged the activity of Chinese traders. In the case of Kobe port in 1894, overseas Chinese merchants accounted for 63 per cent of exports from Kobe to Asia.
It was crucial that the large number of Chinese immigrant laborers drastically increased in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century. Western imperialism needed its labor power to produce and process primary goods, such as tin ore and rubber. There were many Chinese towns where workers spoke the same language and shared the same practices. The important thing was that it was mainly Chinese workers drastically who supplied the large consumer markets in Southeast Asia. It was Chinese merchants who provided consumer goods to these workers, because they had learned and knew the emigrant workers’ adopted languages, social customs and cultural taste.
The overseas Chinese merchants had an advantage in purchasing consumer goods because they used the high valued currencies in Southeast Asia. The currencies in colonies allowed them to buy goods easily. In particular, it was profitable for merchants to deal with Japanese goods because they could be exported at the devalued currency rate. The main reason why Chinese and Indian merchants tried to set up new branches in Kobe was that Japanese goods were very profitable for them due to the difference in currency policies between colonies and Japan. The cheap Japanese goods were needed for people in colonies because they suffered from the deflationary circumstances.
The high valued currencies in colonies also encouraged overseas Chinese laborers’ remittances from Southeast Asia to South China. These remittances brought the information that the immigrant labor was profitable and then promoted further emigration. The more the numbers of Chinese workers increased in colonies, the more overseas Chinese networks could be expanded, based on a common language and background, unifying of the flow of people, money and goods into a single unit.

Traditional vs. Treaty Ports:
Dual Trade System in 19th-Century Taiwan

Yu-ju Lin
Associate Research Fellow at Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica

Abstract
This paper will use merchants, commodity transactions, trade networks, investments, and monetary institutions as prisms through which to view (a) the dual trade system involving both international and traditional port cities in 19th-century Taiwan; and (b) the regional economy that was formed by this dual trade system.
Qing Taiwan was a region of diversity rather than homogeneity. There existed distinct features in different areas, which accounted for their chronological sequence in economic development. Indeed, not only were there temporal differences in their growth, the trade patterns they adopted also varied and the economic systems thus developed differed in scale depending on the characteristics of the areas. Prior to 1860, the three port cities of Tainan, Lugang, and Taipei served as the center of traditional Junk trade between Taiwan and China proper. Over time, guild merchants built a cross-Strait trading bloc, controlled Taiwan's external trade, and established a system of mutual commissioned trade between firms based at these three cities and China proper. These guild merchants also relied on junk captains to establish commercial links (supercargo trade) at smaller port cities in Taiwan. After Taiwan opened its ports to foreign commerce in 1860, Western companies brought new trade practices to the two pairs of international ports cities located in northern and southern Taiwan. Together, guild merchants, large family-owned enterprises, and western companies traded tea, sugar and camphor at these four cities. It is this tripartite commercial network that enabled Taiwan to join the world economic system. Consequently, a dual trade system involving both international and traditional port cities emerged in 19th-century Taiwan. This paper traced the development of port cities to illustrate the economic diversity of 19th-century Taiwan. It further described the trade operations both traditional trade ports and treaty ports opened for foreign trade to highlight Taiwan’s multi-facet and intricate trade pattern in that era.

Keywords: Network, Commissioned trade, Guild, Western Company, Open Port

In the mid-nineteenth century, the free trade regime set the foundation for the global trade expansion. In non-Western regional economies, the regime was imposed by the ratification of unequal treaties. In contrast to East Asia where the treaty system was introduced as an utterly new institution, the Ottoman treaties were established based on the Western reinterpretation of a long tradition: capitulations. Ottoman capitulations, initially granted as Sultan's favor and represented Ottoman "liberalism," were transformed and incorporated into the Western "free trade regime." This paper attempts to elucidate this transition by focusing on two aspects of Western abuses of capitulations – the question of tariff autonomy, and the extended interpretation of foreign protection of Ottoman non-Muslim subjects – and Ottoman attempts to correct them in the period preceding the age of free trade.

The paper is an exploration in the histories of exchange, marketing practices, and trading networks in the India’s northeastern borderland region during the colonial period. It focuses on the reorientation of trade and the implications of this for the political and cultural history of the region. The paper begins by suggesting that this borderland had a rich connected history with a shared cultural and historical memory with Assam, Bengal, as well as with the northern polities of Tibet and Bhutan during the Mughal imperium. During this period, markets and other more non-formal trading practices were marked by considerable dynamism since this was a region rich in ecological resources, separating the towns and trading ports of western Assam and eastern Bengal from their markets inland, in Bhutan and Tibet, and was also the principal channel for trade between Tibet, China, Bhutan and Assam. Further, commercial transactions also formed part of an extended social landscape in the region, and markets and fairs were marked by their cultural and political underpinnings in pre colonial times. The paper then also looks at the negotiations of early mercantilist companies with local trading groups and their practices.
The second part of the paper contends that the introduction of the tropes of colonial modernity, in particular the deployment of the state’s spatial strategies, effected significant everyday and structural changes in the culture of trading in the borderland region. The larger process of erasure of notions of ambiguous territoriality and multiple sovereignties was accompanied by the transformation of the borderland into a politically and economically unified territory, well integrated with the trading networks of eastern India (particularly the province of Bengal). The eastern borderland was reoriented from being a site for thriving commercial and cultural exchange between the northern polities of Bhutan and Tibet, and Assam and Bengal, into a hinterland of goods for the Bengal market. Locating post-colonial continuities in the form of various fairs that have continued into contemporary times from the pre-colonial and through the colonial, the paper also discovers resilience in the dynamics of peddling and fairs in contemporary times, which, in its relationship to seasons, ecology and culture, often resisted the colonial privileging of settled categories.

This paper reconsiders the restoration of governance in Southern China during the middle of the 19th century by focusing on the “coolie trade”.
Qing rule, which was stable during the 18th century, moved into a state of flux until the middle of the 19th century. This became a problem for local Qing officials and foreign diplomats in their attempts to regain control in coastal areas and to establish the treaty ports system. In this paper, we will analyze problems in immigration, particularly the coolie trade, as an example of the formation of new forms of governance.
Many aspects of the coolie trade have received attention. However, although many researchers have studied this area, some issues remain unsolved. For instance, most former studies have focused on the coolie trade and have therefore overlooked the relationship between its emergence and the governance, economic and social changes found in China’s coastal areas during the middle of the 19th century. While they have also highlighted problems associated with the coolie trade, such as fraud and kidnapping, they have failed to analyze fully the reasons for these problems. They have also not addressed why only the coolie trade became a social problem, despite other forms of human traffic taking place within China or from China to Southeast Asia. In general, they have also focused on the role of the government of each country (such as China and Britain) in the process of abolishing the coolie trade. However, this means they have disregarded the function of British consuls and Chinese local officials in the governance of the areas affected. Finally, there has been insufficient comparison of the coolie trade and emigration to Southeast Asia.
In this paper, we address a number of important developments in the coolie trade. First, we analyze the reasons behind the emergence of the coolie trade, especially the economic and social changes found in China during the mid-19th century. Second, we analyze the problems in the coolie trade by focusing on the brokers (ketou) who recruited coolies. Third, we examine how the coolie trade declined in the treaty ports. We especially concentrate on the role of British diplomats and Chinese local officials. Finally, we compare the coolie trade with the emigration system to Southeast Asia.

This paper focuses on the American South in the early nineteenth century, when cotton production based on slave labor became the leading U.S. export commodity. An internal slave trading system emerged during this era, creating new trading networks and economic opportunities, as well as systematically allocating slaves where they were most needed within the South. The paper will indicate that the development of the internal slave trade and the stable growth of U.S. cotton production in the global market were intricately related. The rise of global competiveness of U.S. cotton was supported by a peculiar trade that emerged and expanded at the local level. The complex system of slave trading developed as the most important business in the South, with large interstate trading firms and extensive slave markets. The various measures slave traders took to effectively run their operation and how the rules of the trade were transformed to adjust to the greater acceleration of cotton production will be analyzed. Specifically, the paper will emphasize the formation of partnerships that strengthened slave trading networks, repeated amendment of legal restrictions at both the local and federal level, and modifications in financial transactions. The analysis will further show that the cotton growth was founded on the economic, social, and ideological support that was generated by the internal slave trade, and southerners viewed with confidence that the condition of the southern economy was totally in accord with the world economy.

As this is a round table session, participants will not present formal papers. The titles indicate the issues they will discuss.

As this is a round table session, participants will not present formal papers. The titles indicate the issues they will discuss.

As this is a round table session, participants will not present formal papers. The titles indicate the issues they will discuss.

As this is a round table session, participants will not present formal papers. The titles indicate the issues they will discuss.

As this is a round table session, participants will not present formal papers. The titles indicate the issues they will discuss.

As this is a round table session, participants will not present formal papers. The titles indicate the issues they will discuss.

