Programme

With the onset of the industrial revolution, many manufacturing and mining companies built residential settlements for their workers to facilitate access to the places of production and to secure a stable labor force, thus contributing to maximize production. These centers have received many names: work camps, single enterprise communities, mill towns, factory villages, and mining enclaves; they have been called colonia industrial in Spain; fábrica y villa obrera, fábrica-vila operária, and cidade-empresa in South America; cité ouvrière in France and Belgium; Arbeitersiedlungen in Germany; and bruk in Swedish. In the English-speaking world, most became known by the general name of company towns. These residential and work centers share similarities with other types of single industry settlements. Company towns are urban and service centers created by companies in isolated areas, or in areas without easy reach to other urban centers, with the purpose of attracting and maintaining workers. Companies were not only employers but also landlords, managers, and responsible for overall security and social harmony. Working and spatial arrangements followed the logic of production but were also influenced by factors such as power relations, a hierarchical structure, and the ethnic, racial and gender composition of managers and the working population.

This paper examines the use of the concept of company towns in different geographic and cultural contexts around the globe, exploring aspects such as labor-capital relations, working experiences, gender relations, social and ethnic relations, economic organization, and spatial dimensions of work, social life, and power. It provides a general framework to analyze the contributions of the other participants that explore these topics from different perspectives and using examples from a variety of countries, in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the Portuguese owners of the Cassequel Sugar Company created a model town in Catumbela, Angola. Company officials painted all buildings (and huts) “cor-de-rosa” [pink] to reinforce the appearance of a benevolent and united colonial order. In spite of the uniform color scheme, Cassequel’s Portuguese and African workers lived in distinct realities under the Company’s pink umbrella. The first part of this paper analyzes the boundaries and divisions in labor relations as reflected in the town’s spatial geography. Company executives, engineers, and doctors, lived in villas built atop a hill, with vistas of the river, verdant plantation lands, and the Atlantic Ocean. Middle managers–Portuguese and assimilado [“assimilated”] Angolans–lived in neat houses along Catumbela’s tree-lined streets. The vast majority of the Company’s roughly 5,000 indígena [“native”] employees lived in huts dotting the plantation.
The second part of this paper assesses the colonial economic system in which the Company operated. This system provided Cassequel’s investors with guaranteed markets for Angolan sugar, supplied forced labor on annual contract, and lionized the plantation’s owners as economic patriots contributing to the national (Portuguese) economy. Independence in 1975 flipped this narrative on its head, demonized Portuguese business owners, nationalized Cassequel, and forever changed the lived experiences (often for the worse) of local residents.

Since 1965 and until the present, two company towns, Porto Trombetás in Brazil and Årdal in Norway, have been linked together almost continuously in a transnational commodity chain. Though the ownership and administration of this chain has alternated among several multinational trusts during this period, the chain’s main constant has been the flow of bauxite from the mine in Porto Trombetás to the aluminium plant in Årdal.

Both company towns were part and parcel of national development schemes. In Brazil the establishment of the mine and harbour on the banks of the Trombetás river was part of the national plan of developing the Amazon, while in Norway the establishment of the aluminium plan was a result of the Norwegian Labour Party’s commitment to the development of heavy industry in the Norwegian periphery. In the work of establishing these communities in Brazil and Norway, dictatorship and democracy functioned as contrasting developmental frameworks.

Firstly, Porto Trombetás became much more of a classic company town than Årdal. In the latter, a clear dividing line was drawn between the company and the community. In contrast to Porto Trombetás, the company in Årdal was not identical with the community.

Secondly, the process of development was much more rapid and rigidly enforced in the Amazon region that it was in Sogne Fjord region of Norway. In the course of a few years in the 1960s, Porto Trombetás was established from bare beginnings in a heavily forested region. In Årdal, however, a community already existed where hydroelectric power had been developed and used systematically for decades from the beginning of the 20th century until the end of World War II. The production of aluminium was not begun in Årdal until the end of the 1940s.

Thirdly, there was no need to consider environmental consequences of establishing Porto Trombetás, since the industrialisation of the Amazon at any cost was the prime aim of the military junta and efficient channels for protest by and participation of effected groups were non-existent. This ruthless development policy turned out to have far-reaching consequences for the rain forest and water reservoirs in that area. The open cut mining of bauxite at Porto Trombetás involved the irredeemable clearing of considerable areas of rain forest and massive soil erosion. In Norway, however, the local community allied with protest groups elsewhere successfully campaigned against poisonous fluorine emissions from Årdal’s aluminium factory which during the 1950s had led to substantial forest damage and illness and death among livestock. As time went by, aluminium production in Årdal became more environmentally sensitive and sustainable.

Fourthly, the pre-factory local community of Årdal benefited considerably from the rise of industries in the town, since many of the locals gained employment in the labour force needed to build and to maintain the aluminium plant. To a substantial degree, this work force consisted of peasants disguised as industrial workers. Many worked part time in construction and production and part time on their own or their family’s farms. In Trombetás the opposite was true. Prior to the establishment of the mine and its shipping facilities, several indigenous tribal communities lived in friendly co-existence on the banks of the river subsisting mainly on fruits, fish and animals. In addition, the region also contained settlements of the descendents of former African slave fugitives. In order to establish the mine and the barracks for its workers, these traditional settlements were expropriated and their members expelled. The majority of the area’s indigenous groups died from the various diseases brought in from outside which they lacked the immunity to resist. The labour force needed for the construction and working of the mine was recruited from distant areas of Brazil and even from areas far from Brazil.

And finally, the relations between capital and labour in both communities contrasted radically. As noted in the description of this session, the overall aim of multinationals is “to have optimal access to and control of a stable labour force, thus contributing to maximize production”. But while capital in Årdal exploited labour non-violently, often using social science, and solved conflicts in negotiations, this was not at all the case in Porto Trombetás, where protests by workers were struck down brutally and which involved in the 1960s the deaths of protesting construction workers.

This paper studies a pioneering global enterprise’s expansion to India and its construction, beginning in 1934, of a model company town in Bengal at Batanagar (lit. “Bata town”). The firm’s founder, Thomas Bata, developed both the company and a distinctive ethos in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, creating the ‘Bata System’ which his successors would seek to replicate in operations elsewhere in Europe, in North America, Asia, and Africa. Bata articulated a vision of productivity, cost efficiency, harmonious labor relations and healthy living, enshrining as a corporate commandment “service to the employees, service to the public, service to the nation”. Within the history of the firm, its operations in India offer an especially interesting, and ultimately problematic, history. The aspirations for India and Indians embodied in Batanagar constituted little less than a ‘civilizing mission’ directed at both workers and consumers. Company lore immediately mythologized the founder’s pioneering visit to the subcontinent and his humanitarian motives for promoting shoes for the impoverished masses, whereby the retailing of Bata’s wares constituted a modest project of uplift on a massive scale. Simultaneously, Batanagar was to signal a revolution in labor practices, from the mode of recruitment, to job training, and the housing, education and recreation of the workers and their families. While the construction and working life of Batanagar needs to be considered in the context of Bata’s global operations, the particular history of this model town – both the hopes invested in it and the conflicts occasioned by it (the history of significant labor disputes is nearly as long as that of the town itself) – can only be fully understood by contextualizing it within the history of twentieth-century Bengali politics and economic development.

In 1908, the German “garden city” of Hellerau was established near Dresden. This company town for Karl Schmidt’s Arts and Crafts-influenced furniture workshops was much more than just a home to his employees. It was to intended serve simultaneously as an experiment in architectural innovation and social reform. The German garden city movement had taken the proposals of Ebenezer Howard as its point of departure. Howard’s model had been developed for the British context, where he advocated carefully-planned communities based on the establishment of industry in the countryside, communal ownership of housing for employees living near a given firm, and the incorporation of the latest technology to enable efficiency for employer and workers alike.

Howard’s ideas gained influence in Germany at a moment of broad concern about urban misery and the appeal of socialism. A variety of actors came together in support of the Gartenstadtbewegung included economists, architects and planners, medical reformers, and advocates of land reform and inner colonization. Their shared emphasis was on creating alternatives to the overcrowded, unhealthy, and politically dangerous conditions that existed for workers living in German cities. Economically viable decentralization in the form of harmonious communities where workers could enjoy access to nature and the sense (if not the reality) of home ownership was an idea that had enormous appeal.

Karl Schmidt brought his own economic, aesthetic and political interests to the mix in the planning and development of Hellerau. Schmidt wanted to create an environment in which his craftsmen came to the workshop to produce quality furnishings and went home to single-family dwellings for which those same furnishings would be purchased. Some of the most famous architects of the German Werkbund designed the houses of ordinary residents, in close consultation with Schmidt. A sense of belonging and ownership was created through complicated collective financing arrangements, and the value of stable accommodation in single-family units was posited as an answer to the constant disruption of private life that was alleged by reformers as a source of urban misery. At the deepest level, the purpose of Hellerau’s structure was to foster “modern” relationships between employer and employee – cooperative rather than either authoritarian/paternalistic or socialist – by promoting the development of each worker-resident.

This paper will explore the tensions and contradictions inherent in the dual function of Hellerau as company town and model town. The coalition that came together to support Hellerau’s establishment and propagandize for its success was based on a suspension of arguments over economic and aesthetic matters, the proper level of engagement with the state, and how far German realities could be accommodated using a model from England. As Schmidt’s own priorities brought him into conflict with the reformers whose support he needed to realize his vision of Hellerau as more than just another company town, the repressed competition among the expectations for Hellerau emerged to hinder its successful fulfillment of any of them.

In this paper, I explore the spatial dimensions and social relations of Japanese colonial rule through an investigation of the history of Fushun, a coal mining town in Northeast China. Between 1906 and 1945, the Fushun colliery was under the control of the South Manchuria Railway, a Japanese semi-government agency that also acted as an instrument of colonial expansion. During those years, Fushun was transformed into an urban industrial center, though racial segregation marked the pattern of urban development and labor relations. This segregation created a colonial spaced where two racially demarcated economies of the Chinese and Japanese communities co-existed.

This is a very relevant case of company town and its particularity is the plural factories that operated in the " City of the Factories".
Sesto San Giovanni was created at the beginning of the XX century. During the century the companies then operated in Sesto San Giovanni (AFL Falck, Breda, Ercole Marelli e Magneti Marelli)created many social activities, from schools to houses for their workers. The specificity of this company town is the plurality of enterprises that in the same period built an extensive welfare community, so it is possible to compare the different strategies and their results.
In particular, I wish to analyze the relation between the growth of production and the expansion of welfare directly organized by the companies. Also migrations is one of the crucial aspect in the growth of the Sesto San Giovanni, above all during the period of major develop (1900-1920 and 1945 – 1960).
In general all aspects about corporate social responsibility will be studied.

Professionalized academic historiography in Central Europe originated in the mid-19th century and reflected a strong influence of German historiography. Despite the fact that from the second half of the 19th century onwards there are a good number of high quality scholarly publications in the field of medieval studies, economic history is not really represented it the historiography of that period. This field of scholarship was not attractive enough to draw the attention of many historians; some topics of this field were not considered dignified enough to be studied. Two categories of publications were most typical in that period: source publications and comprehensive narratives of national histories. Economic history became a part of the scholarly discourse only at the turn of the 20th century. In this respect the publication of scholarly journals had key importance. Between the two World Wars new topics became part of the scholarly discourse, like monetary history, history of customs and financial administration, foreign trade, and the significance of urban economies, among others.
After the Second World War, the situation became more paradoxical. In the late 1940s several countries of Central Europe became part of the Soviet block and thus an oversimplified version of Marxist ideology became dominant in the region, but despite this few works were published on medieval economic history. The study of the economic conditions of medieval Central Europe was not among the most attractive topics even in the last couple of decades. Through the 1970s and 1980s a new type of less ideological historiography emerged and developed in the region. With the loosening of the political influence, a new, although methodically more traditional, approach came forward. Because of the thorough changes of the state borders in the 20th century the conventional national historiographies became more obsolete.
Another challenge has been the modification of the term “economic history” in the last few decades. It is now clear that the traditional approach to medieval economic history cannot proceed without contradictions. Recent monographs and syntheses have proved that multidisciplinary methods can contribute significantly to a new understanding of medieval economic history.

Long distance trade of Italian merchants, due to the particularly developed and efficient business tools they used, to their high-scale commerce and business network, and finally to the abundant source material surviving on both the economic activity and the social background of these entrepreneurs became and remained object to particular attention in economic research throughout centuries.
In the recent scholarly literature however, beside the analysis of the activity and organizational features of Italian mega-companies and the volume of their business, an increasing interest can be observed towards the business and social attitude and strategies of Italian merchants working and sojourning abroad for a shorter or longer time period.
My paper presents a research on Florentine merchant families’ business activity in Hungary in the first half of the fifteenth century. Hungary did not belong to the first-range geographical areas of Florentine business interest, as it is usually stated in both Hungarian and international literature on the issue. I do not debate this statement, however I would like to recall the attention to the challenging possibility of surveying in many ways the social and economic strategies of highly skilled Italian merchants and their adaptation to different regional conditions and business possibilities taking into consideration also their fields of interest in Florence.
Therefore, the paper aims to draw a short overview on the major results of the scholarly literature and to propose an approach which considers the families and even subsequent generations in fortunate cases, rather than the single merchant, trying to put the very few, isolated records preserved on the given businessman’s activity in Hungary into a broader social and economic context.
The collection of the data set enabling such investigation proceeded in two phases: first the compilation of a prosopographic database of Florentine merchants working or investing in business in the Hungarian Kingdom, based on the systematic research of the archival fond of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (that is the documentation of the new, direct taxation system introduced in Florence in the same year), the instructions and reports of Florentine legates sent to the Hungarian realm, the diplomatic correspondence of the Florentine Signoria with the Hungarian King (mainly with King Sigismund of Luxemburg, 1387-1437) and finally of the quite fragmentary source material preserved in Hungary.
At the present stage of the research, altogether 144 persons belonging to 68 Florentine families working in the Hungary are included in the database. Out of this sample, around 81 persons (43 families) appeared personally) in the territory of the Hungarian kingdom on at least one occasion. The database contains around 31 families having more family members (altogether 94 persons) interested in the business on the territory of the kingdom out of which 77 businessmen were personally working in the region. Where there were several family members from the same generation (basically brothers or cousins) 10 families (17 persons) are listed and another nine families (31 persons) stayed and established themselves in the kingdom for at least two generations. The latter two groups, altogether 19 families with 48 persons apply particularly for the analysis of their attitude towards integration with the socio-economic structures they encountered in the Hungarian Kingdom.
In a second phase of the data collection a further research was carried out on the families included in the database, mainly investigating their homeland social and economic background.
When considering the unusually substantial body of evidence of the database, two main questions will be addressed:
1. The reconstruction of the network systems of the investigated families shall provide information on the mobility and motivation of those Florentines, who operated in Hungary for a longer time period or even established themselves in the kingdom and integrated into local nobility or into the leading urban elite of different towns.
2. Finally, the question of cooperation versus competition within the families and within the different Florentine groups present in the kingdom shall shed light on the dynamics of the business carried out by them.

Between 1354 and 1453 Ottomans conquered the Balkan region which almost had remained under Ottoman rule until the 19th century. This fast expansion and settlement period of Ottoman State in Balkan territories can not be explained with only military success. We consider that there are other parameters in this enlargement period. The most important parameter is the change in socio economic conditions. What do we mean with the “change” is the construction of the socio economic system by Ottoman State for Balkan native population and the Turkish population that transferred from Anatolia. Today many historians mention that this century brought an order to the region, before which was in a continual chaos. We think that this order is the result of the successful implementation of the classic Ottoman system in Balkan territories. We intend to focus on iskan (settlement) and istimalet (Policy of tolerance and protection) policies, demographic change and economic and administrative organization in this century. Our references in this paper will be the studies of Turkish economic historians who based their thesis on Ottoman archival documents.

Between XIIIth and XVIth centuries the Kingdom of Hungary was not stricken by usual and cyclical famines, that instead interested other regions of Europe, and the western parts of the Continent in particular. Why did this happen? Is it possible to explain this particular phenomenon applying to the medieval hungarian reality the models that Ernest Labrousse and Amartya K. Sen elaborated to clarify the appearance and evolution mechanisms of crisis and famine?
In comparison with other parts of Europe, in Hungary alimentary alternatives such as grain, meat and fish remained accessible to most of the population, so the inhabitants normal diet of the Kingdom decidedly remained diversified and not entirely established on cereals, and on grain in particular.
The specific productive and exchange structures of the Kingdom of Hungary in late Middle Ages and early Modern Period “allowed” the population to turn to the market – after all not at all developed – in a limited way. The exports were made of the agricultural articles of which the country was rich, while the importations mainly consisted in specific luxury articles demanded by the Crown, the nobilitas and the wealthiest classes of the Kingdom. Contemporarily, most part of the hungarian population preserved a free access to the alimentary resources (agricultural and sylvo-pastoral, that is grain and meat). This permitted the maintenance of an “alimentary equilibrium” that, founded on an ample and diversified nourishing basis (and on meat in particular), prevented the rise of vast alimentary crises and famines, unless a shock such as war, climatic difficulties and so on occurred.
Also Western Europe had known a similar alimentary regime, characterized by a vast access to the resources and founded above all on meat, but only between the early and high Middle Ages. In the most developed and integrated markets of Western Europe in late Middle Ages and early Modern Period, cereals and grain in particular had nearly become an unique nourishing basis. The shortage of these goods, whose production had a strongly fluctuating course because conditioned by the seasonal rhythms and not – or not at all – by the times of the market, implicated an increase of their price. Therefore, in reason of the wage unelasticity and of the lack in “alimentary alternatives” that might be socially approved, and in case of inadequate provisioning politics, this shortage can easily bring to alimentary famines of large impact, such as to falling in demand and production of non agricultural goods and services, up to set a phase of economic crisis, of great proportions too.
On the contrary, although more and more integrated in the European markets, Hungary didn’t suffer tragic moments of famine because it preserved an “alimentary equilibrium” and the free access to the great many part of the resources in most regions of the country. Between XVIth and XVIIth century, in a different political, economic and social context, also in Hungarian lands alimentary equilibrium and free access to resources had been progressively restricted or negated, but not always with success, causing a differentiation in crises and famines impact, according to various territories.

