Programme

Researching about what is fiscal modernization is one of the most remarkable questions in Fiscal and Financial History. There have been a lot of very important historians, sociologists and economists who have tried to answer this question. Perhaps, the most important change in fiscal history has been How did the State begin to raise more and more money in order to support their expenses?
Fiscal history has explored in depth these ideas for decades and decades. Now, new methods and new sources determine the current international research. But the question remains the same: What is modernization in Fiscal History? Why, Where and How did monarchies begin to spend more and more money? How those political systems controlled the fact of collecting taxes when there are not a tax bureocracy along kingdoms?
In this paper we present a first draft of mapping fiscal demarcations in Castile between 1503 and 1525 using GIS technologies. During this period, as several studies have pointed out, the crown didn’t know the fiscal geography exactly. Fiscal system used external agents as tax farmers or cities for collecting taxes. In order to approach at fiscal efficiency of crown, it would be very important to know how monarchy conceived its own kingdom. Thus, this paper will present a first reconstruction of castilian fiscal demarcations with all dates related to tax farmer or headed taxes (encabezamientos). We will divide our paper in three parts:
1) An approximate division of fiscal demarcations taking advantage of Pilar Zabala’s dates. (P. ZABALA AGUIRRE, Las alcabalas y la hacienda real en Castilla. Siglo XVI, Santander, 2000)
2) A first analysis of evolution of regular royal taxes using GIS technology
3) The incidence and importance of tax farmers through these demarcations, where we will define the biggest financiers of crown along all Castile.
In conclusion, we would like to explore both the possibilities and limits of GIS technologies in order to study an historical tax system. In consequence, we will not only offer a preliminary result of all this, but we will focus on methodological problems as well.

Historiography on Spanish colonial trade stresses the essential role played by non-Hispanic mercantile networks in the economic expansion in the Atlantic. Within the Iberian Peninsula proper, colonies of Anglo-Irish, French, Flemish, and Dutch and of other nationalities maintained a prosperous trade from the main urban nuclei. Late in the second half of the XVII century and throughout the Enlightened XVIII century, the old enemies of the Hispanic Monarchy had developed certain sophisticated operations within the framework of trade between Spain and America, from within the very heart of the state monopoly.
In this presentation, I will deal with some of the features of the mercantile and financial networks between different cities in the European Atlantic coast which were implied in the so called Spanish monopoly with America. These networks can be represented in a GIS (Geographic Information System) where new scheme of analysis tools can be used to study the different typology of interconnection between systems and companies in and around the atlantics routes. Through an analysis of such networks, we will try to analyze their mechanisms and the extent of their influence in the Spanish trade with America between 1689 and 1713. I will try to know if these merchants communities can be considered as authentic Self-Organizing Network in order to understand the connections between the networks and how worked in the framework of the Spanish Atlantic system.

In this paper I will examine the correspondence found on board a Spanish merchant ship coming from colonial Peru that was intercepted by two British privateers in October 1779. The correspondence is held in the archive of the British High Court of Admiralty (the National Archives, London). It includes nearly two thousand envelopes containing letters, accounts and various documents sent by a total of 540 people to 926 addressees located in 154 cities, towns and villages scattered throughout Spain and Europe.

This cache of confiscated letters will be used to map the transatlantic networks of the merchants of Lima, which was the second most important commercial center of Spanish America after Mexico City. More specifically, I will discuss the limited geographical reach of the transatlantic networks originating from Lima: 75 per cent of the correspondence was sent to Cádiz and Madrid, whereas only 1.25 per cent was for places outside Spain. This is a feature worth analysing for two important reasons: first because most of the merchandise sent from Spain to Peru was made of textiles of French, British and Italian origin; and secondly because the official channel of the Spanish colonial trade, although in theory a monopoly for Spaniards established in Cádiz, was widely penetrated by foreign merchants and investors.

The problems for the merchants of Lima to establish relationships of trust with European traders and manufacturers (and vice versa) may well have been the reason why no direct correspondence took place between the two. The paper will start off by describing the attempts made by the Norwich manufacturers Richard and John Gurney to trade with colonial Peru in the early 1770s, before moving on to analyse the 1779 correspondence.

