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Thursday, August 6, 9.00 AM – 12.30 PM


A7  -   The Labour-Intensive Path of Development in South Asia: Environment, Division of Labour and the Quality of Life
Room: Zaal 1636 (Academy Hall)

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South Asia has been home to probably one fourth of world population for the last few centuries. Thus it is natural to assume that its historical path of modern economic development can be characterized as labour-intensive. However, the character of labour-intensity in South Asian development is quite different from that in East Asia. While labour absorption in agriculture was not so high in South Asia, the typical rural economy was highly labour-intensive, if we include proto-industry and service sector. Although attention has been paid to the labour-intensive character of the proto-industry sector in recent historiography, we need a more balanced approach for the understanding of the traditional industrial structure, including the study of the service sector. We should also note the fact that the region’s developmental path was determined by hard ecological conditions. South Asia suffered from many severe famines and epidemics. Risk factors, especially uncertain climatic conditions, ordained the development, and necessitated a social structure with a thick layer of landless and service castes. In this respect the caste system functioned as a specific type of division of labour. And it affected the quality of life of ordinary people. The market economy gradually interacted with the caste system since early modern period. This session examines the character of labour-intensity in the modern economic development of South Asia in comparative perspective with the East Asian experience. We invite experts on East Asia as paper givers and discussants. A preliminary workshop will be held on December 19-20, 2008 in Kyoto, Japan.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 9:05 AM: Introduction (Kohei Wakimura)
9:05 - 10:35 AM: Presentations by Kohei Wakimura, Kaoru Sugihara, Haruka Yanagisawa, Takashi Oishi, Tirthankar Roy and Sayako Kanda (15 mins each).
10:35 - 11:00 AM: Break
11:00 - 12:30 AM: Presentation by Takeshi Nishimura & Kaoru Sugihara (15 mins); comments by Linda Grove and Masayuki Tanimoto (15 mins each); free discussion (45 mins).


Organizers:

- Scarcity of Land, Division of Labour and the Service Sector: The Labour-Intensive Path of Development in Modern South Asia

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This paper consists of three sections. The first section examines the issue of land scarcity in South Asia from a long-term perspective. We clarify that land scarcity became a serious issue in the late 19th century. In the second section, we argue that the response of Indian rural societies to the scarcity of land was not of the ‘labour-intensive’ type in agriculture, because climatic conditions did not allow this sort of path. If we look at the labour-intensity in the rural society as a whole, however, we can conclude that it was rather high during this period. There was a thick layer of landless labourers who were categorized as being employed in agriculture. But in one sense we had better think that they belonged to the service sector rather than the agricultural sector. Here we propose a working hypothesis on the South Asian path of development, namely ‘division of labour in community’. This path tended to be service-sector-oriented. In these two sections so far, we have relied mainly on studies by Japanese scholars on South India. Their research was motivated by a comparative perspective on East Asian cases, focussing on labour absorption in agriculture and division of labour in community. The third part is concerned with the particular group of people and the division of labour in community in South Asian urban settings. This group consists of people employed as scavengers by the municipal corporation of Calcutta, who were a typical product of South Asian social development. We would argue that this example clearly shows the service-sector-oriented path of social development.

• Kaoru Sugihara - The South Asian Path of Economic Development: A Comparison with East Asia

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This paper sketches the long-term path of economic development in South Asia, in comparison with East Asia. The starting point of this comparison is the notion that the both regions followed a “labour-intensive” path, with a relatively low land-labour ratio and labour-intensive technology and labour-absorbing institutions. Haruka Yanagisawa argued that there was a labour-intensive pattern of agricultural development in South India, similar in character to Japan, since the nineteenth century, while Tirthankar Roy traced the development of labour-intensive (or skill-intensive) industries such as cotton textiles, which grew in the sixteenth century or earlier, had survived colonial rule and remain as an important sector to this day. Although in general land was not as scarce in South Asia as in East Asia till the end of the nineteenth century, there were regional variations. In any case, there was a clear similarity between the two regions since the end of the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, comparisons in the studies of famines and epidemics suggest that the degree of risks and uncertainties South Asian population had faced may have been much greater than East Asia. Broad ecological instabilities, such as river floods, were also more visible in South Asia. There was perhaps a greater institutional attention to these phenomena in South Asia than in East Asia as well. And this might account for the tendency that East Asia pursued the increase of land productivity more eagerly than South Asia did, while South Asian technology and institutions have been built on the need to respond to sudden shocks and frequent uncertainties, in addition to productivity concerns.
The paper ends by making some speculations about how the early modern path of economic development had underpinned South Asia’s response to the two key changes in the modern period, namely the arrival of western colonialism and the increased land scarcity, with the East Asian experience in mind.


Participants:

• Linda Grove

• Sayako Kanda - Fuel Crisis and Conditions of Salt Workers in Early Nineteenth Century Bengal

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This study examines the working conditions of salt workers, known as malangis, under the East India Company’s monopoly in early nineteenth century Bengal. The malangis are considered to be one of the most oppressed class of workers in Bengal, and this was largely due to the Company’s exploitative policies towards them. This paper suggests that their conditions were determined not only by the Company’s monopoly but also by wider environmental, economic and social changes surrounding the salt industry over the period.
Until around the mid-1830s, the malangis were in a strong bargaining position, and it was difficult for the Company to secure them without providing good welfare and extra financial support, because the malanigs had other employment options. However, the increasing difficulties in procuring fuels, grass and straw in particular, which were used for boiling brine as a part of production, began to lower the working conditions of the malangis. An increasing demand of fuel for fuel-consuming industries, steamships and motorised factories, reclamation of grasslands into cultivated lands, and ecological changes limited the availability of fuels for industries. Such circumstances encouraged commodification of biomass fuels, and as a result the malangis began to be more dependent on fuel the market for fuels, which increased their expenses.

• Takeshi Nishimura - Railways, Exports of Primary Products and the Commercialisation of Forests in British India, 1890-1913
Co-author(s): Kaoru Sugihara

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Ramachandra Guha and others have argued that railway construction, especially the need for sleepers, was largely responsible for the initial deforestation in British India, mainly on the evidence taken from sources relating to the development of forest administration. The movement of wooden sleepers and timber, recorded in trade statistics and railway reports, have never been systematically examined with the issue of forest commercialisation in mind. This paper traces the development of external and internal trade of sleepers and timber, and show how sleepers were secured through long-distance trade across the subcontinent for the period from 1890 to 1913.

We have used foreign trade, coastal trade and rail- and river-borne trade statistics in combination with information on forests. Together, they show that the main source of sleepers initially came from Punjab, but Burmese teak quickly became the chief source from which sleepers were made. The bulk of trade passed the three main ports of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and from these ports sleepers were transported to hinterland where they sometimes competed with local supply. The movements show large annual fluctuations, reflecting the nature of demand arising from construction and periodic replacements. We suggest that the development of transport networks and internal trade that could cope with them provided a vital foundation of the imperial forest policy, which promoted commercial timber production in relatively concentrated areas under state ownership and generated a large amount of revenue.

• Takashi Oishi - Workmen, Machines, Schemes Shifted from Japan to India: Mobility of Labour Intensive Production in the Cases of Matches and Glass wares, 1900-1940.

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This paper takes up the economy of match and glass ware in Japan as well as in India, and puts focus on the mobility of its labour intensive production between those two countries. Through illuminating the historical facts around migration of manufacturing engineers/workmen, relocation of technology/production scheme, and modulation of consumption preference, between Japan and India, I emphasize that the labour intensive production did not necessarily develop in accordance with conditions within a single specific area, but was molded under the dynamic intra-Asian interactions involving the nature of industry, labour, entrepreneurship, institutions, commodity, consumption, and natural environment.
To be more concrete, match manufacturing in Japan did not go straight toward factory-based mass production, but many small and medium size units survived with unique type of labour intensive machines as well as production scheme including out-sourcing of particular operations to nearby employee homes. Glass manufacturing in Japan also reserved unique range of products, namely glass wares such as bangles and beads, with innovation of labour intensive production methods and equipments. In the early twentieth century, these elements and agencies of labour intensive production were relocated from Japan to India by the hands of entrepreneurs with some modifications to suit Indian environment.
The paper analyses this process through the investigation of historical records concerning match and glass wares industries as well as private records brought from Indian as well as Japanese merchants/industrialists who were involved in the relocation processes described above.

• Tirthankar Roy - Labour Intensity and Indian Industrialization: An integrated view

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Indian industrialization in the first half of the twentieth century was labour-intensive in two senses: factories were characterized by a relatively high employment-elasticity, and the ordinarily more labour-intensive crafts made a positive contribution to income growth in manufacturing. Individually, these two characteristics are well-known to historians, and have inspired much debate and controversy. Central to labour history is the low labour-productivity, or the ‘inefficiency’ of the mill worker. This stylized fact has been seen in cultural terms by a segment of scholarship explaining the emergence of international economic inequality, whereas Southasianists have vehemently argued against culturalist descriptions of the worker. The ‘survival’ of the crafts, on the other hand, is central to analytical narratives of the link between trade and industrialization in the non-western world. In most received stories, the survival of the crafts would appear to be counterintuitive, and call for special assumptions about consumption and technology.

A significant gap in the economic history of modern South Asia is the absence of an integrated account of labour-intensive industrialization, one that requires us to treat the mill labour and craft labour – the inefficiency of the mill worker and the efficiency of the craft worker - as parts of one story. Such an account is not yet available, though a strong plea for one had been made by the late Rajnarayan Chandavarkar sometime ago.

The paper seeks to connect the two segments of Indian industry. It does so by means of the concept of skill formation and training, and two related arguments. Historically South Asia has been well-endowed in craft skills, which skills shaped the evolution of modern small-scale industry in the region. The learning of craft skills was embedded in robust and long-standing master-apprentice tradition, which stood in good stead during the process of adaptation. However, the mechanized factories that emerged in the nineteenth century did not utilize the accumulated heritage of skilled craft labour. The skill exchange and institutional overlap between the two worlds, craft and factory, was weak. The mills recruited mainly from the peasantry rather than the artisanate. Consequently, they faced special challenges in the way of creating a system of skilled and trained factory work-force. Many non-western societies faced similar challenges, and handled these in distinct ways, with better or worse results. Indian factories by and large addressed skill formation with recourse to its own informal tradition of social hierarchy. The ‘inefficiency’ issue reflected, not the cultural specificity of the average Indian worker, but the slow and tortuous change from informal to formal institutions of learning.

• Masayuki Tanimoto - The Evolution of Export-oriented Industries in Japan's Economic Development:From ‘Labour-intensiveness’ to ‘Skill-intensiveness’(Reference Paper for comment)

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This paper explores the role of small-scale industries in Japan’s industrialization by focusing on the changing patterns of the export trade from the late nineteenth century to after World War II. Arguably, this is the best arena to examine this issue as entering export markets entails facing severe competition. It is well known that textile goods occupied the largest part of Japan’s export continuously until the 1960s. Although the individual categories only accounted for small proportions, the sum of various consumer goods other than textiles contributed a considerable proportion of manufactured exports, with changing the patterns in the composition after World War I. We can assume that there was an evolutionary process in production and that the small-scale industries played a central role in it. In other words, the foundation of the competitive-edge of Japan’s export-oriented industries transformed from cheap female labourers at the large textile factories to the skilled or semi-skilled male workers in the small workshops. We exemplify this process by focusing on the development of urban toy industry in the interwar period and suggest that this form of industrial rivalry—competing for the affluent market in industrial finished goods—appears to have pioneered an important type of world trade, which expanded after World War II.

• Haruka Yanagisawa - Village Common Land, Manure, Fodder and the Intensification of Agricultural Practices: South Indian Agriculture since the Middle of the Nineteenth Century

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In the early decades of the nineteenth century only a small part of village land in Tamilnadu, a region in South India, was used as farmland. The uncropped land, however, played an important role in sustaining the lives of villagers, as it produced manure, fodder, fuelwood and house-building materials and served as grazing land for cattle and other household animals. In this sense, such uncultivated land served as village common land, indispensable for sustaining agricultural production in the village, although it was often classified as “waste land” by the colonial administration.

The extent of “waste land” in Tamilnadu shrank rapidly in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, as villagers extensively reclaimed it and converted it to cropping. The government encouraged this extension of cultivation. The reduction in, and decline of, the agrarian infrastructure, however, was not automatically accompanied by a decline in agricultural production in Taminadu, at least until the 1920s. Though the extent of village common land deceased, rural people not only managed to maintain the yield per acre but, rather more often successfully, raised agricultural productivity by changing their agricultural practices, resorting to more labour-intensive production methods and reducing their dependence on village common land.

In areas under the river-irrigation system, it is likely that the cultivation (and the resultant decrease) of non-cultivated land expanded remarkably in the first half of the nineteenth century. A typical case was witnessed in paddy cultivating areas irrigated by the Kaveri River and its canal system in Thanjavur District, where, according to government reports in the 1860s and 1870s, there was almost no waste land left by that time. Due to the shortage of pasture land, cattle there were fed only on paddy straw and were therefore in very poor condition. Silt in the river water used for irrigation was the only manure given to the growing paddy. People did not apply other manure to their fields, since a flood could wash it away. In spite of their location in an area benefiting from a highly developed canal irrigation system, most paddy fields in the region produced only one crop a year, and their yield per acre was reported to be lower than that of other districts where irrigation conditions were less favourable.

This state of affairs changed towards the end of the nineteenth century. The construction of dams in the upper reaches of the Kaveri reduced the quantity and richness of the silt. Farmers started buying leaf manure, which was brought by carts from other districts. Thanjavur farmers also penned herds of goats and sheep coming from other districts as a method to enrich the soil of their fields. It is interesting to note, in passing, that Kaveri farmers sent their cattle to other unirrigated regions to graze. By increasing the application of manure, Thanjavur farmers maintained their paddy yield per acre and succeeded in considerably increasing the extent of double-cropped areas after the 1880s. Hence, the increase in manure use in canal-irrigated fields was supported by expanding transactions and movements of manure and animals that developed between irrigated and unirrigated regions over several south Indian districts. It goes without saying that the general rise in prices of agricultural products in this period and the increased income paddy farmers received for their products are likely to have been important factors in enabling them to invest money to purchase commercial manure for their fields.

Except for river-irrigated regions like the Kaveri delta, cropped land formed only a part of village land, as exemplified by Salem district, where only one fourth of the total land was cropped in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Farmers used various kinds of manure on their fields, such as cow dung, leaf manure and rubbish. Uncultivated common land supported agriculture by providing the leaf manure as well as grazing for cattle and other animals. Cattle there were reported to be in strong condition, thanks to the good grazing in the forests. People were allowed to collect free fuelwood from forests.

Nevertheless, the environment that had supported agricultural production deteriorated towards the end of the nineteenth century. Cultivation expanded into what previously had been waste land, and this led to a rapid decrease in village common land. The government forest reservation policy also compounded the situation by regulating the collection of leaf manure in forests. This led to a shortage of leaf manure and a resultant rise in its price, as well as in that of bullocks. Local people, however, seem to have coped with the new situation by developing a more intensive agricultural production system. A 1933 document reports the development of manure markets in unirrigated regions. People not only brought leaf manure from forested areas but also started to grow manure crops in their fields. Groundnuts were also used as manure. Farmers even in unirrigated regions started to purchase green manure for their fields, and some even used chemical fertilizer. As the use of manure increased, so did the number of irrigation wells, which multiplied substantially. As a result, the cropping intensity of the cultivated fields strengthened. It is important to remind ourselves here that price rises of commercial crops like groundnuts formed the background against which the intensification of agricultural practices proceeded.




B7  -   Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
Room: Foyer (Academy Hall)

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“Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy” is a new international, interdisciplinary research project involving ancient and economic historians, classicists, New Testament scholars, patristic experts, and scholars of Late Antiquity. The project seeks to delineate the relationship between early Christianity and the ancient economy in the period from Jesus to Justinian, demonstrating both similarities and differences in attitudes, approaches to problems, and attempted solutions. The project was launched last November with an address by Walter Scheidel, one of the co-editors of The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007), and sessions devoted to this topic have already been held this year at conferences in New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States, and more are planned for 2009.

The project itself comprises three sub-projects: The first sub-project involves a study of all the major aspects of the economy in the ancient world, especially the Roman Empire. The second sub-project examines first-century early Christianity both in relationship to the ancient economy and in regard to its own economic aspects. The third sub-project does the same for Christianity in the second to the fifth centuries. Given the scope of the project, we anticipate that studies will be both synchronic and diachronic, with some contributions focused on specific issues (such as money), texts, authors, and events, and others being more comprehensive and thematic in nature. Paper proposals for all three sub-projects are welcomed, especially those dealing with the economies of the Greek and Roman worlds.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 10:30 AM: First session.
Presentations by John Fitzgerald, Charo Rovira, Willem Jongman, and David Hollander (15 mins each), followed by discussion (30 mins).
10:30 - 11:00 AM: Break.
11.00 - 12:30 AM: Second session.
Presentations by Marta Garcia Morcillo, Constantina Katsari and Arjan Zuiderhoek (15 mins each), followed by discussion (45 mins).