Abstract: Between 1354 and 1453 Ottomans conquered the Balkan region which almost had remained under Ottoman rule until the 19th century. This fast expansion and settlement period of Ottoman State in Balkan territories can not be explained with only military success. We consider that there are other parameters in this enlargement period. The most important parameter is the change in socio economic conditions. What do we mean with the “change” is the construction of the socio economic system by Ottoman State for Balkan native population and the Turkish population that transferred from Anatolia. Today many historians mention that this century brought an order to the region, before which was in a continual chaos. We think that this order is the result of the successful implementation of the classic Ottoman system in Balkan territories. We intend to focus on iskan (settlement) and istimalet (Policy of tolerance and protection) policies, demographic change and economic and administrative organization in this century. Our references in this paper will be the studies of Turkish economic historians who based their thesis on Ottoman archival documents.

The aim of this paper to summarize recent trends in medieval economic history in East-Central Europe, particularly in Hungary. During the last two decades, environmental and landscape historical research significantly contributed to the understanding of economic processes in the Middle Ages. New studies were published on the problem of forest history, water management and flood-plain economy, based on archaeological-environmental data-sets. Furthermore, archaeological field walking and large scale rescue excavations produced new data on the problem of agrar production. The emergence of open field systems, the introduction of new ploughing techniques and the problem land use patterns became important research questions in these new studies. While earlier studies mainly built their conclusions on the written evidence in charters and inventories, new studies focused on environmental data and on more recent investigations using landscape archaeological methods. The paper offers case studies from these areas and a general summary of the recent development interdisciplinary economic history.

"The Merchant Guild at the city of Wrocław. A Contribution to the History of Trade Culture in the late medieval Central Europe"


Organizational forms of the activity of merchants are one of basic issues of trade culture. The topic of my paper is a history of the merchant guild at the city of Wrocław (Breslau in German), that was one of several chief economic centers in late medieval Central Europe. The main discussed topics are: the origins of the Wro-cław’s merchant guild; its essential character and the inner rules of a coexistence of its members; its composition; a role and significance played in the socio-economic life of the city.
The merchant guild at Wrocław (kumpanie) was called into existence by a city council in 1339, in which practicing merchants dominated. Unlike the other Central European guilds, the association of merchants at Wrocław turned out to be not only one of the oldest, but also one of the most durable.
In the statute of the guild (written in German) socio-ethical rules prevailed. The lawmakers put emphasis on unity and solidarity of the guild’s members as well as on their making business according to ethical rules. The question of an acceptance into the guild and exclusion was defined precisely. The guild was governed by the two sworn deputies (iurati), which were elected every year. Most of them were not in-volved in the long-distance trade.
The rules of the guild were to soften severe economic competition between their members and to pave the way to reach a compromise by litigating merchants. This autonomous association was to help them to reconcile individual ambitions with the interests of the city. One of the statue’s articles included an idea of solidarity with a merchants persecuted by the town councilors.
The merchant guild as an institution seems to have played an auxiliary, advi-sory role, whose limits were fixed by the superior city council. The latter one con-sulted also some non-economic issues with the guild.
This association of merchants could have been some kind of the organized transmission chain between the patriciate and ordinary merchants. It must have been used also not only to transfer the orders from above, but also to deliver some infor-mation from below to the city council, e.g. on public feelings in the city.
Scarce source references to the activity of the merchant guild as an institution combined with its long-lasting existence evokes a question on its other functions.

This paper examines two major dimensions of the economic life in Transylvania in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century: trade and manufacturing of goods. The focus of the investigation will be on the Saxon towns of the province, namely Sibiu (Nagyszeben, Hermannstadt) and Brasov (Brassó, Kronstadt) as the most significant representatives of the medieval urban economies. Although compared to European towns they were founded late, a rapid economic development enabled Sibiu and Brasov to become major trading posts in the long distance trade but also in the regional and local trade. Guild statutes and privileges testify for a strongly developed production of manufactured goods as early as the fourteenth century. The paper will discuss the characteristics of the guild manufacturing and of trade in Sibiu and Brasov.

Historians that studied the medieval Hungarian-Ottoman relations focused their efforts on the military events and the diplomatic contacts, although some scholars showed the importance of the trade relations as well. This state of research is probably due to the extreme rarity of quantitative sources related to the topic.
My paper is based mainly on two such sources, namely the only two South-Hungarian medieval external customs accounts conserved in these days we are aware of, which refer to the traffic between 1503 and 1505 of the customs of Kölpény, Barics and Szabács (in the region of Belgrade). In my paper first I will present the juridical and administrative framework of the medieval Hungarian-Ottoman trade, after which I will analyze the quantity and the value of the transported wares, the structure of the transport, the geografical origin, the nationality and the commercial activity of the traders, and finally I will make a critique of the results.

This paper examines the forms of estate organization on the domains of lay lords from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. The sources used the term praedium to describe the majority of these estates until the end of this period. The origins of the praedium are lost to the lack of source material, but praedia were viewed as economically independent units whose primary purpose the production of grain. Lords relied upon the direct cultivation of their praedia by dependent laborers who should more properly be termed slaves. The organizational structure of the praedium was not static however, and there was a general trend toward a more bipartite structure in which some of the praedium was worked by laborers owing defined, albeit harsh, work obligations. Then end of the praedium came at the end of the thirteenth century, and it came quickly. The praedium gave way to the village community which was itself imported from western Europe. Lords were willing to allow their dependents the favorable conditions of the village for two primary reasons: they faced massive flight of their dependents if they did not, and they saw in the tax structure of the village a good source of cash income.

The Czech lands situated between two important trade centres of medieval Europe – northern Italy and the Baltic – came into limelight of German and Italian prospectors and merchants in connection with open silver mines. The relevant impulses were coming from Venice which became the largest European market of precious metals for more than two centuries (about 1280–1500). The city profited from the fact to be situated closer to Central European mines than other Mediterranean ports. The penetration of Venetian merchants into the Eastern Mediterranean called for a growing coins production which was fully depended on the silver supplies. Most of them originated in the 1260s and 1270s from Jihlava (Iglau) and directly influenced a productive efficiency of the Venetian mint (with the top in 1278).
The public finances in Venice were substantionally strengthened by the reforms of Ranieri Zeno, Doge of Venice (1253–1268), and of his successors. Within their framework it was established a public debt (1262) and a permanent deposit (1265), realized a large administrative reorganization (1266/67) and passed the law of coin (1269). Remarkable is the chain of reforms realized at the same time in Venice and in the Czech-Austrian Empire of Přemysl II. Otakar, King of Bohemia (1253–1278). The aim of three Otakar´s reforms was to put a currency, weights and measures compatibility of two different monetary systems (bracteates and pfennigs) through and to make so trade contacts with Venice easier. Although they have never been brought to successful conclusion, the experience with them became the basis for the great currency reform of 1300 directed by the Florentine financiers. They could prove their knowledge and experience just thanks to a good quality of Czech coins arisen from previous reforms.

This paper assesses the abrupt privatization of property rights to the subsoil in Brazil in 1891 by considering both the actions of miners and the outcome for the mining sector. Using new databases of indicators of mining activity (concessions and land transfers) and of mining law, it finds that miners reacted to both privatization and re-nationalization (in 1934) in expansive manners. Neither change in the specification of rights led directly to meeting their goal of large-scale expansion, of iron ore exports and iron & steel manufacture, because of the complex interaction of other fundamental institutions. Notably, the indivisibility of real assets and the capital markets created insurmountable obstacles to private-sector mining development. The paper’s conclusions suggest Olsen’s theories of collective action as a framework for understanding the persistence of these barriers. The paper by points to an important instance in which liberalized property rights were not sufficient to support self-sustaining growth, and emphasizes the need for institutional analysis to consider interaction, as well as the behavior of single, well-defined institutions.

Peru’s experience with sovereign debt during the guano boom is one of the most remarkable in the nineteenth century. Despite the country’s ongoing political instability and poor capital market reputation, the price of Peruvian bonds soared shortly after settlement in 1849, and the country enjoyed relatively low credit risk until the 1870s. The paper discusses the incentives Peru and its creditors faced, and explains how Peru’s extraordinary performance was founded on its credible commitment to service its debt with the guano proceeds.

Although the United States holds vast reserves of both anthracite and bituminous coal, this vital energy resource remained relatively underdeveloped in the early period of American industrialization. The political economy of Pennsylvania, which accounted for three-fourths of the nation’s coal production in 1850, fostered an atomized blend of individual proprietorships, large canal companies, and small scale railroad concerns. Production increased substantially, but the coal trade remained disorganized through the 1840s and 1850s. The American Civil War rapidly altered this structure. The corporate form of enterprise, long held in political suspicion as “soulless monsters” in the antebellum period, benefited from the Union’s procurement systems during the American Civil War just as many northern railroads saw a boost in traffic, incentives to increase carrying capacity, and a source of revenue with tonnage taxes. The close relationship between railroads, indeed with corporations in general, and state and federal policymakers emerged as a major factor in the postbellum economy; this relationship did not develop “naturally,” but instead came as a response to the unique challenges of wartime. In Pennsylvania, a law passed in 1861 allowed railroad corporations to purchase the stock of other firms and a few years later the legislature authorized the purchase of stocks and bonds of mining firms by railroad and canal companies—an unthinkable option for antebellum policymakers that opened up new opportunities for large-scale consolidation. By the 1870s, for example, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad was poised to embark upon an ambitious plan to purchase enough anthracite coal lands to set prices. The American coal trade, largely centered in Pennsylvania during this time, thus saw a critical institutional reorganization occur in a few short years that wedded railroads, the corporate form of enterprise, and state government into a lockstep arrangement that would persevere for decades.

Conventional wisdom suggests that as the value of a natural resource rises, private property will emerge. The Ngwa and other Igbo groups of Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper presents a game between a youth and an elder in which an increase in the price of palm oil makes it possible to introduce regulated communal tenure. This makes both parties better off than under private property. This model is used with colonial court records to interpret the political economy of property disputes during the interwar period.

Where natural resources form an important part of a country’s economy, price fluctuations have long been known to have a dramatic influence on public revenue and expenditure. This paper will use a case study of Northern Rhodesia (colonial Zambia) to argue that this effect was exacerbated under colonial rule by the Gladstonian structure of British colonial public finance, which dictated that colonial administrations should limit their expenditure and then raise only enough revenue to meet their needs. With limited administrative capacity, colonial governments turned to the source of revenue which was easiest and cheapest to collect. In Northern Rhodesia, this source was the copper mining industry, which represented 85 per cent of Northern Rhodesia’s exports less then a decade after the opening of the mines. Government revenue generated by this industry dominated total collections throughout the colonial period, despite the fact that a large proportion of this revenue was expropriated to Britain as well as to the other members of the Central African Federation after its formation in 1953. Few other means of raising public revenue were developed in boom times, which left the colonial administration financially destitute when the copper price fell in the early 1930s and late 1950s. In addition, the expropriation of copper revenue during the colonial period made the recovery of those funds a top political priority at independence, ultimately leading to the nationalization of the copper mines. Nationalization increased the Zambian government’s dependence on copper revenue, leading to a fiscal disaster for the new state during the 1970s.

This paper explores the origins of the Mexican oil industry. Using information from stock prices and drilling concessions for the period 1914-1917 we explore the characteristics of the first companies that entered the industry. We found that an important number of small Mexican firms had and active role in exploration, extraction and distribution activities amidst the most violent years of the Mexican Revolution. Despite the contraction of credit markets and high transaction costs, the emerging domestic industry raised the funds to embrace operation in order to compete with larger foreign corporations. Our research suggests that the boom in the domestic oil industry was the result of a speculative bubble driven not only by the rise in international prices but also by the lack of proper regulatory institutions, which also paved the way for the highly concentrated market structure the industry would soon take.

Conjectures, assumptions and assertions surround the debate on the size of Native American populations prior to European contact. Current estimates for North America north of the urban civilizations of central Mexico range from a low of 1,894,350 argued by Ubelaker to Dobyns estimate of 18,000,000. A consensus view would put the estimate in the six to twelve million people. A critical assumption underlying these estimates is the impact of early contact epidemics on Native peoples. Aboriginal populations in the Hudson’s Bay hinterland experienced their first smallpox epidemic in the 1780's. Some sources report declines in population on the order of 50-80%. With a population in the region of less than 10,000 prior to this epidemic, such declines would have been devastating.
In contrast to the reports on mortality, the records of the Hudson’s Bay company and those of the Northwest Company suggest a strong and vibrant trade in furs in the 1780s and subsequent decades. As native people were the sole trappers and traders, there is no indication in the trading records of a large decline in aboriginal populations. As well population estimates based on lodge counts prior to the epidemic and in the 1820s makes high mortality in the 1780s seem implausible. Furthermore, large game animals were the main and in most areas only food source for native people. The evidence on large game populations suggests a decline in the animal stock. This in turn suggests a rising and not a declining aboriginal population. In this paper we use the evidence from the trading records, lodge counts, and the animal resource base to infer the impact of this first major epidemic on the aboriginal population of the Hudson Bay region.

As a result of the War of the Pacific, Chile conquered Peruvian and Bolivian territories rich in nitrates and guano. We conduct econometric tests for structural breaks in the time series of the government bonds for Chile and Peru between 1876 and 1890 in order to examine the effects of the changes in resource endowments on the investors’ perceptions of the risk premia of Chilean and Peruvian securities. Our results reveal that investors were extremely pessimistic about the prospects of Chilean, and especially Peruvian debt prior to the war. Early Chilean victories that anticipated the transfer of the richly endowed provinces to Chile caused significant increases in the price of Chilean securities, as expected. But such was the low regard with which investors viewed the Peruvian government, that the fall of Lima caused an increase in the price of Peruvian bonds on the hope that Chile would assume some of the responsibility for them. Endowments, reputations, and the countries’ financial conditions figure prominently as the driving forces behind the investors’ behavior.

The paper is an attempt to provide an interpretation of the Italian puzzle in the post-WWII era consisting of very low levels of expenditure in R&D and yet high TFP growth. The research aims to supply the basic tools and the framework for a better understanding of the Italian industry innovation system and of its contribution to the country’s long term growth performance. The study applies the localized technological change approach to implement the notion of knowledge interactions so as to appreciate: a) the role of external factors in the generation and exploitation of technological knowledge; b) the role of creative adoption in TFP dynamics. The analysis is based on a new dataset containing sectoral and regional series of TFP, capital intensity, wages per labour unit, R&D expenditures, patents granted in the USA, Technological Balance of Payments receipts and expenses, etc. for Italy over the 1950-1990 period. Using a SURE model framework, the impact of user-producer interactions on the dynamic efficiency of the Italian industrial sector is investigated across industries and regions. The significant and distinctive features of Italian innovation dynamics in the post WWII era that result are: i) the emerging and functioning of an innovation system based upon both horizontal dynamics of technological cooperation within industrial districts and vertical dynamic interdependence within industrial filieres; ii) a relevant, albeit incomplete, diffusion/catching up process in Italian regions.

The paper tackles the undisputed fact that, in the long-run, the Latin American countries have failed to converge with world leaders. The paper shows that this failure is strongly related to the limits of structural change, to the insufficient development of technological capabilities and to the weak conformation of national systems of innovation.
The paper presents the main features of relative economic performance, structural change and technological capabilities in three different periods of Latin American economic history: the first globalization boom (ca 1870-1913), the so called State-led industrialization period (SLI, ca 1930-1970) and the second globalization boom (since the 1970s and onwards). It is suggested that in all these periods, with specific features in each of them and across countries, Latin America in general failed to build up strong innovation systems. This has led to a slower process of structural change and economic diversification, which further compromised the catching-up process. The paper discusses the institutions of the region and suggests some indicators of the intensity of technical change and technological catching-up.

In my paper I investigate the relationship between size and innovativeness of firms in the long-term perspective. To this day, the so-called Schumpeterian hypothesis about an above average innovativeness of large firms has been neither confirmed nor rejected, often because of insufficient data or a too-short observation period. Many studies concentrate only on a specific region or a specific sector, or they analyze a very short period of time. In contrast, this analysis is based on a completely new dataset containing every long-lived patent in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic (1877-1932). The dataset contains 66.500 entries concerning economically relevant innovations. Firm size is measured by employment, revenue, and capital stock.
Using different panel regression models, the impact of firm size on the innovativeness of firms will be investigated. In addition to the size, a firm’s access to the capital market is another firm specific variable to be included. The regional availability of human capital and the degree of urbanisation are other important aspects that probably influence a firm’s innovativeness, and, therefore, are included in the analysis as well.
In a next step, I will investigate, whether the variable’s impact differed among sectors.
Technological booms, providing a window of technological opportunities for both firms and sectors, have not yet been investigated. An analysis of Germany’s chemical and metal sector between 1877 and 1932 revealed that the sector-specific long-term relationship between firm size and innovativeness is negative, expect for the time of a specific technological boom. In combination with firm-specific characteristics, this new aspect can contribute to a better understanding of the long-term relationship between firm size and innovativeness.

This paper analyses the co-evolution of science, technology and innovation policy and industrial structure in a small, open, resource-based economy (Norway). The contributions of the paper are threefold. First, it develops an evolutionary and historically oriented approach to the study of the development of these policies that may have wide applicability. Second, it focuses on a particular type of innovation, innovation in resource-based activities, that differs in many respects from the more commonly studied case of innovation in “high-tech” industries. Third, the paper advances our understanding of the roles played by institutions and politics in innovation. Previous work on national systems of innovation has devoted little attention to these matters, possibly because much of this work examines “snapshots” of various innovation systems at a specific point in time and lacks historical depth.