En el proyecto DynCoopNet (Dynamic Cooperation Network) se está elaborando un Sistema de Información Geográfica (SIG) espacio-temporal sobre redes de cooperación en las rutas de la Monarquía Hispánica. Este sistema integrará diversas bases de datos históricas, dándolas un significado global, que ayudarán a comprender la dinámica de este complejo sistema, y a responder cuestiones acerca de la evolución de la cooperación de las redes comerciales auto-organizativas de la primera era global (1400-1800). El modelo de datos conceptual que se presenta en este trabajo pone en relación dos grandes bloques de información histórica: por un lado el ciclo de vida de los navíos que intervinieron en las operaciones comerciales de esa época, y por otro lado las relaciones de cooperación que establecieron los diferentes agentes entre sí en localizaciones geográficas concretas.

La materialización del modelo conceptual en una base de datos espacial, y la potencialidad de los SIG, permitirán entre otros, modelar las relaciones de cooperación entre agentes, los flujos comerciales, la dinámica de las redes comerciales y sus grados de cohesión; podrá detectar áreas prioritarias de comercio, analizar la eficacia de cada una de las redes en términos socioeconómicos, identificar qué mecanismos sociológicos entre los agentes mantuvieron altos niveles de cooperación (asociaciones comerciales, relaciones de parentesco, religión, apadrinamiento,…) y posibilitaron la explotación de ciertas áreas comerciales sobre otras, así como la evolución de dichas redes a lo largo de cinco siglos de historia.

El estudio de las redes comerciales del Océano Índico y el Pacífico nos permite conocer sobre que bases se estructuró el capitalismo moderno y las relaciones que se establecieron no solo entre Europa y Oriente, sino también con el sistema comercial del Atlántico y los cambios que provocarían

Analysis of European empires in the Early Modern Age are usually focused on central power strategies and imperial rivalries. It is, on the contrary, our perception that several individuals or groups contributed extensively to these dynamics, at times to an even greater extent than the central power itself. Based on the study of Iberian maritime expansion this paper sustains that a widespread cooperation was in place and linked, through self organized networks, Portuguese and Castilian/ Spanish empires, in which individual initiative was a key factor.
We argue that even if the Tordesillas treaty (1494) divided the overseas world between Portuguese and Spanish Crowns, and even if both states were very keen about political and economical protection of their possessions, the fact is that intense and unstoppable flows occurred between both colonial empires.

In the last quarter of the 15th Century the performance of the genoese family Rey, in the Kingdom of Murcia, not only emphasizes for his action in the business of the alums -topic up to the moment partially studied- but for a certain legal business, especially imports and exports of cereal, that indeed only mask commercial activities that well we might consider to be like illegal from the moment that his economic benefits to fiscal level do not know.
The paper, obviously, does not remain in this so anecdotal aspect but studies up to what point it is possible to manipulate the economy to obtain a few political certain purposes; and as this manipulation is influenced by an exogenous factor to the proper economic system of the territory in question. This influence is declared in the collective of foreign merchants: the familiy Rey.
Conclusions treat on the modernity of the Kingdom of Murcia on not having sheltered colonies but foreign companies, and a possible globalization in the late Middle Age from the royal power to the regional economy trough the political-trade networks.

In the aim of the DynCoopNet Project, the Portuguese team will focus the attention studying cooperation among Iberian trade networks in the XVI and XVII centuries. For our purpose we have been using the information collected in the Simón Ruiz archive, namely the bills of exchange and commercial correspondence. In our brief presentation we pretend to prove the advantages of these data sources in the reconstruction of a merchant network, as well as showing cooperation mechanisms. Secondly, we’ll demonstrate our methodology consisting in an agent-based database (TimeLink) and how we extract data regarding spatial information. TimeLink can also deal with geo-tagged data in order to export it to GIS software. Finally we would like to drive the attention to our expectations on this kind of visualization method and on what it can bring to our project main questions.

In this paper, I present a method for the study of populations of maritime ship masters using visual analytics tools. This method is founded in evolutionary thinking and aims to provide a framework for the historical study of maritime transportation as an integral economic activity, rather than as a spin-off effect of trade. The method presented in this paper consists of three techniques and covers three levels of analysis.
The three levels of analysis are mico, meso and macro and are defined as such in accordance to the general analytical framework of evolutionary economics elaborated by Dopfer and Potts (2008). The three techniques that constitute the method are database operations, computational aggregation and the use of visual analytics tools. All three techniques are closely related and deemed to provide synergistic analytical results.
In the paper, visual analytics tools covering all three levels of analysis will be described, tested and explained using the large variety of maritime-historical resources that is currently being made available by the Navigocorpus programme, subsidized by the French National Research Agency.