Organizers:

- The Early Christianity and Ancient Economy Project: An Introduction and Overview

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This paper provides an introduction to, and overview of, the “Early Christianity and Ancient Economy Project,” which seeks to delineate the relationship between early Christianity and the ancient economy in the period from Jesus to Justinian. During this period, early Christianity went through an incredible metamorphosis both demographically and geographically. It began as a tiny Jewish sect centered in Jerusalem, yet by the end of the first century its adherents were largely non-Jews drawn from the large urban centers of the Greco-Roman world. At that point it was still a small and statistically insignificant religion, but by the end of the fourth century it had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Throughout this period, it dealt with different economic issues, though the role that it played in the overall Roman economy was constantly changing and becoming more substantial, especially after Constantine. Yet the economic life of Rome was by no means static during this period, for it also underwent numerous changes. The aim of the project is to establish the economic history of early Christianity, which will involve assessing its relationship to the ancient economy as a whole and demonstrating similarities and differences in attitudes, approaches to problems, and attempted solutions.



• David B. Hollander - Illness, Death, and Precautionary Demand in the Late Republic and Early Empire

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Historians who view the ancient economy as ‘primitive’ often point to the phenomenon of hoarding as corroboration. Meikle (2002: 242), for example, concludes that Greek and Roman hoarding precludes the existence of investment opportunities and markets for capital and labor in the ancient world. Jongman (2003: 191), however, suggests that “an important reason for rich Romans to hold large reserves in cash was the need to alleviate the complexities and unpredictability of property transfers from one generation to the next.” The prospect of illness and death created two additional categories of precautionary demand extending well beyond the Roman elite. An unexpected illness or injury might necessitate cash for doctors, medicine, or even votive offerings for the gods. The structures and inscriptions to be found on the outskirts of Rome and other Roman cities indicate that a tremendous number of Romans, wealthy and otherwise, wanted themselves or their loved ones memorialized and their remains treated honorably. Death was often an unexpected event that could require the bereaved to spend considerable amounts of money on short notice. Funerals might involve the purchase of frankincense, wood to fuel cremation, land for a monument or space for an urn, as well as wine and food to be offered to the dead or consumed at the tomb. One might hire pollictores to wash and anoint the body, praeficae to wail at the funeral, vespillones to carry the corpse, ustores to cremate the body, and fossores to dig space in a catacomb. In this paper I will consider the dimensions of these precautionary demands and how they might have changed in the late Republic and early Empire.


Participants:

• Marta Garcia Morcillo - Distribution and Consumption of high-valued goods in the Roman World: Patterns of Continuity and Change

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Being basically defined as something desirable but not utilitarian, luxury has been commonly associated with sumptuous goods, conspicuous consumption and typical expressions of social status. In ancient Rome, material luxury further involved ideas of moral decadence, laxity and negligence, as Latin terms such as luxuria, opulentia and desidia illustrate Beyond moral and rhetorical uses, this paper explores the impact of the phenomenon in the Roman economy from the early Principate to Late Antiquity, focusing on particular key questions and scholar debates: Did the Roman market of high-valued goods contribute to economic stimulus, or should it be regarded as a symptom of economic decline or fatigue? Can this be explored as an indicator for the dynamics of production, distribution, marketing and consumption? To what extent did Rome experience fundamental changes or patterns of continuity in the processes of supply and demand of costly goods? How did political, military or social evolutions and transformations influence them?
Material culture (such as furniture, jewellery, tableware, etc.) made of gold, silver, bronze, fine-glass, ivory, purple or gems are some of the exclusive commodities generally involved in exemplary episodes of luxury as seen in the literature, from Cato the Elder to the hagiographic texts. Making use of complementary archaeological, epigraphic and papyrological evidence, I will further attempt to reconstruct financial and commercial mechanisms and processes of transmission and acquisition. How did public authorities and law delineate and sanction these practices? Can we follow the traces of consumers, professional agents and intermediaries, industries, workshops, market-places and other physical structures linked to this phenomenon?

• Willem M. Jongman

• Constantina Katsari - The Morality of Money in the Roman World

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Economists study rational human behaviour with a focus on the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. When the irrational aspects of human attitude come into force, then, the discipline of economics changes and becomes another form of art. The study of these aspects should not be neglected but should be incorporated in the mainstream analysis of rational data. Historians of the Roman empire tend to consider the illogical features of the economy as evidence for its underdevelopment, hence following Polanyi’s substantivist views. Such features include moral attitudes, religious beliefs, psychological factors or habits formed by long lasting traditions. In this article I intend to show that these characteristics are, in fact, potent economic determinants and they co-exist harmoniously with other more ‘rational’ factors.

• Charo Rovira - THE FIRST CHRISTIANS?: TRADE AND TRADERS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

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During his journeys along the Mediterranean Sea Paul travelled through different harbours such as Cesarea or Puteoli. Communities of traders from several Roman provinces were living in these ports sometimes, on a permanent basis. These communities in charge of the trade of goods along the Mediterranean would probably be the first gentiles that would listened to Paul’s preaching and would help to spread Christianity. We see it in the case of Lydia in Thyatyra. This had already happened with other religions; in Italy the first place where the cult of Isis is documented is Puteoli, the major trade centre of the Mediterranean after Alexandria and also the first Italian city that Paul visited in his journey to Rome. A necessary stop since all the Alexandrian ships ended their journey there; here it is then one of the first place where he would have encountered his first listeners, either Jews, since there was an important community in the city, or gentiles. By studying the communities of traders in the ports visited by Paul we can grasp the activities of the early Christians and their involvement in economic activities since these economic centres worked also as cultural magnets and as places for the exchange of ideas.

• Arjan Zuiderhoek - Good citizens? Citizenship and the economy in the Greco-Roman world

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Citizenship formed the basis of Greek and Roman socio-political organisation. Yet did it also have economic significance? Inspired by the ideas of Max Weber and especially M.I. Finley on the ancient economy, scholars have argued that ancient citizenship constituted a barrier to economic development, because it frustrated the effective functioning of factor markets. There are, however, alternative ways of looking at citizenship. In this paper, I shall discuss a number of theoretical viewpoints that might help us to reconceptualise ancient citizenship as an economically efficient institution.




C7  -   China’s Southwest Frontier Areas in Early Economic Globalization
Room: Opzoomerkamer (Academy Hall)

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Geographically consisting of Yunan,Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi and Tibet, China’s southwest frontiers region is one of the most diverse regions in the world, ecologically, ethically, culturally and economically. Its location as the intersection of East, Southeast and South Asia increases this diversity.
In the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, the early economic globalization was under way. These centuries saw a great change in this region’s economy and its relations with other parts of the world.
In this region economic globalization came first to those areas of lower attitudes and then to those of higher attitudes. Closely linked with it was most of significant phenomena which happened in this region during the period, such as large-scale migrations, the introduction of new crops (maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, opium, coffee, rubber plant, etc.), the exploration of mountainous areas, the connections of sea and land trade routes, changes of commercial roads, the rise of market towns and cities, the decline of the tribute trade and traditional tea-horse barter trade, the rise and fall of opium trade, the appearance of foreign trade firms and the evolution of traditional commercial organizations, the abolishment of cowrie currency and the circulation of copper currency, the substitution of silver dollars for copper coins, the establishment of customs, the opening to the Western powers, the changes of economic structures, and the others. The discussion of these issues will be helpful not only to our understanding of hows and whys of this region in the early economic globalization, but also the globalization itself.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 10:00am: Chair Wen-xun Lin.
Papers by Peng-sheng Qiu, Xiao-liang Wu and Wen-cheng Wang.
10:00 - 10:30am: General discussion (chair Yi-fei Lou / Wen-cheng Wang).

10:30 - 11:00am: Break.

11:00 - 12:00am: Chair Xiao-liang Wu.
Papers by Yi Xu and Wen-xun Lin.
12:00 - 12.30am: General discussion (chair Yi-fei Lou / Wen-cheng Wang).


Organizers:

- Yunnan in the Early Economic Globalization ( 1492-1945 )

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Ever since the great voyage times at the end of 15th century, the economy links all over the world including Americas and Australia had been being strengthened, which unfolded the globalization of economy. Yunnan, which lies in the east of the Tibetan Plateaus and belongs to one of the important proponents of the South-West China, also initiated increasingly-closer-and-broader links with the inner-China as well as with other areas such as Southeast and south Asia, Europe, Americas and Australia. This thesis inquired briefly into the following three issues: the development of the links, transportation and communication, between Yunnan and the world; the main role of Yunnan’s in the early economic globalization; and the impacts of the early economic globalization on the Yunnan economy. So as to get a comparatively-full knowledge of the diversity and complexity of the early economic globalization.

1. Transportation and communication, the links of Yunnan and the world
Before the 15th century, Yunnan had already developed a system of transportation and communication with the caravan as its core and with the human and livestock as its power. Through this traditional system, Yunnan had exchanged economically and traded with both the inner-China and the neighboring countries. Since then, this system had been playing the key role in Yunnan’s involvement in the globalization as well as in economic links between both within and outside of Yunnan. With the strengthening of the economic links, this system also had got a relatively-greater development. During the late 19th and the early 20th century, the development of railways, roads, airports, post service and telegraphy had shortened greatly the distance between different areas both within and outside of Yunnan. The scope and the depth of Yunnan’s involvement in the globalization took on the trend of increasingly broadening and deepening.

2. The main role that Yunnan had played in the early economic globalization
Yunnan has played in the early economic globalization three major roles: one of the important areas of spreading passage and introducing base for various plant species; the supply of various mineral products for the global market; and one of the ties to the world economy in the South-West China.
(1) As one of the important areas for introducing and planting various plant species, corn and potato originated in America had been introduced into Yunnan long before and thereafter had been spread in the China. Planting poppy in Yunnan had been spread quickly because opium became widespread hard drug. Such plants as tobacco, pine-apple, coffee, rubber and olive had been introduced into successively and had been planted successfully in Yunnan. Some of them had gradually showed in Yunnan their advantage over other areas and the plantation had been enlarged rapidly.
(2) As the supply base for various mineral products, Yunnan had been an important area supplying silver for the inner China while American silver had been being exported to China. While the rate of exchange between the copper and silver rose to a high level with the increasing of outflow of the copper coin and the supply of silver in China, Yunnan had become the important base to supply the material of copper. As the outflow of silver in China’s foreign trade, the mining and smelting of copper in Yunnan had been going downhill. During the late 19th and the early 20th century, the undulating price of such mineral products as gold, silver, tin and tungsten in the world market had been leading more directly the foreign trade and the currency of Yunnan than before.
(3) As one of the ties to the world economy in China, not only had the products from the countries or areas in South-East Asia, the West and their colonies been sold through Yunnan to Tibet, Sichuan, Chongqing and Guizhou, but also those from these areas had been exported through Yunnan to foreign countries. During the late 19th century, not only had the companies from Europe, Americas and Japan been operating directly in Yunnan, but also the business organizations in Yunnan had established offices in Tibet, Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing, Hongkong and the West colonies in South-East Asia and South Asia, doing trans-regional businesses broadly.

3. The impacts of the early economic globalization on the Yunnan economy
The early economic globalization was like a two-sided sword, which had done both positive and negative effects upon the economic development of Yunnan. On the one side, with the deepening of Yunnan’s involvement in the globalization of economy, the market economy in Yunnan had been enhanced at a certain degree, its dynamics had been strengthened, the market mechanism had been gradually functioning in the allocation and distribution of resources, technologies had made progress, and economic benefits had been more or less upgraded. The economy in Yunnan had gained some development in some economic areas. On the other side, the early economic globalization had given a series of negative impacts on the development of the economy in Yunnan. Except for its damages to the environment at a certain extent, in the face of the comparatively-developed international market, the scope of the local market of Yunnan was small and under-developed, whose leading function to the development of economy was limited. Depending on its resource advantage, Yunnan inevitably fell down into the passive position in unfair competition with other areas relying upon technological advantage on the international market. Especially, because of the imperfection of market rules and a series of unequal treaties, the benefits of Yunnan were harmed in the process of the early economic globalization.

• Wenxun Lin - The Economic Interaction Between Yunnan and the World

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ABSTRACT
Yunnan, located in the bordering area in Southwest China, has always a special feature in its social and economic development. Historically, it used a kind of cowry as its main formal money since a remote time dated back to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty(770~221 B.C.). This historic fact was recorded in the documents of Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, and was also proven archaeologically true in the last century. However, modern scientific analysis of Yunnan’s money cowry shows that most of the shells were from the countries and areas in South and Southeast Asia, rather than from the coasts of China. What’s more important is that the numeration system of Yunnan’s cowry was different from what was adopted in Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties(2100—221 B.C.), but the same as the one used in South and Southeast Asia. These evidences indicate that Yunnan and South and Southeast Asia belonged, ever since a very ancient time, to a same area of currency circulation and trade.
As the economy and society advanced, Yunnan began “to replace cowry with coins” in Ming and Qing Dynasties, and the currency circulation gradually evolved into the copper-coin system which was accepted in most parts of China. But the replacement did not prevent Yunnan from trading with the world, especially with South and Southeast Asia. Foreign coins and paper money were still in circulation on Yunnan markets. Furthermore, foreign currency had a more stable value than Chinese money in some cases.
Modern time saw the rising and world-expanding of the capitalist world. This greatly changed the pattern of world economic development. Economic and trading activities became more frequent between the countries and areas on the whole earth, and the ties were closer as well. In these circumstances, Yunnan had such development in foreign trade that it turned from a remote bordering province into a major foreign trade frontier of China. As a result, coins from many countries and areas worldwide were brought in Yunnan and put into circulation. Among the foreign currencies circulated in Yunnan, the main ones were Spanish coins, Mexican coins, British coins, trade silver coins issued by the United States, Japan, France, etc, as well as various paper money. Yunnan was, therefore, called “the exhibition hall of world coins and notes”. These foreign coins and notes circulated in Yunnan were of great amount and had a more stable value than the Chinese domestic money, and they became actually the long-used main currency in Yunnan. This helped enhance the economic interaction between Yunnan and the world.
For a long time, we thought that Yunnan was a remote bordering province and the development of its economy and society had a characteristic of enclosure. But when we observe Yunnan through the evolvement of the money circulated there, we will find that, in spite of its bordering location, it has a strong opening feature even in its very early developing stage. Opening feature characterizes Yunnan’s development in the history
The economic interaction between Yunnan and the world shows that the phenomenon of economic globalization has existed for ages, with a profound history. It is the change of the world economic developing patterns that brings the modern economic globalization a new developing stage. The interaction also shows that economic globalization is not only suitable to the economy-developed coastal areas, but also of magnificent meanings to the remote bordering areas. Economic globalization has far-reaching effect and great influence on the world economy and human society, whether developed or underdeveloped.

• Xiaoliang Wu - Yunnan in the early twentieth-century economic globalization:

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Abstract

Located in the southwest frontier areas of China, Yunnan has had commercial links with South and Southeast Asia for millennia. In the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most of South and Southeast Asia were under the rule of Britain and France. The communication with these Western colonies involved Yunnan into the economic globalization led by the modern West. The involvement changed the market behaviors and life styles in Yunnan, which demonstrated some characteristic features of China in globalization. In this article, we’ll take the Hongshengxiang as a case to see what these features would be.
The firm was established by Dong Shaohong in 1888, based on two smaller firms of Hongxingzhao and Hongxingfu. Its headquarter was located in Tengyue (the present-day city of Tengchong) in the Sino-Burmese border area, while its branches were spread in Yongchang (the present-day city of Baoshan), Xiaguan (the present-day city of Dali), Kunming, Jiading, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Rangoon, Mandalay, Lashio, Bhamo, Calcutta, Kalimpong and other cities. The major business of the firm was international trade.
Two of the survived accounting books of the Hongshengxiang, Quzhan hongshengxiang gelu wanglai dibu (榆棧洪盛祥各路往來底簿, the Dali branch’s base book of communication with other places) and Yangguang hongshengyang gexiang lingxing kaifeidi di er ce (仰光洪盛祥各項零星開費底第贰冊, the Rangoon branch’s book of out-of-pocket expenses, Book II) are kept in Yunnan Museum. The first book recorded the operations of the Dali branch of the Hongshengxiang in 1907-08, and the second one recorded the operations and overheads of the Rangoon branch in 1936. From the data kept in the two books, we can see that the foreign trade business of the firm was closely related with the demand and supply in the international market. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, besides jade which had been the traditional import goods, the firm dealt mainly with the import of new staple goods, such as cotton yarn, cloth, raw cotton and other commodities. This prosperous business brought considerable fame and fortune to the Hongshengxiang. In the 1920s and later, the firm took shihuang (石璜), a speciality of Yunnan, as its major export goods to meet the increasing demand in the markets of South and Southeast Asia. Though this business, the firm grew fast.
From the commercial operations of the Hongshengxiang, we can see that the rise and fall of the firm were closely linked with the world market. We can also see the influence of the world economy upon the society of China in general and of Yunnan in particular. On one side, the influence can be seen in the flooding of imported commodities in China’s domestic markets, in particular the impact of imported yarn and cloth to China’s agriculture and rural textile handicrafts. In another side, however, it can be seen in the influences of the Western material life and thoughts to the social life in Yunnan.
The operations of the Hongshengxiang, as a particular case, respect the interactions between Yunnan and the world economy. From this study, we can learn more about how globalization was undergoing in China, even in the remote frontier areas of the country such as Yunnan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


Participants:

• Pengsheng Chiu - Enquiring the Early Economic Globalization through the Mining and Selling of Yunnan Copper in Eighteenth-century China

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The early economic globalization might be engined by western navigations after the sixteenth century onwards, but this process was certainly embedded in the specific economic and social development occurred in each area or country which encountered with those western foreigners. This paper will delve into the China's encounter with western trades in the eighteenth century from the angle of the growth of economic network of the southwestern China. The mining and selling of Yunnan copper constituted one of the crucial commodities in the growth of the southwestern China’s economic network, to understand this growth may shed light on the crux of the embeddedness of China’s early economic globalization.

