Programme

Our research makes evident the participation of the poor Italian immigrants in the forming of the Brazilian industrial business community. With this purpose, we detach ourselves from the relative consensus of literature and emphasize a less sophisticated view of the industrialists forming. Thus, we change the focus of interest of industrialization to the city of Ribeirão Preto in the São Paulo State countryside. Within a little time, due to the coffee expansion, this city becomes one of the richest cities in Latin America. The peculiarity of the industry in this city was due to its establishment in a colonial center (Antonio Prado), constituted to the settlement of the immigrants next to the coffee crops. This colonial center provided the development of the industrial activities aiming at paying for their properties. The industrialization process that occurred in Ribeirão Preto confuses itself with this small industry emerged from the colonial center.

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Archeological data from the Neolithic shows that when agriculture was adopted, the result was a decline in average living standards. Current theories take for granted that the new lifestyle was inferior to hunting and gathering, and its adoption the result of a demographic trap forcing growing populations to become and remain farmers against their best interest.
I show that the pursuit of lower volatility can not only account for a lifestyle choice which results in lower income per capita, but for the case of Malthusian-type demographics can even lead directly to a lower average standard of living, without the requirement for irrational agents or a restricted choice set.
In closing, I underline previously downplayed empirical findings which seem to support this view.

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The objective of this study is to show how the emergence of operational knowledge clusters was crucial for the development of maritime shipping and for economic growth in early-modern and modern times (1500-1850). It will be argued that operational knowledge clusters are complex, evolving structures consisting of informational, social, political, economic and geographical network components. This study will analyze where and when the clustering of operational knowledge took place, what its characteristics were and how it evolved. Consequently, maritime shipping will be understood as an integral economic activity that is defined not only by the nodes it connects, nor by its own social structures exclusively but by both elements at the same time.
The method that will be used to generate analytical results will tentatively be called historical maritime economics. Its analytical framework has evolutionary realism as its underpinning philosophy and must be seen as a practical elaboration of the general theory of evolutionary economics (Dopfer, Potts, 2008). The framework consists of three levels of analysis (micro, meso and macro), distinguishes between source-specific and multi-source data analysis and contains a set of visualizations that is developed with the aim of strengthening its analytical power.
Micro level analysis consists of a number of units gathered together under the umbrella of 'the ship as a business entity', representing all persons, items and actions in, on and around individual ships at particular points in time and space. At the meso level, the various micro units are elaborated in a spatio-temporal framework that allows establishing relationships between sets of micro units as well as studying populations of micro units. At the macro level, connections between the core elements of historical maritime shipping are examined both from an individual and clustered systems perspective with the aim to discover how particular circumstances give rise to the emergence and development of operational knowledge clusters.
The innovative potential of this study lies in the consequent foundation of its method in evolutionary thinking. The analysis of operational knowledge clusters will not only provide valuable insights in the organization of early-modern maritime shipping, it will also enable to explain the emergence and further evolution specialized populations of ship masters in distinct coastal regions. Finally, it is hoped that the denomination of historical maritime economics and its subsequent theoretical and methodological elaboration will become a substantial contribution to the development of maritime history as a scientific discipline.

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