The paper examines the case of the Jewish operators active in transalpine trade during the modern age. It focuses on the role of the Jewish merchants at the fairs of Bolzano, one of the main commercial junctures between the Mediterranean area and central-northern Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The documentary basis of the study consists mainly of the trial proceedings conserved in the archives of the Magistrato Mercantile (mercantile magistracy) of Bolzano, the body which adjudicated disputes arising at the trade fair, and which also acted in representation of the interests of the merchants. In the period considered (1750-1799), around 300 trials were held which involved Jewish merchants, and they furnish information otherwise difficult to obtain on the origins, types of activity, and business practices of this particular category of merchants.
Can one speak in this specific case of ‘small business’? The question mark in the title is due to the fact that it is possible to allocate the Jewish merchants active at the Bolzano fairs to this category, but only with caution. In effect, Jews were excluded from the contrattazione, the small group of those entitled to vote in the elections of the members of the Magistrato. In this sense, therefore, they cannot be considered prime protagonists of the fair. Nevertheless, examination of the transactions recorded in the trial proceedings yields a more diversified picture that highlights the role of the merchants from Hohenems, who exploited the town’s location between Switzerland and south-western Germany. By also relying on the networks of relationships that tied the various Jewish communities together, they developed a substantial volume of business at the Bolzano fairs, especially by selling Swiss and German textiles and purchasing silks, dyes and colonial products
What emerges, therefore, is on the one hand an anything but sporadic presence of Jewish operators at the Bolzano fairs, and on the other, a certain degree of trust in the workings of the fair institutions, particularly in the mercantile magistracy, which evidently had to be sufficiently impartial and effective in its operations.

Although Venetian merchants were very active in the sixteenth century, in the following two centuries French, and English and Dutch merchants increased their commercial interests in the Levant. Wars and political conditions in the eastern part of the Mediterranean also influenced the commercial activities of the Western merchants. It seems that while Southern Europeans wore themselves out with a succession of wars, the Dutch, English and French captured much of trade with the Levant. Overall Italian and Spanish shipping declined: there was a shortage of timber, and ship design was inferior to that of northern ships, which were better built, were faster, and had lower freights.
It can be said that in spite of the discoveries and finding new trading routes to the east and west the Ottoman Empire’s share in international trade did not decrease in the early modern times. In addition to the appearance of western mercantilism, state interference and later birth of free trade, the Ottoman pragmatic and alternative economic policies and models also played a role this results and influenced the commercial trafic between the east and west.

Dutch private enterprise played a unique role in the Atlantic World. Despite the fact that the Dutch did not have an extensive Atlantic empire compared to the English, the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese, relatively large quantities of the produces grown in the New World, like tobacco, sugar, cacao, rice and indigo ended up in the Dutch Republic to be processed for the European consumer market. Especially for these “Atlantic” commodities a large manufacturing industry had developed in the Dutch Republic, such as spinning tobacco, refining sugar and turning cacao into chocolate.
From the 1680s onward, three major trade routes developed. First, the shuttle trades with the growing plantation colonies on the Wild Coast: Suriname, Berbice Essequibo and Demerara. Second, especially West Indian sugar and North American tobacco and rice arrived in Amsterdam and Rotterdam indirectly via Bordeaux, Copenhagen, London and Glasgow. Third, trade contacts with non-Dutch overseas settlements and colonies in North America, the West Indies and South America. This trade had often a rather informal character or at least the rules were bend. Here we will deal with smuggling or contraband trade (sometimes called “direct trade”) as long as it was illicit from the vantage point of at least of one of the colonial powers involved. In the Dutch case two types of contraband trade evolved: direct and indirect interloping. Direct contraband trade developed between the Dutch Republic and several foreign colonies. Indirect interloping took place via de small Dutch Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Saint Eustatius.
Using the ideas of Hermann Simon, Hidden Champions. Lessons from 500 of the World’s Best Unknown Companies (Cambridge, Mass., 1996) on small entrepreneurs and business opportunities, I will explore Dutch contraband trade in the Atlantic Word between 1680 and 1800. For this, three aspects were imperative: manufacturing, neutrality and institutions like insurance, finance and business information.

This paper investigates cultural commodities as a means of commercial exchange between Europe and Asia. From the onset of the seventeenth century, the Danes participated in the European intercontinental as well as in the intra-asiatic-trade. Simultaneously, they imported artistic or cultural produce such as paintings or furniture to Asia and stimulated the emulation of European pattern and style abroad. This fact especially applies to the latter half of the eighteenth century facing an ever growing British territorial expansion in India.

This paper is a case study dedicated to the activity of a commercial colony from the Ottoman Empire, heterogeneous from an ethnic point of view, in the first years after the conclusion of the peace of Karlowitz, an analysis conducted on the basis of unpublished Venetian documents from the period in which Zorzi (Giorgio) Cumano acted as Venetian consul in the ottoman Albanian port. In these years, Durazzo was one of the main gateways of access through which the goods from Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, in general, entered the Italian Peninsula. The activity of the Venetian and Balkan merchants proved remarkably dynamic in the period immediately following the end of the conflict between the Porte and the Christian Coalition, when competition became acute between Venice and the Western economic powers, whose merchants were present in large numbers in the Levant. As a result, the tensions between the Venetian consul Zorzi (Giorgio) Cumano and the French and Dutch consuls were frequent, and the attempts to protect the business of their countrymen were interconnected with political intrigues and denunciations of the competition presented to the senior officials of the Porte.

This paper will describe the Swedish East India Compnay and its business strategy in contrast to the large chartered companies (the British and Dutch). In the second part of the paper I will in detail describe the mechanisms of the SEIC’s trade, the illicit trade in Britain and the financing of the its business in Europe and in Canton in the mid-eighteenth century.

In and around 1750, Scotland, a small and peripheral European economy, accounting for only one or two per cent of Europe’s gross total trade, handled close to one-fifth of European tobacco re-exports (re-exports of British colonial tobacco to continental European destinations). What were the reasons for this quite unusual and very peculiar pattern? The following paper argues that, whilst a good bundle of causal factors for this pattern has been identified in the past – mainly a somewhat fortuitous location of Glasgow, as well as asymmetrical credit relationships, coupled with a sophisticated method of acquir-ing American tobacco, developed by Glaswegian merchants since the 1740s, which all somewhat pre-destined Glasgow to become one of the larger tobacco traders after 1700 – this “traditional” explana-tory framework falls short of the institutional and macro-economic aspects of the Scottish tobacco trades 1700–1760. It will be argued here instead that a new customs legislation introduced in Scotland in 1707, coupled with a weak domestic export economy, were bound to channel the Scots’ commercial interest into re-exporting tobacco to continental Europe.

Did Europe gain from overseas colonies, and if so what parties in Europe? This paper looks at the case of Denmark and its colonies in the West Indies during the early-modern era. All the major parties in Denmark – producers, consumers and the Danish Crown – benefited from the country’s possession of colonies in the West Indies. The results stand in sharp contrast to previous research that has studied British gains from colonialism during the same period of time. The Danish case might thereby diversify the picture of who stood to gain from colonialism and potentially give a more accurate picture of the costs and gains of the first wave of colonialism.

Till now historiography cherished the idea that Hamburg trade to North America got a real take off only after the Peace of 1783 when the Senate of Hamburg officially acknowledged the United States of America; however, this is not the whole story: several merchants in Hamburg and nearby port towns in Denmark and Sweden had used their personal connections to colleagues especially in Philadelphia to establish a booming trade in arms and military supplies to the "rebels" in North America. Their business papers and observations of desperate British representatives in towns on the River Elbe will provide enough material to show that Hamburg merchants in the 1770s-1780s used all the gaps in the British system to earn their riches and to establish close relations to the US before Hamburg's political establishment -many merchants themselves- followed their example.

In the second half of the 18th and in the first half of the 19th century North Italian and Tessin merchant families like the Fratelli Loscho, which were engaged both in international and local retail trade, established a network along the trade route Milano – Simplon Pass – Lausanne – Lyon – Paris. The activities of the company settled down in Brig are modifying the image of the Alpine «vagrant merchant» («marchant ambulant») dealing with urban goods. This conception generated by the hawking research is replaced by that of the specialised long-distance merchant, who has permanent bases of business, where he certainly sold masses of short-distance trade goods in his small «bottega».

The main Marshallian externalities (i.e. specific knowledge, subsidiary industries and specialized labour force) were at the basis of the competitive advantage of districts throughout the 20th century. Apart from the former classical Mashallian externalities, the international competitiveness of industrial districts could be also associated to other factors. One of them might be the flexibility derived from the dominance within a district of a dense network of cooperative small entrepreneurs (neomarshallian districts). The other could have to do with the hierarchical capabilities of a few medium-large firms that coordinated the network (hub-and-spoke districts or clusters). This paper explores the sources of the competitive advantage of Spanish industrial districts specialised in textile, apparel and footwear products. It shows that in the 1980s the latter type of district was as common as the canonical neomarshallian one. Consequently, the paper suggests that the Spanish export districts for textile, apparel and footwear products could benefited from classical Marshallian externalities, but they could also take advantage from the hierarchical capabilities of medium-large firms. Finally, the paper argues that since the early 1990s, deregulation and the diffusion of the technologies of information and communication still reinforced the advantages of hierarchical organizations. These, in turn, developed capabilities in marketing and distribution, the competitive advantage of districts experiencing relative decline. This loss of competitiveness accelerated after China joined the World Trade Organization. Nevertheless, most of the present outstanding Iberian firms in fashion-related international markets emerged from Marshallian districts.