By 1900 New Zealand patenting activity per capita was the highest in the world and more than twice the rate of the UK and the USA. Patents data are matched with commodity output estimates to investigate how new technology influenced rates and patterns of New Zealand economic growth. Together estimates of patents and commodity output are used with modern time series methods to explain the contours of New Zealand’s economic development, including the shift to intensive per capita growth. The knowledge utilization which invigorated development was connected primarily to the more intensive use of land and to the integration of farm and factory within a New Zealand system of mass production. Several strands of the technology central to New Zealand’s economic development, including refrigeration and the centrifugal separation of cream, had overseas origins. How these were assimilated, adapted and utilized in New Zealand are central in the shift to intensive growth. How knowledge growth influenced New Zealand’s pastoral sector and the wider economy are explored via a statistical analysis of the relationship between patenting and commodity output. By estimating the cointegrating relationships among 25 categories of commodity output we show that a small number of industries drove New Zealand’s economic development. The dairy sector was central, but other kinds of manufacturing, including printing and publishing, played a leading role. In turn we demonstrate how patenting activity associated with 40 industry groups had causal links to the expansion of New Zealand’s key industries.

This paper explores the ways in which government and firms have contributed, in terms of innovation, to Korea’s economic growth after 1945.
Korea remained in deep trouble in the first half of the 20th century because of the Japanese colonial rule (1910-45) and the Korean War (1950-53). In the second half, however, the country rapidly grew to achieve an economic success: between 1963 and 2007, GDP has swollen from $2.7 billion to $1 trillion, the 13th largest in the world; and, GDP per capita from $100 to $20,000.
Within the short period of time, Korea’s economy has been continuously transformed, innovated, and ‘creatively destructed’: from an agriculture-based to an industry-based economy; from a light industry-based to a heavy industry-based economy; from a labor intensive to a capital intensive economy; from a standardized technology-based to a hi-technology-based economy; from a domestic market-oriented to an export-oriented and then to global production-oriented economy; and, from an industry-based to a knowledge-based economy.
In the forefront of these transformations and innovations were two key actors, government and firms. In the earlier years of the lack of a free market system, government took the lead, guiding the direction of growth and organizing innovation systems that comprised government’s departments, public research institutions, firms, universities, and industrial clusters. Gradually, firms took over the lead and, in particular, Korea’s unique family-owned conglomerates, called chaebols, stood out. Chaebols, such as Samsung and LG, and their ambitious entrepreneurs increasingly had leading parts to play in changing innovation systems, ardently pursuing world-class competitors.
This paper examines how successive Korean governments created and supported the environment and context within which innovation systems took shape, became mature, and worked efficiently. The paper also analyses how Korean firms, chaebols in particular, learnt technological knowledge, developed technological capabilities, and accomplished technological innovations.

From a long-term perspective, technological innovation could have come from local or domestic inventive and research activity, or from the transfer of foreign technology. In reality either option produces similar effects and often it was a combination of both which drove the historical acceleration of the rhythm of innovation and expansion of industry. This was fundamental for Great Britain and its early followers, and even more so for the latecomers and the underdeveloped countries. Spain, for example, suffered from scientific, technological and industrial backwardness which impeded the implementation of a national research and development infrastructure capable of generating competitive inventive activity. However, the national innovation system was designed, from the 18th century onwards, to favour the transfer of technology and human capital from abroad and thus establish the basis of modern economic growth and the process of industrialization.
In this paper we will reflect on the design of the Spanish Innovation System, especially in one of its institutional aspects (the patent system), in order to understand the real role and function of a curios legal process the “patent of introduction”, which in practice promoted and permitted anyone to protect foreign third-person technologies in order to implement them locally, providing they were not already established. Although this legal practice represents a very clear declaration of intentions concerning the innovation policy and despite its existence in other patent systems in lagging countries, economic and technology historians have paid little or no attention to the subject. Therefore it is unclear how patents of introduction functioned and what consequences they had on the innovation and industrialization processes, especially in underdeveloped countries such as Spain, which, incredibly, maintained this practice until joining the European Union in 1986. We will attempt to shed light on how patents of introduction were established and how they evolved, the role they played in the promotion of innovation, who used them and in which sectors, and the real impact they had. The conclusions point out that, as with protectionism as a commercial policy, forcing national processes of innovation that take advantage of foreign inventions with or without respecting the original inventors rights –as generally occurs with the transfer of technology from abroad- could have positive consequences on the industrialization processes as well as helping lagging countries such as Spain to catch up with modern societies.

Innovation, particularly in the form of development and adoption of new technologies, is central to long-term industrial competitiveness, economic growth and rising living standards. Interwar Britain constitutes a particularly interesting case study - characterised by extremely high rates of unemployment, declining international trade and an industrial structure dominated by industries in secular decline. However, it also witnessed impressive levels of corporate innovation, with the rapid expansion of ‘new’ assembly and science-based industries, a process accompanied by important innovations in both product and process technologies as well as major changes in the scale, organisation and geography of industrial development.

This paper enhances our understanding of British interwar innovation and its contribution to the country’s competitiveness at the sectoral level. It is based on a newly constructed dataset of patents granted in the USA to British inventions, for various benchmark years. The information collected includes patent number, technological field, location of the generating research facility and corporate assignee. Therefore, this new dataset allows us to map the distribution of innovation activity across British regions, to study their Revealed Technological Advantage (RTA), and to analyse the composition of activities across regions. This analysis is important not only from a historical perspective but also from a theoretical one, as it enables us to assess various propositions of the theory of technological accumulation, such as the cumulativeness of technological innovation, its incremental development and differentiation.

Today, German machine tool makers accuse their Chinese competitors of violating patent rights and illegally imitating foreign products. A century ago, however, German machine tool makers used exactly the same illegitimate methods to catch-up to innovative American firms. To understand the dynamics of this catching-up process we analyze firms’ imitating and innovating activities based on two newly developed patent statistics: the Baten/Streb patent data base containing every long-lived patent that was granted to Germans and foreigners by the German patent office before 1932, and the Richter patent data base including all patents that were held by machine tool makers located in the innovative focal points of Chemnitz (Germany) and Cincinnati (USA) in the same period. Using these information we will distinguish five different sub periods of the German machine tool makers’ catching-up: (illegal) imitation (1867-1899), innovation and diffusion (1900-1914), falling behind again (1915-1918), (illegal) imitation “reloaded” (1919-1925), innovation and diffusion (after 1925). Interestingly enough, German firms were willing to gave up their strategy of imitating American products and change to respecting foreign intellectual property rights twice (around 1900 and again after 1925) after gaining own innovativeness and international competitiveness due to their preceding imitation activities. American firms reacted to this fundamental change of the attitude of German firms (and the German patent authorities) by applying more often for German patents which then seemed to be an appropriate instrument for protecting their own innovative knowledge.

We study the long-run evolution of Portuguese living standards from the 1720s to the end of the 20th century using anthropometric techniques. We find that the Portuguese had a similar height level around 1820 as a sample of European countries. However, during the mid- 19th century, a slow divergence started, which increased after the 1870s, when the anthropometric record of many European countries increased strongly. Although Portuguese heights grew during the 20th century, convergence to the rest of Europe began only during the 1970s. We study a number of determinants such as income, human capital formation, protein supply, urbanization and migration. In a panel of Portugal and three European regions versus we confirm a significant positive influence of real wages and human capital on heights.

Height data offer insights into the well-being of populations and historical periods for which
other indicators are lacking. Researchers modeling historical heights have typically relied on the
restrictive assumption of a normal (Gaussian) distribution, only the mean of which is affected
by age, income, nutrition, disease, and similar influences. We develop a different approach,
in which covariates – age in particular – are allowed to affect the entire distribution without
imposing any parametric shape. We apply this method to a new database of height distributions
for Italian provinces drawn from conscription records. The data are of unprecedented length
and geographic disaggregation, but suffer from a variety of statistical problems: variation in
the age at measurement in particular. Our method allows us to standardize distributions to a
single age and calculate moments of the distribution that are comparable through time. The
distribution of heights at age 20 is not normal over most of our sample. Our method also allows
us to generate counterfactual distributions for a range of ages, from which we derive age-height
profiles. These reveal how the adolescent growth spurt (AGS) distorts the distribution of stature,
and document the earlier and earlier onset of the AGS as living conditions improved over the
second half of the nineteenth century. Our new estimates of provincial mean height also reveal
a previously unnoticed “regime switch” from regional convergence to divergence in this period.
In the light of this evidence, previous assumptions about regional economic development during
Italian industrialization will need to be reexamined.

See under Bas van Leeuween

ABSTRACT: Despite being an important theme of social and economic research in Brazil, the historical approach to social inequality is still rather shallow. And studies about human capital in Brazilian history are much scarcer. In this way, the use of age heaping as an indirect evidence of schooling widespread in Brazil will be a great advance in this research area. The idea is that by measuring age heaping during a long term, it will be possible to see the transformations and/or permanencies in Brazilian population capacity to express in numbers. In this paper I will use two large database with more than half a million individual microdata from provinces of Minas Gerais and São Paulo, covering the areas of two of the most important and populated states in Brazil today. After showing this database, I will describe the methods used to measure age heaping and then I will analyze the results. It can be seen that in the 1830’s the indexes for São Paulo and Minas Gerais were relatively close (especially amongst the women), although the former presented better pointers. In 1940, both states presented advances in terms of index reduction, but this fall was more significant in São Paulo, with a wider gap between them. In this scene, the differentials between Minas Gerais and São Paulo, in terms of the indirect numeracy indexes, assumed great importance within the context of the Brazilian economic development at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, albeit poorly explored by historiography until today.

The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 334 Prussian counties in 1849. Estimating two separate instrumental-variable models that instrument education by landownership inequality and distance to Wittenberg and fertility by previous-generation fertility and sex-imbalance ratio, we find that causation between fertility and education runs both ways. Furthermore, education in 1849 predicts the fertility transition in 1880-1905.

For Europeans and their descendents New Zealand was a relatively healthy environment during the 19th century. New Zealanders were relatively tall. Nevertheless stature declined from the 1870s to the early 1880s cohorts, again from the 1880s to the late 1890s, and from the 1910s to the early 1920s. We hypothesize that the 19th century experience reflects the same pattern of adverse pressure on net nutrition documented for this period in other countries. The failure of stature to rise after 1900 is more surprising as height was beginning to rise in other overseas European populations. The sharp decline for the 1920s cohort probably reflects the abrupt deceleration of the New Zealand economy at that time. Stature differed across occupational groups; farmers and men in higher socio-economic status occupations were taller. The differential between shorter and taller groups increased from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries; rising inequality then is one possible explanation for the failure of population mean stature to rise 1900-1920. There was some tendency for those born into a New Zealand city to be shorter as adults. No systematic differences between New Zealanders of European descent and the indigenous Maori are visible before 1900, although among the post-1900 cohorts the Maori were significantly shorter. Crude death rates, infant mortality rates and death through specific infectious diseases confirm a pronounced racial disparity in health. We conclude that there was considerable inequality in the experience of physical well-being even in the relatively healthy New Zealand environment.

For a long-run study on living conditions from pre-historic times onwards sufficient data are very rare: on the one hand, no ‘conventional’ economic data exists; on the other hand no quantitative information on aspects like numeracy level or infant mortality is available in adequate amount to investigate overall welfare. Promising though is the application of an interdisciplinary concept utilizing skeletal material and applying anthropometric methods in order to determine the nutritional status. For the first time in economic history this approach is employed here in order to investigate the conditions in Europe from pre-historic times onwards, i.e. the 8th century B.C. until the 18th century A.D.
The current study is based on the data of over 18500 individuals (final mean human height used as proxy). Overall, for the centuries A.D. the results of an earlier study (Koepke and Baten 2005; 2008) have been confirmed by the much enlarged data set in the current paper, indicating that there was no pronounced trend in mean height for these centuries. Yet, including the centuries B.C. we found a modest increase in the mean height of about 0.5 cm per 1000 years. However, strong variations between centuries are observable: Conditions of constrained human welfare repeatedly superseded enhances living conditions during pre-industrial history. Nevertheless, in the long-run living conditions have been improved continuously, even prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Decisive determinants in influencing mean height are urban rate, and the cattle share. Moreover, in contrast to the common idea of a positive impact of the expansion of the ancient Roman Empire on living conditions, actually our results indicate a negative effect of Roman occupation.

This article mobilizes and integrates both existing and new time series data on real wages, physical heights and age-heaping to examine the long-term trend of living standards and human capital for China during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Our findings confirm the existence of a substantial gap in living standards between China and North-western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They also reveal a sustained decline in living standards and human capital at least in South China from the mid-nineteenth century followed by a recovery in the early twentieth century. However, comparative examination of age-heaping data shows that the level of Chinese human capital was relatively high by world standard during this period. We make a preliminary exploration of the historical implication of our findings.

Anthropometric data collected by Franz Boas at the end of the nineteenth century show that equestrian Plains tribes were exceptionally tall but differed by nearly 9 centimeters in average height, which is more than native-born Americans grew from the early 1700s to the present. Tribal heights followed an inverted U shape by latitude, and an attenuated patterns of this type also existed among Union Army troops who enlisted from states located east of the Great Plains. To understand tribal differences, I bring new explanatory variables to the table for the study of historical heights. These are proxies for effort prices in hunting and gathering food, including biomass, rainfall estimated from tree rings, and tribal area. Also relevant are socioeconomic measures such as encroachment on tribal lands by Euro-American trails to the west and, later, forced movement to reservations. Collectively these variables explain a substantial share of the systematic variation in average height across tribes. The analysis sheds light on ecological and socioeconomic determinants of health and nutrition in both past and present populations.

This paper uses four major sets of anthropometric data to construct time series of average human height in Indonesia from the late-18th century until today. The paper observes stagnation, or possibly modest growth of male heights until the 1870s, and a significant decline during the 1870s-1890s. The decline may be related to the consequences of cattle plague. Increases in average heights were observed since the 1890s (with the exception of the 1940s), which may be related to gradual economic development, improvements in food supply and the abating impact of accumulating improvements in hygiene and medical care. In an international perspective, the growth of average heights in Indonesia during the 20th century has been relatively modest.

Was the height difference between West Africans and Europeans that exists today already visible at the end of the Atlantic slave trade? We present the first study of changing heights for people born in West Africa during the early 19th century. The data set, not used before for anthropometry, documents men, born between 1800 and 1849 in what are now Ghana and Burkina Faso. Mostly purchased from slave owners, they were recruited into the Dutch army to serve in the Netherlands Indies. We find that height development was stagnant between 1800 and 1830 and deteriorated strongly during the 1840s. In international comparison and after taking selectivity issues into account, these West Africans were notably shorter than northwestern Europeans but not much shorter than Southern Europeans during this period.

As American cities grew between 1850 and 1900 their residents suffered from an urban penalty manifest in lower life expectancy, higher mortality rates and smaller average stature than in rural districts, but the extent of this penalty varied among cities. Using a sample drawn from the US Army’s national enlistment records for 1898 to 1900 of men born between 1847 and 1882, and data from the US census of 1880, this paper investigates the divergence in stature that occurred within America’s urban system and its determinants. This variability is related to variables indicating the characteristics of the urban built and mortality environments, the structure of the urban economy, level of immigration, the urban growth rate, the role of the city in the inter-urban transport system, and the size of the city. Our research on the stature of 45,025 US Army recruits born between 1847 and 1882 reveals that the 19,025 recruits born in urban areas of 20,000 inhabitants or more, were on average a half inch shorter than the national average for all of the US Army recruits. In both the urban-born group and the full national data set, average heights were highest among the older recruits, and there was significant variation according to occupation. Nevertheless, regression analysis reveals determinants of the remaining variations in average heights across US cities. The size of the city, urban mortality rates, and the city’s freight handling capacity had significant negative effects on average stature. Population growth rates and real wages in manufacturing had significant and positive effects. This research outlines the characteristics of US cities that contributed to the urban penalty.

Susanna Fellman, Reino Hjerppe & Riitta Hjerppe
University of Helsinki

Is it a strong state or needs of structural change that create a welfare state? - The case of Finland and the Nordic countries.

When discussing the ‘Nordic model’, the role of the State and the public sector is often brought into the discussion as one factor. The state is usually regarded as having been fairly strong in these societies and actively promoting the economic and social development by interfering in the economic and social sphere. The public sector has also been fairly big measured as a share of the GDP, providing a growing amount of welfare services, while e.g. state companies have been prominent. The big public sector, the (alleged) strong state, the high level of taxation and extensive welfare system in combination with the successful economic development of these countries during the last decades has been seen as something of a paradox: the Nordic countries have not necessarily fitted the (primarily Anglo-Saxon) ‘text book’ model as ‘best practices’ for furthering economic development. Still, the Nordic countries have been also economically successful and competitive.
In this paper, we will investigate the role of the State and of the public sector in Finland over a long period of time and in a comparative perspective. Firstly, although the state and the public sector have played a significant part in the Nordic societies, it is evident that the role of the state and the public sector has transformed significantly, and that there have been significant variations in both the policies and the actions. Secondly, a significant part of the activity classified as ‘the public sector’ has not taken place within the central government, but on local government level and this ‘division of labor’ between central and local government has transformed over time. In addition, there has been a tendency to classify the state and public sector according to simple lines of axes, e.g. of ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ or ‘strong’ versus ‘weak’, or of ‘large’ versus ‘small’. The role and significance of the state and the public sector has been, both complex and multifaceted, and these agents can do significantly different things, while e.g. an active state is not necessarily strong with respect to sector interests. Neither can the state and the public sector be seen as entities with common goals and interests, but instead as arenas for various competing interests, leading to both compromises and tensions within the political decision making, within state bureaucracy and between local and central government.
We will here investigate what the state and the public sector have actually done at various points of time, actual policies and goals of the policies, particularly with respect to the promotion of economic development and social welfare. We will draw up the development of the size (public expenditures) of the public sector over time and show how the focus of activities has shifted between the local and central government. We will discuss the expenditure structure of the public sector to show concretely the evolvement of the welfare state. What time pattern the development of public activities has had, what significant setbacks, if any, have occurred? We will also discuss the main compromises in the development of the public activities. One basic controversy has been between the agricultural party and the labour parties as social reforms may affect these groups rather differently. We will also study contemporary discourses in certain policy areas to illuminate the contemporary view on the State and its role for promoting economic development and welfare at various point of time. These actions will be reflected against broader contemporary economic, social and political goals. We will focus primarily on the Finnish case, but put the questions and results within a broader comparative perspective with respect to the other Nordic countries, in order to look for similarities and differences.
The internal structure of the development of the public expenditures logically follows the needs of the development of the economy and society. Therefore, the public expenditures seem to support the general needs for economic development. In the background there is a relatively strong state, but its functioning is affected by the workings of the various interest groups, political parties and participants in the civil society. Firm legal foundation and nearly absence of corruption in the administration are seen as important preconditions for the success of the Nordic model.