• Jeffrey Y.F. Lau

• Yi Xu - The Overseas Trade, Nation and Borderland Society in 16th to 19th Century:

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Based on the national policies to govern frontier regions, this paper examines the socioeconomic significance of overseas trade towards Fujiang Area. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ming government made full use of the opportunities of overseas trade to suppress the turmoil in Fujiang area. Subsequently, the Qing government used an open and positive policy to fit the development of overseas trade in Fujiang area, which represented by the increasing Guangdong merchants and the rapid development of interprovincial trade, mainly food trade. Encouraged by these exterior economic factors, an unprecedented prosperity appeared in Fujiang Area. However, this kind of prosperity was at the price of that Fujiang area was brought into the South China market system and became the economic hinterland of Guangdong. At first, the nation was able to limit the negative influences of “hinterlandization” by its policies to guarantee the benefit of local people and to maintain the stability of borderland society. However, with the deepening of hinterlandization and the decreasing administrative efficiency of the nation, much more serious problems appeared both in economic and social fields. The nation was exhausted to deal with these problems and finally the situation became out of control. It can be said that the prosperity of Fujiang area in the 18th Century is the outcome of the mutual interaction between nation and overseas trade, while the social conflicts in the 19th Century is the result of independent action by overseas trade to release from the control of nation. The historic process, from turmoil to stability then to prosperity and finally back to turmoil, in Fujiang area reflects the special meaning of early economic globalization towards China’s southwest frontier regions.




D7  -   The Welfare State in Capitalism Revisited
Room: Belle van Zuylenzaal (Academy Hall)

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In the 1970s and early 1980s one of the big themes in welfare state research was the relationship between welfare state and capitalism. One the hand classical variants of Marxist theory, arguing that the welfare state (historically and contemporary) had to be empirically analysed as part of the capitalist system and its domination of the working class. Social policies were to be understood as instruments for meeting the requirements of the reproduction of capital and labour and the regulation of the antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production. On the other hand, “social democratic” or reformist approach saw the welfare state as the concrete historical victory of organized labour movement over capital. We also find a number of studies on “the political economy of the welfare state” (Gough) trying to take a more theoretical and analytical position. In this line we find numerous economist, historians, and sociologists. Especially after the declaration of the “crisis of the welfare state” from the early 1970 (structurally associated to the break down of the Bretton Woods system and the so-called oil crisis) was started a year long academic debate asking if the welfare state and capitalism could co-exist also in the future? One of the most influential studies in this respect was the German sociologist Claus Offe's “Contradictions of the Welfare State” (1984) with its famous dictum that “capitalism could neither live with or without the welfare state.”

With today’s advantage of hindsight it can be concluded that Offe's pessimistic prediction was not fulfilled. Capitalism seems to be stronger than ever both as an ideology and economic system due to the process of globalization. However, the happy marriage of the welfare state and capitalism has also been questioned by interpretations concerning a transition from the welfare state to a “workfare state” (Jessop) or to a “competition state” (Streeck). The notions of continuity and discontinuity seem to be interestingly intertwined in “the welfare state in capitalism”.

In our session we bring together a mixed group of scholars and have them considering “the welfare state in capitalism”. This will emphasize the historical (and historiographic) perspective: What went wrong in the analyses of the 1970s and 1980s and why? Can it be explained by historical changes in capitalism or in the welfare state? Was it a wrong understanding of the historical developments in economies or welfare policies? Or was it a wrong theory? What happens if we take a much the longer historical perspective of the last 100 years? But it will also include a more “history of the present” approach discussing what characterizes “the welfare state in capitalism” of today. Does the process of (hyper)globalization mean we will have to rethink the political economy of the welfare state and in which way?

Session schedule:

After a short introduction by Klaus Petersen and Paulli Kettunen (5 mins) general lectures will be given by Bob Jessop and Chris Lloyd (20 mins each), followed by discussion (also 20 mins).

Next a panel discussion will take place (60 mins). Papers will be presented by Matti Hannikainen; Wessel Visser; Luther P. Carpenter; Paolo Azar, Reto Bertoni & Milton Torrelli; Nirod Palai, Sarojini Mishra & Kumar Das. Each paper will be presented by one of the authors who will give a 10 min presentation based on the paper discussing the following general themes:
- A general reflection on the relation between the welfare state and capitalism in the individual case study;
- Type of capitalims, type of welfare state, type of regulation?
- "Happy marriage" or the welfare state as a challenge to capitalism?".

The panel discussion is followed by a general discussion and comments (45 mins)", a closing lecture by Göran Therborn titled 'Welfare states and 21st century capitalism (20 mins) and closing remarks.


Organizers:

• Pauli Kettunen

• Christopher Lloyd - Models of the Relationship Between The Welfare State and Capitalism

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Welfare States are usually understood as the product of advanced western industrial capitalism, emerging first in a few places before the First World War, further developing in some countries in the 1930s, and becoming widespread after the Second World War. But the close connection that such states are presumed to have with liberal democracy is a central issue that needs exploring in the age of the global spread of dynamic capitalist industrialization. Social Democratic Welfare Capitalism (SDWC), which is the convergent western model that has a close connection with liberalization, may not be the only possible trajectory of the capitalist/welfare trajectory in the long run.

One central question of historical welfare state research concerns the origins of SDWC in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in a context of capitalist instability, crises, and major socio-political and ideological conflict. The relatively great stability of the period since the 1950s in Western developed countries has tended to obscure the turbulent history of capitalism in prior times and in other places. The extent to which SD welfarism was instrumental in stabilizing western capitalism in the post-war era is another, related, central question. In the current context of a developing major world economic crisis these issues have become highly pertinent again.

Welfare systems of various sorts have historically been developed within socio-economic systems other than liberal western capitalism (such as Fascism and Communism) and today Chinese and other East Asian forms of authoritarian capitalism are presenting major challenges to the capitalism-industrialisation-social democracy-welfarism path. Thus another central question concerns the possibilities of welfare states emerging in the future within models of capitalism other than the Western. The conceptualization of varieties of capitalism and the history of the capitalist/welfare connection needs to be considerably broadened to encompass all possibilities in the 21st century.


Participants:

• Paola Azar - Fiscal and welfare state regimes: the case of Uruguay, from a regional perspective (1970-2000)
Co-author(s): Reto Bertoni; Milton Torrelli

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Fiscal management, as an expression of State “institutionalized engagements”, has been applied to identifiy the existence of different “fiscal regimes” in Uruguay, during the XXth. century. This paper analyzes the performance and characteristics of the social public expenditure in the framework of the fiscal regime prevaling during the last thirty years. Through a comparative perspective, it addresses the changes in the revenue structure, the evolution of the social public expenditure and the management of fiscal results for Uruguay, Argentine, Chile and Costa Rica (countries which have historically shared similar patterns of development). The period of reference is the one when economic liberalization, trade openness and structural reforms, including the macroeconomic management, were strongly implemented in the Latin American region.

After looking into the differences in the relation between “fiscal regimes” and social protection policies under macroeconomic stablization programs in the selected countries, it will be possible to identify distinct experiences of the welfare state peripecy in the capitalist periphery under “neo-liberalism” times. Has it deepened social inequalities or has it created a “reactive equity” opposed to the “proactive equity” needed for sustainable development?

• Reto Bertoni

• Luther P. Carpenter - The French Welfare State in the Economic Crisis of 1974-84

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It worked. Not perfectly, but in the pragmatic way that social systems succeed. In 1974-83, successive French governments expanded features of the existing welfare state, especially unemployment benefit. They used the minimum wage to preserve the purchasing power of ordinary working people. They invented 'early retirement' and started to share the available amount of work to new entrants to the job market. They ran modest deficits in total public spending, not a full-fledged Keynesian policy. Viewing the economic crisis as a structural, not merely one of macroeconomic policy, the Mitterrand government tried to use nationalizations of major industries to make the economy competitive in the long run. The international context (and opposition of the employers' federation) forced them to retreat in 1982-3. Nonetheless, they had expanded the existing bargain and defended it politically; it survived into the next stage of capitalism. Now as we face another economic crisis, analogies with 1974-83 are useful.

• Kumar Das

• Matti Hannikainen - Improving Social Capability. Social Contract and Structural Change in the 20th Century Finland

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The transformation into the modern wage-work society has to a great extent happened in Finland after the Second World War – in European comparison late but on the other hand quite rapidly. Fol-lowing Moses Abramovitz’s (1986) famous concept of social capability it is possible to argue that Finland avoided institutional and technological obstacles of development. Social capability refers to the facilities for the diffusion of knowledge, conditions facilitating structural change, and macro-economic and monetary conditions encouraging and sustaining capital investment.

The social contract between employees, employers and the government has been the important di-mension of social capability in Finland during the second half of the 20th century. It decreased resis-tance to structural changes in the society and made easier implement economic growth. In the Nor-dic countries there were a widely shared trust in ‘a virtuous circle’ between economic growth, social equality and the widening of democracy, at least from the 1960’s until the late 1980s. Moreover, the formation of welfare state, too, can be considered as endogenous enlargement of social capabilities in Finland.

However, it can be argued that collective bargaining and welfare institutions have also negative ef-fects on productivity, e.g. by delaying and preventing necessary changes in the context of global market and economic crises. The beneficial institutional commitments induced by the past devel-opment may stand as an obstacle in the future. This paper analyses the role of Scandinavian-style social contract and extensive welfare-enhancing policy interventions during the rapid catch-up growth period in Finland.

• Bob Jessop

• Sarojini Mishra

• N.K. Palai

• Göran Therborn

• Wessel Visser - From RDP to GEAR to Post-Polokwane: The ANC and the Provision of Social Security for Post-Apartheid South Africa

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Under minority rule a South African social security system was established along the lines of early social security in Western Europe where it evolved mainly as social insurance, first for the industrial workforce and later for the whole population. The expansion of this system to other racial groups ironically put South Africa in the uncommon situation of a semi-industrial country having the trappings of a modern welfare state, the core of which is the provision of a basic pension for everyone in need.

Black expectations of a social security system was already evident by 1955 when the so-called Congress of the People gathered near Johannesburg to endorse the Freedom Charter. The contents of the Charter reflected rudimentary elements of social security such as unemployment benefits, health insurance, social old-age pensions, disability grants and child and family grants. Prior to South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994 the ANC agreed in principle to adopt the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of the super trade union federation, COSATU – a programme that contained elements of social security in return for COSATU’s support in the elections. However, the RDP soon ran into trouble. From the beginning the government lacked the capacity to implement it. As the RDP staff lacked proper implementation skills huge backlogs in providing access to basic services, as defined in the RDP, occurred. In order to calm domestic capital and foreign currency markets the government embraced a neo-liberal conservative macro-economic strategy – Growth, Employment and Redistribution, or GEAR. Perhaps the most important difference between the RDP and GEAR was that, while the former expected the state to conduct a people-orientated development policy, the latter saw South Africa’s economic “salvation” in a high economy growth rate that would result from a sharp increase in private capital accumulation in an unbridled capitalistic system.

The ANC’s unilateral acceptance of GEAR would generate considerable internal disagreement, especially from the ranks of COSATU. Union opposition to privatisation in South Africa included concern about the socio-economic impact of restructuring and privatisation, since it would lead to enormous retrenchments and job losses and therefore labour-market insecurity. The unions also harboured fear of the loss of social security benefits, such as pension/providence, medical aid and other related benefits as part of any workplace restructuring/privatisation programme. Tensions between the Mbeki faction and COSATU supporters within the ANC, inter alias over GEAR policies, culminated at the party’s national convention in Polokwane in December 2007 when President Mbeki was ousted as ANC president. In March 2008 he was also “recalled” as state present by the ruling party. After the general election of April 2009 with the ANC under the new presidency of Jacob Zuma South Africa is probably bound to see a revised, strongly labour-biased and developing state welfare and social security policy.




E7  -   Empirical studies in African Economic History
Room: Maskeradezaal (Academy Hall)

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Studying the historical development of an economy provides a context for existing challenges and a source of hypotheses to explain the trajectory and slope of that evolution. Data and its usability are one of the key tools in understanding the past and an even more important tool for addressing current and future dilemmas. However, one of the main problems for doing research in African economic history is the availability of data and also its usability. Data are scarce and often unreliable in many Sub-Saharan African countries, even South Africa.

This session will bring together a number of papers that make use of inventive ways to improve the conduct of quantitative economic history in Africa. The papers will include topics such as colonialism, slavery, conflict, and the emergence of democracy.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 10:30am: Presentations by Jutta Bolt; Alexander Moradi (with Marcel Fafchamps); Bill Freund; Morten Jerven; Krige Siebrits, Estian Calitz and Stan du Plessis.
10:30 - 11:00am: Break.
11:00 - 12:30am: Presentations by Nuno Valério, Rita Martins de Sousa and Sandra Domingos Costa (with Carlos Bastien and Ana Bela Nunes); Frans Buelens; Stan du Plessis; Johan Fourie and Dieter von Fintel.


Organizers:

- Happy in the service of the Company: the purchasing power of VOC salaries at the Cape in the 18th century
Co-author(s): Stan du Plessis

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This paper investigates the empirical basis for perceptions of rising affluence at the Cape of Good Hope during the 18th century. Recent scholarship (for example, Allen 2005) have calculated and compared the levels and evolution of real wages in various European and Asian economies since the early modern period. This paper extends that literature to the Dutch East India Company’s colony at the Cape of Good during the 18th century. We follow Allen (2005) in calculating two measures of real wages in the colony, the first based on a simple relation between nominal wages and the cost of a calorie and the second based on a broader index of goods as an approximation to the cost of living. We are able to perform these calculations for both skilled and unskilled categories of labour, which will allow a comparison to trends observed in European and Asian economies where real wages were either stagnant or on a downward trend in this period.

This papers draws on a number of different data sources, some of which have only recently become available to economic historians. Nominal wages data for various categories is drawn from Muster Rolls (from the National Archive at the Hague) of the VOC’s wage payments at the Cape of Good Hope for a number of dates starting in 1699 and ending in 1790. Production volumes, prices and quantities consumed of agricultural commodities central to the diet of colonists are from Van Duin and Ross (1987) while the prices of cloth and commodities are from the Transcriptions of Estate Papers at the Cape (TEPC). These data are combined to calculate the level and trend of real wages at the Cape of Good Hope over the course of the 18th century.

JEL codes: N3, N9

Bibliography
Allen, R. C. (2005). Real Wages in Europe and Asia: A First Look at the Longterm Patterns. Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe. R. C. Allen, T. Bengtsson and M. Dribe. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Van Duin, P. and R. Ross (1987). The Economy of the Cape Colony in the eighteenth century. Leidein, Intercontinenta no 7.s

• Stan A. du Plessis


Participants:

• Jutta Bolt - Indigenous Slavery in Africa’s History: Conditions and Consequences
Co-author(s): Dirk Bezemer; Robert Lensink

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This paper is the first study to conduct an econometric analysis of indigenous slavery in Africa. We distinguish indigenous slavery from export slavery and survey the literature in order to identify the factors that shaped its prevalence and its impact on Africa’s long-term development. We present data collected from anthropological records and utilize these in a statistical analysis. The results show that indigenous slavery was more common in Equatorial and West Africa (specifically the Belgian colonies) and in societies with more developed states. Our analysis also shows that indigenous slavery is robustly and negatively associated with long-term income development. . We find evidence that this effect runs via less political development, especially lower democratic accountability.

• Frans Buelens - Profits, stock returns and evolution of the capital structure of Belgian based Congo companies during the era of colonisation. A unique quantitative assessment of a former African colony.