Italy’s industrial structure has been traditionally dominated by small family firms in traditional intensive industries, often clustered in local production systems known as industrial districts. Given the difficulties of large firms (both private and State-owned) following the Seventies, during the following decade the formula of the industrial districts proved to be largely successful in sustaining the Italian economy. Their success was based upon the identification between the household and the plant, and between the family and the firm in terms of finance, labour, management and other skills. At the beginning of the Nineties, however, a growing competition from less developed countries in labour intensive industries affected also the brilliant formula of the local specialized systems of production. These challenges had basically two effects. The first one was to speed up a selection process inside the industrial districts, which eliminated many underperforming firms. Secondly, many other entrepreneurial firms moved on the upper level of the market, adding much more value in terms of quality and design to their products. As a third effect, hierarchical structures (holdings, groups, formalised networks) started to diffuse inside local systems of production, originating a growing number of medium-sized firms able to cope with the internationalization process as well as with the foreign competition. Fourth, many of these firms are becoming more and more specialized, i.e. able to gain a stable competitive advantage in well defined, international market niches. While relatively new strategies are at the origin of these firms’ competitive advantage, a substantial continuity can be found in their structures. The transition from small workshop to a “real” enterprise meant in fact to enlarge the firm’s boundaries, adopting a relatively complex organizational structure and to some degree delegating responsibilities to management. However, the family still remains in command, as in the past, influencing strategies and controlling the succession. This situation is also due to the fact that the generally good performances of these firms in terms of sales, ROI and ROE means that adequate internal funds are available to sustain expansion, thereby providing continuity in the symbiotic relationship between ownership and control.

This paper analyzes the rise of the textile district of Buenos Aires between 1914 and 1960. In this period, the cotton textile industry led the import substituting industrialization in Argentina. This development accentuated the characteristics that the industrial location had assumed in the Argentina; especially the spatial concentration in the south of the city of Buenos Aires and the outskirts. It is supported that this case adapts it partially to the industrial district model, but it differs from the cluster studied by Michael Porter.
This communication splits into four parts. The first one reports the origins of the Argentina’s textile industry and presents some of the characteristics of the domestic market of textiles. The second one analyzes the industrial development between 1918 and 1945. There is studied the location of the cotton industry and the emergence of some subsidiary industries. The third one analyzes the industrial policy and its impact during the government of Juan Domingo Perón. Finally, we present some last reflections.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Spanish cork industry had lost its hegemonic position to Portugal, in the world market of manufactured cork.
In this work we intend to demonstrate that one of the most important explanations of the consolidation of this country’s leadership in the cork business lies in the formation and development of the industrial cork district of Aveiro (Santa Maria da Feira) in the north of Portugal. It was there where the growth of the Portuguese stopper industry took place and with this, the decisive orientation of this nation towards the manufacture of natural cork, substituting the traditional Portuguese trade in cork planks. We argue that the legislation that established the control of the industrial investment in Portugal, the so-called Industrial Conditioning (Condicionamento Industrial) did not restrict the opening of small cottage industries in the north, that fact being a determining reinforcement of the competitiveness of Aveiro in the world stopper trade. Another measure of major importance was the wage regulation covering this industry, being responsible for the wage differential favourable to the north comparing with the south and the centre of the country. Finally, we highlight the role of a big company (Amorim&Irmãos) in the formation and development of this industrial district, which became a leader firm in this sector at a world-wide level.

JEL classification: N4, N5, N74, N8, N9, R32, L52.
Key words: Cork, “New State”, Portugal, Spain, Industrial District, Amorim&Irmãos.

Clusters and industrial districts are the two concepts that have changed the way to think about competitiveness. For both, the formation of competitive advantage lies outside the business or industry, residing in the surrounding environment to which the firm or the industry belong.
Nevertheless, between the two concepts, there are differences in how they define the nature of the surrounding environment: a spatial concentration of productive activities, in the case of cluster; a local community, for the industrial district. From a historical perspective, these differences are the basis of three different approaches to the problem.
The first approach, more and more prevalent, tends to deny the existence of differences, going to identify the cluster with the industrial district, paying full attention of the historical research on the genesis and evolution of the spatial concentration of production.
A second approach identifies the district as a special case of cluster, in which the long duration and evolution have led to exceptional socio-cultural conditions that are hardly replicable elsewhere.
Finally, a third approach makes the district and the cluster out to be two distinct concepts by identifying the local community – and its related socio-cultural features based on a value system that foster industrial skill and business ability – as the founding component of the district. So that, according to this approach the productive apparatus is considered the outcome of a process of industrial specialization and organization of the local community. This third approach, therefore, establishes a logical gap between the concept of cluster and district; and, in the extreme, it may even belong to two different disciplines: to the business history, the cluster; to the economic and social history, the district.
This paper is part of the latter approach. It comparatively analyses historical trends of cutlery industry in Maniago (Italy), Thiers (France) and Sheffield (England) to found empirically the reasons that make the district a more robust theoretical paradigm than the cluster in the understanding how competitive advantage is formed and reproduced over time.

La problématique des districts industriel (expression prise ici au sens large) a surgi au coeur des sciences humaines et sociales lorsque la crise économique des années 1970, et les décennies de dépression consécutives, ont fait vaciller le modèle du gigantisme industriel fordien. Les pouvoirs publics des pays développés et, pour ce qui nous intéresse, les français, ont cherché des alternatives et des remèdes à travers un intérêt renouvelé porté aux PME et aux territoires industrialisés dédiés à des productions spécifiques. Dans la longue durée, cette dimension n’est pas nouvelle, puisqu’elle vient s’inscrire dans l’histoire du rôle mobilisateur auquel s’astreint l’Etat durant le XXe siècle en matière économique et sociale. La question posée ici est celle des voies suivies par l’action publique en matière de mobilisation des ressources ; l’approche se fera à travers l’exemple d’une industrie, celle de la chaussure, qui a connu de manière plus ou moins parallèle ou successive, c’est selon, le développement de deux types de configurations : des concentrations géographiques de PME (Fougères, Romans, Limoges, Cholet, etc.), des concentrations usinières et en groupes (les Chaussures André, etc.). Nous montrerons que l’Etat dans sa recherche d’institutions partenaires, pour assurer sa prise sur l’économie, s’avère dans l’obligation impérative de prendre en compte les reconfigurations du système productif, sans forcément y réussir. [...]

The paper is an analysis of the long-term development of the Spanish shoe industry from the mid 19th century to the end of the 20th century. Its primary objective is to determine what enabled Spain to become an important world exporter of footwear from the end of the 1960s and why this expansion did not occur earlier. The accepted hypothesis is that the evolution of the Spanish shoe industry was determined by both the economic evolution of the country and by the characteristics of the sector on an international scale. When the latter opened up the possibility for Southern European countries to become large world footwear suppliers, Spain was able to take advantage of this opportunity thanks to its production structure being concentrated into highly specialised clusters and therefore was able to adapt quickly to the new situation. These clusters would also demonstrate their collective efficiency and high capacity to adapt to changes in the market during the crisis of the 1970s. The paper begins with a review of the behaviour of the global footwear market since the end of the 19th century. It then goes on to examine how the main specialised clusters in this industry were formed in Spain. Then, in the third section, it analyses how these clusters were decisive for the significant expansion of this industry in the last third of the 20th century. Finally the paper will present its conclusions.

see current file

The main Marshallian externalities (i.e. specific knowledge, subsidiary industries and specialized labour force) were at the basis of the competitive advantage of districts throughout the 20th century. Apart from the former classical Mashallian externalities, the international competitiveness of industrial districts could be also associated to other factors. One of them might be the flexibility derived from the dominance within a district of a dense network of cooperative small entrepreneurs (neomarshallian districts). The other could have to do with the hierarchical capabilities of a few medium-large firms that coordinated the network (hub-and-spoke districts or clusters). This paper explores the sources of the competitive advantage of Spanish industrial districts specialised in textile, apparel and footwear products. It shows that in the 1980s the latter type of district was as common as the canonical neomarshallian one. Consequently, the paper suggests that the Spanish export districts for textile, apparel and footwear products could benefited from classical Marshallian externalities, but they could also take advantage from the hierarchical capabilities of medium-large firms. Finally, the paper argues that since the early 1990s, deregulation and the diffusion of the technologies of information and communication still reinforced the advantages of hierarchical organizations. These, in turn, developed capabilities in marketing and distribution, the competitive advantage of districts experiencing relative decline. This loss of competitiveness accelerated after China joined the World Trade Organization. Nevertheless, most of the present outstanding Iberian firms in fashion-related international markets emerged from Marshallian districts.

In recent years one major evolution in several industrial districts in Italy has been the emergence of new hierarchical structures due to the rise of lead firms. These are firms that - contrary to canonical district firms which tend to remain small - pursue size growth, invest in marketing, distribution and R&D, reorganize their subcontracting networks, and become international by establishing commercial subsidiaries and production facilities abroad. Despite their increasing importance, lead firms' histories remain largely unexplored. This paper contributes to fill this gap by examining the case of one of such lead firms: Wam, a company set up in 1968 in the mechanical engineering district of Modena, which at the beginning of the 21st century had become the world leader in the production of bulk material handling and dust filtration machinery. This paper in particular analyses the strategy of growth and internationalization that this company has pursued and its consequences in both the host nations and its Italian district of origin.