Social Democratic Welfare Capitalism (SDWC) can be understood as a powerful equilibrating and stabilising force in the history of Western capitalism during the past century or more, centring on the interventionist and redistributive roles of democratic states. But will SDWC continue to be so stable? This paper comparatively explores the sources of crises and the different responses by SDWC countries in recent decades. In order to do this the general nature of SDWC first has to be examined and the usefulness of the concept for examining the political economy of a range of western countries established. It is argued that this model applies to most advanced western countries since the 1950s. But the history of SDWC in its various manifestations shows a pattern of convergences and divergences during the past century. In recent decades the SDWC system has come under increasing stress and although the recent economic upswing enabled a period of prosperity and stability in the system this proved to be a temporary phase. Will the underlying contradictions of SDWC, so prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, come to the fore again with the crisis and the responses to it?

The paper examines fundamental long-run tendencies and tensions within SDWC that come from the globalisation of markets of all kinds (especially finance and labour), demographic pressures on publicly financed welfare systems, and the erosion of national state hegemony over political processes and culture. The rise of non-state-regulated markets, organisations, social movements, and cultural forms, necessarily raises basic issues about the regulatory structure and systemic stability of existing SDWC states. Differing responses to these pressures have led to growing divergences within the group of SDWC states. In particular, the Australasian and Nordic patterns have diverged markedly in recent decades and now there is widespread discussion of the viability of both the Anglo Liberal Market model and the Northern European Social Market model. Other models, such as in Central Europe and East Asia, are being developed.

The extent of social expenditures in the U.S. and the Nordic Countries is compared in the early 1900s and again in the early 2000s. The common view that America spends much less on social welfare than the Nordic countries does not survive closer inspection when we consider the differences in the structures of social expenditures. The standard comparison examines gross social expenditures. After adjustments for direct and indirect taxes paid, the net social expenditures in the Nordic countries are much closer to American levels. Inclusion of mandatory and private social expenditures raises the American share of GDP devoted to social expenditures to rank among the middle of the Nordic countries. Per capita net public social expenditures in the U.S. rank behind only Sweden. Add in the private spending, and per capita spending in the U.S. is higher than in all of the Nordic countries. Finally, I document the enormous diversity across time and place in public social expenditures in the U.S. in the early 1900s and circa 1990.

Views on the transformation, its methods and results as well as the conduct of specific individual actors in the are to this day the subject of political confrontation and controversy, as is the still heated question of the conflict of expert approaches and not infrequently personal animosities. The costs of the transformation, the transparencey of transfers of property, and whether the concept of transformation should have been one of shock therapy or gradualism are all issues of continuing discussion and dispute. The transformation also had its moral dimensions (the redress of past wrongs and injustices) and its immoral dimensions (corruption, fraud, misappropriation of property). Most of the people who conceived and planned the transformation admit that often they were searching an even groping in the dark, and that they made mistakes. Nonetheless they showed strength of will and courage for a great work. What is indisputable is that the transformation was successful. A social-economic transformation was accomplished which installed a democratic political system and a capitalist market economy with all its advantages and its problems. Moreover these great changes were implemented in an atmosphere of social peace, something made possible by the great speed of the change.

ABSTRACT

The Swedish model and welfare capitalism
Hans Sjögren, Linköping University and Stockholm School of Economics

The Swedish welfare capitalism is associated with close co-operation between the government state and private business. In the mid 1930s, the pragmatic balancing between capitalism and socialism was named as ‘the middle way’, a label that was also spread internationally by Marquis Childs in a book about how Sweden handled contemporary problems. The middle way carries a tradition of compromise thinking that goes back a long way in the history of Scandinavia, and has survived even in times of strong internationalisation. The Swedish ‘middle way’ is also associated with the Swedish model, with connotations to strong labour unions, corporatism, compromise thinking, consensual democracy, low corruption, high-taxes and an egalitarian spirit. This indicates an active modern state, but also a national culture that has roots in early agrarian society (peasant proprietors instead of a feudal system).

The Swedish model and welfare capitalism is a result of path-dependency and co-existing historical layers, as successive institutional and techno-economic regimes have been put on the original platform. Institutionally the welfare capitalism in the mid-19th century was based on liberal principles, which remained an under-layer when social democratic policies and a regulated economy appeared in the mid-1930s, a regime that began to dominate after the Second World War. From the 1980s, a neo-liberal regime was established as a new institutional layer on top of the two former ones. Viewing the techno-economical side, welfare capitalism underwent – as in most western countries – a structural transformation from an agricultural society to an industrial one, which has recently been transformed to a service society. These layers correspond to the two waves of globalization, the first from 1880 to 1929, followed by a period of disintegration and protectionism, which in the late 1970s turned into a new of globalization.

In the 1980s, the Swedish model was really questioned for the first time since the Second World War. However, the Swedish model could be defined and interpreted in at least three ways and, depending on the definition, the answer to whether it has faded away or is still alive will differ. This paper will discuss to what extent it is still relevant to talk about a Swedish model today. Conceptually, the Swedish model is treated as a narrower concept than welfare capitalism. The discussion will be based on the development of the Swedish economy, in order to understand the reasons behind the transformation of the Swedish model. The paper also relates to the question if there is a Nordic or a European model of welfare capitalism or not.

This paper analyses the similarities between the Dutch welfare state and the Nordic Model. We argue that the outcome, when viewed from an international comparative perspective, is rather similar. But the paths leading up to these advanced welfare states were quite different. Applying recent literature in the historical, sociological and political realm, we survey these differences, in particular focusing on the difference in the amount of state planning. Social policy aims (among which eugenetics in Sweden) and economic policy aims (such as the Rehn-Meidner Model in Sweden) are connected in order to evaluate the impact of the state. In the conclusion, we argue that beneath these different paths, there were underlying structural similarities such as the willingness to neutralize class antagonism and an ensuing collaborative attitude despite political dissension.

A very wide process of the dissemination of Sir Isaac Newton’s Mechanical and Experimental Philosophy took place in eighteenth-century England, creating an atmosphere of fascination regarding the possibilities of applying this new kind of knowledge to the necessities of productive life and to people’s general welfare. The activities of many independent or itinerant lecturers, who traveled around the country, were fundamental in the spreading of Newtonian Philosophy and the emergence of an ideal of Applied Science. These courses of 10, 12 or 16 lectures, involving the presentation of many subjects and experiments, were given to a very diversified and growing clientele, which included not only a specialized audience of manufacturers, engineers and mechanics, but also dilletante gentlemen and ladies whose sole objective was to obtain knowledge of the basic principles arising out Newton’s Principia and Opticks, according to the interpretations of these independent and itinerant lecturers.
The focus of the present paper is the intellectual trajectory of John Theophilus Desaguliers who was the Curator or “Official Experimenter” of the Royal Society of London and became a pioneer in the divulgation of Newtonianism, as well as being the most respected English independent lecturer on Mechanical and Experimental Philosophy in the first half of the eighteenth century. His personal trajectory reflected, in a way, the crossroads of Modern Science with the many learned people who were advocating or divulging it being in the middle of a transition process from an aristocratic society, based on the value of the nobility and patronage relations, to a new society established on the production and consumption of material and cultural goods which increasingly adopted the nature of merchandise.

"Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems". This is, unquestionably one of the main characteristics which distinguishes Science and Technology. Not that technology is restricted to the application and treatment of technical knowledge and our approach is clearly open to controversy and debate when we say that,within this essay, we start from an elementary definition: Technics concern the application of scientific results or, starting from its Greek definition technē(τεχυη), he application of scientific knowledge to the fields of productive activities(not limited to economic ends).
Those preliminary lines are meant to set the limits of our paper whose aim is to expound the role of both as economic history variables within a definite chronological and spatial context. We are not working on the lines of pioneer French research on technology, neither are we following the well developed anglo-saxon investigation. What constitute the backbone of our enquiry in progress concern the role and influence of science and technology in the diverging economic evolution between the two major continental european powers: France and Germany between 1830 (circa) and 1930. Two others economies : Great Britain and Switzerland acting at irregular intervals as comparative variables.
Since the paper that will be presented in Utrecht in August 2009 is part of a wider design, several sectoral papers have already been published or presented. The main object, or Ariadne thread can thus be formulated: Between 1830 and 1930( but basically between 1830 ans 1914) the relative economic relation between France and Germany experienced a global reversal in favor of the latter, bringing forth antagonistic tension, among which the rise of "Imperialism" so dear to the historians of International Relations and and unfolding into three successive wars.
This last if dramatic aspect has been treated in innumerable publications. Even if the question is ( and will always be) wide open, it it not our main purpose since our investigation concentrate on some main technical factors of the inversion helping us if not to explain, at least to understand some mechanisms and and determine how this evolution laid a heavy stress on the modernization of France.

This paper examines the entrepreneurial behavior evolution among cocoa beans growers in the Cocoa Region Bahia, Brazil, since it begins until the contemporary period. The focuses analysis is supported by the habitus notion, seen as a symbolic unification of socially attained schemas that drives the practice of social agents in a specific economic field. The employed method was the historical reconstitution of the land appropriation processes, rural work organization and technology trajectory, based on the scientific production and literature. Built on the pioneering work off supported by the commercial capital, on the self risks taken under a discreet state support, on the competence to export and on the defense of their decisive role in fostering the regional economy since the 19th century, the venture producers’ habitus has been transposed and modified through four cycles, helping to create concepts and categories facilitating the comprehension of present entrepreneurial agriculture. Although in each cycle the world vision of the cocoa producer had changed, is only after the late crisis that appear an economic agent able to survive with the cocoa sector crisis
Key words: Habitus; Cocoa beans growers; Cocoa region, Bahia, Brazil; Crisis

Taking into account the affirmation that science and technology must be taken as “economic variables“, the aim of this paper is to investigate the interplay between internationalization of Technology and economic development during the first half of the 20th century. This article examines the economic consequences of the international diffusion of technology in three countries who have a long history of technological cooperation and convergence : France, the United Kingdom and the United States,. First, although technological and scientific exchanges are not following the phases of the general economic situation, the internationalization of technology, through the transfer of knowledge, represent a permanent challenge for institutions that play a central role to promote R&D and technical knowledge within competitive international markets. Second, the paper claims that this internationalization has affected the ways by which actors, scholars and institutions (Schools of engineering, technological institutes, Universities, Academies of Science), speculate about the new directions of industrialization, considering the key role of engineers, professors and scientists who are engaged in specific and innovating projects to lead information and technological knowledge toward High-tech industries. At the same time, this part consists in tracking the ability of the French, British and US technical and scientific institutions to include themselves into the flow of the internationalization and modernization of technological information.
With a wide-ranging use of business archives, as well as university and government documents, this historical paper tend to show how a new institutionalized context had begun to play a central role in the international circulation of sciences, technologies and innovations during the first half of the 20th century. Characterizing the internationalization of Technology as an “economic process“, the paper ultimately examines the ways by which this process intervene directly in the emergence of economic convergence between countries or regions who have a wide and organized technological cooperation. This aspect touch the question of the role of independent actors and national institutions in the understanding the role of internationalization of technology as a factor for economic development. On the other hand, this question represents a field of investigation in which it is possible to speculate about the meaning of the concept of technology as an aspect of economic history

This article examines the process of technological change in the 19th century global mining industry. A historical view of the innovation chain will be considered from the perspective of the macro and microinventions concepts. France, Germany and Great Britain will form the main focus of this study as the main mining countries. As analyses of the 19th century global mining industry should have a close link with the economic history of technological change, this essay will consider the chain of innovations in global mining from a historical perspective. In other words, it means that there will be inevitably an analysis of technological changes such as innovations in prospecting, drilling and blasting operations as applicable to mining and new processes of concentrating and separating mixed ores (the process of working underground mines – mining operations – and the treatment of the ores obtained). Besides considering this gradual development of the techniques, it is relevant to evaluate how these innovations were utilized and adapted in an economy based on slavery. This kind of examination will help to determine which types of new techniques and machinery came into practical use at the time and in which forms they were introduced into Minas Gerais gold mining operations by the British companies. Thus, the aim is to highlight the information which would allow a historical study of the techniques used by the British companies in Brazil, where the first signs of some type of technological policy used historically by British mining companies in the 19th century can be witnessed.

In general the word collection defines: a set of objects or data gathered for their symbolic, material or useful value. In Spanish, French and English languages, for instance, collection is a synonymous of others words such as "conjunto", "accumulation", "réunion"; in fact a collection is an accumulation of objects of the same class, or not, realized for their study, exhibition or experimentation.
Inside this definition is possible to identify the allusion to the act to collect, which was a practice very extended during the early modern period. That practice had their first systematizing in relation to the survey of exotic lands developed by the different European institutions from 1492. In the core of this historical process the historiography have identified the developing of the Natural history, in this reason a new utilitarian dimension have enriched the comprehension of this discipline.
Specially, in the last years some important books have defined the principal aspects of the act to collecting natural specimens during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The intersection of the cultural and economics variables was crucial to understand the practices of collecting like a mechanism to stimulate the economical improvements founded on a research of the natural resources. In fact, botanical gardens and museum of are considered today like a very powerful institutional framework where Natural history produced very significant benefits to the economic improvement of the monarchies.
My paper studies the approach developed by the History of Collecting in order to identify some conceptual and thematic nucleus that can be useful to elaborate a research agenda in relation to integrate the History of science and Economic History. So, that historiography introduced a very useful distinction about the natural objects, agents, institutions, territories, etc. involved in the act to collect: an activity linked to the manual managing of the natural objects and the social circulation of the data related to the characteristics of this natural things. Consequently in front of the traditional philosophical history of science is possible to observe a new socio-cultural history of knowledge.
In my perspective History of Collecting offer a way to integrate the History of Science and the Economic history in relation to a history of knowledge. A type of approach that identifies and describes agents and their skills in a framework located beyond the scientific ideas, in other words in the level of the expertise and the experts.

As far back as the first half of the 19 Century, food was widely preserved at low temperatures produced by ice. In addition, products such as beer and butter were already becoming more popular as a result of the expanding trade in natural ice. The production, conservation and trade of ice was becoming increasingly economically important , and there was thus the pressing need to increase and especially stabilise supply. Natural ice was unable to meet requirements. Between 1850 and 1855 numerous artificial ice machines were patented in France, Germany, the UK and the USA, and the first ice factory was opened in 1860 in California.
Ice factories spread slowly at first and more rapidly later, but at the same time, the same ice-making techniques started to be applied to air-cooling. Ice was used of course for preservation and cooling, but as cold temperatures could now be obtained artificially and directly, production of ice declined and its use was mainly limited to households. This trend consolidated between the two World Wars. By the end of the Second World War, ice factories had no future ; technological development in refrigeration had removed the need for the raw material.

The standard view of U.S. technological history is that the locus of invention shifted during the early twentieth century to large firms whose in-house research laboratories were superior sites for advancing the complex technologies of the second industrial revolution. In recent years, this view has been subject to increasing criticism. At the same time, new research on equity markets during the early twentieth century suggests that smaller, more entrepreneurial enterprises were finding it easier to gain financial backing for technological discovery. We use data on the assignment (sale or transfer) of patents to explore the extent to which, and how, inventive activity was reorganized during this period. We find that two alternative modes of technological discovery developed in parallel during the early twentieth century. The first, concentrated in the Middle Atlantic region, centered on large firms which seem to have owed their prominence less to R&D labs than to their superior access to the region’s rapidly growing equity markets. The other, located mainly in the East North Central region, consisted of smaller, more entrepreneurial enterprises that drew primarily on local sources of funds. Both modes seem to have made roughly equivalent contributions to technological change during this period.

Conventional wisdom usually underestimates the important role of public research institutes and universities in successful cases of Brazilian economy. History of science and technology institutions shows a long-term process of formation of these institutions and their interactions with industrial firms, agricultural producers or society. This paper investigates historical roots of successful cases of Brazil. First, we present the late onset of National Innovation System (NSI) institutions and waves of institutional formation in Brazil. Second, we describe the history of three selected successful cases, which spans from a low-tech sector (agriculture), a medium-tech sector (steel and special metal alloys), to a high-tech sector (aircraft). These findings present new challenges for present-day developmental policies.

Les pratiques de la comptabilité privée tardent à être harmonisées en France. Il faut attendre l’Occupation et le régime de Vichy pour que la profession des experts-comptables et des comptables agréés soit organisée et pour qu’un premier Plan comptable général soit introduit. Ces réformes sont entérinées après la Libération, mais la décision d’obliger toutes les entreprises à adopter le Plan comptable général, modifié en 1947 puis en 1957, n’est pas retenue avant 1959. La généralisation effective de ce Plan n’aboutit pas avant la fin des années 1960.
La lenteur du développement de la normalisation comptable française constitue une originalité, comparée à ses principaux partenaires économiques dont les entreprises disposent de cadres comptables homogènes et s’appuient sur une profession de comptables reconnus avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La lenteur française étonne d’autant plus que l’efficacité des expériences étrangères y est souvent vantée et qu’elle ne correspond pas à l’image traditionnelle de la France qui est celle d’un pays marqué par une forte intervention de l’Etat. Il convient donc, pour la période qui précède la décision de généraliser le plan comptable en 1959, de préciser les contours de cette imperméabilité apparente du cadre comptable français aux expériences étrangères, d’en trouver les motifs et d’en analyser les effets, tant pour les entreprises que pour la croissance économique nationale.
Accountancy development and normalization in early 20th Century France: sequencing inaccessible to foreign experiences?