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Studying the profitability of the Congo companies during the colonization period reveals that this was extremely high. We report the profitability as witnessed by accounting data as well as by stock market data, and compare the stock market data with international data. The colonisation of the Congo proved to be a highly lucrative business.

Belgian investors did invest in the Congo, but a lot of the final capital of their balance sheets in 1960 was from other sources. A considerable part of capital of companies came from reserve funds, build up by retained earnings realised in the Congo itself. Put in another way, an important part of "primitive accumulation" of capital (as far as companies is concerned) in the Congo was realised by internal efforts, not by imports of capital. This was especially the case from the Second World War on. On the contrary, during the 1920s considerable amounts of investments were made, an effort that was not continued during the 1930s. With the Second World War and the boom in raw material prices due to this War and the Cold War the Congo economy produced enormous amounts of profits, making it possible to distribute huge amounts of dividends and bonuses. The bulk of capital increases was realised with incorporating reserved funds and revaluation gains.

• Estian Calitz - Institutions and the sustainability of fiscal policy in South Africa, 1960-2008
Co-author(s): Stan du Plessis and Krige Siebrits

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In recent decades, mounting evidence of the deleterious effects of excessive fiscal deficits on macroeconomic performance has fueled interest in mechanisms to maintain fiscal sustainability. These include institutional innovations such as numerical fiscal rules, budget-process reforms and transparency frameworks to enhance the accountability of policymakers. Their widespread adoption should not, however, be interpreted as a consensus on the effectiveness of institutional mechanisms for ensuring fiscal discipline. Indeed, the empirical evidence is decidedly mixed – with considerable variation in the effectiveness of fiscal institutions between countries and over time – and consequently the debate about the efficacy of institutional reform continues.

In this paper we study the influence of institutions on fiscal outcomes with a case study of South Africa since the 1960s. The aim is to identify institutions that had a lasting impact on the ability to increase tax compliance and restrain public expenditure within socially acceptable bounds. The fiscal institutions included a dual-budgeting system (revenue and loan accounts) which may be described as a rules-based regime (1960-1976), a discretionary regime (1976-1997) and a discretionary regime underpinned by accountability-enhancing transparency measures (1997 to the present). During the mid-1990s and despite rapidly rising budget deficit-to-GDP and public debt-to-GDP ratios (peaking at 7.3% and 49.5% respectively) and soaring expectations about the extent and quality of public services, the fiscal authorities achieved a significant fiscal consolidation. This occurred amidst a political transition from apartheid to full democracy and was implemented with discretionary measures – an achievement that defied expectations (in terms of economic theory) of rapid growth in government spending and worsening fiscal imbalances. We argue that periods of rising deficits and public debt in South Africa, with particular reference to the above-mentioned episode, have historically been followed by a return to sustainable levels before causing major economic crises, signifying sound fiscal institutions.

• Sandra Domingos Costa

• Johan Fourie - The dynamics of inequality in a newly settled, pre-industrial society: The case of the Cape Colony
Co-author(s): Dieter von Fintel

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One reason for the relatively poor development performance of many countries around the world today may be the high levels of inequality during and after colonisation. Evidence from colonies in the Americas suggests that skewed initial factor endowments could create small elites that owned a disproportionate share of wealth, human capital and political power. The Cape Colony, founded in 1652 at the southern tip of Africa, presents a case where a mercantilist company (the Dutch East India Company) settles the land and establishes a unique set of institutions within which inequality and development evolve. This paper provides a long-run quantitative analysis of trends in asset-based inequality (using Principle Components' Analysis on tax inventories) during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, allowing, for the first time, a dynamic rather than static analysis of inequality trends in a newly settled and pre-industrial society over this period. While theory testing in other societies has been severely limited because of a scarcity of quantitative evidence, this study presents a history with evidence, enabling an evaluation of the Engerman-Sokoloff and other hypotheses.

• Bill Freund - The Social Context of Economic Growth 1960-2008
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Abstract
The health of the African economy is normally measured in terms of rates of growth. This paper suggests that growth figures are to a certain extent deceptive and, even more than that, superficial. In Africa, they largely measure the internationally tradeable indices and their rise and fall tends to reflect the market price of commodities such as coffee or copper or the development of oil deposits. The current, relatively positive picture given comes mainly from the greatly improved commodity prices that have characterised the first years of the twenty-first century rather than some kind of structural ‘take-off’. The broader context of what is happening is posited as being more fundamental for understanding trends. Surveying the literature relevant since 1960, this paper tries to point to some of the factors which have been more critical in change: demographic trends including urbanisation, the scope of so-called deagrarianisation and migration out of Africa entirely. It suggests how to come to terms with the varied phenomena jointly referred to as the informal sector. It looks at changes in the labour market, at how the African bourgeoisie/entrepreneurial class have been considered and the extensive literature on the African state. It finally considers as well the necessity to develop a more nuanced sense of the continent by stressing the range of different trends in different regions.

• Morten Jerven - The African Growth Evidence: Accuracy, Reliability and Volatility of National Income Estimates.

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It has been argued that the fundamental cause of Africa's current relative poverty is a lack of pro-growth institutions deriving either from the colonial system, the period of slavery, or from particular African geographic/population characteristics. This paper takes a fresh look at the African income estimates. It subjects the available datasets to tests of accuracy, reliability and volatility and finds that there is very little to explain in terms of income diversity. Apart from some resource rich enclaves and islands and the exception of South Africa, the income of one African economy is not meaningfully different from another.

• Rita Martins de Sousa

• Alexander Moradi - Referral and Job Performance: Evidence from the Ghana Colonial Army
Co-author(s): Marcel Fafchamps

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Using data compiled from army archives, we test whether the referral system in use in the British colonial army in Ghana served to improve the unobserved quality of new recruits. We find that it did not. If anything, referred recruits were more likely to desert and be dismissed as inefficient or unfit. We find instead evidence of referee opportunism.
Army recruiters may have been aware of this problem by insisting that referred recruits have better observed characteristics.

• Franz Krige Siebrits

• Nuno Valério - Banking in the Portuguese Colonial Empire (1864-1975)
Co-author(s): Ana Bela Nunes, Carlos Bastien, Nuno Valério, Rita Martins de Sousa, Sandra Domingos Costa (GHES, ISEG – Technical University of Lisbon)

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Abstract
This paper provides a general view of the evolution of banking in the Portuguese Colonial Empire between the founding of the first Portuguese colonial bank in 1864, and the independence of most Portuguese colonies in 1975. The text summarizes the legal background, presents the existing banks, examines their businesses, and discusses their contribution to the economic evolution of the territories under consideration. As the main conclusions it may be said that: (i) Portuguese colonial banking followed the continental model of government initiative and tight control, not the British model of private initiative without much government control; (ii) development of Portuguese colonial banking was always mainly a matter of profiting from the opportunities afforded by the economic evolution than a matter of autonomously fostering economic development of the territories.

• Dieter von Fintel




F7  -   Origins and early years of the International Economic History Congresses: Discussion Forum and Oral History
Room: Senaatszaal (Academy Hall)

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A group of economic historians led by M.M. Postan and Fernand Braudel met in Paris in the winter of 1959 to organize an international gathering of economic historians. Their initiative was followed by the first international conference held in Stockholm in 1950. This year in Utrecht we participate in the fourteenth world congress and celebrate fifty years of international association in the discipline. This interview forum with some of the early Presidents and key members of the Secretariat provides an opportunity to discover the origins and development of the congresses, the ways the agendas were set and how these connected with the big issues of the discipline over this past half century. The forum opens discussion of the institutional and cultural framework of the congresses across the Cold War divide, and their growing internationalism.

Session schedule:
- Introduction: 'Economic History in the Age of World Congresses: Intellectual Issues and Institutional Frameworks' (Maxine Berg);
- Presentations by Herman Van der Wee / Peter Mathias: 'The Foundation of the International Economic History Association and its Early Years'.
- Informal discussion and comments. Participants: Li Bozhong, Larry Neal, Vera Zamagni, Osamu Saito, Richard Sutch, Om Prakash, Jan DeVries, Sushil Chaudhury, Patrick Fridenson, Riitta Hjerppe and Leonid Borodkin.




Organizers:

• Pat Hudson


Participants:

• Leonid Borodkin

• Sushil Chaudhury

• Jan DeVries

• Patrick Fridenson

• Riitta Hjerppe

• Bozhong Li

• Peter Mathias

• Larry Neal

• Vera Negri Zamagni

• Om Prakash

• Osamu Saitō

• Richard Sutch

• Herman Van der Wee - The International Economic History Association in the Mirror of its Past

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UtrechtPaperHistAss09Abstract




G7  -   The Economic Dimension of the Cold War in the Third World
Room: Kanunnikenzaal (Academy Hall)

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The impact of the Cold War on the economic relations with developing countries is an area that requires further research. In this field the distinct yet inter-related issues of decolonisation, Cold War politics and expropriations are only treated jointly in high-profile cases. Yet these issues were relevant in most instances of economic cooperation between developed and developing countries. As decolonisation proceeded in the empire, Western and Eastern powers vied for the support of the new states, often through the medium of development aid and foreign investment. Nevertheless, as Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard have argued, development operated on many levels, ranging from the local to the global. Development was propagated by very different actors: by community leaders; by nationalists who framed their vision of the nation state in modernist concepts and language; by Europeans who transformed discredited notions of the ‘civilizing mission’ into European-defined concepts of modernity; and by Cold War actors who competed for sympathies and allegiances. It spawned a number of organisations and programmes, which became the experts in development and aid, such as the World Bank, various United Nations organisations, non-governmental organisations. The aim of the session is to contribute to a transnational economic research of the decolonisation process. Therefore we invite scholars to contribute with papers on the inter-relations of decolonisation, Cold War and nationalisation as well as case studies concerning Africa, Asia, Latin-America and the Middle-East. The following topics could be addressed: economic consequences of decolonisation, influences of elites, economic and military aid, role of local business and multinationals.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 10:30am: Introduction by Stephanie Decker; papers by Larry Butler and Stephanie Decker (20 mins each); comments by Anja Kruke (20 mins).
10:30 - 11:00am: Break.
11:00 - 12:30am: Papers by Ragna Boden and Stefanie van de Kerkhof (20 mins each); comments by Anja Kruke (20 mins).


Organizers:

- Playing the Cold War Game: Kaisers, Nkrumah & the Volta River Project in newly independent Ghana

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In its attempts to revamp the British Empire after World War II, the Colonial Office fell back on older plans for exploiting bauxite in the Gold Coast (later Ghana). In the following years, this initial idea formed the core to one of the largest post-war development projects of its kind: a hydro-electric dam was to be constructed at the river Volta, creating a massive new lake and enough power for Ghana’s limited electricity consumers, as well as a new fishing industry and irrigation for agriculture. The surplus power was to go towards the creation of an integrated aluminium industry that would use local bauxite to create finished aluminium ingots. Beyond the capacity of any single company or government to fund, it eventually became a joint commitment of the governments of the UK, US, and Ghana, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the Eximbank as well as Kaiser Industries and Reynolds Aluminium Company (the latter only held a ten percent stake compared to Kaisers 90 percent ownership of the aluminium smelter VALCO). As a quintessential mega-project of the Cold War era, it is a good example of how the ‘fashions’ and trends of its day shaped not only the geography, but also the political and economic room to manoeuvre for an entire country.

• Stefanie Van de Kerkhof - Military Aid and Marketing of European Arms Producers in the Cold War

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The Cold War shaped cultural and social phenomena in the fields of fine arts, media, literature and in the spheres of images, discourses and memories. How this process influenced war or peace cultures in Eastern and Western Europe have yet not been researched sufficiently. Besides images of high technology, economic development and dominant virility, there were two main fields of discourse, on which marketing strategies of firms like Rheinmetall focussed: security and trust.
By using the security concept of Conze and Sywottek I intend to underline the cultural and media based dimensions of the Cold War in Europe, Africa and Asia. It should become clear, that weapon producers in Germany, France and Great Britain used techniques of discourse framing for their marketing strategies, and that “aid” – both economic and military – played an important role for their argumentation.


Participants:

• Ragna Boden - Modernization – Soviet Style: Soviet Aid to Indonesia

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By combining classical and recent modernization concepts, I will analyze the obstacles to Soviet engagements in Indonesia as a case study for modernization projects. I will focus on typical spheres of modernization such as the economic-technical, the military and the societal-ideological fields with special regard to the Soviet rivalry with the U.S. as well as with the People’s Republic of China. A comparison between Soviet, Western and Chinese modernization strategies for developing countries can reveal which of them was most successful in applying its own model of modernization to non-European cultures and acted according to the idea of “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt). The paper is based on archival documents from Russia, Germany and the Netherlands.

• Larry Butler - African mining in a Cold War context: the case of late-colonial Zambia

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Taking the example of copper mining during the last years of colonial rule, this paper examines the interaction of increasingly important questions concerning the role of the state, the strategies adopted by business in response to political change and rival visions of ‘development’ against the background of intensifying ideological rivalry in the Cold War. In Zambia’s case, all of these questions had a particularly acute significance because of the country’s heavy dependence on a single export – copper, making Zambia unusually vulnerable to fluctuations in world demand.

• Dr. Anja Kruke




H7  -   The Hanse: a typical and an atypical medieval mercantile phenomenon
Room: Raadzaal (Achter Sint Pieter)

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The Hanse was once famously described as a mollusc: a strong, yet changeable and fluid body. As a medieval organisation of traders and towns, it was a phenomenon difficult to grasp fully in standard contemporary legal, organisational and even mercantile terms. However, it was at the same time deeply rooted in the commercial culture of northwestern Europe. In a host of issues, the trade of its members underwent the same developments which changed European commerce in the Middle Ages. This session aims to disclose some aspects of the idiosyncrasies of the Hanse, and set them in a general context. The typical and atypical traits of the Hanse will be discussed in papers on Hanseatic trade, Hanseatic legal and organisational structure, as well as questions of politics and culture which shaped the Hanse.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 10:30am: Papers by Geir Atle Ersland (9:00), Mike Burkhardt (9:15), Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz (9:30), Jens E. Olesen (9:45) and Carsten Jahnke (10:00); discussion (10:15-10:30).
10:30 - 11:00am: Break.
11:00 - 12:30am: Papers by Edda Frankot (11:00), Richard W. Unger (11:!5), Marie-Louise Pelus-Kaplan (11:30), and James Murray (11:45); discussion (12:00 - 12:30).


Organizer:

- Hansards and the ‘Other’. Perceptions and strategies in late medieval Bergen.

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Hanseatic traders formed the largest and most prominent group of foreigners in Bergen, Norway, in the Late Middle Ages. In practice, they gained a hegemony in the trade of this Norwegian economic capital. Hansards had attained this position through the acquisition of privileges from the Norwegian rulers, through the organisation of their trade and settlement in the town in the form of the Kontor, and through being part of the efficient trade network of the Hanse. However, it has to be recognised that the process of becoming the prime players on the Bergen market did not happen in a void, but in interaction with other groups: Norwegians, Englishmen and Hollanders. The relations with these groups took a different shape, and were conditioned by changing temporal and situational contexts. Still, all these groups had one thing in common from the Hanseatic point of view: they were the ‘Other’, non-Hansards. In this paper, the various perceptions the Hansards in Bergen held of the ‘Other’, and the strategies they developed in contacts with them, will be analysed, and a model of classifications will be constructed. Moreover, the question will be addressed to what extent Hanseatic perceptions of the ‘Other’ converged with or differed from medieval notions of alterity. In other words, whether the comportment of Hansards in Bergen was typical or atypical of their time. The case of Bergen will thus set the Hanse into the general discussion on alterity in the Late Middle Ages.


Participants:

• Mike Burkhardt - Business as usual? – A critical investigation on the hanseatic pound toll lists

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Pound toll lists are one of the most important sources for the calculation of quantities in Late Medieval Hanseatic trade. Often they are regarded as comparatively objective and complete mirrors of a towns’ gross trade or of certain merchants’ trade activities within one or several towns. This assumption led as far as a comparison of Lübeck’s gross trade with that of Genua, which was solely based on the pound toll registry in Lübeck’s case.
There are, however, several issues that question the value of the pound toll lists as a source for a complete statistical survey of Lübeck’s annual trade volume. The aim of this paper is to show these issues on the background of an investigation of one particular group of Hanseatic merchants – the Bergenfahrers.
In order to achieve this goal it is necessary to have a closer look on several aspects of the Hanseatic Bergen trade. These include the Bergenfahrers’ business organization, and trade concepts as well as social and business networks of different Hanse merchants who were active in the Bergen market. With these information as a backbone we can have another look at Lübeck’s pound toll lists of the second half of the 14th century and of 1492-1496 with the focus on entries regarding the Bergen trade. This part of the paper will investigate possibilities to get information on specific Bergenfahrers’ winnings or losses in the Bergen trade and discuss reasons for differences found in these calculations. A question that follows this investigation must then be: Can we speak of a typical Bergen trade in the Late Middle Ages? Or was the untypical the typical way of doing business in this market?
On the background of the information gathered in part two, the third and last part of the paper will on one hand make a statement about the problematic issues of Lübeck’s and other hanseatic towns’ pound toll registry as a source for large scale trade statistics. On the other hand the question if they can be useful as a source must be raised, and if so, what problems and tasks can be tackled with their help.