First of all, the author wonders about the degree of success of the Catalan sparkling wine industry in the recent past. The comparison with the Italian sparkling spumante and also with the case of the most celebrated sparkling wine in the world, champagne, shows a very positive trend of the cava production and exports in the last three decades of the XXth century.
Secondly, this paper focuses on the agent or cause responsible of this success. Is it due to a particular firm or should it be attributed to the whole industrial cava cluster around the area of Sant Sadurni d’Anoia? More than two thirds of the exports correspond to a particular firm. In this sense, we should attribute the success to it. However, the historical explanation of the development of the industrial cava cluster in the main and well-kwown viticultural Catalan area of Penedès, shows that all producers have benefit from the Marshalian external economies due to this concentration. And the paper shows that the leading export firm would never have succeeded in the international market without the existence of this kind of invisible advantages.

A abertura dos portos brasileiros em 1808 tem profundo significado, real e simbólico. Marca a ruptura do sistema colonial que, durante três séculos, regera a vida do território dominado pela monarquia lusitana no continente americano. Dá início à transição política que culminaria, 14 anos após, com o nascimento de um novo Estado na América, o Império do Brasil. A passagem do sistema de portos fechados ao regime de portos abertos teve profundo impacto na trajetória econômica da ex-colônia, da mesma forma que repercutiu sobre a economia britânica, em processo acelerado de industrialização vivenciado numa conjuntura política internacional crítica, de conflito aberto pelo controle da hegemonia mundial travado com a arqui-rival França. Complementarmente, interferiu no ritmo de crescimento da economia industrial portuguesa e constituiu-se em elemento decisivo na asfixia da industrialização francesa. Em síntese, a íntegra do texto porá em evidência, pela primeira vez, a balança de comércio entre a Grã-Bretanha e o Brasil num momento crucial de suas trajetórias históricas, revelando valores e produtos prioritários em suas transações mercantis, produtos estratégicos, como o algodão, que alimentava a industrialização inglesa em momento de retração de seus fornecedores norte-americanos, viabiliza o boom da indústria têxtil francesa entre 1808 e 1811, ao mesmo tempo em que alça o Brasil à condição de ator de destaque no cenário histórico mundial.

These Canary ports: s cale of the Atlantic traffic in the “First Globalization”
Luis Cabrera Armas (ULL)
lcabrera@ull.es
Miguel Suárez Bosa (ULPGC)
msuarez@dch.ulpgc.es

In the 19th Century freedom of the seas went hand in hand with free-trade, a generalized concept that coincided with what is acknowledged to have been the “First Globalization”, or simply stated, a free circulation of economic factors. This process needs to be seen within the framework of the world economy in the 19th century, which, in its latter part culminated in colonial expansionism. Such a market was possible due to the convergence of diverse technological, economic and political factors. Among these factors we should also highlight free-trade as an ideology, as well as the success of the Gold Standard to facilitate monetary order, and also the revolution in transport, and capital exports, etc. However, in the real economy, this freedom was limited due to economic controls put in place by certain nations and company networks, in such a way that large shipping and coal-mining companies were controlling a large proportion of traffic through shipping routes and supply stations. The entailment of the canary ports with the international trade is inseparable of its history due to its strategic position in the Atlantic Ocean and the institutional regulation of the free commerce, confirmed in 19th century after the implantation of the free ports in 1852. All this confers to the Canary Islands at the time of steam navigation, unquestionable attractive as intermediary in the interchanges between Europe and other continents. This communication studies the commercial routes that had as node the Canary ports, routes that are, as well, indicators of the development and the expansion of industrial Capitalism from the end of 19th century to the present time. Subsequently will be analyzed the key shipping companies of this traffic and its alliances: the marine confederations. Finally, the role of the island ports as food supply stations is studied, doing special emphasis in the enterprise strategy regarding these provisions.

The aim of the following article is evaluate the real impact of the Shipping Conference concerted between Elder Dempster and Woermann Linie in West Africa in the beginning of Twentieth Century. We make efforts in the role played by the Canary Islands in this subject.
We will realise an exhaustive study of the significance and importance of the Shipping Conferences on development of International Trade, and the different roles played by the members of these Conferences. We will make comparison between the West African Shipping Conferences and others like North American Shipping Conferences or Baltic Shipping Conference for example. These aspects are explained too by the theory of interlocking connections and the agents who make relations between the colonies and the home country. In our work, we will invest the rivalries between United Kingdom and Germany in West Africa in the precedent years to First World War, with a clear and fundamental focus in the Canary Islands. In these Islands the effects of international context are basic for understand the development of his trade, economy and society. In this aspect, we will realise economic analysis where the results will reflect the subject we said before.
This article is supported by the Atlantic Studies Group (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University), who is characterised for his interdisciplinary studies and the intervention and collaboration of researchers and specialists from Brazil, Spain, United Kingdom, Venezuela and Cuba. In last instance, this work conform an important section of the Thesis Project directed by Dr. Miguel Suárez Bosa where is treated the relations between the Port of Las Palmas and Dakar in the XX Century, and it is supported by the Insular Government of Gran Canaria (Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria).

The interaction of infrastructure, multilateral trade and learning is explored to explain the patterns of shipping productivity growth in the 17th and 18th century

The paper examines the port of Salvador da Bahia as a node in shifting commodity networks. A detailed empirical tableau of Bahia’s external trade by origin and destination for the years 1845-1914 is presented and analyzed, thereby revealing the major shifts. Given this contextual map, I then analyze in greater depth three commodities passing through the port of Salvador which played critical roles during 1850-1914: leaf tobacco, codfish and sugar machinery. The effort is to overcome distanciation – both socially and spatially – between the consumer and the producers, unveiling the fetish (of disconnectedness) by tracing out the social relations involved ‘behind’ consumption. The cod fishers of Newfoundland knew not that their catch would eventually feed African slaves working in Bahia’s sugar plantations. The affluent German cigar-smokers had little idea that their cigars contained Bahian tobacco leaf grown, harvested and dried by impoverished ex-slave families. Each of these commodities connected the rural hinterlands of Bahia with the metropolitan cites of Europe. One commodity (cod fish) was a final consumption item, another was an imported intermediate good (sugar machinery), and the third was a primary product export (leaf tobacco).

This paper examines the ways in which the economic development of French Indochina, which included the modernisation of port cities such as Haiphong, served to increase human trafficking from Vietnam to China during the period of French colonial rule in Indochina.

The paper deals with the first results of a research about the importation and commerce of fossil coal in Italy during the XIXth and early XXth century. The increasing supply of coal was a very important circumstance in Italian economic history. In fact, the possibility of using a new source of energy, cheaper and more effective than traditional ones, was an essential precondition for the industrialization of the country. The fossil coal arrived above all through the harbour of Genoa. This started off many transformations which changed the urban and social aspect of the city. Along with a drastic modernization of the harbour, and the development of communications, as roads and railroads, for transporting the goods in direction of the factories in Milan and Turin, the birth of a new class of workers, specialized in handling of coal, and the growth of the local and national entrepreneurship, became key elements of such a transformation.

European colonialism facilitated population migrations across vast distances, spurring the growth of concentrations of middlemen far removed from their regions of origin. Late 19th-century West African port cities received several waves of Levantine migrants beginning in the 1880s. These groups, dominated by the Lebanese, played critical roles as intermediaries in the late 19th- and early 20th-century 'commercial pyramid' of West Africa, selling European manufactures (beginning with textiles and beads) to African consumers, and thereby helping spread the monetized economy. In exchange, Levantine traders purchased African cash crops, including palm kernels and cocoa, which they 'bulked-up' and sold on to European firms for export. This paper will investigate the roles played by Levantine middlemen in the expansion of colonial port-city trade in West Africa, which helped develop imperial commodity networks linked to the region on an unprecedented scale. It will also demonstrate that Levantine middlemen served as active agents in the spread of the port-city 'beachhead' of the colonial economy, helping diffuse the monetized economy upriver, and later, via road and train networks into the interior. It was both the transnational and hybridized quality of West African colonial entrepôts, and their increasing links with metropolitan ports, that allowed Levantine traders to settle, flourish, and participate in the expansion of the colonial economy. This paper will analyze these linkages and processes, while also speaking to wider issues related to the formation of transnational diasporic identities based in port cities, and the transmission of business knowledge through the family. It will underscore a highly significant point of articulation between facilitated migration and the expansion in scale and complexity of imperial trade.

The challenges that the increasing globalization of the world economy brought about during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries opened up new economic opportunities for certain areas, especially those with access to new trade routes by sea. Therefore, ports were since then privileged places that channelled the gradual process of integration of markets.
During this long period, ports of the most developed nations underwent an outstanding growth, thanks to the factors upon which this first wave of market integration was built, which allowed the development of scale economies that also irradiated their impact on the surrounding territories. In other words, they served as transmission belt of the mechanisms of wealth generation, as they were vehicles for the exchange of goods between land and sea transport systems.
The response in the peripheral European countries like Spain, was somewhat less robust. The strengthening of the Spanish port system was based on a short number of leading ports, located naturally in those regions endowed with comparative advantages for exportation, and above all for the importation from abroad. This took place within a general context of high tariff protection, which reinforced the supplementary role of coastal shipping. The aim of the paper is to reflect on the basis of the consolidation of the Spanish port system, linking the relative success or ‘failure’ of each port with the endogenous dynamics of development of the regions or areas where they settled in. And then to analyze more deeply a case study, a port that was representative of the medium-sized maritime cities, which formed the cement that compacted the – unbalanced – national port structure.
Spain stands out for its considerable coastal perimeter. Despite this, historically, the volume of maritime traffic has not achieved the levels that one would expect, and it was not until the twentieth century when there was a significant growth of the trade in its ports. For that reason, the period that was chosen seems relevant as it coincides, on the one hand, with the advent of several different junctures that had a profound impact on international shipping, but above all because it is consistent with the hypothesis of an explosion of the urban phenomenon in the country, mainly during the 1920s and the 1950s.