Abstract

Business accounting practices are late to be harmonized in France. It was not until the German occupation and the Vichy’s regime that the profession of accountants and chartered accountants has been organized and a first General Accountancy blueprint instituted. These reforms were confirmed after the “Liberation”, but the decision to oblige every business to conform to the General Accountancy Plan, successively modified in 1947 and 1957, was not applied before the end of the Nineteen Sixties.
The slowness of the development of the French accountancy normalization confers a true peculiarity in comparison with its main economic partners where businesses are disposing of an homogeneous frame of accountancy references and can rely on an accountant profession with a recognized statute before the Second Wold War. The slowness of the French experience is even more surprising when one notes that the efficacy of foreign practice is often boasted and that it does not comply with the traditional image of France as a country with a strong tradition of state intervention. Therefore, one has, in the period preceding the decision to generalize in 1959 the use of the General Accounting Plan, and in order to circumscribe the outlines of this seemingly imperviousness of the French accounting frame to foreign experiences, to find its motives and to analyse the results, for its businesses as well as for the National economic growth.

Today's global economy is built on the foundations of an earlier world economy. That world economy - created in the later nineteenth century - was to a considerable degree based on falling costs of transport and communications that were dramatic in their integrative effects. The nineteenth century revolution in communications embraced the steamship, the railway and the telegraph; however it is our contention - and a key theme of this paper - that the communications revolution was primarily maritime based. This argument is vigorously pursued and supported by an extensive analysis of the timing of transport advance by continent and country. This reveals that steamship liner services preceded the railways by some two decades in Western Europe and North America and that the gap in the rest of the world was far greater. The paper then considers some implications of transport and communications advances in relation to modernisation; trade, development and integration; business practice, and the process of globalisation in the nineteenth century. The conclusion re-affirms the significance of the maritime dimension and lays stress on the key role of Britain in the creation and sustaining of the new world economy.

In Early Modern global trade diaspora merchant networks played a large and often over-looked role that is being better explored. In contrast to the Greeks, the Armenians and the Jews despite their well-known successful global mercantile networks are not viewed as a seafaring group. What can be said about how Armenians conducted maritime trade? To what extent was their trade carried by their own ships or by those of the European companies? Several ship owning Armenian merchant princes carried trade out from Bengal. What role did a diaspora network’s maritime trade play in India in its pre-colonial relationship with the English? Very little information has surfaced about Armenian ships, which were built in India, this paper explores the present state of our knowledge. The most well known Armenian ship of the few that are documented is tied to the fate of the famous Captain Kidd, a Scot who was financed by the English as a privateer to apprehend pirates. After seizing a valuable prize Kidd was unjustly convicted as a pirate. He was hung in London in 1701 largely because of his last and richest prize, a ship qualified as an Armenian ship in his second trial, the Quedagh Merchant. The ship wreck was discovered in 2007.

The paper comprises three parts. It starts with a historiographical survey on Norwegian maritime history for the period 1870-1914. In the second section of the paper, we investigate the transformation of Norwegian shipping through a combination of a unique database on shipping statistics and qualitative sources from consular representatives in ports all over the world. Finally, we try to see how this episode in Norwegian maritime history can be interpreted through different narrative traditions and conceptual perspectives. More precisely, we seek to investigate how the combination of the particularity of the historical phenomenon and the context of the historian through prevailing ideas of history creates its own contingency for the histories to be narrated.

This paper scrutinizes the trade connections between Seville and North-West Europe in the 17th century, which were essential for the contiguous transatlantic commerce. At the beginning of the Early Modern Times, Seville stood out as the most central entrepôt of the Atlantic economy. The reason for that was the royal monopoly that the city received for all trade to and from the Indies. While the transatlantic part of the America trade of Seville has been subject to a number of investigations, the European extension has rather been neglected. In the 17th century, the trade with North-West Europe was barely in the hands of Spaniards. Instead, it was the Flemings who dominated the trade connections going to Seville. By means of selected micro-networks of companies and merchants between North-Western Europe and Seville, the connections of the backyard of the American trade will be scrutinized. The examples focus on the Flemish textile trade between cities like Antwerp, Amsterdam and Hamburg at the North Sea and Seville in the year 1620, i.e. at the heyday of Spain’s golden age. The investigated sources come from two archives: the Archivo General de Indias (AGI), containing naturalization files with information about private connections; and the Archivo de Protocolos de Seville (APS), with information about commercial networks of the merchants.

Maritime historians have reacted to the rise in Global history with mixed feelings. Many feel, with some justification, that maritime history was global long before this became the new watch word for historians. Their subject matter was always crossing traditional boundaries of national or continental historiographies. But at the same time, maritime history has often been surprisingly parochial and reluctant to embrace new approaches. It is thrust into the global sphere largely by a technological ‘accident’: waterborne transport was and is the only economically viable way of shipping large amounts of cargoes over long distances. However, the fact that maritime historians deal with a global industry in itself does not make it global. This paper tries to offer a critique of maritime history from the point of view of new global approaches. It analyses a number of challenges: overcoming the technological determinism still prevalent in maritime history, rethinking the old notions of port economies and coastal regions as somehow ‘more open-minded’, and challenging the notion of Atlantic history.

The massive mid-nineteenth century growth of pelagic whaling coincided with the expansion of European empires into the South Pacific, meaning that many of the first contacts between Europeans and Pacific Islanders occurred in the context of the whaling industry. This paper aims to reconcile whaling history – a field dominated by amateurs and one in which the few specialists are narrowly focused on particular regions, techniques and eras – with the recent trend towards the global in both maritime history and histories of empire. It asks where the whaling industry should fit in accounts of the economic and colonial expansion of Europe and America in the nineteenth century, and assesses the place within that story of interactions between whalers and indigenous peoples of the Pacific, whether aboard ships, on island shores or in colonial and metropolitan ports. After examining correspondence between whaling merchants and government officials as well as shipping arrival and departure lists for key Pacific whaling ports, I argue that whaling was indeed an important feature of colonial expansion, increasing the global reach of British, French and American influence and bringing the indigenous people of the Pacific into contact with Europeans in many new ways.

To illustrate this argument I examine two case studies, looking first at Maori participation in the New Zealand whaling industry, which began in the 1790s and peaked in the 1830s, and secondly at interaction between Native Hawaiians and visiting whalers, mostly American, from 1830-1860. In both cases I emphasise the role of Pacific Islanders in hosting visiting ships and providing them with food and hospitality; as chiefly entrepreneurs who formed commercial relationships with ship’s captains and whaling merchants; and as workers who joined shore whaling stations and ship’s crews. I also link the growth of whaling to New Zealand’s incorporation into the British Empire in 1840, and American annexation of Hawai'i, formalised in 1898, in order to show how indigenous communities actively participated in the processes of globalisation, maritime interconnection and colonial expansion.

South Asian maritime histories experienced vibrant growth (e.g. Chaudhuri 1974, Prakash 1985) at the same time that the new world and global history schools were beginning to develop. The relationship between these schools/histories suggests that European maritime expansion in the Indian Ocean world after c.1498 was pro-globalisation. This is problematic in two ways. The first is conceptual: maritime historians – and global historians focussing on the ocean (e.g. Fernandez-Armesto 2007) – adopt a vantage-point which prevents an analysis of the relationships between changing maritime and land-based commercial contacts and, hence, of the overall extent of any resultant ‘globalisation’. The second is empirical: old (e.g. Steensgaard 1974) and new (e.g. Levi 2007) research on Indo-Central Asian overland trade provides ambiguous/conflicting suggestions about the extent and significance of land-based trade relationships from the seventeenth-century onwards. This paper hence attempts the following. First, to develop a sub-continentally oriented vantage point to better understand the relationship between maritime (and land) trade history – and hence of global exchange – a model of trade-diversion and trade-creation is developed. Second, the seventeenth century Indo-Central Asian and Indo-European trades are analysed to determine whether trade-diversion (i.e. de-globalising: decrease in volume/number of global consumer-producer links) or trade-creation (i.e. pro-globalising) effects dominated as a result of maritime expansion. Thus, this paper reminds maritime historians with an interest in global history that they must appreciate the impact of changing maritime trade on established land-trade patterns, and thereby committing to “see maritime history as interacting with activities on the land all the time” (Pearson 1999:2).

A noteworthy feature of maritime transportation is the abandonment by vertically integrated oil companies of their shipping capacity. Vessels supplying crude to France under the French flag are now mostly owned by Norwegian or Belgian carriers. In 1996, Total, France’s unique "major", withdrew from the business of transporting its oil and turned to chartering. The phenomenon is all the more paradoxical in that it seems to have been set off by legislation passed in 1992 to protect the marine marchande.

The aim of this paper is to attempt to explain the reasons for the withdrawal of oil companies from the shipping sector by focusing on Total, France’s leading carrier, importer, refiner and retailer. The closure of the Suez Canal in 1967 set off a tanker building boom. Very large crude carriers (VLCC’s) became the order of the day. By the 1970’s, the world’s oil fleet was suffering from acute overcapacity. In 1974, Total stopped ordering tankers. Four years later, it began scaling down its fleet.

Using Total’s archives, the paper will seek to measure the destabilizing impact on the company of the cyclical and highly competitive international shipping market. It will also try to determine the extent to which factors other than overcapacity contributed to the process of externalization of its transportation function. What was the role of regulation, of the comparative advantage of flags of convenience and of the risks of ecological disasters ? Examination of the performance of Total in the area of transportation will begin in 1945.

Maritime expansion in the early modern period was crucial for economic development at large. However, in order to make this expansion possible, it depended on the active recruitment of labour which usually involved long-distance migration and thus led to the emergence of geographically extended labour markets. The present paper presents an overview of recruitment patterns of European nations with regard to their maritime activity in European, intercontinental and Asian waters. National recruitment patterns being the norm for most European shipping, we argue that in the early modern period some important exceptions can be discerned. First, Dutch shipping in virtually all branches, employing mixed crews from North-West Europe. Second, Northern European shipping across the Atlantic, following the Dutch recruitment pattern. Third, European shipping within Asiatic waters, employing mixed crews of European and Asian sailors.
The paper attempts to offer some first explanations for these findings. The paper argues that internationalisation did not necessarily lead to a form of class consciousness, as Rediker has suggested for the eighteenth century Atlantic. Other forms of identification, such as nationality, or local and ethnic identities, seem to have been more important. Furthermore, it is argued that despite possible problems caused by identification and loyalty in an international setting, the strategy of employing mixed crews did not hamper efficiency.

This paper presents a preliminary discussion of the involvement of the English East India Company and their competitors in the slave trade in the Indian Ocean during the late seventeenth century. Focusing on the maritime aspect of the trade allows us to look at the continuing interdependence of the areas around the Indian Ocean during the colonial period and in particular to highlight the often neglected role of Africa in the story of early modern globalisation in the East. Looking at the roles that slaves played both in a maritime context – as sailors, doctors, interpreters – and the skills they transferred between different areas of the world – in building, planting and tending certain types of crops – demonstrates both how essential the existence of unfree labour was to the development of mercantile capitalism and how crucial the experience of migration was to the transfer of skills and knowledge across the oceans.
I will discuss how the architects of European expansion conceptualised the transfers of people around the globe – in terms of the development of theories about the effects of environment and place on people and of the legacy of these early experiments for later colonial tactics of transporting workers and convict labourers between territories. I will also explore how slaves forged new alliances among themselves to resist their condition, sometimes using the same knowledge – such as of the properties of plants and languages – that made them useful to the trading companies.

Keywords: Indian Ocean, slavery, trading companies, seventeenth century

Aims: To explore slavery in the Indian Ocean and the role of the trading companies in the context of their contribution to early modern globalisation. Some scholars have investigated slavery in the Iberian maritime world from the fifteenth century century onwards and how this trade and slaves themselves shaped this world. Slavery in the territories of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) such as Cape Town and Batavia and the slave trading activities by the French following their acquisition of Mozambique and the Mascarene Islands in the mid-eighteenth century have also received serious attention in recent decades. Nevertheless, only a handful of studies have focused on the wider picture of transportation between different locations or the maritime context of the employment of many slaves. Furthermore, there has been no major study of slavery within the English East India Company. The paper therefore aims to suggest some starting points by identifying some potential resources and perspectives in which studies of the trade could be grounded.

Theoretical framework: I will make use of the potential offered by the discipline of world history for de-centring the discussion of imperial history, to discuss the movement of people across spaces without passing through or being directed from a colonial 'centre'. I will draw on ideas of environmental history and the longue durée to view the movement of slaves across the Indian Ocean in the light of longer-term social and environmental factors (such as trade winds and droughts) resulting in patterns of forced labour which the European companies became part of and altered rather than initiating. The paper will reflect recent attempts to expand the meaning of the term 'the middle passage' from its original reference to the Atlantic slave trade to signify a number of different forms of coerced migration. Like some recent studies in this field, I will emphasise the breaking of former ties constituent of identify (or 'social death') and the new alliances formed between migrants.

Empirical framework: The potential for a quantitative history of slavery in the English East India Company settlements is limited, especially given the fragmentary nature of many of the records of this period. However, records of customs levied on the trade in slaves were kept fairly regularly in Fort St George (Madras/ Chennai), meaning that it gives some indication of how significant this revenue was compared with that obtained from other items. Early censuses and lists of inhabitants on St Helena and Bencoulen give some idea of the numbers of slaves in these settlements and their occupations. It is therefore possible to make some assessment of how significant the enslaved population was in terms of revenue and work-force at least in these regions.

Sources: The main sources are the archival records of the English East India Company in the UK and overseas. These are the factory records of St Helena (South Atlantic Ocean, records in the India Office Library, British Library, London and St Helena Archives), 'Bencoulen' (Bengkulu, Sumatra, records in India Office Library), the Indian factories (Surat, Bombay, and Madras, records in the India Office and in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata). The trade of the English East India Company in this period cannot be viewed in isolation and therefore I will also draw on studies and published records of the VOC, Estado da India and Mughal Empire.

Abstract
In this article we explore organisational changes associated with the automation of non-bank financial intermediaries the UK while making a running comparison with developments in Spain. This international comparison helps to ascertain the evolution of the same organisational form in two distinct competitive environments. Changes in regulation and technological developments (particularly applications of information technology) are said to be responsible for enhancing competitiveness of retail finance. Archival research on the evolution of savings banks helps to ascertain how, prior to competitive changes taking place, participants in bank markets had to develop capabilities to compete. Moreover, assess the response of collaborative agreements to opportunities opened by technological change (in particular resolve apparent scale disadvantages to contest bank markets). Of particular interest are choices made between applications of computer technology to redefine the relation between head office and retail branches as well as between staff at retail branches and customers.

Keywords: comparative financial markets, United Kingdom, Spain, market structure, technological change, regulatory change, savings banks, banks, TSB, cajas de ahorro.

In this article we explore organisational changes associated with the automation of non-bank financial intermediaries the UK while making a running comparison with developments in Spain. This international comparison helps to ascertain the evolution of the same organisational form in two distinct competitive environments. Changes in regulation and technological developments (particularly applications of information technology) are said to be responsible for enhancing competitiveness of retail finance. Archival research on the evolution of savings banks helps to ascertain how, prior to competitive changes taking place, participants in bank markets had to develop capabilities to compete. Moreover, assess the response of collaborative agreements to opportunities opened by technological change (in particular resolve apparent scale disadvantages to contest bank markets). Of particular interest are choices made between applications of computer technology to redefine the relation between head office and retail branches as well as between staff at retail branches and customers.

Keywords: comparative financial markets, United Kingdom, Spain, market structure, technological change, regulatory change, savings banks, banks, TSB, cajas de ahorro.

This article discusses the German automation process in banking with a special view on savings-banks. Its core argument is that the German development differs from other European countries because of characteristic internal and external factors, which created a specific implementation setting with the savings banks as first movers.
As the key internal/institutional issue the paper identifies the fact that German savings banks in contrast to other European countries acted from the beginning of the 20th century as universal banks. This led to a high amount of customers and business transactions (statistically almost every household with a savings-bank account), a necessary precondition triggering the automation process quite early (scale advantages). As a consequence a sensitive awareness of technical progress in terms of enhancing competitiveness was embedded in strategic thinking.
Two significant external facts are World War II, because it destroyed old machinery (path dependencies) opening space for a modern technique development path. A second central fact was the early implementation of cashless wage-payment, based not on a cheque-system as for instance in Britain, but on giro. This structure strengthened automation issues once more including the commitment of the savings-banks as giro-business market-leaders. As a result an individual German automation path developed with the savings-banks as first movers depending on economies of scale and scope.
Keywords: Germany, financial markets, market structures, technological change, automation, savings banks, banks, giro
This research benefited to from support of Sparkasse Saarbrücken as well as Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband (DSGV) including access to historical records.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the relation between the implementation of information and communication technology (ICT) and organizational change in the Swedish banking industry from 1975 to 2003. The analytical framework focuses on the complementary nature between major trends in the organization of work and general changes of computer technology during the last 40 years. The hierarchical technical structure of main frame computers are expected to further deepen the Tayloristic mode of organization, while the introduction of PC based LAN during the 1980s is supposed to strengthen an organizational transition towards a Post-Tayloristic mode. In terms of skill requirements for the permanent workforce a de-skilling/re-skilling hypothesis is formulated. The reconstruction of the computer technology investments in the Swedish banking sector is done by using company material as well as published data on the development of machinery capital stocks. Three waves of investments are identified. The investigation of the organizational development is conducted by using wage statistics jointly produced by BAO, Bankinstitutens arbetsgivarorganisation (The Employers’ Association of the Swedish Banking Institutions) and the union organizing bank employees, Finansförbundet. Analyzing the organizational data does not confirm the proposed hypothesis, but highlight the complex interaction between the technical and organizational development.

This paper investigates the early years of Britain’s National Giro, which opened for business in 1968. We place Giro’s establishment and development in the wider political, social and economic context, addressing commercial and technological issues at a time when techno-nationalist and wider macro-management concerns were far stronger than at the present time. The Giro was established to operate a national payments system, making use of the post office branch network. It provided an alternative to the traditional cheque-clearing system operated by the major commercial banks, which British governments in the 1960s regarded as uncompetitive, and inefficient hoarders of labour and constant threats to government attempts to control inflation. We add to the growing literature examining the role played by technology in financial institutions and extend existing scholarship by examining this unusual business organisation: the Giro was established as a state-owned financial institution, rare in Britain; and it was designed to function from the outset on a computerized basis, a key element in the government’s techno-nationalist stance (promoting Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of the scientific revolution’), which sought to nurture the British computer industry against US competition.