This paper deals with the idea of cross-cultural trade networks. A growing amount of studies situated in fields such as global history, Atlantic history or imperial history focus on human interaction as the fundamental notion in the construction of historical spaces. It stresses human agency, but not exclusively on an individual basis. Historical force is instead given to groups of individuals, and different types of relationships. Trade networks, both mono- as well as cross-cultural take an important place in such narratives. If webs of human interaction are to function as perhaps the main analytical category in large-scale histories, it is important that the inner mechanisms of such informal organizations are researched. Especially in the case of cross-cultural connections, issues of trust, creditworthiness and reputation are central. These issues can be analyzed based on the frequent business correspondence maintained between different merchants. The sending of letters did not only serve as a tool in concrete business transactions, but was used to divulge information, enhance one’s reputation and establish regularity and stability. Secondly, they served as the main vehicle to become engaged in complicated strings of credit and money remittances. As such, business correspondence not only shows how trust was generated socially, but also economically. This allows for a quantitative and concrete analysis of long-distance and long-lasting commercial relationships.

During the last two decades, a growing number of economic and social historians have used the records of friendly societies and other organisations with health insurance schemes to investigate the history of sickness and morbidity. This paper seeks to build on this work by utilising the individual sickness records of members of the Hampshire and General Friendly Society to reconstruct the sickness histories of more than 5000 working-class men in central-southern England between circa 1871 and 1950. During the course of the paper, we intend to examine the following issues: the seasonality of sickness claims; changes in the 'age-of-onset' of chronic morbidity; changes in age-specific morbidity rates; the causes of sickness claims; and the relationship between specific causes of sickness and the ages at which people fell ill. The paper will also raise important questions about the ‘cultural inflation of morbidity’ and the relationship between changing patterns of morbidity and the history of health care.

It is the aim of this paper to explore the determinants of friendly society membership in late nineteenth-century England through an examination of the miners' permanent relief fund movement (which insured against industrial accidents).
It is argued that neither level of risk, nor level of earnings nor the availability/non-availability of other sources of relief provides an adequate explanation of miners' decisions to join/not to join the movement.
It is suggested that membership can be explained best by the attitudes and behaviour - the culture - of coal miners and coal owners in individual coalfields.

In the academic narrative of the origins of the welfare state in Britain, friendly societies have played a mixed role. The societies' almost complete exclusion of the poor has led many historians to discount their role in the political transformations of the early 20th century (Thane 2004). Further, most historians have tacitly accepted the argument made by Gilbert (1965) that the friendly societies were increasingly insolvent into the late 19th century and that any political impact the societies had in shaping early pension legislation was related to their increased financial stress. Related to this claim is the common argument that the friendly societies, with their quasi-moralizing, cultish rules and non-actuarial pricing systems, were irrational institutions that were unable to compete with emergent commercial insurance providers and eventually state provisions.

This argument, though supported by secondary sources from the period, has never been quantitatively scrutinized. This paper, inspired by the path-breaking work of Emery and Emery (1999) on North American friendly societies, seeks to partially remedy this gap. It does this in two ways. First, using data from the AOF and IOOF archives, it computes two empirical tests of financial viability for each society lodge: the implicit share of risk loading and the probability of ruin. These values improve upon the conventional literature by more precisely defining financial insolvency and by more accurately capturing the financial decisions facing lodges. Second, in order to test the hypothesis that societies were irrational institutions, the paper performs demand regressions to isolate the determinants of friendly society membership. These computations, though inherently limited in scope, will provide a cliometric test to historians' strongly-held convictions about the financial and economic rationality of the friendly societies.