This study focuses on the importance of the demand for Brazilian products by the Spanish market. From the treatment of quantitative data concerning Portuguese exports to Spain from 1796 to 1831, it is possible to highlight the role of Portugal as a commercial platform between Brazil and Spain. The two main Brazilian products exported to the Spanish market were tannery products and cotton.
The period when Portuguese exports to Spain reached the highest annual average was 1814-1820 and, at that time the Spanish Market was Portugal’s third largest client. Moreover, despite the opening up of Brazilian ports to the whole world on January 28th, 1808, it is precisely in this period that the Spanish demand for Brazilian products was intensified, Portugal being used as channel for indirect commerce of Brazilian leather and cotton to Spain.
The occasional Spanish demand for Brazilian sugar, which represented a significant quota of that market by the end of 18th century, is also analyzed.

Keywords: Spanish demand, Brazil, cotton, tannery products, sugar

The first transformation of world trade was the opening up of the Atlantic during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a trade in which Cork came to play a major role. Its traditional markets were expanded to include the Americas and the West Indies. During the seventeenth century it enjoyed a provisions trade unrivalled in the Atlantic world. Despite a reversal of fortunes at the port after 1815, its involvement in early capitalism enabled it to partake in a trade-based international economy throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

At the dawn of Imperialism, Cork’s global position was reawakened. There was a shift in its trade roots, which was simultaneously a catalyst and outgrowth of emigration. The migration of human cargo and transferral of local commodities to global markets were inextricably bound. In the latter decades of the century, trade and emigration developed in isolation.

From the seventeenth century, Cork’s role in British overseas expansion was vital. The port provided a gateway for a colonising population and a means by which products could reach a global market. This paper will address the role Cork played in mediating local goods to North America, the West Indies and Atlantic Europe from 1850. The interchange of agricultural products from Munster, raw material from Canada and foodstuffs from the Caribbean will be considered. The physical development of the port, to facilitate the world’s largest vessels and become an open trans-shipment site will be discussed.

This article relates to the major initiatives of the urban reform project occurred in the city of Vitória at the beginning of the 20th century, considering the idea that the public power ha regarding the urban action on the city combining sanitation, traffic, and urban remodeling. The intention of attributing to Vitória a modern character according to the progress ideals and on behalf of the civilization development will be noticed in the urban reforms that happened in the city, which were supported by the speeches sanitarians/hygienists that will give meaning to these reforms. In this context a plan was designed in three dimensions: the structure outworks and the rigging of the port, the city's sanitation, and urban reform. As in other port cities in Brazil that at the end of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century received notable influences of European urban modernization, Vitória sought to align its progressive feats to the new ideas of hygiene/modernization, taking also the ownership of European influences to guide its project of recast urban, prioritizing the reforms of the Port as the largest agent on the state progress and modernization of the city.

This paper presents a case study of soy beans -- its production, trade, and consumption in China and Germany -- and how its rising demand contributed to the development of the Siberian port city Vladivostock. My paper has three parts: first, I examine the family dynamics and struggles within Rickmers Rheederei, a Hanseatic shipping firm, and its competition with other shipping lines for the East Asian market, in particular Norddeutscher Lloyd. The second part examines the route taken by Rickmers, asking why the Russian port Vladivostock was favored over Chinese treaty-ports. Finally, my paper delves into the fate of soybean shipments upon their arrival in Hamburg: the processing and eventual consumption of soy products in Germany.
Unlike its larger competitors, Rickmers was actively run by a single family and primarily interested in transport between Asia and Germany. Focusing on Rickmers offers a unique opportunity to explore the struggles of a Hanseatic family business both internally between the generations, and externally in its competition with other shipping companies, against the backdrop of Japanese and Russian imperial ambitions in northeastern China and Siberia, where the soy originated, and the rapid growth of Vladivostock, from where the soy was shipped. By following the soybean trail and probing into its various uses, my paper connects contemporary nutritional developments and practices in Germany together with the transnational trade in East Asia.

Since the introduction of a basket peg by China in 2005, interest in this exchange rate regime has risen. This paper explores the emergence of the basket peg in the mid-1970s, using New Zealand and Australia as case studies. Policy-makers in both countries regarded the exchange rate as a tool that could influence various goals. We highlight the complexity of regime choice following the collapse of Bretton Woods. For Australia and New Zealand the basket peg was a plausible (though interim) solution in an era when they were reluctant either to peg to a single currency or float.

Drawing on data from 1980-2007, and historical antecedents, this presentation considers the stability of the overall system of exchange rates along three dimensions: individual countries' macroeconomic performance (inflation, growth, crises); their external interaction (adjustment, trade, capital flows); and risks to the system--a possible scramble for reserves, global imbalances, and the reserve currency status of the dollar.

Ireland had been considering a break in the long-standing currency link with sterling for some time when the ideal opportunity of a new exchange rate regime – potentially retaining the sterling link while stabilizing other exchange rates – seemed to offer itself in the form of the “zone of monetary stability in Europe” proposed by France and Germany in April 1978. Based on newly released archives, this paper reviews the evolving attitude of Irish officials and the Irish Government over the following months as the decision gradually shifted to one of breaking the sterling link and rejoining what was little more than an expanded “Snake” arrangement; the UK having decided to stay out. While financial issues were to the fore in the discussions, the final decision to join was based on a strategic vision that Ireland’s economic and political future lay with Europe rather than with the former colonial power.

This paper deals with the evolution of real exchange rates in Latin America from 1960 up to 2007 and its misalignments with respect to the “equilibrium exchange rate”. During the multiple phases of growth and crises Latin America countries have implemented a wide range of exchange rate systems going from floating exchange rates up to currency boards, pegging their domestic currency to the dollar. Many times in this period the adoption of one or another exchange rate system was strongly related to the idea of “overvaluation” or “undervaluation” of the exchange rate with respect to a long-run measure (“equilibrium exchange rate”). These concepts are strongly related to the consequences that the adoption of different exchange rate regimes may have on economic activity, inflation, unemployment and poverty.
This paper calculates with different methodologies (going from simple Purchasing Power Parity based bilateral and multilateral exchange rates up to more complex econometric methods) equilibrium exchange rates for the main Latin American economies and shows the discrepancies between the different calculations results. The paper analyses then if the changes in exchange rate regime in the period 1960 -2007 were coincident or not with strong departures from the calculated equilibrium exchange rates.

Why did policymakers adopt the gold standard? Although previous research has identified ex post effects of gold standard adoption on trade and bond yields, few studies have sought to understand whether these were the actual outcomes of interest to policymakers at the time of adoption. We examine the political economy of Japan’s adoption of the gold standard in 1897 by exploring the ex ante motives of policymakers as well as how the legislative decision to adopt gold won approval. We then link the beliefs of contemporaneous policymakers to data so that we can test the economic effects of adoption. In contrast to previous studies examining bond yields, we find little evidence that joining the gold standard reduced Japan’s country risk or investors anticipated a dramatic decline in borrowing rates for the government. Moreover, we find no evidence of a domestic investment boom or that investors anticipated one and bid it into stock prices. However, as some policymakers suggested, we find that membership in the gold standard increased Japan’s exports by lowering transactions costs and because the price of gold fell relative to silver, making exports to silver standard countries more competitive. While Japan also received a boost in exports to its regional trading partners when it switched from paper to silver, going onto gold allowed Japan to tap into the growing share of global trade that was centered on the gold standard: by the late 1890s nearly 60 percent of Japanese exports and total trade were with members of the gold club.

After the Second World War, and until the late 1950s, France and Italy opted for two different exchange rate policies as a consequence of their political scene and the relative degree of commitment to the opening of their domestic economies. Whilst the Italian economy was early oriented to a gradual opening of the domestic market, the French economy was less clearly committed to open her domestic market. After 1947-1948 Italy stabilised prices and opted for a relatively low exchange rate. Such an exchange rate and the parallel trade liberalisation policy favoured a subsequent export-led growth with positive effects on investment rates. Instead, until the late 1950s France adopted a strong currency policy, even if this had some relevant effects on the price stability and the macroeconomic performance. In 1957, finally, France devalued and shifted towards the dismantling of domestic barriers to foreign manufacturers. This difference in the exchange rate policy had an impact on investments and on the related productivity growth rates in these countries. The deferred exchange rate adjustment in France entailed a parallel deferred increase in investments and technological updating of the industrial sector in the country. Indeed, the French economic growth gained momentum only after the currency depreciation of 1957-58.
In a way, the French choices of the late 1950s seem to follow and replicate what Italian central authorities decided to reach almost a decade earlier. Such a policy produced a long term effect on the productivity growth rate as a result of investments and technological transfers, on one side, and a reallocation of factors, both by sectors and regions, on the other one. But why French central authorities failed to adjust to a changing international environment (Eichengreen, 1996)? The rationale for the French exchange rate policy was not simply the ambitious grandeur policy, but we argue that a highly turbulent political system imposed strong currency and protectionism to stabilise expectations, even if such a goal was not actually attained, whilst the Italian political scene was stabilised in 1947-1948 allowing for more innovative economic policies.