French banks faced harsh organisational problems in the 1910s-1920s when the scale of their operations progressed a lot because of the broadening of customership among personal investors and of the boom of discount activities, both requiring larger book-keeping. In the meanwhile, because of inflation and trade-union impulse, wages had to be increased. This led to to a strategy of sharing information with German banks, which seem to have earlier developed the process of mechanisation of book-keeping activities. Knowledge exchanges were set up with German (and Belgian) bankers so as to accelerate the transfer of organising (re-engineering) skills and data-processing. Banks of Alsace were pionneers in such a renewal; but several big banks did not wait long to introduce a policy of investing in machines and in new plat-forms of tackling data. The 1920s and the 1930s were a key stage of the transformation of French banks into actual services “organisations”. A further stage took place in the 1950s when the blooming accounting operations pushed managers into feeling drastic ceilings to the capacity of the “classical” machines, which led them to join the researches and tests about the first “computers”, almost ready at the turn of the 1960s.

Adoption of mainframe computers in Mexican banking began in 1965 opening a route of continuous technological change in the industry. The central argument of this chapter is that computerization of retail operations and data processing responded to the massification of bank services, and that this technological platform allowed building an automated payments system in that country. The massification of services, in particular savings and checking accounts and the introduction of credit cards, required systems that gave speed and precision to the operations. However, it is unclear how the implementation of computer technology represented a strategy to reduce operational costs of banks. At the end of the period under study, the Mexican largest banks had a nationwide, but fragmented technological platform. The integration of different, fragmented systems of this platform resulted in the creation of an automated payments system.
The chapter also shows how computerization required redesigning various operational methods and how banks used adoption of computers as an emblem of modernization. The chapter centers in the experiences of the two largest Mexican banks, Bancomer (today part of BBVA group) and Banamex (today part of Citigroup), due to their leadership in implementation of computer systems and their predominant market share in the Mexican banking industry. The research is based in archival sources of banks, journalistic reports, and interviews.

Keywords: Commercial Banks, Latin America, Bank computerization, Payments system

Comments:
Chronology: 1965-1990, but it briefly explains developments since early 1940s
Type of institutions: Commercial banks
Geographical area: Latin America, Mexico
Nature of the technological adoption: firm/industry phenomena

The paper explores the link between the creation of a unified money market in Japan (in the 1880s) and its pinnacle, the first, nationwide communication network the Postal Savings System (PSS). The first part of the paper elaborates the rationale behind creating a universal language via money and its specific forms such as the remittance system, money transfer and the deposit collecting/centralizing system. The second part offers an overview how the colonial period helped to develop an Asian-based monetary network. The last part gives a technical and technological outlook on the largest pool of deposited assets in the world and the main reasons to have its one century long history.

The massification of retail finance in the 1980s relied on the successful deployment of automated teller machines (ATM) and on-line real-time (OLRT) computing during the 1960s and 1970s. We document how the deployment of ATM networks interweaved with the adoption of OLRT computing in Sweden and the UK (alongside a running comparison of similar developments in the USA). Low transaction volume and small retail bank networks facilitated the early adoption of OLRT by savings banks in America. Although they started their computerisation rather ‘late’, British savings banks benefited from adopting ‘tried and tested’ technology while overtaking clearing banks. Meanwhile, Swedish savings banks spearheaded technological change in Europe. In documenting cases of organizational change in Sweden and the UK, we depart from predominant view that considers the development of OLRT in a single move. We put forward the idea that there are specific conditions inside banking organisations that require considering on-line (OL) and on-line real-time (OLRT) as two distinct stage of development in adoption of computer technology. As a result, we show how in the process of diffusion of OLRT computing enabled the transformation of cash dispensers into ATM at the same time that European financial intermediaries were active in shaping technological change.

At the beginning of the 1960s Barclays became the first British bank to open a computer centre. In this paper I trace the life of this building starting with its official opening on 4 July 1961 and ending with its protracted closure a decade later. From initial status as the most advanced bank bookkeeping system in the world serving as a highly visible symbol of the bank’s technological power, to a final repurposing of its grandiose reception as a distribution point for pre- and post-decimalisation output, the building’s various meanings are revealed. Making use of written, oral, and visual sources I explore the centre’s spatial characteristics, its relation to the distributed structure of the branch, and its place as a first dedicated working home for a newly emerging computing subculture. A blend of multiple perspectives internally from the top down and bottom up, and externally from customer and competitor, offer an analysis that uncovers the part played by the first computer centre place in the banking automation race.

This paper presents an overview of how mechanization and automation affected Rabobank's financial services in the period from 1945 to 2000. Rabobank is a broad financial services provider based on cooperative principles. Its roots lie in local cooperative farmers' credit banks which were founded at the end of the nineteenth century and in the two central banks of 1898. The cooperative organizational structure, whereby the autonomous local banks are members of the central organization, gives Rabobank a unique vitality and has distinguished it from other banks from the very beginning.

Key words: automation, co-operative and mutual
banks, inter-bank collaboration, The Netherlands

Do cultural factors explain the preference for sons in India? If there is a gender bias in the demand for children, this would reflect in the sex ratio in the young. However, if there are more males than females in the young population, it would lead to imbalances in the marriage as males are unable to find partners. This paper uses the evidence from the marriage market in India to argue that even when a significant proportion of males are unable to find partners, this does not create incentives to correct preference for sons. On the contrary these biases persist over time and suggest that there are multiple equilibria.
Using data from Indian censuses from 1901 and 1931, I find that there is a regional variation in the son preference and in the outcomes in the marriage market. Regions with a high proportion of single males in the population are also the regions that show a clear preference for sons. The Northern states stand out in this respect. I use evidence from the sex ratio in the age-group 0-5 and the marriage rate in the age group 45-50 to show that there are regional variations in marriage rate and sex-bias in the demand for children.
A second type of incentives arises if upper castes have better economic conditions. Then the males in this social group would find it easier to find partners and the singles should be concentrated in the lower castes. However there are no clear differences across castes within a region. The regional differences persist over time and reflect the importance of cultural preferences.

Recent contributions on the comparative history of law and long-term development suggest a divergence in the pattern of evolution of property and contract law. In the west, modern law had endogenous roots, in the nonwest law had exogenous roots. In the received narratives, legislative momentum in the non-western and colonial worlds was shaped by European colonialism itself, and the institutional heritage of the western societies. This view has been questioned by others who point at the indigenous sources of law-making in the non-west, especially that part of the colonial world which had a well-developed states system when colonization began. The possible consequences of an almost deliberate traditionalism in these areas remain open to question.

India is a good case-study of the conservative bias in colonial legislation. In this paper I show that the conservative bias was indeed present to begin with, and yet it proved unsustainable in the long run because of an inherent contradiction. In framing property rights, colonists in India tried to make the new rule of law consistent with Indian custom, broadly understood to mean privileging community rights over individual rights. The goal was to preserve allegiances toward family, kin, and lineage, and keep jointly worked assets together. Impartible inheritance of property was strengthened in law. In another respect, however, the British did not follow the Indian precedence at all. Even while trying to privilege Sanskrit and Persian codes, which they believed had upheld the superior rights of the community, the British Indian law tried to create a single judicial process, streamline and validate procedure, and uphold the authority of the new courts of justice over all others. A single referee oversaw many players.

In this case, each tried to play by own rules. Given the diversity of the society, there were not one but many legal codes. Translating these codes into a single law book was a never-ending project. Communities competitively claimed own form of property rights. Admission of impartible inheritance of property, for example, opened a flood-gate of claims to distinctive customs, and also led to conflicts between individual and collective interests. In commercial law, the rule of moral codes upheld by caste elders was incompatible with the demands of impersonal exchange in a globalizing economy. In short, the contradictory endeavour slowed down the judicial process and made it expensive in terms of time and money. In the second half of the nineteenth century, legal evolution adapted to these anomalies by increasingly distancing itself from custom. In other words, an Anglo-Indian hybrid gave up its ties with the Indian civil codes and converged towards a common law framework through the nineteenth century.

The paper traces this evolution and draws inferences based on this story on the role of law in the genesis of modern world inequality.

Despite the centralized nature of the fiscal system in colonial India, public educational expenditures varied dramatically across regions with the western and southern provinces spending three to four times as much as the eastern provinces. A significant portion of the interregional differences was due to historical differences in land taxes, an important source of provincial revenues in the 19th and early 20th century. Provinces with access to higher public revenues such as Bombay developed a large network of public schools more accessible to the broader population, while provinces such as Bengal with lower revenues relied heavily on private funding, which lead to a remarkable growth in English medium secondary schools and colleges heavily favored by Indian upper castes and landed elites. Although public spending influenced the direction of school development (public or private), the effects on overall literacy are surprisingly small in the colonial period.

As politics is pervaded by caste considerations and use of caste in public policy is growing in India, recent academic debates have focused mainly on three issues, namely, the ritual hierarchy of castes, the formation of caste identities and the colonial impact on the ritual hierarchy and identity formation. In the ever-growing literature caste is being depicted as an essentially non-economic phenomenon. Status rankings and social dynamics in India are supposed to be largely unrelated to economic forces. On the other hand, the use of caste in public policy is sought to be justified on the unsubstantiated claim that caste indicates deprivation. Micro-level empirical studies that enquire into the relation between caste and economy come up with mutually contradictory inferences, as is expected in a large, diverse country. This is the first attempt to analyze the link between ritual and economic status of castes at the macro-level, in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, and to relate it to the politics of caste. It uses the hitherto neglected aggregate quantitative data available in the censuses. It devises a new index, using the work participation rate as an inverse indicator, of economic status. This study discovers a close and complex association between ritual rank, economic position and political power of castes. The use of caste as an indicator of deprivation and hence its use in public policy are shown to lack empirical basis.

This paper frames the mid-eighteenth century transition to British colonial rule as a function of growing demand for economic surplus. British agency at the time of the Battle of Plassey is not viewed as the unauthorized excess of a handful of mavericks. I explore how the “visible hand of management” helped draw empire out of the material aspirations of Company management and employees.

In the vast literature on the East India Company’s conquest of India, two reasons for its success are usually emphasized: its military power, and its success at coalition formation. There is, however, little systematic analysis of the relationship between these two factors. We examine a crucial episode in which Company defeated Tipu Sultan, often regarded its most formidable foe, with the critical support of Indian allies. Our analysis suggests that, as the Company and Tipu competed for support, military strength played an ambiguous role: Tipu likely suffered from being “too strong,” whereas the Company was “weak enough.” With a slightly different allocation of military power the Company’s domination of the subcontinent could, at least, have been delayed significantly.

Gas represents a unique case in the field of public services. On the one hand, it was the first urban networked infrastructure and on the other, the energy and environmental crisis that began in the 1970s relaunched its role among the energy sources. In Spain, its course has been discontinuous, ever since networks were dismantled in the 1940s-1950s in most regions and had to be rebuilt in order to distribute natural gas since the 1990s. The majority of studies on the implementation of gas in Spain are usually local case studies written by executives of the gas companies themselves and many do not go beyond the Civil War period (1936-39). The main objective of this paper is to trace the evolutionary lines of gas in the long term in a Spanish region, Galicia, which is representative, but also different from the most developed areas, such as Catalonia, which are usually more studied. The paper is structured, following a chronological order, in four major stages: the age of monopoly, the beginning of electric competition, the defeat by electricity, and the final decline.

The changing topography and skyline of cities in Latin America, even more than those of Western Europe and the East Coast of the USA, were triggered by railways and utility companies. In Latin America, ‘factory’ chimneys were much more likely to be those of power companies than manufacturing plant. If taxes on foreign trade funded the construction of Paris-style boulevards, the laying out of parks and the creation of ‘model’ suburbs, the motivation for driving new streets and avenues through the gird layout of city centres largely unchanged since colonial times was the construction of tramways. Tramways necessitated the remodelling of city centres and gave access to the centre from salubrious suburbs. Railway termini - the ‘cathedrals’ of the nineteenth century - similarly drove the re-modelling of city centres and added a new dimension to public spaces. Railway termini, and associated depôts and worker housing, frequently located around the periphery of historic city centres, further changed the economic and social geography of the city, not least because they were often constructed on land previously occupied by the socially marginalised. As such, stations, marshalling yards and repair shops became symbols of economic and social modernisation - obliterating inconvenient reminders of an earlier, less ordered age.

This paper will offer stylised accounts of urban remodelling during the golden age of export-led growth. It will explore the restructuring of cities occasioned by the utilities boom of the post-1870s decades, a rapid and often socially brutal reconfiguring of cityscapes that frequently served as a vehicle for larger projects of social engineering.

This paper is devoted to analysing the electricity market of the city of Porto since the first contract, signed by Serviços Municipalisados de Gás e Electricidade do Porto (SMGE) and the União Electrica Portuguesa (UEP), to the third one in 1938. During these years, the city enjoyed the use of hydro-electricity and a public regulatory system, but the electrification process did not overcome its past backwardness in terms of energy consumption. These pages highlight the importance of the evolution of electricity prices during these years and the responsibility of the three institutional actors involved in this market –firms, municipality and the state—for its persistent high level during the inter-war period in Porto. Moreover, in these institutions, two prominent Portuguese technicians were in charge of the two boarding committees of the Municipality and the State. They were Ezequiel de Campos and Ferreira Dias and they left the best of their works in these organisms. Entrepreneurial sources from the SMGE and UEP are combined with some evidence from the printed books of Ezequiel Campos and the prolific Archive of Ferreira Dias.

The proposed presentation focuses on the organisation of space via the economic networks. In our perspective an economic networks includes technical functions: more specifically, a bank’s network is been developed and bisected in specific geographical territories, according to each institution politics. A bank’s network creates an economic territory, but in the same time is a presupposition of urbanity: the economic functions are identified to the notion of the city as an economic organism. On the other hand, the concept of technical networks includes the social perception and the individual experience of space.
Therefore, so as to elaborate the main axes of the presentation both theorical and empirical aspect will be included in our methodological optic. In this context, the technological progress is considered as a repercussion but also as a precondition of economic and political modernization. So as to elaborate the above mentioned issues, will be presented a detailed analysis referring to the construction of the Agricultural Bank of Greece’ network during the 1930’s. Our purpose is to focus on the Agricultural’s Bank network as an evidence of the State’s agricultural policy and as a structure that organize enlarged geographical territories, urban or rural.

By the end of the 19th century, when Argentina entered into the international markets as an exporter of primary goods, major port cities set about the building of urban utility networks. From 1880 to 1930, the economic and demographic growth of Buenos Aires and Rosario created expanding markets that attracted the foreign direct investment in public utilities. Tramway, electricity and water systems were mostly franchised to British, German and Belgian companies. On the other hand, the slower growth rate of Cordoba's city prevented the electric system from reaching the optimal load factor and network effects were restricted. Therefore, the pattern of evolution of technological systems in port cities diverged from the systems developed in other urban centers.
The paper compares the historical development of electric utilities in Buenos Aires, Rosario and Córdoba from the creation of urban networks owned by foreign companies until the nationalization of the systems. Based on government reports and statistics, company files and annual reports, the relation between markets, technology and regulatory frameworks is also evaluated.

This paper aims to explain the process of change and modernisation that experienced Spanish cities in the period between 1875 and 1936. This profound transformation was in the demolition of old walls and the route of the new ensanches, the arrival of the railway, the development of new means of transport as the tram or the installation of electricity grids and gas. These new economic sectors have been very studied from different points of view. Conversely, a new sector such as water in which economic, legal, urban and ecological interests converge has gone unnoticed through the modern historiography. The implementation of networks at home supply demanded agglutinate public and private interests and can serve as indicator showing the degree of modernization of Spanish cities.

Since the 1880s the electrification of Mexico proceeded principally in the capital and other big cities, as well as in nearby mines, factories, and export crop plantations. Urban shanty towns and rural areas were neglected. Electric power plants and systems had initially been set up by small local companies of Mexicans and immigrants, which later often were acquired by financially stronger free-standing companies. These became controlled from the 1920s onwards by big multinational electric holdings, to form economies of scale. The most important one was SOFINA of Brussels, active by its subsidiaries in the central parts of Mexico, the second largest one was American and Foreign Power of New York, active in the east, northeast, southeast, and the north of the country. Between 1940 and 1967 the Federal Government of Mexico acquired the foreign electric power and tramway companies, to get the licences back and to establish national systems and norms in the industry. The capital of the free-standing companies and the electric holdings was raised by selling shares and bonds on the financial markets, initially in London and Toronto, later more and more in New York. From 1946 onwards the foreign controlled Mexican subsidiaries obtained new capital only in form of foreign loans of the Export-Import Bank and later the World Bank (both of Washington, D.C.), guaranteed by the Federal Government of Mexico. In most big cities of Mexico the the electric power company and the tramways became integrated. In the 1920s and 1930s the tramways were confronted by the increasing competition of cheaper bus lines. They ran into deficits and therefore had to be sold to cooperatives or public (municipal or state) owners.

Brazilian economy in early 20th century underwent deep changes: the development of national agricultural export trade and increased foreign investments in Latin America, which allowed expanding the urbanization and industrialization process. One of the most visible features of Brazilian cities’ modernization was that of energy power to public and domestic lighting and to tramway systems and industries. Conflicts between a Canadian and a Brazilian company (Light and CBBE) over the supply of urban public services to Brazil’s main economic cities – Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador – mirror the contradictions in the country’s capitalism formation during the first decades of the 20th century. Hence, this paper aimed to rebuild the conflicts between Light and CBEE over the utilities during the beginning of the 20th century. The methodology consisted of an extensive search through the newspapers of that period, Council Town discourses and the companies’ reports besides a review of the related literature on the topic.

Gas represents a unique case in the field of public services. On the one hand, it was the first urban networked infrastructure and on the other, the energy and environmental crisis that began in the 1970s relaunched its role among the energy sources. In Spain, its course has been discontinuous, ever since networks were dismantled in the 1940s-1950s in most regions and had to be rebuilt in order to distribute natural gas since the 1990s. The majority of studies on the implementation of gas in Spain are usually local case studies written by executives of the gas companies themselves and many do not go beyond the Civil War period (1936-39). The main objective of this paper is to trace the evolutionary lines of gas in the long term in a Spanish region, Galicia, which is representative, but also different from the most developed areas, such as Catalonia, which are usually more studied. The paper is structured, following a chronological order, in four major stages: the age of monopoly, the beginning of electric competition, the defeat by electricity, and the final decline.