• Geir Atle Ersland - The Handelsgericht of the Kontor in Bergen

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THE HANDELSGERICHT OF THE KONTOR IN BERGEN
In the Bergenfahrer Archive in Lübeck there are a series of protocols called Protocolbücher des Handelsgerichts. These protocols originate from The Hanseatic Kontor in Bergen, and they cover a rather late period (c. 1630– 1760) in the history of the Kontor. The content of the protocols is of a diverse character, however, the term “Gerichtprotokollbuch” must originate from fact that the protocols for a large part were used to record the many cases judged by the Kontor’s aldermen. The extra-jurisdictional rights and practices of the Kontor have been debated by historians as a feature from its origin in the 14th century. It has been underlined that the members of the Kontor made their own internal law to regulate the daily life, but also that they avoided being submitted to Norwegian courts of law. In this paper I will argue that the Kontor in the 15th century established a court which passed sentences in matters of commerce involving the merchants at the Kontor, and that this court can be seen as the main function of the Kontor. Contrary to the established position among researchers, I will also show that this court was recognized by Norwegian authorities and functioned alongside the local town court.

• Edda Frankot - ‘Der ehrbaren Hanse-Städte See-Recht’: Diversity and Unity in Hanseatic Maritime Law

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Overseas trade was the basis of all Hanseatic activities. In order to secure smooth relations between all parties involved in this trade as regards any problems occurring during sea voyages, maritime laws were formulated. Paradoxically, a comprehensive Hanseatic maritime law did not come into being until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when the Hanse had lost the power to implement such a law, whereas at the height of its power, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a myriad of local laws and jurisdictions existed. This paper will analyse this paradox by considering the development of maritime law and its administration in individual Hanseatic towns, such as Lübeck, Danzig, Reval and Kampen, and by examining attempts within the Hanse at creating common regulations, from irregular statutes starting in 1365, via the Schifferordnung of 1482, to the 1591/1614 general sea law. This analysis will allow us to establish why a comprehensive Hanseatic sea law only came into existence after the Hanse’s demise and how the shared special needs of Hanseatic merchants, for example with regards to gaining justice outside their home towns, were catered for nonetheless.

• Carsten Jahnke - The city of Lübeck and the internationality of early hanseatic trade

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Since the beginning of the 20th century the “foundation” of the city of Lübeck and the beginnings of the Hanseatic League were seen as two sides of the same coin, or as the most famous German historian Fritz Rörig has said: “The whole existed earlier than the parts. The development of the proud Hanseatic cities in the Baltic Sea Area […] was not a whim of fate, but was the consequence of a wilful economic program: the economic dominance of the Baltic Sea by German merchants.” The development as well of the Baltic Sea area as of its western partner at the North Sea area was foreseen by a nearly divine plan, and those who gained the most profit were (certainly) the German merchants.
This concept, developed in the shadow of the victorious German Kaiserreich, contains many weak points, but it was never really questioned until the last decade. By this, most of the histories of the Hanseatic League start with the so called “foundation” of the city of Lübeck in 1158/59 by Duke Henry the Lion, ignoring as well the roots of the hanseatic trade as the roots of the same city. In accordance with this perspective the German merchant came to the new markets like a deus ex machina and was right away victorious as the German army of 1864.
To question these statements and to show the making of the Hanse is the main challenge of this paper. It shall be shown, that international market-connections existed long before the “foundation” of the Hanseatic League and the city of Lübeck. Trade went on the same routes and with the same goods latest at the end of the 11th century if even earlier. The main pillars of this old trade were merchants from all over the Baltic Area, from Russia, Gothland, Sweden, Denmark but also from the pagan Slavonian areas of the Baltic south. All groups together traded between Russia in the east and Flanders/England in the west, alone or together with each other. At the same time, more and more “Germans” came with their goods into this trade. They had to fit in themselves into this system by many reasons, not only because of language problems but also because of transport capacities and knowledge.
The pre-hanseatic merchants are the key-factor of the later development. They explored not only the old markets, but connected also new areas to old markets and were, latest in the middle of the 13th century, able to invest more and more money into the system. They were not dominant a prima die natali, but were part of a development from the beginning of the 12th to the end of the 13th century. In the first times, these “German” merchants were minor partners in an old system. They needed to integrate themselves into the existing system, as long they were not able to hire own ships and to build up own trading connections in foreign countries. Around 1200 the old minors changed their status and challenged the old powers. The “Germans” went to be equals in the system, not dominating but a factor. At this step, more and more old trading places in the Baltic became “German” cities that means that these cities got a new, “German” city-law.
At this time, the “Germans”, which were not a united group at all, stated to change the rules of trade. They were able, to open the big German market for Baltic products and to reinvest their profits in the Baltic trade again. By doing so, the “German” merchants got not better, but richer than their old concurrent and fought for more and more influence and privileges at the main market-stations, the natal hour of the German Hanseatic League.
First around 1240 the German merchants reached that position, which was the attribute of the Hanseatic trade of the 14th and 15th century.
The dominance of the Hanseatic League in the trade between Russia and Flanders/England is the result of a long process, beginning c.1050/90 and ending in the time between 1240 and 1300. This process was not a whim of fate, but the result of an economical development and the inner organising of the new trade, furthermost in the north and western parts of central Europe.
This paper will by this proof, to write a new history of this old story.

• James M. Murray - The well-grounded error: Bruges as

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An all too typical error among historians is to label the Flemish city of Bruges as a member of the German Hanse. This is entirely understandable in one sense because Bruges was the most important settlement and exchange point (Kontor) of the Hanse in western Europe, and became closely identified with products imported by Hanse members. In this paper I will detail the many new findings of research projects undertaken in the last decade that illustrate this atypical relationship of Bruges and its Hanse residents across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

• Jens E. Olesen - The Hanse and the Kalmar Union 1435-1481

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This paper deals with the politics of the Hanse towards the nordic Kalmar-Union during the period from 1435 up to 1481. These years are central in Scandinavian and finnish history, covering problems like the expulsion of Eric of Pomerania 1439-1441, his piracy from Gotland up to 1449, the reign of king Christopher of Bavaria (1440-1448), the presence of two kings ruling Denmark-Norway (Christian I) and Sweden (Karl Knutsson Bonde) and the Union-wars from 1451. The Hanse and their different groups had to decide their positions towards the three Nordic countries and the establishment of a new king restoring the Kalmar-Union after the crisis 1434-1436. The combat between the Wendish Hanse-cities and the Hollanders 1438-1441 created possibilities for the new king Christopher to strengthen his own futural position, had it not been for the harsh proto-national viewpoints of the Norwegian Council of the Realm on the background of the dominant Hanseatic position in Bergen. The Danish King Christian I, who from 1448 fought Karl Knutsson for several years, almost at the end won Sweden by the help of Lübeck and the Wendish Hanse-Towns, who reached a salt monopoly towards Sweden. In short, the paper deals with the strategies and complicated internal interests and relations inside the Hanse towards the thre nordic countries inkl. Finland and Iceland with their different trade-profiles in a crucial period of Scandinavian late-medieval history.

• Marie-Louise Pelus-Kaplan - Mobilité et entreprise dans le monde hanséatique: des entreprises commerciales
Co-author(s): Marie-Louise PELUS-KAPLAN

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Dans le contexte d'un "long XVIe siècle" plutôt favorable, globalement, au commerce hanséatique, il est intéressant d'étudier, grâce à des archives d'entreprises plus nombreuses que celles dont on dispose pour l'époque médiévale, comment les marchands de la Hanse adaptent à ce contexte nouveau leurs formes ancestrales d'organisation et de mobilité. La communication s'attachera à montrer, d'abord, comment migrations et moblité sont deux éléments constitutifs de l'identité hanséatique, puis de quelle manière la culture technique des entreprises commerciales hanséatiques constitue une réponse originale aux conditions spécifiques de leur commerce; enfin, à partir de l'exemple des entreprises lubeckoises, comment les entreprises traditionnelles se maintiennent tout en s'adaptant aux conditions nouvelles des XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Tout en conservant leur structure complexe et éclatée, tout en restant fidèles à leur pratique ancestrale de la mobilité, les entreprises lubeckoises pendant et après la Guerre de Trente Ans vont se convertir progressivement à de nouvelles techniques, comme la comptabilité en partie double, et se montrer capables d'opérer des reconversions spectaculaires(par exemple en misant très fortement sur le commerce avec la France au moment de la Guerre de Hollande). Ces constatations vont dans le sens du regard neuf posé sur les "petites" entreprises hanséatiques par une nouvelle génération d'historiens qui s'attache à réévaluer les réseaux des petites entreprises européennes, à la lumière des études consacrées à l'histoire des réseaux commerciaux des autres continents.

• Richard W. Unger - The Hanse Beer Trade: the norm of nothern European commerce

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The beer trade was a staple of a number of Hanse towns along the south coast of the North Sea and the Baltic. The development of reliable methods to produce beer with hope as the principal flavouring in the early years of the thirteenth century created a durable good that could remain drinkable for up to six months and more. The new additive meant that a lower alcohol content was required to preserve the drink and that in turn translated into less grain needed for each barrel. Hopped beer could cost less to brew and could travel without violent damage to the taste. Hopped beer then became an export product first for Bremen and soon thereafter for Hamburg. In the Baltic Wismar surprisingly was the source of beer for Scandinavia while Gdañsk sent beer throughout Prussia and further east. Beer was bulky so most of the trade went by sea. The towns involved in production set regulations to promote production and even, in the case of Lübeck, built systems to supply water to breweries. Towns also colluded to standardize barrel size to ease interchangeability and increase the chances that brewers would get barrels back to use again. The volume of the trade proved to be considerable. That remained true in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries after population fel. Brewers probably took advantage of consumers having more spare money to spend on what was, among foodstuffs, a relative luxury. Prices indicate that beer held up and that it was a significant source of income for the residents of the major Hanse exporting towns. It was a source of income for the rulers of importing jurisdictions as well. The Hanse had diplomatic bouts with, for example, the Count of Flanders over the taxes on imported beer. At Bruges the building that housed merchants was specially equipped for the storage and easy handling of beer. While the total value of the beer trade may have been impressive the units were relatively small and so apparently no special instruments were required to finance the trade. Difficulties of producing wine in the region of Hanse towns made beer the drink of choice. Brewers in north German towns were able to develop an industry and, in conjunction with shippers, exploited the relatively efficient bulk carrying cargo ships Hanse ports to establish export markets. In the process they eroded the area where wine dominated as a drink. Brewers and merchants trading in beer exploited existing legal and organizational structures, some of which they promoted, to protect and develop their industry. The result was what became by the fifteenth century a standard component of the typical Hanse pattern and practice of trade. As brewers in other parts of northern Europe perfected the art of making beer as good or better than the producers in Hanse towns the trade in beer declined and at the same time so too did the Hanse trading network and Hanse political influence.




I7  -   Converging varieties of capitalism; towards a global competition policy, 1930-2000
Room: Room 0.12 (Achter Sint Pieter)

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Cartels are as old as the hills. The current approach to strict anti-trust legislation developed slowly after World War II and replaced a system in which cartels were not seen as a threat to the functioning of the economy. A transition from a cartelised to a decartelised economy seems to be a global phenomenon and will be the focus of this session of the IEHA-congress. One of the major goals of the session is to promote a deeper understanding about the historical and institutional context of competition policies, both on the national level and from an international perspective. The first objective is to make an historical comparison of national perspectives on competition and competition policy and the influence of international institutions. The position of the firm will be emphasized. The second objective is to connect institutional changes to the performance and strategies of the firms at the national and international level. The third goal focuses on the efficiency and/or performance of cartels. This links the phenomenon to questions of stability and the success of cartel agreements.
In this session the theoretical approach of the varieties of capitalism literature will be the starting point. This literature makes it possible to explore the occurrence and importance of cartels within different market economies and to construct a coherent comparison of policies on cartelisation and decartelisation between different countries. This session will predominantly bring together three levels of analysis. The analysis of the regional (e.g. European Community), national and business dimensions will be the core of the session. Perception, legislation and informal institutions, interaction within and between the different dimensions, and performance will be studied in the long run.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 9:15am: Opening.
9:15 - 10:15: Theme I: Changes in antitrust doctrines and effects on cartelisation and decartelisation.
Chair: K. Sluyterman.
Papers by B. Bouwens & J. Dankers, D. Round & M. Shanahan, S. Fellman and P. Sandberg.
10:15 - 10:45am: Discussant (H. Schröter) and general discussion.


10:45 - 11:00am: Break

11:00 - 11:40: Theme II: International cartels and nation state. Chair: B. Bouwens.
Papers by D. Barjot, M. Bertilorenzi, P. Sandvik & E. Storli, B. Karlsson.
11:40 - 12:00: Discussant (Margrit Müller) and general discussion.
12:00 - 12:30pm: Theme III: Cartelisation and decartelisaton: the perspective of the branch and the firm.
Chair: S. Fellman.
Papers by B-A. Berg, Th. David et al.
Discussants Harm Schröter and Frans van Waarden.


Organizers:

- The invisible handshake; cartelisation in the nETHERLANDS, 1930-1980
Co-author(s): Joost Dankers

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Cartels were among the most important phenomena shaping market structures in the 20th century. For a long time cartels were not forbidden. The anti-cartel legislation dates from the 1950s, but even then it took a long time before it was enforced. The attitude towards cartels was remarkably consistent during a large part of the century. In this paper we want to explain the adjustments in Dutch policy towards cartels in the European framework during the 20th century.

• Susanna Fellman - The “Finnish model of capitalism” and transforming competition policies, 1930-1992.

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In this paper, the Finnish competition policies and legislation over a long time period is analysed. Transforming competition policies and cartel/competition legislation will be illuminated against transformations in the broader economic and institutional context. Antitrust policies and doctrines have been an international phenomenon in the post-war period, but national policies have also been deeply embedded in the local ideological, political and economic context. It is evident that the Finnish competition legislation and the prevailing doctrines and attitudes towards cartels, were closely linked to the Finnish economic and institutional environment. I will discuss the motivation behind transformations in competition policies and the cartel legislation, which groups influenced the process and which were the targets of the reforms.
I will also introduce the meso and micro level in the analysis, to investigate the responses of the corporate sector to institutional transformations will be observed. Competition/cartel legislation is occasionally ineffective, as for example the law of 1958 show. Only by prohibiting cartels, they do not disappear. However, transformations in the legal environment and in competition policies do affect corporate behaviour. In addition, the changing legal framework and transformations in policies and doctrines does not only affect the behaviour of the business leaders and coporate behaviour, but have also effects on the attitudes and views on competition more broadly.
Finally, I will also study the impact from big business and cartels on the legislation. The companies and branch organisations – particularly within big business in the export sector – did not solely adapt and respond to the institutional regime, but, on the contrary, exercised a heavy influence in economic policy and agenda setting in Finland. To what extent and in what way did the interest and lobby organisations, the strong export cartels influence the legislative process? And how did the influence change, as a result of the “big turn” of the 1980s and 1990s?

• Martin Shanahan - Anti-cartel or anti-foreign? Australian attitudes to cartels,cartel policy and anti-competitive behaviour in the first half of the 20th century
Co-author(s): David Round

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Australian cartel policy, like many other countries, has been influenced by the attitudes of foreign countries for many years. From the influence of the Sherman anti-trust act at the beginning of the century to legislative changes in the mid 1970s and later, Australian policy makers have frequently responded to external influences. What makes Australian policy development different from policies in Europe or the US over the 20th century, however, has been some of the motivation behind those policies.

This paper will explore the rise and fall of Australia's attitudes toward cartels; from seeming indifference in the 19th century to a strong US inspired anti-cartel approach early in the 20th century. From World War I until the 1950's, however, Australians returned to a period of relative policy indifference toward cartels until UK and US attitudes and policies began to influence local policy developments. Not until the late 1960s, however, were blatant price fixing and collusive tendering practices identified as undesirable.

In addition to the standard arguments of the influence of US inspired anti-trust legislation and the lesser but important influence of British policy, this paper will discuss the importance of Australian attitudes to nation building, their distrust of foreign 'monopolies', the role of interest groups, including labour in accepting price fixing by business, and the importance of viewing anti-cartel legislation in Australia as a component of the 'protectionist' policies associated with early Australian 20th century development.


Participants:

• Dominique Barjot

• Bengtaake Berg - Industrial Cartels and Monopolies in Sweden before 1950: The Food Industry - Which role did the Government and the Consumer Cooperatives play?