The standard literature considers the 1930s a decade of policy innovations, especially in the domain of exchange-rate regime choice. Thanks to suspension of the gold standard and a widespread acceptance of flexible exchange rate regimes, most countries across Europe were able to float out of the depression. Following Lary (1943) and Nurkse (1944) we modify this standard view. We observe that there was neither a complete suspension of the gold standard nor a shift to flexible exchange rate regimes. We illustrate the new view with a comparison of the international response to the 1937 US recession compared to that of 1929. We show that in most cases, notably the UK, firm exchange-rate targets were maintained without resort to capital controls. Deflationary policies were not pursued, but the reluctance to pursue them was a choice financed by high reserves positions. In short, international liquidity cushioned the world economy from the 1937 downturn. The US recession was reversed before that liquidity was exhausted. Reserves rather than the exchange rate played the accommodating role. On the basis of an error correction model we report estimates of the response of the exchange rate, domestic prices, and foreign reserves in the face of both shocks.

The standard literature considers the 1930s a decade of policy innovations, especially in the domain of exchange-rate regime choice. Thanks to suspension of the gold standard and a widespread acceptance of flexible exchange rate regimes, most countries across Europe were able to float out of the depression. Following Lary (1943) and Nurkse (1944) we modify this standard view. We observe that there was no shift to flexible exchange rate regimes. We illustrate the new view with a comparison of the international response to the 1937 US recession compared to that of 1929. We show that in most cases, firm exchange-rate targets were maintained without resort to capital controls. Deflationary policies were not pursued, but the reluctance to pursue them was a choice financed by high reserves positions. In short, international liquidity cushioned the world economy from the 1937 downturn. The US recession was reversed before that liquidity was exhausted. On the basis of an error correction model we report estimates of the response of the exchange rate, domestic prices, and foreign reserves in the face of both shocks.

Chair and Discussant

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, most businesses were extension of the households and straddled the boundary between the public and private spheres. Consequently, women’s involvement in those activities was easily naturalized; It was part of their daughterly or wifely duties, and business widows were bridges between generations of men.
The nineteenth century saw the emergence and spread of firms, understood as entities distinct from those owning or controlling them. Firms were family firms till the middle of the century, when strictures against joint stock companies were eliminated in western countries. Joint stock companies and public companies further removed firms from the private/family spheres and exclusively located them into the public one. This process should have been inimical to women’s business activities, except in sole-proprietorships. But in northern France, large businesses continued being family ones, and women continued to play traditional roles. It is only among business families that changes occurred, but not solely because of changes in the nature of the firm.

This work is intended to analyse how the issue of female participation in the sphere of the family firm is reflected in Western literature. In this way, several novels and plays in which family business appear are studied here.
Using fictional literature as a source of study for economic history may allow a peculiar approach to the understanding of the past, more specifically, in this case, an approach to female professional tasks related to family business. Of course, it does not provide a detailed piece of information, but instead pertmits us to perceive tendencies and to vividly evoke how things would have happened.
Thus, fictional literature reflects aspects such as female participation in family firms in general and according to activity sectors in particular; women´s involvement when contributing to back the solidity of this sort of firms; marriage policy linked to family business; and the attitude of women towards the management of the family firms and the opportunities they attain in order to take decisions in such a field, so usually ruled and controlled by businessmen instead of businesswomen.

Le présent exposé se propose de dégager les changements intervenus dans le rôle joué par les femmes en droit coutumier bulgare en tant qu'une des manifestations des changements qu'a connus le droit coutumier bulgare dans son ensemble au cours de la période, incluse entre l'accession à l'Indépendance de la Bulgarie (1878) et les années 40 du XXe siècle.
La position des femmes dans le droit coutumier bulgare s'exprime différemment dans ses divers domaines: droit foncier, droit de la famille, droit successoral, droit contractuel et droit réel. Elle trouve pourtant sa meilleure expression en droit de la famille et en droit successoral. C’est pourquoi dans le présent exposé sont traités en priorité ces deux domaines du droit coutumier bulgare.

A la fin on a fait la conclusion suivante.
L'évolution du rôle des femmes en droit coutumier bulgare avait finalement conduit à l'abandon des normes du droit coutumier qui réservaient aux femmes une condition d'inégalité en droits et de subordination. Peu à peu, la femme a gagné une place égale en droits à celle de l’homme, obéissant à l'esprit d'égalité juridique des citoyens sanctionnée par la législation nationale, une circonstance dont l'importance progressiste est indéniable.

Dans les terres de grande émigration du centre de la France, les migrants pluriannuels ont développé un modus vivendi qui préserve à la fois la propriété agricole et la migration économique. Il s’agit d’un système de migration tournante, pluriannuelle, qui assure le retour au pays des hommes et des devises. Mais pour que ce système instable perdure et, surtout, qu’il soit profitable à la famille-souche, il a fallu que, génération après génération, une permanence puisse être assurée à la tête de l’exploitation. Ce rôle a été dévolu aux femmes, notamment à celles qui héritent de la propriété, ce qui, curieusement, est souvent le cas dans les hautes terres du centre de la France. Toutefois, ces femmes n’ont pu être efficaces que parce qu’elles bénéficiaient de procurations spéciales ou générales de la part de leurs maris pour assurer et assumer les décisions durant les absences de longue durée des hommes. Ce système a perduré jusqu’à l’exode rural massif.

Title :Farming and intergeneration: a history of women ? Seven generations of migrant farmers (Auvergne 1700-1900)

Abstract: In the lands of great emigration in the center of France, temporary migrants have developed a modus vivendi which preserves both the farm and the migration. This migration is a rotating system, multiannual, which ensures the regular return of men and currency. But for this unstable system persits and benefits the vital ‘stem-family’, it was necessary that a permanence can be secured to the head of agricultural Property, one generation after another. This role has been assigned to women, especially those who inherit the property : it should be noted that it is often the case in the uplands of central France. However, these women have been efficient because they were receiving special or general proxies from their husbands to make all necessary decisions during the long absences of men. This system lasted until the massive rural exodus.

Given the impact of the historical situation research on (female) entrepreneurship in the context of socio-economic development in the CEE region since 1989 is interesting for several reasons. I will focus on the Czech Republic (CR) as a case. The contribution of this paper to the literature is in the suggested theoretical background for the research of life strategies of women entrepreneurs in the Czech society after 1989: First, although entrepreneurship is a new phenomenon in the Czech Republic after having not existed in this region for forty years, it is possible to sociologically analyze its development and transformation for the past nineteen-year period (since the start of the 1990s to the present). Second, the opportunity for independent business was re-introduced in 1990 in a situation of full employment and newly rising phenomenon of unemployment. The “starting line” has been legislatively drawn for men and women in 1990. But women had to deal with the existing gender inequalities in the labor market and in families. Gender equality and women´s emancipation has been discredited by the legacy of the state-socialist regime. Women and men entrepreneurs have to deal with the experience of having lived part of their life and being socialized under this regime. Third, small entrepreneurship reveals an unusual similarity between the activities and skills applied in this sphere of work and those applied in the sphere of family. This has implications on the entrepreneurship culture given the influence of family, social networks and black economy activities during the communist past. Taking into account the institutional and cultural context of the position of women in the Czech society and in leadership positions of the labor market especially in this paper I draw on statistical data, sociological surveys and on qualitative research of life strategies of Czech women and men entrepreneurs that I conducted in 2003-2006. The paper is contributing to the existing literature further also by bringing results of an in-depth study of implications of gender in the small family and non-family business start ups in the transformed economy of the Czech Republic.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the first results of a work in progress about the economic role of dowries in Venice in the 16th-17th century.
An economic approach will be privileged. Firstly, my aim is to understand how the dowry has been considered inside the two different household estates, i.e. the estate of the bridegroom and the estate of the bride, and the consequence on the gender’s identity. Secondly I try to better understand how the link between some juridical institution, as the “fedecommesso”, and the dowries could limit the free exchange of money and lands inside the whole market. Finally I’ll try to analyse how the different economic trends and political rules affected the dowries amount and the balance of the different dowries’ components (“beni mobili”-“beni immobili”).
The focus is the urban society, conceived in a broad sense, including nobility, merchant-entrepreneurs, artisans, and “citizen” in general.
The paper will show the link between dowries and heritage rules. Therefore the effort is to show how the goods of dowries could improve the household estate and stimulate the business activities, but also to depress the family economy.

Nous présentons le role intergénérationnel des femmes dans les stratégies familiales et la mobilité sociale à Alger aux 17ème - 18ème siècle, nous testerons ce role intergénérationnel à travers la transmission des biens immobiliers par les différents modes de transmisssion.