The introduction of Obligatory Heath Insurance and the National Health in Spain took place during the 1940’s. Until this time, the Mutual Benefit Societies and other private associations had a great relevance in organizing precautionary measures for workers and their families.
The aim of this presentation is to analyse the evolution of the medical assistance provided by The “Sociedad Católica Protectora de Obreros “La Conciliación” between 1902-1936.”La Conciliación" was founded in Pamplona in 1902, as a mixed society, made up by worker, employer and protector members. Until 1936 La Conciliación” evolved from a mixed Mutual Aid Society into a Workers’ Association and, finally, into a Mutual Insurance Association. During these years, the main objectives of La Conciliación were to be a mutual illness, laboral arbitration (to claim about wages and work hours), and unemployment protection society. "La Conciliación" continued to exist until the 1980’s.
This entity is classified among the mutual benefit societies. They were voluntary associations whose members participated in management and administration. Profits belonged to the members as a whole and were distributed following statues or regulations.
The main services offered by the Society until 1936 were: labour mediation, assistance for the member and his family through economic subsidy, medical attendance, pharmaceutical service (beginning in 1910), the Chronic Fund (beginning in 1914) and the midwifery service (beginning in 1914); post-mortem aid (beginning in 1918); it also had a Savings Bank and a cooperative (between 1912 and 1922). Until 1933, it organised educational and recreational activities in addition.
To analyse the evolution of the medical assistance provided by "La Conciliación", we can underline two aspects: firstly, until 1936, at least a third of the workforce were members of La Conciliación, whose records show over 1,000 members. On the other hand, the length of time the organization lasted (1902-1977).
We have used the papers and minutes of the Society and the local press between 1902-1936.

According to standard economic theory, asymmetric information characterizes many insurance contracts. Empirically, results have been mixed, with health economists finding evidence of asymmetric information but specialists in the economics of contracts generally not. Using historical data, this paper takes a more direct approach in three ways. First, it tests for the presence of moral hazard and adverse selection in a straightforward type of insurance contract. In short-term disability insurance, a cash payment to replace lost wages enabled sick or injured workers to take time off work, and it may have encouraged them to do so when otherwise healthy. Second, this paper avoids much of the endogeneity problems of recent studies because insured workers had no choice in their contract’s premium and benefit structure. Third, insurers understood the importance of asymmetric information and included countermeasures in these contracts. This paper estimates the strength of such countermeasures. This study concludes that evidence for the presence of adverse selection was stronger than that for moral hazard, but that both were present and that insurers’ countermeasures against each effectively reduced claims.

The main objective of this paper is to analyse what factors conditioned the configuration of the different models of sickness coverage on the two sides of the Atlantic, the viability of voluntary systems or the presence of the social state? Yet it is possible, however, that both alternatives are the two sides of the same coin. In other words, was it the growing presence of the state in social matters which led to the non-viability of other forms of voluntary protection in European countries? In order to deal with these questions, this paper analyses the case of Spain, one of the last capitalist countries to approve a state sickness insurance, despite the fact that the alternative networks of voluntary cover did not meet the needs of the population.

The aims of this paper is to show the development of the Friendly Societies (in Italy called “Società di Mutuo Soccorso”, hereafter SMS) in the Eastern Lombardy (province of Brescia and Bergamo) from the birth of the Italian State to the start of the first world war. In this period in the Eastern Lombardy the number of the SMS greatly increased: in 1860 SMS were 7 and in 1914 they were nearly 500. In the same time their members grew up from 3,500 to 37,000 (and this figure is underestimated because it is impossible to calculate the member of many SMS).
The analysis of the statutes of the SMS and the elaboration of the data concerning the census of the Italian SMS took from 1862 to 1904 allow to verify a lot of aspects of the activity of the SMS. This paper particularly shows the different types of the SMS and the benefits they granted to their members. Moreover it makes in evidence how, in the Eastern Lombardy, the SMS created a welfare system which substituted the Italian state whose welfare did not exist until the 20th Century. Finally it illustrates the difficult relations existing between the SMS (particularly the catholic and socialist ones) and the Italian government who was disposed to finance the SMS only if it had a wide control on their activity.

The main objective of this paper is to analyse what factors conditioned the configuration of the different models of sickness coverage on the two sides of the Atlantic, the viability of voluntary systems or the presence of the social state? Yet it is possible, however, that both alternatives are the two sides of the same coin. In other words, was it the growing presence of the state in social matters which led to the non-viability of other forms of voluntary protection in European countries? In order to deal with these questions, this paper analyses the case of Spain, one of the last capitalist countries to approve a state sickness insurance, despite the fact that the alternative networks of voluntary cover did not meet the needs of the population.