One of the outstanding phenomena in the history of the great Argentine cities, and particularly the city of Buenos Aires, since the end of the XIXth century, has been the construction and modernization of the urban infrastructure. In Buenos Aires, contrary to what happened in other cases, a National State division was in charge of water and drainage works in this city as well as in many other cities of the interior of the country. The transformation of this division into an autonomous public enterprise, Obras Sanitarias de la Nación, coincided with the execution of a most ambitious project of new waterworks in the city of Buenos Aires, which took place during the second and third decades of the XXth century. In this study we examine the technical, financial and economic characteristics of the project, the political and institutional background of the execution of the plan, and the difficulties encountered with at the beginning of the First World War. In particular, the way the war affected the enterprise, as well as the organizational changes required by the new scale of the operation. The participation of the staff of engineers is also examined in relation to the running of the enterprise, its degree of autonomy from the political power, and the way they managed to become a techno-burocratic elite. This study is based on a series of published and unpublished sources belonging to this institution and available at the Archivo General de la Nación Argentina .

From the beginning of the modern water supply in Lisbon, in 1858, and until 1974, waterworks in the Portuguese capital city were run by a private company. This long-term prevalence of private management did not imply the absence of disputes over the conditions and quality of water supply.
This paper tries to identify the motives behind this recurrent conflict, as well as the moments when it breaks out. The reasons for the absence of municipalisation – although strongly supported by the city council – will be identified and discussed. A complex web of motives emerges as an explanation for the lack of municipalisation. However, financial and technological reasons are presented as the main motives preventing municipalisation in late nineteenth-century Lisbon.

In October 1945, the Soviet Military Administration gave the order to put the large companies unter sequester. Interim operations managers were installed, which mostly came from trade unions. At the same time, denazification was put in the hands of administrative commissions, that superseded the former antifascist committees. Their actions concentrated on administrative staff and on formely state-owned companies such as the railways and the postal service. Formerly privatly owned companies were less affected. Even when the system of denazification commissions was restructured in summer 1947, the economic sector was hardly concerned. The official end of denazification was declared in March 1948. The administrative commissions were dissolved and the major part of former Nazi activists was amnestied.

But the purge did not stop at that point. On the contrary, in the first months of 1948 decisive steps were taken to put the industry under closer state control. First of all, the nationalisation of the industry was finalised, which had begun with the referendum in Saxony of June 1946. The United-Socialist Party SED tried to extend its power on the nationalised sector of the industry especially. The union groups within the entreprises were taken over by SED members. In large companies, SED-party organisations were created undertaking the task of controlling and selecting staff. Several cases in different industrial branches reveal that the years 1948 and 1949 were decisive of the changes within the business elite. Sometimes, Nazi-collaboration was used as a subterfuge to legitimate dismissals or downgradings for political reasons. On the other hand, decisions had to be made as to who was acceptable to be managerial staff. In the GDR, political reliableness was the main reason for the selection of personnel. It can be argued, that the result of this was a lack of economic know-how among leading business managers.

The "épuration" (purges) of French economic elites after the Vichy regime and the collaboration with nazi Germany is usually considered as a failure : very little entrepreneurs and managers would have been sentenced. It is true that definitive penalties and exclusions from the business world were very little. But even if they mostly ended well for the people concerned, an impressive amount of processes of different types (judicial, professional and financial ones) were engaged after the Libération. A lot of "patrons" were temporally fired from their positions and even arrested. The procedures were long and it often took years until their situation would be clarified. Even if they could later come back, their image in the society and their power in their firm were not unaffected. The importance of the "nationalisations" contributed also to changes in leading groups.

The paper discusses how retribution against Nazi collaborators contributed to the process of economic transformation in Czechoslovakia after World War II. The focus will be set on wild retribution within the factories and on the institution of National Administration, which paved the way for the nationalization of banks and industries in autumn 1945.

The short version of the Norwegian story is that the occupation did
not imply or lead to any particular replacement of pre war economic elites despite extensive economic cooperation and collaboration among many members of the economic elite. The extensive character of the economic cooperation and collaboration with the German during the occupation and especially the voluntary one in the first part of war made it politically and economically impossible to instigate any wide ranging purge of economic collaborators within the prewar elite.

This contribution to the session will try to show the continuity and discontinuity of the economic elites in Poland after WWI by the example of the Ministries of Industry and the planning authorities. In this context the iron and steel branch will be particularly analyzed, and an excursus to the level of single companies seems to be reasonable – here by the example of the model investment of the Six-Years-Plan, the iron and steel works of Nowa Huta. It is undebated that in the course of Socialist transformation Poland´s Communist Party played an essential role also at single industrial works and strongly influenced the occupation of leading positions. However, the example of Nowa Huta shows that even at the level of single companies a continuity of the economic elites from the inter-war period was possible and even necessary.

In Denmark, only minor changes took place in the economic elite after the liberation. Retributions with economic collaborators were dealt with in the legal system, and business managers who had been involved in pro-German political activities during the occupation withdrew to their firms’ headquarters and kept a low profile. With Nazism defeated, other ideational forces of integration surfaced as prewar anti-Communist feelings and activities were invigorated. Anti-Communism became an important integrational factor among Danish business leaders during the immediate postwar years.

This study attempts to revaluate the role of different factors which could have led to the long decline of the Paris Bourse after its past heyday.Paris, considered until 1914 to be the second most important international financial centre after London in terms of trading volumes and capitalization, declined more sharply than other centres up to the Second World War. This approach will help us to identify the decisive factors in the attractiveness, or lack of attractiveness, of a financial centre, since decline and crisis lend us fresh insight into the dynamics of financial markets
A combination of reasons, changing from period to period, seems to explain the decline of Paris: regulation and taxation naturally, but also defects in organisation reflected in the division into three distinct markets, one of which was secured but weak, the second dynamic but narrow, and the third profitable but risky. Moreover, the lack of a short term market and of liquidity contributed to keep Paris far behind its two main competitors, London and New York. So it appears that institutional factors, organisational structures and financial policy are the main explanations for the decline of Paris as an international financial centre. Yet, similar structures successfully existed before the War and in other countries. But in the post-war environment defects became apparent which were reinforced by the unstable Interwar context, the end of the Gold Standard and the danger of inflation. The changing international context revealed the weakness of the whole edifice, and policy makers provided incapable of introducing timely and effective reforms.

The main objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of the global reach of international banking flows in the two decades prior to the debt crisis of the early 1980s, which marked the end of the first postwar wave of financial globalization. Indeed, the rise of wholesale cross-border and/or cross-currency lending by international banks was the trademark of the re-emergence of global finance. The international money market based on Eurocurrencies, in which Eurodollars played a dominant role, acted as a powerful conduit of global redistribution of international liquidity. The early literature on Eurocurrency markets discussed systematically the issue of the geographical origins and destinations of international banking flows—a complicated matter, as the long chain of interbank lending made it hard to identify prime suppliers and final borrowers. However, no systematic and comprehensive picture of the geographical structure of cross-border flows was ever provided. By using the BIS statistics (covering G-10 countries plus Switzerland and other small European countries), complemented by the World Financial Markets statistics by Morgan Guaranty (with a broader geographical coverage, encompassing Canada, Japan and off-shore centres), the paper aims to reconstruct the geography of international banking flows, as well as to explore empirically their relationship with trade flows and other aspects of the post-war globalization.

The St. Petersburg Exchange was smaller than exchanges in London, Paris and Berlin, where thousands of securities were traded, but it played a significant force in Russian financial markets. At the end of 1912, there were 295 share issues listed in St. Petersburg, while at the same time there were 480 share issues listed in New York and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had been published for more than a dozen years . Despite the significant number of issues traded in St. Petersburg, we are not aware of any attempts to construct a stock index reflecting the dynamics of Russian share prices. This paper presents our work in constructing such an index for the period of 1897-1914. To a large degree this paper became possible due to the efforts of the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management to collect historical data on stock quotations. One of the databases available at the Center’s website contains price quotation on the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange from 1865 to 1914 (SPSE database).
The paper is organized as follows. Section I provides a brief description of the St. Petersburg Exchange and Russian corporations before 1914. In Section II we describe the construction of the St. Petersburg industrial stock index. Section III reviews index dynamics and its connection to economic development of Russia, and provides a conclusion in light of our findings.

Using archives, secondary sources and interviews, this paper provides a broad-brush picture of structural evolutions in primary markets for foreign government debt. Our focus is the period 1815 to today. We discuss persistence and transformations in what we identify as the four critical steps of the issue process: Prospecting, Planning, Placing and Post-Issue Open Market Operations. One important finding of this study is that in the 19th century, the predominant pattern was the firm taking system which incurred more risk for underwriters and forced them be more selective in the choice of bonds they introduced. After the interwar period, with the emergence of rating agencies, investment banks gave up this function and focused more narrowly on liquidity services: Today, the best efforts system is predominant and the earlier gate-keeping role of intermediaries has been outsourced enabling underwriting to become more competitive and less selective.

Contested takeovers were not invented after World War Two but were common in many countries in the globalised capital markets before World War One. This paper seeks to explain where, why and how they were then suppressed everywhere for decades.

In this paper particular attention is paid to the role of merchant and investment bankers on both sides of the Atlantic who were key actors in establishing bridges between the financial markets of Latin America and those of Europe in the 1880's, a period sometimes described as an early stage of financial globalization. The focus is on Argentina because it was the largest debtor in Latin America in this decade and because it was able to place bonds on different European financial markets, including London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels. The main argument of the paper is that a full understanding of international capital flows requires an understanding of the dynamics of actors in both the emerging financial markets of debtor states and in the mature financial markets of the main capital supplying nations. A comparative review of Argentine international bond issues in the 1880s reveals the key role of local merchant bankers in establishing alliances with European bankers that were essential to placement of loans as well as to the increase of foreign direct investments.

Over the course of the 20th century there appears to have been competition between financial centres for prime position within the global economy. Before the First World War this was seen to involve London meeting a challenge from Paris and the Berlin. Between the wars the battle was seen to be between London and New york though Paris stages a brief recovery in the late 1920s. After the Second World War the competition was between New York and London with Tokyo appearing on the scene from the 1960s. This paper questions whether financial centres actually compete with each other by taking stock exchanges as an example. Each major financial centre had a stock exchange that provided a forum for the trading of securities. However, there was a strong home bias to the securities they traded so that they tended to complement rather than compete with each other

This paper is concerned with the relationship
between government intervention, especially
in the field of diplomacy and international relations, and the issue of foreign loans on
the leading financial centres. The issue is discussed through the analysis of a
particular case study: the impact of Romanian political considerations on the initiatives
taken by the Banque de France and the Bank of England in order to stabilize the leu in
the late 1920s. Initially a technical problem, the stabilization of the Romanian leu
turned into a test case for the political and financial influence of the British and
French central banks in the region within the context of a renewed rivalry between London
and Paris as international financial centres.
Invited to cooperate in the stabilization of the leu in June 1927, Emile Moreau, Governor
of the Banque de France and Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, approached the problem from a different perspective. Norman considered that the League of Nations’ assistance and supervision was the proper route for the Romanian government to take, while Moreau favoured a credit from the central banks led by the Banque de France.
Moreau’s initiative, supported by the Quai d’Orsay, eventually caused the Romanian
government, in July 1927, to break negotiations with the League of Nations (started a
year earlier on Norman’s recommendation) and to officially ask the Banque de France,
against Norman’s opposition, to lead the stabilization of the leu. The leu was stabilized in February 1929 by a consortium of central banks led by the Banque de France.

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of tremendous expansion in international banking and financial activity through the expansion of international networks, particularly by US banks, and by product innovations designed to cope with exchange rate and interest rate instability and to evade regulation. While London continued to dominate as the major international financial centre with New York closely behind, other IFCs emerged or re-emerged in this new and challenging environment. The characteristics of these new IFCs were often very different from the traditional centres of London, New York and Paris which had grown more organically from international commercial centres and were part of large domestic economies. This paper explores Hong Kong’s advantages as an IFC with particular focus on the regulatory environment, which both helped and hindered the development of banking and financial markets, and on how the changing nature of international financial activity and international financial regulation promoted the development of off-shore centres.

-International capital markets were very slow in recovering from the effects of the crises of the ‘thirties and of their virtually complete suspension during the Second World War. For a long time during the postwar period general conditions did not favour a resumption of their activities, even though two of the markets, New York and Zurich, emerged from the war more or less unimpaired. In London, large foreign sterling balances, exchange controls, currency uncertainties and political uncertainties resulting from the cold war tended to discourage for a long time a resumption of foreign issues.
The generally accepted view of the relatively insignificant part played by the Paris Bourse on the international scene after the Second World War was first formulated in the 1950s and has been more or less continually put forward until the seventies. In comparison with major international financial centers like London, New York or even Zurich, the French financial market in the 1950s and 1960s was parochial. Capital resources available for foreign loans were curtailed during the post war period partly by the effect of creeping inflation and partly by post war equalitarianism as a result of which a smaller proportion of incomes tended to be saved.
The main aim of this paper is to try to explore how, despite the very severe control of the State on the international flows of capital, and the very respective attitude of the big nationalized banks, the French Private banks (the so-called “banques d’affaires”) were able and practically the soles in the French banking system to lobby afford the State administration and to use their historic contacts with international bank system in order to reopening the French financial market and to work towards the direction of a more unified European financial market. In a brief comparison, I’ll discuss the “ways and means” other European markets follow towards international activity. I have benefited from The Crédit Lyonnais Archives (Notes de conversations), and from the oral testimony of Robert Jablon, which was at the core of the revival of de Rothschild Frères, as a “banque d’affaires”, from 1945 until his retirement of the bank in 1975 .

As a result of changes wrought by World War I, by the 1920s New York replaced London as the leading international financial center. But the USA had become the world's largest economy at least four decades earlier, and on the eve of the war the US financial system was considerably larger than that of any other country. So why wasn't leadership established earlier? The paper documents and compares the relative sizes of major national financial systems in the early 20th century. At that time, the USA lacked a central bank, and its financial system focused almost exclusively on financing the country's rapid economic growth. Those conditions were altered dramatically when the war broke out in Europe, and in short order Wall Street became the leading financial center.

We study the emergence of the Brussels stock market in the 1830s, and we find that a) there was an incorporation boom, not a price bubble (prices were in line with the actual dividends paid); b) the size of the underwriter had a crucial role in determining the success of the issue and its equilibrium price; c) surprisingly, industrial stocks had a very low (and sometimes even negative) equity premium with respect to Government bonds, depending on the identity of the underwriter. We explain this by showing that A) the structure of the primary market created incentives for underwriters to multiply new IPOs; B) informational cascade effects were triggered by underwriters through noisy signalling (dividend and price signals), which helped enhancing the success of new issues; C) universal banks’ intra-group policies helped defending their own brand, and thus the maintenance of moderate equity premia. The role of universal banks as introducers of new asset classes does emerge: the subsequent internationalization of the Brussels market since the 1850s also took place thanks to the action of these intermediaries.

Political mobilization of peasant masses does not automatically mean a democratization of the respective countries if it is not accompanied by an integration of these strata of population into existing democratic institutions. In East Central Europe during the interwar period agrarianism emerged as an ideology that wanted peasants to be the core of societal and state structures and agriculture to be the motor of economic development. It was characterized by the idea of a third way, that means to offer an alternative ideology for the often still traditionally living peasant masses in the agrarian East that were said to be threatened by capitalist liberalism as well as Eastern communism. Its strength was proved by the founding of several Internationals, such as the Green International in Prague (1923-1938) or the Christian Green International in Vienna (1922-1926). In 1923 the ideological landscape was split by the Red Peasant International (KrestIntern) in Moscow, a suborganization of the third Communist International, which was transformed into the European Peasant Committee during the collectivization in 1929. Finally, there were failed national socialist efforts to found a Germanic Green International including the German minorities in Eastern Europe.
After World War II Western scientists defined the prewar East Central European mass movements as entirely democratic. In 1954 the British historian Branko Pešelj contrasted prewar agrarianism to scientific socialism. Similar efforts to play off grass root democratic traditions in Eastern European villages against Stalinist influences dominated until the late 1970ies. Examples were Stephen Fischer-Galatis in 1967 and Heinz Gollwitzer in 1977. Heinz Gollwitzer even declared that for a short moment in history the international proletarian movement might have been counterbalanced by an anti-communist peasant movement. (Gollwitzer, 1977, S. 2f.) This paper aims to differentiate these assumptions. The author will focus on the strained relations between the actually enormous democratic potentials of East Central European peasant movements during the interwar period and its partly authoritarian and revolutionary roots and objectives. The author will ask whether East Central European agrarianism was destined to fail as a conservative ideology and meant to fuse with fascism finally. Or if agrarianist theoreticians were able to develop stabile democratic-programmatic instruments that were strong enough to survive the authoritarian threat of the 1930ies and 1940ies.

Abstract: This paper compares the reception of the two economists in two countries: Romania before World War II, and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. Kautsky´s impact peaked in Romania two decades before Chayanov´s, but in Brazil their impact was simultaneous. In the latter country, Kautsky´s influence was greatest among radicalized Catholic clergy and laymen, and Chayanov´s among social scientists, but there was interaction between them. The problem is an illustration of Bourdieu´s observation that “texts travel without their contexts.” The presenter attempts to define populism and neopopulism, and considers why there was no classical populism in Latin America.

The paper makes three loosely related points about the fate of the peasant parties in Eastern Europe post-1945. First, in the immediate post-war years, they very often, and for understandable reasons, became catch-all parties of the political right, as the more successful of their number had become between the wars. Second, peasant parties did not have a monopoly on peasant policies. Communist parties took on the more pro-poor peasant strand in agrarian politics, as they too had done between the wars. Third, despite the calculated and often brutal destruction of peasant parties, peasant policies, even pro-middle-peasant policies, survived and their traces can be seen in changing approaches to collectivisation in some, but not all, countries in the region.