This study will use information from a variety of sources--labor contracts and other labor or business documents, legal and private documents addressing inheritance, welfare documents, occupation registers, and other miscellaneous documents--to address questions of women's work and women's role in business. Rural society in Tokugawa Japan is known for a clear gendered division of labor and power within the household. In this study I will investigate the possibility of a similar division of labor and power in business and propose that headship should be seen as a partnership rather than an individual position.

Throughout the recent decades, several researchers have been rescuing from oblivion the figure of women from an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates methods and analytical categories of Social History and related sciences. In general, these studies focused the status of women, their education, the representation of femininity in family relationships or their intimate connection with everyday life. Something otherwise entirely natural, since women in the Old Regime were primarily defined by its domesticity and its reduction to the exclusive realm of the family.
However, one thing was the prevailing discourse, and quite another the capacity to act that the system provided women with, either through the interstices of law or through daily practice. In the rural world, for example, the articulation of the land was due to an inheritance system in which women had equal rights as men, as well as to the distributive quality of their dowries, so that women constituted a key factor in the configuration of rural properties.
In this communication, we expect to investigate the role played by women in southern Spain in the construction of family patrimony, since the late seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, we analyze its role as transmitters of family property through the study of wills and dowries; on the other, we will see them as potential sources of conflict, mainly motivated by their status as legal "menores", and as part of bridal strategies in order to keep heritage as united as possible.

In the 1940s, Salazar’s government introduced several reforms in the nursing education and profession. This interference in the nursing schools was used to help consolidating the ideals of the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Nevertheless, these reforms also aimed to renew the profession in the Anglo-Saxon models and to make it especially attractive for young devoted women, excluding the married ones. Nursing was then presented as the best feminine profession. It was a promising future for young women since there was a large need of nurses in Portugal.
However, not all women were eligible to become nurses and the obstacles in the profession were various. By using a series of interviews I intend to present the reasons that led many single women to study in a nursing school and if the profession fulfilled their aims including their economic needs. And if not, what the causes were as well as the solutions that these women found to be economically independent.
This paper aims to analyse how this profession was presented to these young women when they were entering the nursing school, and what was the reality they were finding after finishing their studies. Was nursing the means to obtain economic security for widows, spinsters and unmarried mothers?

The goal of this paper is to show the intergenerational role of women in the business family strategies in order to ensure the continuity of their enterprises (in urban area) during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. We will analyze the case of Barcelona, a harbour and industrial town that in 1800 had around 100.000 inhabitants and in 1850 about 150.000, where there ruled a system of male primogeniture and a regime of marital property division.
As not all economic activities required the same amount of capital, or same space, and they did not have the same social prestige, different working cultures should develop among the business community in which, women had different roles. For this reason we will deepen our knowledge on the role of women in family strategies in the transmission of businesses in at least two cases: on the one hand, in the lace industry and on the other, in the elaboration and sale of books, leaflets and engravings. In lace related businesses existed female sagas compromising up to four generations. In the printing industry, in which some firm had a large amount of capital, the multi–functionality of women in the triple employment of the book industry (impression, binding and sale) permitted, especially in the manufacturing era, the survival of these businesses in generations to come. A life span of 150 years was something usual and some of them reached nearly 200 years.

Dans le débat qui concerne le rôle des femmes dans les entreprises familiales, l’historiographie s’est toujours intéressée d’une façon prioritaire au rôle patrimonial. La dot que l’épouse apportait lors du mariage ou bien le rôle des veuves dans la conservation et la gestion de l’héritage du conjoint pour les enfants ont été considérés par les historiens comme véritables enjeux autours desquels expliquer le rôle des femmes dans les stratégies reproductives et de mobilité sociale de l’entreprise familiale.

Loin de nier la centralité de la dot dans les couches artisanales et commerciales urbaines, néanmoins d’après moi un accent excessif a été mis sur la contribution uniquement patrimoniale des femmes, en déclassant ainsi l’importance de leur rôle productif réel et donc de leurs capacités techniques et savoir-faire spécialisés. Cela a amené les historiens à caractériser le travail féminin comme résiduel, et marginal tout court, car secondaire par rapport à la contribution patrimoniale.

Pour répondre à cette lacune de l’historiographie, mon intervention se propose de déplacer le regard sur le rôle productif des femmes des milieux artisanaux de la ville de Turin au XVIIIe siècle, sur leur participation au travail de la boutique, sur qualités, temps et modalité d’exercice du métier afin de mieux comprendre leur rôle dans les stratégies des entreprises familiales.
En adoptant un regard micro, une méthodologie de reconstruction des biographies des individus et familles ainsi que le croisement des plusieurs sources (suppliques, actes notariés, recensements des boutiques), nous montrerons comme les femmes des couches artisanales travaillaient elles-mêmes dans les boutiques et jouaient donc un rôle fondamental en assurant le bon fonctionnement, la conservation e finalement la transmission de l’entreprise familiale.

D’abord, comme on le verra, les femmes connaissaient des parcours d’apprentissage et d’entrainement qui, bien que informels et en dehors des corporations ou des contrats écrites régulières, leur permettaient d’acquérir compétences et un savoir-faire technique autant que les hommes. Ces mêmes femmes, d’ailleurs, s’engageaient personnellement pour apprendre le métier artisanal à leurs enfants, garçons ou filles peu importe.
Ensuite, à travers la présentation de quelques cas d’étude nous expliqueront que la présence et le rôle des femmes dans les entreprises familiales était surtout déterminé par les événements démographiques qui touchaient le ménage qui vivait autour de la boutique. En effet, le rôle productif ne concernait seulement les épouses (c’et-à-dire les femmes mariées) mais un éventail des figures féminines (nièces, mère, belles-mères, sœurs, belles-sœurs) qui habitaient, temporairement ou définitivement, avec le couple et qui participaient personnellement et parfois avec des contributions financières à l’entreprise familiale.
Finalement, en soulignant la multiplicité des rôles féminins dans les entreprises familiales ainsi que leur présence liée aux événements démographiques du groupe domestique, nous parviendrons à interroger et remettre en cause certaines études qui, à la suite des travaux pionniers d’Alice Clark et d’Ivy Pinchbeck, ont exalté la centralité de la famille nucléaire comme véritable enjeux de l’économie préindustrielle.

This paper discusses the formation of insurance companies within the Brazilian economy between 1808 and 1864. Despite its small 3.1 percent share in the total number of firms created between 1850 and 1865, the insurance sector, representing 23.1 percent of the capital of all companies operating during this period, figured among Brazil’s highest grossing businesses, together with banking and railway enterprises. Most companies were headquartered in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, large commercial centers on the Atlantic seashore, because the business had its origins in maritime insurance, though it later expanded to fire and life safety coverage. The institutionalization of insurance helped sustain capitalist development, ensuring increased security in trade relationships. The insurance business also played an important role in providing a brisk circulation of capital by increasing credit through the capture of deposits. However, despite its relevant participation in Brazil’s imperial economy, the insurance sector has yet to be studied. Hence, the authors’ objective is to present an overview of the period of insurance companies’ formation within the Brazilian economy.

Deregulation of financial markets has been an important platform for government policy in recent times. It has been a catalyst in the expansion of financial sector. The experience of Australian life insurers during this period represents an interesting case study into the impact of regulatory transition. The lifting of restrictions changed the institutional environment within which life insurers operated. In doing so it precipitated changes in strategies and organizational structures of these financial intermediaries

Abstract: Between 1815 and 1859, textiles comprised over 80 per cent of British exports to the River Plate and Chile. However, very little is known about the market chain of this textile trade. This article considers in detail one aspect of this marketing: marine insurances. The article provides a sketch of the marine insurance market in which British exporters insured their cargoes to southern South America. The different insurance policies available are explained, as well as the difficulties encountered when underwriting. It is also shown that when measured by volume, textiles exported by Britain to southern South America expanded continuously throughout the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s and at very high rates. An explanation behind this continuous growth, so far neglected by historians, was the introduction of better textile packing and improved shipping. These developments reduced marine insurance premiums from 4-6 per cent in the 1810s-1820s to 1.5 per cent of the invoice value of a cargo in the 1850s, which was another important change that fostered British textile exports.

This essay describes the tensions involved in creating and underwriting maternity insurance: the potential and actual danger of informational asymmetries, and the responses of insurers to this danger, real or perceived. Although the evidence it presents of damage to underwriting due to moral hazard or adverse selection is underwhelming, it documents the persistence of both concerns about these problems and the expanding availability of maternity insurance in mid-twentieth century America.

This study clarifies the motive for Japanese life insurance companies entering the Taiwan market. At first, Japanese life insurance companies were wary about the high mortality of the Taiwanese people, so they limited their sales to only Japanese people living in Taiwan. In fact, Japanese life insurance companies regarded Taiwan as a foreign market. However, when the legal infrastructure and public health in Taiwan improved, Japanese life insurance companies began to penetrate into the Taiwanese market. Although language problems limited sales talks for a long time, the improvement in the legal infrastructure and public health not only promoted the sales of policies similar to those sold in Japan under the similar insurance regulation, but it also helped to set up the same premium rate between Japan and Taiwan. Therefore, Japanese life insurance companies began to consider the Taiwanese market not as an overseas expansion, but as a simple extension into another prefecture.

Life Offices to the Rescue. The History of South African Life Assurance Companies’ in the South African Economy during the Twentieth Century.