The increasing costs of drugs and medical treatment during the first half of the twentieth century generated a growing demand for health insurance among the middle income groups in the Netherlands. Due to the height of their income most middle class families could not join the already existing sickness fund schemes. Soon a bustling private health insurance market emerged. Contrary to sickness funds which provided an insurance scheme based on service benefits, these private health insurance companies offered indemnity insurance with (different levels of) cash reimbursement for the costs of medical care. Though there was some market segments services by sickness funds and private health insurance companies, they coexisted relatively peacefully.
This changed with the rise of statutory health insurance. The Sickness fund Decree of 1941 imposed a system of social and private health insurance in the Netherlands, separated by an income-ceiling. The social health insurance schemes were to be carried exclusively by recognized sickness funds, private health insurance was left in the hands of private insurance companies. Though this division of the health insurance market greatly favoured the sickness funds, they almost immediately started to search for ways to penetrate the private health insurance market.
Shortly after the end of WWII sickness funds established joint venture insurance companies to penetrate the private health insurance market. These private health insurance companies, called Bovenbouwers (‘superstructures’), used the cheap agency system and administrative facilities of the sickness funds and therefore could maintain low premiums and liberal conditions. Within the course of a decade the market share of the bovenbouw-insurance increased from 8% to 40%, mostly at the expense of the market share of commercial health insurance companies.
This eventually lead to the odd situation that during the 1980’s the chairman of the national sector-organization of sickness funds and vice-chairman of the Sickness fund Council at the same time was the treasurer of the largest private health insurance company in the Netherlands. Through the bovenbouw-insurance, sickness funds had a major weight on the private health insurance market, triggered by the introduction statutory health insurance. This paper will attend to the influence of sickness funds, and their particular ‘insurance-ideology’, on the development of the private health insurance market and the emergence of ‘health insurance-ethics’ in the private sector. In what ways did the clash of sickness fund insurance and private health insurance shape the private health insurance sector until the end of the dual system of social and private health insurance in 2006.

Thanks to developments in copper mining during the colonial period Zambia was one of the richest
economies on the African continent at the time of independence. This status eroded in the postcolonial period as Zambia, according to most available estimates, experienced negative GDP per
capita growth over the postcolonial period on average. Meanwhile Botswana, one of the
poorest economies at independence, rose to become one of the richest economies today, largely owing to developments in diamond mining.
Dominant explanations of African economic performance emphasise the role of economic policy
and institutions when explaining differences in growth or income levels. A historian, Meredith,
probably represented popular consensus on when he summarized Kenneth Kaunda, the president of
Zambia for 25 years as having a left “a catastrophic record of mismanagement”. Meanwhile
Botswana’s economic success the economists Acemoglou et. al. summed up the record of
policymakers in Botswana as: “There is almost complete consensus that Botswana achieved rapid
growth because it managed to adopt good policies”. This paper compares the economic performance of Botswana and Zambia in the 20th century. It examines the two economies through the colonial and postcolonial period with the aim of evaluating the relative importance of structural and institutional causes of economic growth and
development. It finds that between 1945 and 1965 Zambia experienced a mineral boom, quite
similar to the boom Botswana experienced between 1975 and 1995. It is the contrast of the
institutional contexts and the timing of these booms that has led scholars to conclude that
underlying growth dynamics of these economies are completely different. Connecting postcolonial
and colonial periods of economic expansion and contraction, this paper emphasises the importance
of vantage point in economic historical evaluation.

How did living standards in Ghana develop in the long run? The obvious constraint for a long-term perspective is the limited amount of good data and a consistent measure of human well-being. This is especially the case for the period of colonial rule. Using anthropometric techniques we explore the evolution of living standards and regional inequality in Ghana from 1880 to 2000.
Ghana provides an extremely interesting case study. Major economic and social changes took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of the agricultural export economy, already under way since the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, was consolidated by the adoption of cocoa, of which Ghana became the world’s leading producer. Cocoa farms, and European-owned mines, eventually attracted extensive migrant labour. Railways and lorries revolutionised transport. Medical knowledge spread. Our findings suggest that, overall, living standards improved during colonial times and that a trend reversal only occurred after the economic crisis in the 1970s. This fact is challenging prominent explanations of colonial legacy and allows insights into the institutional argument for growth.