The paper is concerned with the conceptual development of European agrarianism in the 20th century. It concentrates on the vision of a third way, by which agrarian democracy could be a productive way forward from the antagonisms characteristic of liberalism or capitalism and socialism or communism on the other side.
The influence of Russian “Narodničestvo” (populism) was especially evident in the Bulgarian agrarian ideology, which developed up to 1923 and influenced the whole Balkan region. The Bulgarians were the first to formulate the vision of a third way. After them, the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party took the leading role and thanks to its influence from the beginning of the 1930s also the Polish agrarians. The idea of a third way remained a Polish specific immediately after the end of the Second World War. After that, it survived only among Polish and Bulgarian agrarian exiles, and in a special, non-agrarian form among Hungarians. After the changes of 1989, it survived to the end of the 20th century only in Polish agrarian discourse. However, the idea of a third way is still cultivated by European social democrats.

The project Agrarian Change and Political Formation in the Baltic Sea Area 1880-1939 compares agrarian producer cooperatives in Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Galicia. The cooperatives were an important part of the peasant movement in the area, with ideological as well as economical functions. The process covered stretches from emancipation in the 19th century, to the achievement of general suffrage, almost simultaneously in the whole area after the First World War, up to the crisis of democracy in the economic depression of the 1930’s. In this mainly agricultural area, a rural citizenship which has been little studied, flourished in this period. It developed from the same international ideas, but their interpretation was different in the different contexts.
The study concentrates on three aspects: the formative period in the late 19th century, the understanding of citizenship in the rural context, and finally the reactions in the economic crisis in the 1930’s. In the formative period, most cooperatives grew out of general agrarian organisations with educational purposes. Most of them propagated democracy for the peasantry, but the democracy had a particular participatory and decentralised form, somewhat different from the liberal pattern. Sweden stood out as less intereseted in emancipatory issues.

This paper will explore the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party attempted to collectivize agriculture and rural life in general in rural China during the Maoist period. It will pay special attention to Mao's ideological transcript for communizing rural China, and to the local agents who embranced and imposed this transcript at the rice-roots level. The paper will demonstrate that these agents were not "peasants" but rather marginal non-peasant elements who actually exploited and repressed the peasantry while pretending they were protecting villagers against capitalist exploitation and an imagined counterrevolutionary elite incorporating "rich peasants." It will document the ways in which collectivization threatened longstanding household entitlments, and how the process of collectivization stimulated forms of resistance located within the moral economy of peasant familiies. It will demonstrate how rural people not only relied on these forms to escape the great famine of Maoist rule, but also accentuated them in ways that undermined the fiscal basis of the Mao-led party-state, ultimately making Beijing-based nation builders back-off from their attempt to colonize the countryside. It will show how the Communist party repression of a crucial, widely shared popular strategy of survival-dictated resistance severely damaged the legitimacy of the party, especially its efforts to persudae rural dwellers that it was capable of delivering benevolent governance; and it will commnet on how popular memory of this repression and its social consequences persisted into the reform period, posing a "problem" for Central government reformers seeking to reintegrate an alienated, disengaged rural population into their plans for wealth, power, and stability.

The objective of this paper is to study the relationship between municipal taxes, prices and wages in XVIIth century Castile through the analysis of the Madrid´s case between 1596 and 1700.
First part of the paper sums up the main characteristics of Madrid´s fiscal system, which rested on a group of indirect taxes levied especially on wine and meat. Second part presents both a new Madrid´s real prices and wages indexes and after this third and last part is focused on the analysis of the way municipal taxes affected the real prices and wages in the capital, showing that at the end of the century the taxes collected by the town raised real prices levels around 20%, simultaneously reducing the real wages earned by a building worker of the capital in the same measure.

The aim of this paper is to follow the tax policy of of Antwerp throughout the early modern period in the light of challenges such as economic decline, fiscal demands of the central state and accumulated debts on the one hand and internal social struggles concerning the just distribution of the tax burden among the inhabitants.

Antwerp's fiscal system had its origins in its medieval privileges, which entitled the city the rights to levy taxes in the form of excises. The fiscal policy took a decisive turn in the 16th century, when the city became a major commercial and financial centre and its population grew. Major building projects, among which a new fortification, and high fiscal demands of the prince left the city with a huge debt burden throughout the early modern period.

Besides local taxes Antwerp was also part of a larger system and had to contribute to the central taxation of the provincial and the central government. Antwerp, as one of the chief cities of the duchy of Brabant, was not only represented in the Brabant estates, but also had to levy the city's share in the central taxation. To cover the ever-increasing costs, the city had to find ever-new forms of taxation. In doing so the Antwerp magistrate had to convince the city council of the apropriate use of the fiscal means they had at their disposal, ranging from indirect taxes on consumables to direct taxation, without risking popular resistance or even revolt.

In analysing the fiscal policy of Antwerp, a distinction will also be made between local circumstances conditioning the choices to be made when introducing new taxes or to modify the mode of taxation, and general trends of urban taxation that took place throughout the early modern period, such as the introduction of luxury taxes or direct taxation of personal wealth.

Since late Middle Age, town customs have played an outstanding role in the Church state fiscal system. Above all, duties cashed in Rome on trades and consumptions had always produced a steady high return. From a political side, it was easier to charge foodstuffs, rather than yielding money through direct taxation on profits or with unpopular compulsory grants from towns. Wine, meat, salt and flour gave the highest fiscal returns, as usual. But any trade was taxed in Rome. Even snow to refresh wine cellars in summer, or coal and firewood to heat big mansions in winter paid a duty when disembarking at the two Tiber harbours or getting into town through one of its 17 fiscal gates. Yet Rome was the capital town of Christianity, where courts and high rank families of all sorts had to display their power in term of purchases and luxury.
The Apostolic Chamber, a kind of Treasure Ministry, soon overwhelmed municipal autonomy and exploited city customs by means of those private bankers who were already well known by papacy for their good financial services. Bankers were asked to sign nine years term renewable contracts, paying a yearly price, mostly assigned to public debt interests. They were given a large autonomy and for a long period could earn good profits on roman customs.
Major changes in the roman tax system started on the first decades of the 17th century. Customs grew stronger in term of staffs, amount of trades and assets. Tax increases did not discouraged purchasers’ demand, which was quite rigid – but in times of plague. The franchigie (exemptions granted to high dignitaries, aristocracy and ambassadors) were firmly reduced. Furthermore, from mid-century onward, Chamber’s control over the system was enhanced and bankers gradually lost their autonomy. Eventually, at the end of the century, contracts were not renewed any more and customs were administrated by the Chamber itself, by means of an ad hoc bureaucracy. A new large building was built on the remaining of an old roman temple to lodge crowded Chamber tax offices.
Archive documentation helps us to track major steps on the way from a private to a public custom management, over one hundred years: suffocating control on bankers’ accountancy; lawsuits of various kinds going on and on about; yearly profits forcedly reduced down to zero by high contract prices. Figures show how big the Chamber’s economic benefit was, when keeping in its hands the whole business. In one hundred years, with a population increase of 30% only, the roman customs yield grew three times and more. This also demonstrates the capital town high level of consumptions, when the so called 17th century “crisis” was still far away from the roman case.

The Kingdom of Naples - the largest of the states of the Italian peninsula which occupied all the southern part of it - could count on many towns founded a long time before and Naples, its capital, was among the top towns in Europe as regards its inhabitants.
The analysis which is presented here aims at outlining a picture relative to the urban fiscal system with the 20’s of the 17th century as its starting point. The sample examined, Naples excluded due to the well-known loss of the documentation, is made up of 15 towns with at least 5,000 inhabitants (besides 1.000 hearth) found in the different provinces of the kingdom and their diversified economic characters. Therefore, the analysis has to be horizontal: facing not the development of the income for one town in the different years, but the income of 15 towns of the kingdom, which comes out by an enquiry into the local finances carried out by the government in all the reign for the years 1627-28. This allows us to have a common year as a reference and a common surveying methodology of the data as regards the towns chosen for the sample and this means their individual fiscal physiognomies can be compared. The variegated locations allow us to draw up some useful indications with regard to how and if the regional economy influences and models the tributary systems
The following aspects will be picked out and outlined: the make-up of the tributary income in its articulations, the method of asking for and collecting the charges, the weight supported by the tax-payer, the part assigned to the State and the part destined instead to covering the local expenses.
In the background there is the twofold role played by the local finance: to be an intermediary between the State and the individual tax-payer, because of the limits of the public administration, and in the same time to guarantee the rates of debt through the direct taxes on hearts on which that debt was assigned The importance of those roles allows us to outline the policies carried out by the government with the aim of putting in order and balancing the balance sheets of the communities and giving them the chance of releasing themselves from their own obligations with the tax office and with the state creditors.
The acquired data make up a useful platform from which we can move to outline also the evolving lines of fiscal system in the following decades, trying to identify the path taken by the urban fiscal system in the reign of Naples over the two centuries (the beginning of the 17th century and the end of the 18th ). The traditional interpretation has underlined the excessive burden of tax system. In this paper will be quantify the burden of urban tax system and then will be also examined the transformations of tax system: the gradual transition from wealth to rent on assessment of tax base; 2) the birth of securities market, regarding both central government securities and local government securities.

The paper seeks to demonstrate that the fiscal system in Milan during the Spanish dominion (1535-1706), played not only a negative role on the economic growth of the city, but it was affected in a positive way at some phases.
First of all, a short analysis of the structural issues of the Milanese fiscal pattern will be outlined, focusing on the various categories of taxes (direct and indirect, state quota taxes, and autonomous-city taxes). The way they were cashed in, and accounted for, and the complex interplay between the central governmet needs of Madrid and the urban authorities, such as the relationship between the urban core and its countryside, are taken into consideration. Consequentially, quantitative data on the amount of the taxes collection and on the value of fiscal burden will be offered, as far as possible.
Finally, the paper delves into the nexus between the urban fiscal system and the economic trend, analysing both the quantitative factors and the qualitative ones. Concerning the former, until now, we can notice, for example, that the fiscal system shifts income from the taxpayers to the owners of securities, servicing municipal debt, that used these bonds as collateral to get loans. The latter, the enterpreneur-contractor who assumed business risks, is one of the most modernizing figure of the economic Milanese environment.

Traditionally, wars have been the excuse to impose new taxes or to reorganize public funds in order to obtain greater economic resources for financing the deficit originated by the war.

Since most of the monarchies’ tax expenses stemmed from war, it is no surprise that the conflict known as the Jenkins´ Ear (1739) contributed to increase the deficit and fuelled a debate regarding a tax reform that would augment income and would be collected in a more egalitarian way. The Castilian tax system was based almost exclusively on indirect taxes. The taxation (alcabalas, millones, cientos, tobacco monopolies, customs…) of consumables ensured that whilst some taxes affected primarily rich consumers (for example tobacco), most taxes targeted the masses. Increasing the fiscal charge via indirect taxes seemed like an unfeasible and damaging option for trade and craftwork. This is the reason why there was an attempt to create a direct tax, similar to the Catalan cadastre. One of these attempts prior to the Marquis of the Ensenada’s cadastre was la décima. It was devised as a direct tax but its manner of collection ultimately depended on the willingness of the local cabildos.

English rulers had a distinct interest in urban revenues by AD 700, but this paper concentrates on the better-recorded period from 1100 onwards. Then, as later, the English state was notable for its unity, coherence and tax-gathering powers. This affected the fiscal experiences and activities of towns, which contributed a significant part of the national revenue. The notion that royal (domainal) taxation required consent was established early on and towns (especially London, by far the largest and most powerful of them), had an important role in articulating it. That was one of the ways in which towns contributed to wider political conflict and debate and to development with regard to taxes. The pattern of urbanisation affected the geography and structure of state, and the fiscal relationship between monarch and towns was a bargaining one, involving both political and charitable considerations. It seems likely that for these reasons – the town’s strength as bargainers, as least in the case of London, and the state’s fear of urban revolt -- the tax contributions of the major towns were under assessed by comparison with those of lesser settlements, although the larger centres also contributed in other ways, through customs revenue, cash loans and gifts.

Under the domainal system, regular royal revenues (farms) and occasional special levies (tallages) from towns presented the dual problems of negotiation and a tendency to fossilization. A contribution towards resolving these problems was the development, during the late 13th and early 14th centuries, of general subsidies, not limited to the royal domain and approved by parliamentary assemblies representing lords, clergy and commons. Initially the lay subsidies were based on assessments of moveable goods, but soon became fixed quotas due from towns and other settlements across most of the country (some privileged areas were exempted) levied regularly at the monarch’s request but with parliamentary approval. These regular contributions promoted fiscal expertise and responsibility within towns, although it is clear that in earlier times the local assessment (often complex and sophisticated) and collection of tallages had also promoted those skills, but on a less regular basis. Along with constitutional developments within towns, this regularity and expertise probably helped to avoid the bitter disputes over the fairness of individual assessments (the rich being accused of avoiding their share of the burden) associated with taxation in London and elsewhere during the 12th and 13th centuries.

Fiscal practice was promoted by the needs of monarchs and other lords, but internal levies and the beginnings of genuinely municipal taxation can be dated back to the eleventh century (if not earlier) when urban guilds, especially the emerging merchant guilds, exacted payments from their members for the common benefit. Communal responsibility for urban government, often having a basis in guilds, became more coherent from the later 12th century onwards and absorbed officials and other elements of royal (or seigneurial) town administration. The distinction between strictly royal or seigneurial finance on the one hand and communal finance on the other became confused. Moreover, towns adopted a variety of approaches to accounting for them which makes interpretation and comparison difficult. Nevertheless it seems that by the 14th century, at the level of the individual town, the scale of municipal finance was often greater than that of the fiscal demands of the state, even at times when the latter when the latter were at a peak.

Municipal revenues were derived almost entirely from activities within the jurisdiction of the town, which generally did not extend far beyond the built-up area, if that far. The raising of revenue, therefore, had little direct impact on the countryside. The money was spent on internal bureaucracy, infrastructure (defences, public buildings, water supply, harbour facilities, etc) and gifts and entertainment for influential royal officials and local lords. The purpose of the last was to secure the liberties and pursue the interests of the town within the political realm. It went with the sums spent on maintaining the town’s representatives in parliament and on payments to legal representatives active in London on the town’s behalf. Parliamentary activity could also benefit towns in other ways. For example, it could legitimate special levies, which might otherwise be challenged, towards local infrastructure and in the centuries after 1500 parliamentary bills came to be important tools in raising the funds for such improvements.

The paper also addresses positive and negative aspects of the local economic impact of both municipal and state taxation, not least in relation to overseas diplomacy and war. In addition it places municipal taxation in the context of the recent reassessments of the ‘rise of the fiscal state’ in England. This should help focus attention on parallels between urban and state fiscal activity, drawing attention to the cyclical rather than unidirectional nature of change and to successive peaks of activity before 1350, which were not to be equalled or exceeded until the late seventeenth century.

This paper analyses the importance of the institutional framework and social negotiation in order to introduce fiscal reforms in towns and cities during the Ancien Régime though a case study: the Kingdom of Aragon during the 17th century. If laws concerning municipal taxation became increasingly inappropriate for the evolution of economy, the Aragonese public institutions failed to provide general means to reform the urban fiscal system. This situation imposed to the councils a difficult process of social and political negotiation to carry out fiscal reforms. These problems led to the local elites to circumvent this negotiation by applying heavy taxation on basic foods. This decision reduced the public control around the market and produced several unfavourable economic consequences. Thus, rising fiscal pressure limited consumption, reduced the standard of living and the capacity to save of a large part of the population, as well as discouraged agricultural and industrial investment. This process depressed towns and cities as centres of commerce, production and services, giving them a more marked agrarian character.

As in early modern times the Habsburg monarchy was a complex building of various not central administrated territories, also the fiscal system varied respectively. So following only towns in a part of the monarchy can be taken into consideration. Because of the various fiscal systems only the hereditary lands – the core-lands – will be examined. The towns of these territories had similar administrations and taxes, and they stood in a similar position in the relation between princely ruler and territorial estates. Since the beginning of the 16th century the princely ruler raised taxes of different kinds. During the early modern period not only the height but also the sorts of taxes increased. Main reason was not the expensive court but the expenditures of warfare. In the hereditary lands there existed only two types of legal status – the territorial and the dominial towns come into consideration. The territorial towns held a part of self-government in administrative concerns until mid 18th century, but the town council could not determine the height of taxes but only their administration.
The aim of this paper is to analyze following points:
- The development of the height of the fiscal burden – segregated in ordinary and extraordinary taxes as well as segregated in excise and direct taxes – in different towns respectively under the influence of the levels of prices and wages. This development will be put in relation to the development of the whole system of urban finances.
- The complex relationship between estates and princely ruler, when on the one hand the estates undertook the tax collection and depts for the ruler by granting loans by themselfes.
So the urban fiscal system can only be interpreted in the context of the developing monarchy during the early modern period, which obtained gradually more influence on the local administrative level.

What made city dwellers buy annuities and why did urban authorities choose to sell them? Different motives may have contributed to assure a steady flow of investors in the urban debt. Did moral duty prevail in the decision making of the government and in the minds of the citizens? Were citizens forced to buy renten, as has been shown by the Italian historians Bowsky and Molho for late medieval Florence and Sienna? Or were annuities primarily seen as a profitable investment, as Tracy, Potter and Rosenthal have shown for respectively Holland and Burgundy? Groups of citizens may have aimed at improving their own position in urban life. By investing in urban debt local elites could even further increase their power in financial en political urban institutions – city administration depended on the citizenry. Nevertheless, citizens also depended on the urban government since the government provided a secure and profitable investment. In short, the sale of annuities entailed a reciprocal relation between administrators and citizens: they were mutually depended.
In order to investigate this reciprocity we have compared several Dutch cities between 1500 and 1700 which are rather similar. Our research has shown that political interests prevail over financial interest in times of economical crisis and a low level of urban autonomy. However in times of economic growth, financial interest often prevail. In this situation supply and demand are balanced, large groups of investors have the opportunity invest and the town governments are creditworthy. Nonetheless, when times change, and the economical and political situation with them, the public annuity market begins to shrink. Subsequently, the town falls back on the tradition patrimonial relationship, giving way to more coercive means. We will argue that it is very difficult to discern between social coercion, political (self-)interest or financial profitability. We can however put these motives into context, link the different motives and trace developments during the 16th and 17th century.