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The Swedish variety of capitalism has been well researched by economic historians as regards factor markets like capital (banking and ownership) and labor (“the Swedish model”). The way the capitalist system worked in the product markets has however gained less attention. A large part of the industrial production took place in firms with markets where price competition was either absent or severely restricted. Tobacco and Spirits were state monopolies. Sugar, Yeast, Dairies and Slaughter houses were controlled by private monopolistic organizations. Breweries and Flour milling had cartels dividing markets into exclusive regions i.e. local monopolies. In the margarine and starch industries, there were price cartels with syndicates. In still others, there were no formal agreements but informal norms of “fair”, i.e. non-price, competition. Productivity growth seems to have been high in the monopolized industries but lower than average in the cartelized ones. Available profitability data show the highest values for the cartelized industries.
The Government made next to nothing to protect the consumer interests while those of the agricultural cultivators were painstakingly taken care of. Governmental action varied from high tariffs and quantitative regulations to active promotion by state grants to organize cartels in the dairy and slaughter businesses. For the Consumer Cooperatives the struggle against trusts and cartels was an important part of the propaganda. The cooperatives had no confidence in state actions but took successful initiatives to production of their own in some parts of the Food industry. Price competition was however not their most important objective. High profits in order to reinforce their solvency and to finance investments in other industries were ambitions that had higher priority.

• Marco Bertilorenzi - Cartels and Competition. The dynamics of the international cartelisation in the interwar aluminium industry, 1926-1939.

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According with Jeffrey Fear, cartels are not the opposite of competition and “the question is not cartels or competition, but cartels and competition. Historically, cartels provided participating firms a range of market-ordering options” and “they reshape the rules of the game on which competition rests” [J.Fear 2007 and 2008]. Even if we can not exclude a partial working of demand and supply law, economic conditions of interwar period influenced a general tendency toward a “coordinate market”, as it is called by Hall & Soskice, in which “the equilibria [...] are more often the result of strategic interaction among firms and other actors”. [Hall & Soskice, 2001]. Financial difficulties, monetary fluctuations, governments’ policies and the progressive destruction of international trade, however, were at the same time the main cause of the infectiveness of international cartels pushing firms toward un-fair attitudes and competitive behaviours.
Aluminium industry can offer a good case study concerning these general ideas. Aluminium is often considered a sort of “model” of this international cartelisation wave in the historical literature from 1920s, 1930s and 1940s because (a) it was a strong oligopoly about which reports of the period always emphasized the efficacy in controlling production and markets, because (b) aluminium cartels were often described as “fair” or “honest” in regards of consumers that helped the development of the branch and because (c) Louis Marlio, the “president” of aluminium cartels in interwar period, was one of principal international economic experts on cartels, and he enforced the construction of contracts with his intellectual and entrepreneurial savoir-faire. However, the cartelisation could not impede international competition or the development of newcomers and also the efficacy of cartel agreements must be demonstrated.
After a period of competition between an European cartel, settled up in 1926, and the sole American firm (Alcoa), the great crisis of 1929 pushed a new world cartel, conceived with a long duration, long term strategies, and with sophisticated managerial tools for bonding each member’s interests in the new association. However, the new cartel could not prevent during the 1930s neither the overcoming of outsiders (as countries that started to produce aluminium for strategic aims as Russia, Japan or Italy) that reduced international markets of cartel members, nor the emergence of antagonisms between members implicated in nationalistic policies of their governments (as, for instance, autarkic policy of Hitler’s Germany, or Commonwealth preferences of Great Britain, or war stock policy of France).
This paper wants to provide a study of interwar aluminium cartels underlining the external and institutional influences on cartelization and competition. At the same time, the internal organisation of aluminium cartels will be analysed, providing an analyse of inter-firms relations, of contracts’ effectiveness, and of cartels’ general performance in aluminium industry.

• Joost Dankers

• Thomas David - Still “the unmatched world champions of cartels”?
Co-author(s): Alain Cortat, Stéphanie Ginalski and frédéric rebmann

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According to Hall and Soskice (2001), Switzerland can be classified among the coordinated market economies where non-market mechanisms of coordination between economic actors play a major role. In particular, Switzerland exhibited a high degree of cartelization in the domestic product market. Three major periods can be distinguished concerning the development of cartels in Switzerland: World War I, the depression of the thirties and World War II. However, an anti-cartel tendency manifested itself from the 1950s on, but this dynamic remained very feeble until the 1980s. The Swiss were thus, at that time, declared “the unmatched world champions of cartels” (Schröter 1999: 149)

During World War I, the Swiss Government entrusted professional associations with the distribution and management of raw materials. As a consequence, many unions were formed for this purpose. At the end of World War I, many of these unions were turned into professional associations and developed cartels agreements. The depression of the thirties is the second great period of cartelization in Switzerland: It encouraged entrepreneurs to seek solutions and cartels often seemed more appropriate than ruthless competition. In addition, part of the political left-wing, which was quite opposed to cartels in the 1920s, more or less supported the idea that cartels could solve various problems. Thus, there was very little opposition to the development of cartels in the 1930s. Finally, during World War II, the State delegated certain tasks of coordination and distribution of raw materials and products to professional associations, which promoted discussions between entrepreneurs and the creation of cartels.

From the 1950s on, due to the influence of the international post-war context which was characterized by the emergence of a relatively strong anti-cartel movement (notably in Germany, the European Economic Community and the United States), the Swiss attitude towards cartels began to change. This can be observed with the adoption of the cartel law in 1962. However, considering cartel practices as one of the most efficient tools to restrain foreign competition as well as one of the major means of self-regulation, Swiss business associations succeeded in making the cartel law as harmless as possible: the cartel law remained essentially formal and despite some measures supposed to control the cartel situation in Switzerland (such as the creation of an independent Cartel Commission), the State and its administration did not obtain any effective tools to restrain cartel practices (the law was almost entirely based on private legal measures, no cartel register, no cartel tribunal, the Cartel Commission could only get information about cartels on a voluntary basis, etc.). The private economic sector thus remained largely free to regulate economic competition in Switzerland according to the principle of self-regulation.

This contribution will focus on the cartel issue in Switzerland between 1910 and 1980. It will combine the questions of the practices of the firms/sectors and of the evolution of the legal framework. Two interrelated levels will be taken into account: 1) the domestic coalitions (companies, business associations etc.) which favoured cartels or the decartelization movement; 2) the influence of international institutions and neighbouring countries.

• Stephanie Ginalski - Still "the unmatched world champions of cartels"? Cartels in Switzerland, 1910-1980
Co-author(s): Alain Cortat, Thomas David, Frédéric Rebmann

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According to Hall and Soskice (2001), Switzerland can be classified among the coordinated market economies where non-market mechanisms of coordination between economic actors play a major role. In particular, Switzerland exhibited a high degree of cartelization in the domestic product market. Three major periods can be distinguished concerning the development of cartels in Switzerland: World War I, the depression of the thirties and World War II. However, an anti-cartel tendency manifested itself from the 1950s on, but this dynamic remained very feeble until the 1980s. The Swiss were thus, at that time, declared “the unmatched world champions of cartels” (Schröter 1999: 149)

During World War I, the Swiss Government entrusted professional associations with the distribution and management of raw materials. As a consequence, many unions were formed for this purpose. At the end of World War I, many of these unions were turned into professional associations and developed cartels agreements. The depression of the thirties is the second great period of cartelization in Switzerland: It encouraged entrepreneurs to seek solutions and cartels often seemed more appropriate than ruthless competition. In addition, part of the political left-wing, which was quite opposed to cartels in the 1920s, more or less supported the idea that cartels could solve various problems. Thus, there was very little opposition to the development of cartels in the 1930s. Finally, during World War II, the State delegated certain tasks of coordination and distribution of raw materials and products to professional associations, which promoted discussions between entrepreneurs and the creation of cartels.

From the 1950s on, due to the influence of the international post-war context which was characterized by the emergence of a relatively strong anti-cartel movement (notably in Germany, the European Economic Community and the United States), the Swiss attitude towards cartels began to change. This can be observed with the adoption of the cartel law in 1962. However, considering cartel practices as one of the most efficient tools to restrain foreign competition as well as one of the major means of self-regulation, Swiss business associations succeeded in making the cartel law as harmless as possible: the cartel law remained essentially formal and despite some measures supposed to control the cartel situation in Switzerland (such as the creation of an independent Cartel Commission), the State and its administration did not obtain any effective tools to restrain cartel practices (the law was almost entirely based on private legal measures, no cartel register, no cartel tribunal, the Cartel Commission could only get information about cartels on a voluntary basis, etc.). The private economic sector thus remained largely free to regulate economic competition in Switzerland according to the principle of self-regulation.

This contribution will focus on the cartel issue in Switzerland between 1910 and 1980. It will combine the questions of the practices of the firms/sectors and of the evolution of the legal framework. Two interrelated levels will be taken into account: 1) the domestic coalitions (companies, business associations etc.) which favoured cartels or the decartelization movement; 2) the influence of international institutions and neighbouring countries.

• Birgit Karlsson - Towards a regulated economy. Swedish wood, iron and steel in the inter-war period

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Sweden is regarded as a co-ordinated market economy. This implies that the interaction between state and industry is crucial for understanding the process of cartelization. Wood products and iron and steel products are classical Swedish export commodities. During the inter-war period they underwent processes of international cartelization. The Swedish forest industry was an active part in the forming of international cartels, while the Swedish iron and steel industry was more of a reactor. This also implied different strategies towards the state. The forest industry organisations were reluctant to allow state interference while the iron- and steel industry was more eager to ask for help from the Swedish state. The need for help was actualised when dumping occurred, but in the end the state was quite passive and private regulation had the upper hand over state regulation.

• Margrit Muller

• Andreas Nybø - Scandinavian carbide and ferroalloys producers and the international cartels in the 1920s

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The paper examines how a Norwegian group of carbide and ferroalloys producers and its Swedish collaborators contributed to the establishing and consolidation of international cartels in the 1920s. During the last decades there have been published many studies of international cartels in the interwar years. Only a few have analysed the process of establishing cartels. Even fewer have studied cartelisation from the perspective of the firm. The paper deals primarily with the Scandinavian groups’ role in the cartelisation of the markets. In addition, it analyses the relations between cartelisation, market structure and strategic behaviour in the European interwar carbide and ferroalloys business.

• Peter Sandberg - On the road to competition – the evolution of the cartel register and competition legislation in Sweden up until the 1950’s
Co-author(s): Peter Sandberg

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The decartelisation in many West European countries started in the aftermath of the Second World War. It has been rightly stressed that the growing economic influences from the Anglo-Saxon world after the war put pressure to liberalise the cooperative capitalism that had been a main feature in many European states before and during the interwar period, Sweden included. But it is important to keep in mind that cartel- and trust organisations were an important topic and were closely connected to the discussions concerning monopolistic behaviour. In Sweden, the phenomenon was already on the agenda before the First World War but it was not until the 1920´s that the debate took of and engaged all levels of the political-economic establishment. One of the major reasons for the increased interest in cartels was the growth of monopolistic enterprises and their effects on price levels and competition.

The purpose of this paper is to present the cartel debates in Sweden that precede the competition legalisation in the 1950´s with focus on the evolution of the establishment of the cartel register in 1946. Public authorities as well as interest groups from the trade and industry, the labour movement and the Swedish Cooperative Union & Wholesale Society (KF) were the main participants in the debate. Of importance are also the governmental appointed committees and the inquiries published in official reports.

• Paal Sandvik

• Harm G. Schröter

• Keetie Sluyterman

• Espen Storli - A Small State and International Cartels, The Case of Norway 1919-1939
Co-author(s): Paal Sandvik

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The paper examines the relationship between the Norwegian State and international cartels in the interwar period. Norway was on the forefront with regard to implementing legislation regulating cartels. The Norwegian authorities used the legislation first and foremost to further two aims in relation to international cartels. The first aim was to promote economic nationalism and to combat foreign ownership; the second was to protect the interests of the export industries. Unlike the Sherman anti trust laws in the United States, the Norwegian laws were not primarily used to support the interests of the consumers. This was not because the State was uninterested in consumer interests; it was more that export interests and national control over industries was deemed to be far more important.

• Frans van Waarden




J7  -   States, institutions, and development: Standardization and enforcement of trades in diverse markets.
Room: Room 0.13 (Achter Sint Pieter)

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Market economy based on impersonal trades governed by Western institutions has been the driving force of the modern economic growth in the last two centuries.
Western institutions of trade governance roughly consist of two essentials, one of which is third party enforcement by effective judicial system, and the other is standardization of trade practices. Not only standardization has decreased transaction costs and boosted growth as well as preemption of moral hazard by third party enforcement, also effective enforcement necessitated standardization of trade practices. Workability of trade standardization, however, could depend on feature of markets. While trades in commodity markets are relatively standardizable, and in financial markets are probably too on the one hand, labor market is not necessarily. In a successful economy, market transactions have consecutively, rather than simultaneously, prevailed from more to less standardizable markets. Coordinated standardization process, often led by state, of diverse markets is thus critical to modernization of economy in depth.
This session focuses on gradual and consecutive arrangement of standardization and enforcement of diverse markets, where Japanese experiences are taken as a comparison benchmark. Japan, which had isolated itself not only from the West also from China and developed a unique common law system that generated one of the most sophisticated commodity market then in the world in Tokugawa period, and had rapidly introduced Western legal system since the late 19th century, is an interesting experimental case. Early modern UK, early modern France, colonial West Africa, and contemporary China will be considered for comparative analysis.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 9:05: Introduction (Masaki Nakabayashi)
9:05 - 9:45: Making the financial market work.
Papers by Yasuo Takatsuki (9:05), Dan Bogart (9:15), and Gerhard Kling (9:30).
9:45 - 10:30am: Transition to the free labour market.
Papers by Gareth Austin (9;45), Claire Lemercier (10:00) and Masaki Nakabayashi (10:15).
10:30 - 11:00: Break.
11:00 - 11:25: Building the internal labor market.
Papers by Naofumi Nakamura (11:00) and Mayo Morimoto (11:15).
11:25 - 11:40am: Comments and discussion from the discussant (Patrick O'Brien).
11:40 - 11:50am: Reply to comments from presenters.
11:50 - 12:30am: General discussion.


Organizer:

- The governance of trade in the labor market: An experience of the Japanese silk-reeling industry

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Protection of the property right and governance of trades of the property right by the state are the institutional basis of the modern market economy. However, it could face difficulty to settle the governance of the labor market in this context. While the owner of labor is the worker him/herself, a employment contract provides employer with a claim to discretionary use of and investment in the labor, a residual-control-like right. Under the slavery, the problem did not appeared to exist from the viewpoint of slave owners, because their investment in slaves were protected in the slave market. While the free labor market arguably enhance efficiency through both-sided freedom of contracts, employers' investment and other expenses should be protected by some institutional arrangement. If the state court provides governance that satisfies the condition but does not contradicts the free labor, it would be a solution. Alternatively, the judicial system with the third party enforcement sometimes makes favorable environment for private governance by making the off-path actions less profitable. This paper focuses on this kind of experience in the silk-reeling industry in early twentieth century Japan.


Participants:

• Gareth Austin - Coercion and Markets: Integrating Economic and Social Explanations of Slavery in Precolonial West Africa, c1450-c1900

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Enslavement and slave trading were the main source of labour recruitment, apart from the slower process of marriage and child-rearing, in the economies of precolonial West Africa. As elsewhere in the world, first-generation slaves in African societies were mostly foreigners. Unlike the forms of slavery practised by Europeans, however, indigenous African slavery was usually assimilative, in that the descendants of slaves tended to be integrated into the society concerned on increasingly more equal terms over subsequent generations, with varying rates and degrees of completion. The conjunction of slave labour and partial assimilation has generated a long-running debate between ‘economic’ and ‘social’ interpretations of the institution in its West African settings. This paper aims to reconcile and integrate these traditionally rival interpretations, and to explore the economic implications. I argue that, in radical ways, it was the interaction of economic and social (and cultural and political) dimensions of slavery that was central to the history of slavery in precolonial West Africa. On the one hand, the growth in the volume of slavery and the specific uses to which slaves were put within the region cannot be explained without reference to the demand for slaves as labourers producing commodities. On the other hand, without organized coercion, and the political and ideological conditions for applying it, there could have been no slavery and no slave trade. Indeed, it will be argued here that, without such coercion, there would have been no market in labour at all in the economic conditions that prevailed in most of West Africa during this era. Moreover, the assimilative tendency in African slavery should be seen both as responding to the political circumstances of the region (the severe constraints on state formation) and, ironically, as underpinning the continuation of the internal slave trade.