We find with survey data that the increase in height stature experienced by successive cohorts born in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana during the late colonial period (1925-1960) is almost as high as the increase observed in France and Great-Britain over the 1875-1975 period, even when correcting for the bias arising from old-age shrinking. In contrast, the early post-colonial period (1960-1985) is characterized by stagnation or even reversion, not only in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana but also in other countries in Western Africa. We argue that the selection effects linked for instance to measuring the height of women rather than of men, then of mothers rather than of women, and most importantly the interactions between height and mortality cannot give account of these figures. We then disaggregate these national trends by parental background and district of birth, and match individual data with district-level historical data on export crop (cocoa) expansion, urban density and colonial investment in health and educations. We provide evidence that a significant share of the increase in height stature may be related to the progresses of urbanization and of cocoa production.

Colonial tax systems have shaped state-economy relationships in the formative stages of many present day nation states. This paper surveys the variety in colonial tax systems across 34 dominions, colonies and protectorates during the heydays of British Imperialism (1870-1940). It compares and discusses per capita tax incidences and the source composition of colonial public revenue and assesses the results on the basis of different views in the literature regarding the function and impact of colonial fiscal regimes: is there a clear distinction between ‘extractive colonies’ and ‘settler colonies’ in relative tax rates and the source composition of taxation? How ‘extractive’ were colonial taxes in the ‘extractive colonies’ of British Africa, Asia and the Caribbean? The main argument of the paper is that there is little evidence for the view that ‘excessive taxation’ or a specific source composition has been a crucial characteristic of ‘extractive institutions’ in non-settler colonies. Moreover, the paper finds a strong positive correlation between colonial tax incidences and long term post-colonial GDP growth rates. This nuances the Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002) hypothesis and calls for a further decomposition of the term ‘extractive institutions’ as such. The Engerman-Sokoloff-Zolt hypothesis (2000, 2006) that specific distributive relations shape fiscal policies in American settler societies may be extended to some parts of Sub Saharan Africa.

That economic history and institutional economics share common grounds is evidenced by the works of Acemoglu et al (AJR) tracing the roots of underdevelopment, which are identified in terms of institutional inefficiencies, back to early colonial times. Although this should be welcomed by economic historians, who often grumble about the narrow time horizon of economists and their tendency to prescribe universally applicable policy blueprints regardless of historical context, questions may be raised about the explanatory power of this approach for understanding differential growth and poverty reduction paths of today’s developing countries.
The case of Vietnam, represented by the different development paths between Tonkin and Cochin-China, shows the complexity involved in analyses of the impact of colonialism. Population density was not the organizing principle behind the settlement of French colonialists. Nor did it significantly determine the level of extraction as predicted by AJR’s theory. On the contrary, we show that the presence of several agents, local and foreign, with their own vested interests led to very different outcomes in the North as compared to the South. While the North, an extremely densely populated area prior to French colonization, remained in a high level equilibrium trap and sought tax evasion via population under-representation, the South through French investments, extended the land frontier and allowed for commercialization and economic growth, which became the main revenue of the French authorities. However, at the time of independence inequality in land distribution had reached startling proportions and had become not only a burning political issue but also a hindrance to economic transformation. In the Mekong Delta only one fourth of the farming families owned all they land they were cultivating and secure property rights in land were held by a small minority. These results point at the need to reexamine what is meant by extractive institutions versus institutions for private property.
If we were to apply the interpretation of AJR's theory of the development of colonial Vietnam, one would have to argue that the French did just perpetuate extractive institutions in Tonkin, while in the South they established a “wrong type of capitalism”. Such an analysis does not capture the processes of change which are left unexplained. In this paper we redirect attention to the factors and processes that generated inequality in colonial times, and to the interaction of colonial and local institutions as well as to the importance of market mechanisms.

We examine the current pattern of inequality in late 20th century South Africa and then look for its historical roots with a particular focus on the position of the Coloured population. Growing inequity in access to education and labour legislation was informed by a hardening of race-based social categorization during the 19th century. Further institutionalization of racial categories amid the growth of the public sector and regulation during the first half of the 20th century cemented a pattern of inequality that has survived in a modified form to this day. We attempt to monitor the position of the Coloured population through this long-run process using available evidence on social, economic and physical well-being.