Investment theories in the life assurance industry have changed considerably over time. The history of the life assurance industry in South Africa shows that these companies have made a considerable contribution to stabilisation circumstances of instability, contraction of growth and uncertainty. This paper investigates the role of life offices in South Africa in the twentieth century towards the mobilisation of savings for the mutual benefit of policy holders and the South African economy. The paper investigates the competition between local and foreign companies and how and why locally incorporated companies came to dominate the industry. The influence of these financial organisations is explored through an analysis of their investment strategies amidst political and statutory constraints in South Africa. Where were their investments directed and what impact did that have on the overall performance of the South African economy? What was the influence of these investments and management direction offered by the life office to underlying concerns, on the stablisation of financial markets in South Africa? What role did these companies perform during the period of political turmoil and transition? The controlling position of life offices in the banking sector towards the last quarter of the twentieth century, requires explanation. This paper then explores the gradual transition into international financial services markets by these life assurance companies as the vanguard of South African corporate globalisation towards the end of the twentieth century. The paper seeks to investigate whether this role performed by the South African life assurance companies was typical of the operations of life assurance companies during the late twentieth century, or was this specific to South Africa’s peculiar circumstances? Did the life offices perform any different functions in the seize economy from life offices elsewhere in the world?



Paper proposal by:
Professor Grietjie Verhoef
Department of Accountancy
University of Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel: + 27 11 559 2008
Fax : + 27 11 559 2617
gverhoef@uj.ac.za

When the modern life assurance was introducing in Japan, who bought it? Taizo Abe who was the first president of Japanese modern life assurance company deplored that Japanese people couldn’t understand what is insurance, and insurance knowledge never diffused into the society. The life assurance market , however, was growing rapidly in the early Meiji Japan. Who bought life assurance? This a simple research question in this paper. We discuss one pioneer project, three first-movers, and one follower in life assurance. The Kyosai 500 Members was only an assessment insurance society. The members were enough rich to make a life, but they also concerned about personal and family risks. The first-mover was literally Meiji life. The company sold its life assurance to new intellectuals in urban society. Two challengers, Teikoku Life and Nippon Life, competed with Meiji Life and both companies built their position in life market in a few years. Their policyholders ware similar to Meiji Life, but each had some differences. Lots of life assurance companies challenged against these three first-movers, but of these challengers, only 7 companies survived more than 30 years. Yurin Life was one of these survivors.　In this paper new materials on its assureds are examined. Consequently, we can find that the assureds of Yurin were different from ones of these first-movers. The assureds generally were not richer than ones of the first-movers. Most occupations of Yurin Life belong to so-called penny capitalists.

Cotton textiles were ‘the first global commodity’: in the early modern world their production, consumption and exchange far exceeded that of any other manufactured commodity. They acted as global commercial, cultural and social connectors; they supported agrarian structures, local manufacturing economies and systems of taxation; they were a sector of dramatic technological innovation, experimentation and transfer; and finally they were sought after commodities that shaped taste and material expectations of populations living across the vast Eurasian landmass and beyond. Yet we whilst we know a great deal on the consumption of Indian cotton textiles in Europe, much less is known on their role in the consuming habits of several parts of Asia where these textiles were traded, but also in India itself. This paper wishes to investigate the consumption of Indian textiles by asking in what were the different meanings that Indian cotton textiles assumed in different local contexts? A reply to this question will allow to better understand in what ways European consumption might have been qualitatively and quantitatively different from similar stories of engagement with cotton textiles across and beyond the Indian Ocean. Secondly it will help us understand the relationship between manufacturing and consumption in India and the production and trade for world markets.

This paper explores the role of Chinese ceramics in local and global contexts. It contrasts two sites of ceramics production in pre-modern China: Jizhou and Jingdezhen. Both were located in Jiangxi province, and both produced ceramics for local, regional, and overseas markets. Jizhou produced a range of wares, some of very high quality, but many mass produced for local use in tea consumption. These ‘ordinary’ tea bowls became particularly sought-after in Japan for use in the tea ceremony, and for a time Jizhou produced wares for the Japanese market. Despite this production for overseas markets, Jizhou never came to be regarded as manufacturing site of ‘global’ ceramics. The decline of the kilns in Jizhou coincided with the rise of Jingdezhen from the thirteenth century. Jingdezhen’s wares quickly became popular in a range of markets, including Japan, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and, eventually, Europe. We tend to think of Jizhou as ‘local’ production site and Jingdezhen as ‘global,’ but those terms are used rather indiscriminately? The contrast between these two sites of manufacture is instructive for understanding the impact of global manufacture for the local. This paper will explore precisely in what ways Jingdezhen can be considered a global site of production, and the implications of global manufacture for local culture.

In 1964, historian Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote, “An adequate history of Indian work in ivory still remains to be written,” and forty- five years later, this still remains the case. This is an odd state of affairs for a nation whose past is inexorably tied up with elephants and ivory. This paper examines ivory as a cultural commodity in India to understand the importance of ivory in Indian history.

I would like to present a Paper on the relations between Japan and Western countries, with attention to the question of the characteristic features of the Japanese economy and society during the centuries preceding Japan’s emergence as a great economic power. In this perspective we should ask how the historical significance of the Meiji Revolution (1868) should be interpreted. Undoubtedly, even if this revolution was an important turning-point, it cannot be seen as marking the single beginning of Japan’s growing economic status, with a clear rupture between the previous Edo period and the modernisation afterwards. Such a rather outdated view implies that it was only from the nineteenth century onwards that Japan acquired technological know-how and ‘caught up’ with the West and that previous centuries were of no importance to this process. More recent literature stresses the fact that also during the Tokugawa regime "western" influence on consumption, economic and urban development and structural transformation underpinned the social and economic Japanese society.
Many western commodities entered the Japanese archipelago through the Dutch trade colony in Nagasaki. Among these items clocks played an important role, being used in Japanese houses, as "lantern clock" as "bracket clock" as "pillar clock" but also as watch and portable precious objects. They were increasingly used, also by women.
The influence of the western culture undoubtedly exercised a great impact on the production system. The Japanese technique was certainly not inferior to the Western one, but it had to adapt itself to international markets. The Japanese method, following the Chinese, was based on the natural day. The day was divided in periods of six hours each. The clocks needed to be regularly adjusted, as the length of the period from sunrise to sunset varied with the seasons. As long as the production was limited to the internal market, the Japanese system could persist. Only when the clock industry decided to conquest the international markets adaptations had to be carried out. This Paper focuses on the exploration of this process.

Silver has long been viewed as a commodity as well as a status symbol in various places on the globe. Across early modern Eurasia, the beauty and the plasticity of this precious metal have made it a unique medium for the decorative arts, while it also functioned as a medium of exchange in the form of money. In galleries, churches, and private homes in Europe, for example, we can still see handcrafted silverware that served as a symbol of wealth and escaped being melted down for use as money or as a source of new fashion objects. On the other hand, the material culture of Japan, which was one of the world largest producers of silver in the early modern period, is known for its organic nature. The tableware was made of porcelain, earthenware, wood, and bamboo, and the use of precious metal jewellery was limited compared with the other edge of Eurasia. Through what historical processes were these unique conditions of material culture created? This paper will focus on the economic, social, and cultural characteristics of the non-monetary use of silver during the early modern period, together with a quantitative analysis of the global silver trade.

Imagined by some Europeans as a new or rediscovered Ophir, Latin America from the time of Columbus on was a significant global exporter of precious metals and stones. Metals have been examined, stones less so. Caribbean pearls were exported to Europe by 1500, and Brazilian diamonds followed near the end of the colonial era. In between were the emeralds of New Granada, roughly today’s Colombia. This paper traces the flow of Colombian emeralds to India, Persia, and Turkey from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Beginning in 1538, emeralds were mined in the mountains north of Bogotá by forced indigenous and African workers (pagan and Christian), traded largely by Portuguese Jews and New Christians periodically hounded by the Inquisition, and consumed by Muslim nobles from North Africa to South Asia. Emeralds were special to end-users not only because they were rare, but also because green was the color of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Emerald-encrusted gifts such as the Topkapi dagger were thus symbolic of piety as well as wealth. Nodes of emerald exchange including Cartagena de Indias, Amsterdam, and Goa are briefly treated, along with cultural meanings assigned to these deep-green American gems by Asia’s wealthiest Islamic princes.

The paper aims at tracing and analysing the growing connections and integration of silk markets across different continents between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The trade in raw silk and finished cloth in the early modern period assumed a truly global dimension, involving all the major world powers - from Spain and Portugal with their colonies to the Mamluk, Ottoman, Persian, Mughal and Ming empires - and most European states, making silk one of the leading global commodities. Particular attention will be given to the key centres of silk production and exchange (Venice, Bursa, Alep, Izmir, Isfahan, Manila, etc.), in order to assess how the urban concentration of technical know-how and market information fostered product innovation; to the policies enacted by different governments in support of the silk industry and/or against its excessive consumption; to the role played by the major actors in the silk trade (Italian, Jewish, Armenian and Chinese merchants); to the circulation of models and fabrics through commerce and diplomatic gifts that fostered a cross-cultural taste and a cosmopolitan pattern of consumption; and to the impact that the accelerating global demand for silk had on the social and economic structure of the regions involved in its production.

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