• Dan Bogart - Were Statutory Authorities Second-best? Examining the benefits, costs, and alternatives to British Institutions in the eighteenth century

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British institutions differed from those in Continental Europe and throughout the world in the
eighteenth century, but there is disagreement about their contribution to economic development.
Statutory authorities are one example of Britain’s economic institutions. Parliament granted
organizations monopoly rights to levy tolls and undertake infrastructure projects. This paper
examines whether two types of statutory authorities, turnpike trusts and river navigations, were second-best policies by comparing the social benefits with the social costs. It shows that the
social savings from lower transport costs exceeded the social costs from monopoly, exclusion,
and legal expenditures. It also argues that the alternatives to statutory authorities were generally
worse because they would not have produced the same level of infrastructure investment.

• Gerhard Kling

• Claire Lemercier - Regulating apprenticeship in 19th-century France

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Recent research has stressed the complementarity of and ties between "public" and "private" institutions implied in economic regulations in 19th-century France. I try to describe this complex "co-regulation" in the case of apprenticeship, by focusing on a study of Parisian labor courts.

• Mayo Morimoto - The technological progress and the transformation of labor organization: Modernization of the Japanese coal mining from the 1900s to the 1930s

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This paper focuses on the interaction between the changes in production technology and the transformation of labor organization in the coal mining. Along with the introduction of modern technology, the Japanese coal mining indstry experienced drastic changes both in the labor organization and the labor market. Coal mining firms moved from indirect employment to direct employment and built up the internal labor market in which investment in human capital was conducted by each firm, as new skills were required for operating machines newly introduced. At the same time, when traditional skills being less useful, intermediary bodies that had supplied workers with firms disappeared and firms directly came in the labor market to hire freshmen.

• Naofumi Nakamura - Personnel Management, Business Organisation, and Internal Labour Market: A Case of the Nippon Railway Company in Meiji Japan

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The purpose of this paper is to present the history of organisational reforms in Nippon Railway Co., the largest railway company in Meiji Japan, focussing mainly on the relationship between the personnel management and the internal labour market of the company. Through this work, I intend to have some insights into the background and implications of the formation of modern business enterprises in Japan.

• Patrick O'Brien - Concluding discussant

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Concluding discussant

• Yasuo Takatsuki - Informational Efficiency under the Shogunate Governance: Concentration and Integration of the Rice Market in Tokugawa Japan

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In the Tokugawa period, market transactions grew explosively and the local markets of Japan were effectively integrated into a national market. This is the common view shared among historians. An important question is how these markets performed.

To evaluate their performance, this paper focuses on the comovement of rice prices between Osaka and Otsu. Applying the Granger causality test, it is shown that the Otsu market reflected the rice prices in Osaka within two days in the early 19th century, and within a day by the mid-19th century.

This change stemmed from the development of communication technology. The rice merchants' appetite for the information had made the comovement of rice prices so rapid that the Otsu market did not need even one trading day to reflect the rice prices in Osaka.

• Takenobu Yuki




K7  -   Industrial agglomeration and urbanization in comparative historical perspectives
Room: Room 0.23 (Achter Sint Pieter)

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Development of the theoretical spatial economics (New Economic Geography) along with the spatial information science has brought about the renaissance of economic geography, and the wave has reaching to the economic history research. The researchers proposing this session, whose fields include spatial economics, spatial information science and development economics as well as economic history, has been working on compiling and analyzing historical spatial data of Japan. The first purpose of this session is to present and discuss the results of our research. The titles of the papers already confirmed are “Urbanization and size distribution of industrial plants,””Identifying the sources of agglomeration economy: Plant-level analysis of the silk industry,” “Spatial relationship between old industries and emerging industries,””Impact of a natural disaster on industrial clusters: A case of the Great Kanto Earthquake, 1923” At the same time, we plan to invite scholars working on the same issue on other areas including Europe, North America South East Asia for a comparative study. We expect that this session will be a starting point of the global network on comparative historical study on industrial agglomeration and urbanization.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 10:20am: Papers by Tomohiro Machikita (9:00), Maarten Bosker (9:25), and Asuka Imaizumi (9:50 - 10:15).

10:15 - 10:45: Break.

10:45 - 12:30am: Papers by Peter Howlett (10:45), Tetsuji Okazaki (11:10) and Kentaro Nakajima (11:35); general discussion (12:00 - 12:30).


Organizer:

- Impact of Natural Disasters on Industrial Agglomeration: A Case of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake
Co-author(s): Asuka Imaizumi and Kaori Ito

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In this paper, the effect of a temporary shock on the industrial agglomeration
was investigated, focusing on the case of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Using the
ward and county-level data of Tokyo Prefecture, the persistence of the effect caused by
the earthquake was examined. It was confirmed that the effect would finally dissipate,
which is consistent with preceding literature. In addition, this paper investigated the
persistence differences across industries, specifically the differences between the
linkage-intensive industries, and the non-linkage-intensive industries. It was found
that the effect of the temporary shock was more persistent in the linkage-intensive
industries, which suggests that the there was at least an endogenous portion in the
mechanism of industrial agglomeration.


Participants:

• Maarten Bosker - City seeds: the geographical origins of the European city system

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This paper empirically disentangles the important roles of geography in shaping the European city system. To do this we employ a, largely new, database covering all actual European cities as well as potential city locations over the period 800-1800, during which the foundations for the European city system were laid out. We relate each location’s urban chances to its physical, 1st nature geography characteristics, and develop a new empirical strategy to assess the importance of the 2nd nature geography characteristics of the urban system surrounding each location as well. Instead of the, up to now, largely narrative historical accounts on the role of geography in determining the location of cities in Europe, we provide quantitative empirical evidence into the important, and changing, role of geography in creating the European city system. First nature geography is the dominant explanation from the 9th until the 16th century, but, second nature geography gains in importance from the 17th century onwards.

• Peter Howlett - Income convergence across the US states in the postwar period: a distribution dynamics approach
Co-author(s): P. Epstein

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In their classic paper (‘Convergence across States and Regions’, Brookings Papers 1991) Barro and Sala-i-Martin argued that among the factors that were important for understanding the income convergence process across the US states were the existence of regional clubs (they identified 4 regional clubs - East, South, West and Midwest) and the share of personal income originating in the agricultural sector. In this paper we borrow these stylised facts to re-examine the convergence of income across the U.S. states in the postwar period but do so by using a distributional dynamics approach. This approach allows us to examine the empirical cross-sectional income distribution as it evolves over time and also allows us to use this to derive the steady–state solution for this system.

We address a range of questions: has the distribution of US state per capita income exhibited convergence since 1948? What was the pattern of mobility (stratification, polarisation,etc) across states 1948-2007? Given the empirically observed dynamics of this period, what was the projected steady state solution? Did tax matter? We then introduce conditioning factors into the analysis to first examine the importance of geography (captured by the regional clubs identified by Barrro and Sala-i-Martin) and then to analyse the importance of initial conditions (captured by the share of personal income that originated in the agricultural sector).

Our initial results do confirm, in terms of the empirically observed dynamics of US state incomes between 1948 and 2007, that there was convergence but that this was underpinned by low levels of mobility (a result that is not clear in the more traditional regression based literature). We also find that taxation helped this process, especially at top end of distribution. However, more important were geography (in terms of regional clubs) and the initial share of personal income originating in the agricultural sector (the latter was especially important in explaining mobility). Perhaps more surprisingly, we conclude that when considering the steady-state there was no strong evidence of convergence, although again both geography and the initial agricultural share influenced the steady-state solution.

• Asuka Imaizumi - Determinants of Industrial Agglomeration: A Case of Japan, 1900-1935

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This article aims at exploring historical patterns of industrial location and their determinants, focusing on industrial agglomerations. 
A recent study on the determinants of industrial agglomeration in pre-1931 Britain compared the implications of the Heckscher-Ohlin model and the new economic geography (NEG) model to find the gradual increase of the effect of scale economies (Crafts and Mulatu 2005). Referring to this study, in this article, I observe the location patterns of factories in pre-World War II Japan, using the city and county-level data.
It is revealed that industrial agglomerations were formed in metropolitan areas, and that the main factor which caused the agglomeration was inter-industrial linkage. With this estimation result in mind, since there can be seen several lines in the study on industrial agglomeration, I try to understand industrial location from multiple angles.

• Tomohiro Machikita - The Determinants of Size Distribution of Plants in the Early Stage of Agglomeration and Industrial Development: Japan, 1904-1921
Co-author(s): Asuka Imaizumi, Kaori Ito, and Tetsuji Okazaki

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This paper proposes a new mechanism linking size distribution of plants and urbanization in developing economies to detect the location choices and investigates its empirical implications in micro data on manufacturing plants in Japan. In a model with economies of urbanization, smaller plants utilize more production linkages in urban area in terms of number of different types of firms than larger plants, and also success to sell product to local market. In a model with plant-level scale economies, plants have geographic proximity to large market in terms of local population would produce more, and also success to be large plants. First, we find that the number of local (neighbourhood) firms decreases size of plants only for plants located in urban area. Second, we find that the size of local population increases size of plants for plants. This effect is also bigger for plants located in urban area than plants located in less urbanized area. Third, historical trends of urbanization stimulate these two effects, i.e., both of urbanization impacts of plant size and population impact of plant size are larger for area where are also previously urbanized area. These findings support the hypothesis that agglomeration economies of different types of firms only for urban area. These findings support the hypothesis that plants become larger when plants have geographic proximity to larger market.

• Kentaro Nakajima - Agglomeration or Selection? The Case of the Japanese Silk-Reeling Industry in 1909-1916
Co-author(s): Yutaka Arimoto and Tetsuji Okazaki

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Plants in clusters are often more productive than those located in non-clusters. This has been explained by agglomeration effects that improve productivity of all plants in a region. However, recent theoretical development of trade and spatial economic theories with heterogeneous firms has shed light on another channel of productivity improvement in clusters, "plant-selection effects". This paper uses plant-level data on the Japanese silk reeling industry in 1909-1916 and distinguishes between these two effects. We identify the plant-selection effect by using the fact that the two effects have different implications on the distribution of plant-level productivity of the two effects. We confirmed that plants in clusters were indeed more productive. At the same time, we found that the widths of distribution of plant productivity in clusters were narrower and more severely truncated than those in non-clusters. Our results imply that the plant-selection effect was at least one of the sources of the higher plant-level productivity in clusters.

• Joan Rosés




L7  -   Entrepreneurial Minorities and the Modern Economic Growth, XIX - early XX Centuries
Room: Room 0.24 (Achter Sint Pieter)

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The history of compact ethno confessional groups of entrepreneurs in non-coreligional entourage (“trade or entrepreneurial minorities”) has been lately the point of research interest in different countries. As a methodological impact is used a well-known Max Weber’s thesis about the forming of specific business ethics of religious minorities (according to Weber – protestant ethics) as a spiritual source of modern capitalism. The question is how far this thesis can be applied to other ethno confessional groups both within Christianity and out of it (Islam, Judaism)? To which extent these groups served as a catalyst for the modern economic growth in different countries during the early industrialization, i.e. before the WW1? How much did they manage to secure their national and religious identity or did they undergo the process of acculturation being influenced by the western modernist style?
The section intends to study first of all the legal framework and forms of activity of entrepreneurial minorities in different countries. Secondly, we aim to research the economic and financial resources of these elite groups and to compare the economic niches they occupied. Thirdly, the matter concerns the investigation of entrepreneurial minorities’ ideology, mainly the impact that it had over their relationships with the government and society during the transfer from traditionalistic economic system to modern industrial society.
A number of researchers from different countries could take part in the work of the session.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 10:30am: Block 1.
Papers by Yuri Petrov, Dittmar Dahlmann, Wolfgang Sartor, Valery Kerov, and James West (18 mins each).
10:30 - 11:00am: Break.
11:00 - 12:30am: Block 2.
Paper by Rita Bredefeldt (20 mins); comment by Thomas Owen (30 mins); discussion (40 mins).


Organizers:

• Yuri A. Petrov


Participants:

• Rita Bredefeldt - Early Jewish entrepreneurs in Sweden. Economy, identity and assimilation 1782-1930.

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Jews were not allowed in Sweden before 1782. After that legislation defined the Jewish minority totally as a special kind of economic men. Sweden needed foreign capital, to get rid of impeding guild regulations, a enhanced turover and know-how from European financial networks. Jews were allowed to to occupy themselves within a limited range of economic activities and to settle down in four cities only. The first Western Jews that immigrated to Sweden accepted the economic role given to them, expanded their economic activities and worked for their emancipation, a goal that was reached in 1870. Swedish citizens of the Jewish confession established themselves during the 19th century as an economic and cultural elite. Many came to belong to Swedish bourgeoisie and contributed to modern economic growth. They were bankers, large scale wholesale dealers, entrepreneurs in trade and industry, publishers, art dealers and philanthropists. The second wave of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire 1850-1914 played another economic role in Sweden than the Western European Jewish immigrants a hundred years before. In spite of contradictions between the two Jewish groups, both exhibited upward social moblity in their economic activities as a central motif. Aside from the traditional traits of Jewish identity, other central dimensions of identity were the cultural, the economic and the cautiousness against anti-Semitism creating a need to overemphasize economic and cultural success.

• Valery Kerov - GOVERNMENTAL PERSECUTION, CONFESSIONAL VALUES OR COMMUNAL CORPORATIVISM? Factors of the Old Believer’s entrepreneurship forming and development in Russia in the 18th–19th centuries
Co-author(s): Kerov Valery

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The modern foreign historiography doesn’t find anything in the religion of the Old Faith” that could explain Old Believers’ extraordinary accomplishments in the economic sphere. The majority of historians consider social position of a persecuted group (the society’s “outcast”) as the main factor of Old Believers’ entrepreneurship forming.
However, the influence of political and legal factors was contradictory. On one hand, the persecution encouraged profitable entrepreneurship, like it was in the rest of the world (in similar cases), to achieve confessional goals – support of communities and etc. But the need to protect themselves from governmental persecution, to ensure the confessional practice through corruption diverted huge amounts from being invested or reinvested in the economy thus weakening the Old Belief management.
The repressive legislation could, not by itself, give life to developed and a powerful system of the Old Believer’s entrepreneurship. That legislation contributed to the transformation of Old Belief into a confessional economic community only in conjunction with other factors.
The Old Belief confessional-ethic system had considerable influence on the formation and development of Old Believer’s entrepreneurship. The updated religious guidelines, religious values, ethic institutions and socio-psychological settings and ideas of Old Believers interacted with other factors, seriously motivating them to resort to active business activity.
Change of the Old Believer’s religious and ethnic norms, in conjunction with personal factors, were settled on the ground of natural social evolution. The processes running in the Old Belief could not have been possible in absence of the relevant economic and socio-cultural processes and the development of the Russian society in general. The Old Believer’s system of values, institutions and ideas witnessed the synthesis of traditions of the orthodox civilization and post-traditional society at a new stage of civilization.

• Thomas Owen

• Wolfgang Sartor - German entreprenurs in St. Petersburg Family and Confessional Structure 1815-1914

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German entreprenurs in St. Petersburg Family and Confessional Structure 1815-191

"From the mid-18th century the export trade of the German entrepreneurial elite constituted the leading ethnic merchant group in Russia's leading port, St Petersburg. It accounted for more than 50% of the major exporters in the port and handled nearly 50% of the export turnover up to the third quarter of the 19th century. In second place up to the mid-19th century was the powerful British merchant elite. Others including Russian merchants were relatively insignificant. German merchants in their ethnic-confessional and cultural characteristics of their family enterprise formed a distinct merchant diaspora. The objective of this paper is to show how and to what extent this structure changed over time. The priority of the diaspora and especially of the various family leaderships was to preserve the cohesiveness and solidarity of their community.

Through inter-marriage there can be discerned first the stability of the community and subsequently then the beginnings of the erosion of that cohesiveness. Whereas in the 18th century over 90% of marriages were within the German merchant community and German protestant families in particular, in the first half of the 19th century this went down to below 50% and at the beginning of the 20th century to about 30%. Family members increasingly gravitated to the safer professions as administrators, officers and doctors or to more intellectual spheres such as working in the universities or the arts. This was accompanied by a reduction in the weighting of germans in the export trade. In the ethnic field the changes had not been so pronounced. There was a fall here too but to only 60 to 70%. Inter-ethnic partners had been increasingly British in the first half of the 19th century, then Russians.

The same tendency is to be observed in the confessional sphere. Marraiges to all protestant - Lutherans, Reformed Church and some Anglicans- fell from over 95% to about 70%. Lutherans at over 65% remained relatively stable.

There is also discernible change in the main occuptational activity. The new generations preferred to engage in their own chosen fields of interest rather than join the family enterprise. Furthermore a growing cosmopolitan attitude is observable among merchant families which brought about more changes to its ethnic character."