We investigate the historical roots of poverty, with particular reference to the experience of Africa during the twentieth century. Like the recent studies by Acemoglu et al (2001, etc) we find that institutional inheritance is an important influence on current underdevelopment;unlike them , however, we find that the influence of policies on institutions is highly significant, and that, in Africa at least, a high representation of European settlers in land ownership and policy-making was a source of weakness, not strength. We argue this thesis, using mortality rates as our main index of well-being, with reference to two settler colonies (Kenya and Zimbabwe) and two peasant export economies(Uganda and Ghana). Our findings suggest that, in Africa, settler-type political systems tended to produce highly inequal income distributions and, as a result, patterns of public expenditure and investment in human capital which were strongly biased against small holder agriculture and thence against poverty reduction. In contrast, we argue that peasant-export type political systems produced more equal income distributions whose policy structures were less biased against the poor. As a consequence, liberalisation during the 1980s and 1990s produced asymmetric results, with poverty falling sharply in the 'peasant export' and rising in the settler economies. These contrasts in the evolution of poverty in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we argue, can only be understood by reference to differences between the two systems whose roots lie in political decisions taken a hundred years previously.

A long-run view of inter-country inequality in living standards is provided for a large sample of countries in Western Europe, the European Offshoots, Japan –OECD, for short- and Latin America. A long term rise in real per capita income inequality is found. The deepening gap between OECD and Latin America was the major factor beneath this increase. Inequality in non-economic indicators of well-being (longevity, education, and human development) fell in the long run but a gap between OECD and Latin America remained by 2000. Polarization took place in the Western World during the second half of the twentieth century.

The received narrative on the origins of rural poverty in South Asia attributes poverty to the disruptive effects of the nineteenth century globalization, especially the destruction of traditional handicrafts and consequent pressure upon agriculture. Whereas the decline of craft industries is explained in the standard view with reference to cost-competitiveness of Indian production, a non-standard view speculates that fall in agricultural yield in the late eighteenth century due to Mughal decline added to the decline of the crafts by raising the cost of wage goods. These stylized stories predict a fall in real wages in agriculture. In this paper, I consider the evidence on long-term trends in real wage and standard of living of the agricultural worker to shed some light on the historical roots of rural poverty.

The main finding of the paper is that real wages from the last third of the eighteenth century until the mid-twentieth do not show a distinct trend at all, which leads us to conclude that (a) neither de-industrialization nor fall in agricultural yield can sufficiently explain the origins of poverty, and (b) poverty was not created in the eighteenth century but derived from a long-term structural feature of dry-land agriculture, namely, low and variable land yield. Confirming this hypothesis, agricultural wages varied significantly according to regional resource endowments. These patterns began to change from the end of the nineteenth century with increased mobility and migration of agricultural workers.

The aim of the paper is to expand our understanding of Chilean economic long-run growth in two fundamental dimensions. First, it provides a traditional growth accounting view identifying factor contributions and total factor productivity. Second, it offers a framework as an organizing scenario for exploring consistency between opportunities and institutions, on the one hand, and factor contribution to growth on the other.

This paper has three parts. In the first part we present econometric evidence showing that increases in the international demand for enslaved Africans induced a reallocation of resources in Africa towards slave production and away from other economic pursuits. In the second part of the paper we use this econometric evidence to help specify theoretical models of conflict and cooperation in Africa before and after the slave trade. Our goal is to reveal the conditions under which the induced reallocation of resources also produced several negative externalities thought to impede long-term development in Africa. These include constraints on the growth of African states, increases in ethnic and social stratification, and predation. In the third part of the paper we test the predictions of these models against the history of the Asante Empire (present-day Ghana). We find that the models explain Asante’s origins and expansion extremely well, including the Asante Alliance, the causes and timing of territorial expansion, and the “southern problem.” We argue that the models reveal long-term consequences of slave production that apply to many African economies, not just Ghana.

Primary products, or export commodities as they are called, have far greater price volatility than do manufactures or services. In addition, Third World economies that specialize in such products have high export concentration and thus do not spread their risk, yielding even greater volatility in their terms of trade. Recent economic analysis has shown that price volatility of this sort has been very bad for long run growth in poor countries over the past four decades or so. Has it always been that way? This paper confirms that it has been so since 1700, and it helps explain the Great Divergence.

The specialization in exporting primary products is frequently deemed harmful for long-run development, because it increases volatility of terms of trade and thus of the GDP. One would expect modern economic growth to solve the problem by changing the composition of trade. This paper tests this hypothesis with a new series of Italian terms of trade from 1861 to 1939, a period which spans the first stage of the industrialization of the country. The results do not tally with the hypothesis. The change in composition improved marginally the terms of trade, but it did not help much in terms of volatility.