• Huibert Schijf - Global and local Networks of International Jewish Bankers. The Koenigswarters and Bischoffsheims in Amsterdam, 1817-1862

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In the nineteenth century, many of the Jewish bankers who operated internationally were of German descent and they played an important and innovative role in banking, the foundation of industries and new railway companies. This paper purports to discuss the various networks used by Jewish bankers in the nineteenth century to create cooperation and trust between partners and to minimise transaction costs in their global and local financial relations, where the global links are restricted mainly to the political, economic and cultural space of Europe. Two time-honoured concepts from network analysis, ‘strong ties’ and ‘weak ties,’ will be applied to examine the various connections. Intermarriage within the group of already strongly intertwined international bankers was a strategy to guarantee cooperation and trust, and these marriages made it possible not only to keep capital within the family but also to keep their financial partners abroad in line. In the end, success of these banks remained precarious because solving the problem of continuity was far from easy, as there are no conclusive strategies to guarantee success over several generations.
As far as religion is concerned, the conclusion will be that it was not necessarily intrinsic Jewish values that mattered, but social circumstances, among others exclusion from certain professions that interacted with the economic experiences that were part of the past of Jewish Diasporas in several European countries. In this respect Jewish bankers followed the same principles that many entrepreneurial minorities have followed till the present day.

• James West - Max Weber in the Shadow of the Anti Christ

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The history of Old Belief (Staroverie, Staroobriadchestvo) is full of paradoxes, not the least of which is the pioneering role played by Old Believer entrepreneurs in the early economic development of Russia. As one historian has mused, how could “the worshippers of religious immobility, the fanatical enemies of ecclesiastical reforms, the irrational adherents to letter and gesture, appear as energetic modernizers in their very rational economic pursuits”? Attempts to answer this question almost inevitably involve references to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This paper will examine the entrepreneurial role of Old Believers in Russia through the lense of the Weber Thesis.




N7  -   The development of the rural economy and the ‘demesne lordship’ (Gutsherrschaft): East-central Europe, c. 1500-c. 1800
Room: Room 0.01 (Trans)

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This session aims at summarizing and extending recent research on rural economic development in early modern East-central and Eastern Europe, which in the last twenty years succeeded in overcoming the notion that this area was a compact entity of a ‘second serfdom’. Rather than taking a ‘general backwardness’ and a long-term stagnation of rural societies for granted, studies now focus on regional variation and the concrete economic consequences of regional structures of lordship. All papers will have a strong empirical basis and will test new hypotheses that rural power relations in East-central and Eastern Europe were more flexible and did not generally suppress economic innovation and development in the landlord and peasant economies. They will form a first contribution to a more general debate on revising existing theories of a ‘second serfdom’. Papers will concentrate on the following issues:
- the peasant economy and the market
- the standard of living in early modern rural society
- the variation of landlord income
- rural proto-industrialization
- agricultural development within ‘demesne lordship’
- the state and rural economic relations in early modern East-central and Eastern Europe

The session’s assessment of recent research will focus on a comparison within East-central, Eastern and Northern Europe. On this basis, a broader comparison across Europe will be easier to achieve in the future. It will thus form an important basis to strengthen and widen existing new comparative research approaches towards economic development during the early modern period and towards building a new general model.

Session schedule:
9:00 - 10:30 AM: Session 1, chair William W. Hagen.
Introduction by Markus Cerman (9:00); presentations by Piotr Guzowski (9:05), Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen (9:20), Heinrich Kaak (9:35), and Erich Landsteiner (9:50); followed by general discussion (10:05-10:30).
10:00 - 10:30 AM: break.
10:30 - 11:00 AM: Session 2, chair Markus Cerman.
Presentations by Mats Olsson (11:00), William Hagen (11:15); summary by Edgar Melton, discussant (11:30); followed by general discussion (11:50-12:30).


Organizers:

- The development of the rural economy and the ‘demesne lordship’ (Gutsherrschaft): East-central Europe, c. 1500-c. 1800: Introduction

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This session aims at summarizing and extending recent research on rural economic development in early modern East-central and Eastern Europe, which in the last twenty years succeeded in overcoming the notion that this area was a compact entity of a ‘second serfdom’. Rather than taking a ‘general backwardness’ and a long-term stagnation of rural societies for granted, studies now focus on regional variation and the concrete economic consequences of regional structures of lordship. The introduction argues that forms of subjection need to be separated from outright ‘serfdom’ conceptually and analytically. A brief summary of the main research results over the past two decades emphasizes that agrarian society of early-modern east-central and eastern Europe was not dominated by ‘serfdom’. On this basis, it will be important to strengthen existing new comparative research approaches towards economic development during the early modern period and towards building a new general model.

• William W. Hagen - EUROPEAN YEOMANRIES: A NON-IMMISERATION MODEL OF AGRARIAN SOCIAL HISTORY, 1350-1800

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The neo-classical and political economy literatures view the post-medieval history of the European peasantry as one of economic dispossession and legal disability. Against this vision, this paper propose a model of early modern European rural history which concentrates foremost on the maintenance and reproduction of the medium-size or large, partly self-sufficient though also market-integrated family farm. Its proprietors figure here, ideal-typically, as working farmers employing as laborers a mix of family members, farm servants, and wage-workers. Such farms must be conceptualized in an historical setting in which European villagers were everywhere subject to seigneurial lordship or landlordism, whether as serfs, manorial subjects, or freemen. So too were landholding family farmers universally, if variously, subject to rents (whether market or feudal rents), taxes, and often conscription too. They occupied their farms under widely differing tenures, with correspondingly varying property rights, though never altogether without some degree of ownership in fixed capital, farm stock, or other mobile goods.
This paper aims, then, to delineate a sphere of comparative history within which such family farms, despite the many ways they differed across Europe, figure as a major stratum of European society which, in the post-medieval half-millenium, did not disintegrate under the advancing tread of capitalism. Instead, many family farmers themselves became successful agrarian entrepreneurs, while others managed at least to survive through market production. Such a stratum of family farmers (or landed peasants) remained, despite the turbulent fortunes of early modern rural society, a major structural feature of European society into the nineteenth century and beyond. This truism of social history has often disappeared into the shadows of economic history.
Some may think the English word yeomanry non-exportable. But if it is understood to refer less to a politically enfranchised freeman agriculturist than to a medium or largeholding family farmer (whatever his legal disabilities) living--in times free of war, epidemic disease, and famine--in socially customary sufficiency, and engaged in market production with opportunities for surplus-accumulation (in one or another form), the experimentation-friendly reader will not step down from this train of thought.


Participants:

• Piotr Guzowski - The demesne economy in Poland in the 16th-18th centuries: myths and reality

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The paper presents a variety of social and economic phenomena which accompanied the process of transformation from rent to demesne economy. Special emphasis is placed on investigating medieval origins of enforced unpaid labour (labour services) and its growing popularity in the early modern period. The paper considers also legal circumstances of serfdom and of the status of serfs as labourers bound to the land. Regional differences in the system of lordship, and economic situation of Polish gentry and peasants are also discussed. The author presents results of the latest research into the origins and development of demesne lordship in early modern Poland, but simultaneously, an attempt is made to challenge some stereotypical images and persistent myths about these issues. It is in this context that the author considers the influence of economic boom at home and of growing demand for grain abroad on Polish economy, the share particular social groups had in a rapidly expanding grain market, and critical moments in the creation and development of Polish demesne lordship with its periods of prosperity and crisis

• Heinrich Kaak - Agrarian politics in an area of personal serfdom - the Order of St John in the Neumark Brandenburg from 1650 to 1811

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Since about 1570, Brandenburg can be characterised as being the first area possessing a
complete system of demesne lordship (landlord subjection with corvée, building and extra-ordinary services, compulsory service at the estate and large-scale demesne farms). Nevertheless, its sphere of influence was moderate in comparison with other East-Elbian regions. The territory constituted the east-west link between the German north-west with good peasant property rights (Meierrecht), a few demesne estates and large regions with personal serfdom and an abundant large-scale noble demesne economy. At the same time, it created a north-south bridge between personal serfdom in Mecklenburg and Pomerania and the more moderate landlord system in Central German areas of Saxony and Anhalt. Conditions within Brandenburg reflect this in the gradual shift from undefined demesne estates in the west and south to remains of serfdom in the north and east.

Considered in detail, this state of affairs is of course more complex. Nobles’ estates and princely/royal domains were characterised by large-scale demesne farms and peasant subjection. Domains were in a more favourable situation for keeping workers due to the system of lordship. In urban areas and on (former) church lands, hardly any large estates existed and there were consequently less problems with corvées.

It is undeniable that East-Elbia was backward to a certain extent in comparison with western areas, particularly after the Thirty Years’ War and a decline of rural prosperity from the Altmark, west of the river Elbe to the Neumark, east of the river Oder. However, the east of Brandenburg did not merely continue to exist upon lethargic ‘serfdom’ with no incentive for development.

In this sense, the Brandenburg Bailiwick of the Knights’ Order of the Hospital of Jerusalem is remarkable. It owned four commanderies and three domains of the Order with about fifty villages in the area – particularly in the eastern part. After the Thirty Years’ War, the Lords’ Master, Johann Moritz von Nassau (1652-1679) secured the property of subject peasant farmers in the manner of times former to the war, the large number of feudal village magistrates with secure property rights and peasantry thriving on. Thus, especially in the domains of the Order, a greater number of smaller estates came into being than would have usually been the case in the Neumark. From 1750 onwards, the Bailiwick took part in the colonisation of the Oderbruch area and from 1770 onwards it played a considerable role in the reclamation of the Warthebruch. Not until this time did it construct demesne farms on the new agricultural land. What is, however, most noteworthy is that numerous villages with hundreds of settler families with secure property and personal rights came into existence. Like the royal domains, the domains of the Order constituted a sphere in which improvements inherent in the system, technical-agricultural and social improvements were combined with one another, at the same time creating an increase in productivity and material security.

• Erich Landsteiner - Demesne Lordship and the Early Modern State in Central Europe. The Struggle for Labour Rent in Lower Austria in the Second Half of the 16th Century

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Demesne lordship and the early modern state in Central Europe. The struggle for labour rent in Lower Austria in the second half of the 16th century.

With regard to the model of an agrarian dualism in early modern Europe the hereditary lands of the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty, particularly the provinces of Lower and Upper Austria, and Styria (as well as Bavaria and some other west-Elbian territories) have been analysed as hybrid forms, where most of the preconditions for the formation of Gutsherrschaft were present in the 16th century but where this development was blocked for one reason or the other. The most prominent cause advanced to explain why this possibility was not realized is the supposed deployment of specific state policies designed to protect the rural subjects from increasing lordly oppression and exploitation. The politics of Bauernschutz by early modern territorial rulers, motivated not at least by concerns about the fiscal potential of the rural subjects, would have aborted the incipient development of commercialized manorialism and tipped the balance of power between subjects and lords in favour of the peasantry.

In my contribution to the session I will draw on the example of Lower Austria to argue that this optimistic interpretation of an either benign or strategically acting territorial ruler (or state) is dubious. This province of the Habsburg hereditary lands lived trough a fierce struggle for the right of the landlords to demand unlimited labour services form its subjects waged between the peasantry, the landed nobility, and the state during the second half of the 16th century. The conflict was accompanied by a pronounced extension of demesne farming in some parts of the province and resulted in an armed revolt of the rural subjects in 1596/97. The role of the state in this struggle was fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand the government showed itself highly reluctant to recede in front of the demands of the noble landlords for the right to use the labour power of their subjects more intensively in a period of rapidly rising prices for agrarian commodities, on the other hand it devised and implemented measures to raise the revenues from the so-called Chamber Estates – the manors owned by the Archduke/Emperor himself and usually leased to members of the provincial nobility – in a situation of severe financial distress. The measure taken was to impose a uniform standard of labour service on all these manors. It was not intend that these services were actually used in farming given the small extent of the demesne economy on these manors, but was designed to raise the value of these estates and thereby the income from leasing them out. Given the fact that a lot of still surviving source material was produced in the course of these conflicts and manoeuvres, this seems to be a good occasion to revaluate the role of the prince/state in the (non)development of Gutsherrschaft.
Erich Landsteiner
Dept. of Economic and Social History – Univ. of Vienna

• Edgar Melton

• Mats Olsson - Peasant productivity and lordship economy. A comparative study of south Sweden 1700–1860

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The impact of the agrarian system of demesne lordship on the productivity and prosperity of peasant farmers has engaged a lot of researchers through the years. It was already in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an area of debate among contemporary writers. But due to lack of sources very few comparative analyses of economic outputs between e.g. freeholders and subject tenants have been done. So, our idea of the economic impact of demesne lordship on peasants is to a large extent influenced by contemporary opinions, either from critics or defenders.

The aim of the study is to present broad quantitative analyses of production outputs from peasants inside and outside a system of demesne lordship. In the region Scania (Skåne) in south Sweden about half of the farmsteads belonged to freeholders or crown tenants, while the other half were owned by noble landlords and tilled by subject tenants. In the nineteenth century, the region saw a development full of contradictions, when the rise of the independent peasantry coincided with a new wave of a commercial noble demesne expansion.

The comparative analysis show that while the differences between the peasant groups were quite small in the eighteenth century, although a significantly lower production output for manorial tenants is noticeable already then, the divergence increased in the nineteenth century, in favour of the freeholders.

• Aleksander Panjek - Feudal Economy in a Comparative Perspective: Western Slovenia between Central and Southern Europe

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The paper aims to present an interpretation of the fundamental economic and social characteristics of the feudal estates in the southern Hapsburg lands (today South-Western Slovenia) by adopting a comparative perspective. The work concentrates on the last decades of the 16th and first decades of the 17th centuries. Specific attention is dedicated to the attempt of evaluating the presence, nature and extent of an active landlords’ approach to the economic activities within their estates.

• Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen - Innovative Feudalism. Gutsherrschaft and Koppelwirtschaft in Schleswig-Holstein in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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Manors in 18th century Schleswig-Holstein are a challenge to simple dichotomic concepts of progressive and backwards forms of economic organisation. On the one hand they are examples of the most extreme Gutsherrschaft with a very large proportion of demesne land, one of the highest levels of corvee demands from dependant serfs known anywhere in Europe, and an extensive manorial jurisdiction. On the other hand its large scale farming was seen as a model for adjoining territories to the north and east, admired for its productivity and innovation.
Manors in Schleswig-Holstein started expanding demesnes in the 16th century, and the process continued till the early 18th century, when demesnes covered half the land of the manors. In the course of this process corvee burdens on peasants rose dramatically, the second serfdom was introduced, and manor owners gained extensive jurisdictional and administrative privileges. In these aspect the picture of manorial development in Schleswig-Holstein is a classic narrative of Eastern European Gutsherrschaft – perhaps one of the rather few cases where many of these assumptions actually come true.
Nonetheless these large demesnes developed a form of farming that was admired by many, not because it was feudal, but in spite of it. In the early part of the period large farms concentrated on grain growing, but in the course of the 17th century the demesnes combined large scale dairy farming with a special field organisation and rotation, known as the Schleswig-Holstein Koppelwirtschaft. The social organisation was complex. Field work was done as corvee, work in the cowshed and dairy performed by paid workers, but both groups of workers were mostly serfs. The dairy was let to a capalist tenant, but he was dependant on corvee labourers for haymaking, fence works, and bringing out manure.
The system was thus complex and challenging to simple concepts. It combined ‘feudal’ and ‘capitalist’ features, it combined a ‘feudalisation’ with a technical innovation. ‘Reformers’ of the late 18th century who fought corvee, serfdom, and other ‘feudal’ institutions, obviously saw the Schleswig-Holstein as a example of all the things that were to be changed, but imitated many technical features from the same manors.




P7  -   Coin circulation in Central Europe
Room: Room 1.01 (Trans)

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The study of economy is mainly linked to the study of the extension of the influences of the main Empires. For the Antiquity, the main axis of study is to understand the relations between the Mediterranean Empires and the Barbaricum, considering specially the general evolution of the importance of the economic relations and the conflicts between the main states and economic centers. Since 1995, international scientific programs try to understand the evolution of the importance of the economic relations of the Mediterranean states and the rest of the World and to analyze the evolution of the integration of the "other states" in the Mediterranean economy.
The objective is to use the coin finds as a mirror of the development of the exportations of the Hellenistic and Roman Empires and to analyze the importance of these exportations as linked to the political influence of the Empires. The coins are, in that research, the best element to evaluate the evolution. All the coins are dated and the mints are known. Therefore, it is possible to use the coins as a kind of seismograph of the importance and the intensity of the relations.
The session is the continuation of the session of Helsinki. We continue to analyse the coin circulation and coin finds in Central Europe.
This program is actually financed by a special program of the CNRS (Groupement de Recherche Européen / European Research Network) with the participation of the University of Warsaw, the Rumanian Academy, the National Museum of Slovenia, the National Museum of Moldavia, the Musee des Beaux Arts, Lyon and the Centre de Recherches Historiques.


Organizers:

- Presentation of the current cooeration in Europe

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Presentation of the European Network on the study and ublication of coin finds

• Aleksander Bursche


Participants:

• Alenka Miskec

• Delia Moisil

• Francois Planet