This paper looks at the evolution of the terms of trade between commodities and manufactures since 1870, when steam navigation permitted international price equalization. Besides an updated statistical analysis of the relative price series for 24 commodities and eight indices pioneered by Grilli and Yang, we include other products that became more prominent during the 20 the century. For those products, we calculate a new price index, since 1962, that provides a detailed evolution of the more relevant products still traded today. As our previous analysis showed, and as the Economist Commodity Price Index history reveals, there has been a significant long-run deterioration in their barter terms of trade. However, this decline was neither continuous, nor was it distributed evenly among individual products, however. The data identifies new breaks and characteristics of the series that have accompanied the long term stepwise deterioration in aggregate real prices for raw materials.

The localization of the industry in Chile between the ends of the 19th century and 1967, is related with the evolution of the regional distribution of the mining GDP. In the same way, this is extremely determined by the evolution of the nitrate and cooper prices cycles. After the Pacific War, the provinces of the “Norte Grande” leaded the export boom of the nitrates until the end of the First World War. The result is the highest figures in the concentration of the regional mining GDP. During the twenties, the beginning in the growth of the cooper production changed this pattern. This was more spatially diffused than the nitrate one (Antofagasta in the north and O’Higgins, Santiago and Aconcagua in the centre). The collapse of the world markets during the Great Depression affected all the mining exports. Afterwards, the nitrates never recovered their importance but the cooper became the new leading product. The result during the thirties and the forties was a decrease in the concentration figures of the mining production localization, until the expansion of the oil production in Magallanes (in the south), in the sixties.
On the other hand, the localization of the industry shows a different pattern. The first period was characterized with higher dispersion of the industry, coinciding with the nitrate cycle. After 1911, started an intense process of concentration which was reinforced during the GD and the thirties, and remained concentrated until the fifties. At the same time, the imports substitution process between the Second World War and the seventies changed the industrial structure of the country. Between 1957 and 1967, the public policies oriented to the regional development acted as a centrifugal force for the industry localization and increased the dispersion of their space distribution.

This paper develops a model of the terms of trade and money supply determination under a currency board system to analyze industrialization in pre-World War II Malaya. Still a largely empty land in the 1870s, Malaya provides a global periphery variant to the late nineteenth-century de-industrialization hypothesis. Specialization in tin and rubber production for world markets fostered industry where previously little had existed. I argue, however, that even in the 1930s industrial development in Malaya still fell well short of what might have been expected in a country of rapid economic growth and relatively high per capita income. Dutch disease effects arising from volatile primary commodity export prices and currency board requirements limited the potential for industrialization in Malaya. Weak financial development and severe credit contraction in times of economic downturn led to sharp falls in demand in the Malayan economy and left local entrepreneurs unable to borrow from the banks.

Our objective is to concentrate on analysing the evolution of the terms of trade for products comprising agricultural and food trade in the second half of the last century. We therefore attempt to evaluate in what direction the real prices of these products have moved. In line with the abovementioned literature, which emphasises that the behaviour of the terms of trade for primary products has varied significantly, depending on the products and period in question, we have attempted to perform a highly disaggregated analysis for the set of products of agricultural origin, with the aim of excluding raw materials not of this nature.
We have constructed 56 new series of price indices for specific agricultural products which were traded internationally between 1950 and 2000 and are representative of all the groups comprising such trade . Additionally, to obtain real prices, the series of agricultural prices has been deflacted by an index for international trade prices which includes the important changes in the prices of not only manufactures but also of other goods, such as energy products, which had such a great influence upon the shocks occurring in the period under study. In summary, we are specifically working with the evolution of the real prices of agricultural products and food.
We shall analyse the presence of two structural ruptures in non-stationary series, and in addition establish endogeneously the years of structural rupture . We shall study when this deterioration occurred and its nature.
This set of analyses is aimed at characterising the different behaviour of the product groups which comprise international agricultural trade, determining in which of them the greatest deterioration took place and approximating the possible causes, both economic and institutional. The study concludes with an analysis of the economic regions or countries most affected by the deterioration in the real prices of agricultural and food products during the final quarter of the XX century.

From 2002 to 2007 Latin America registered one of the highest average growth rates in three decades. Aggregate demand decomposition into the three major sectors of the economy (external, government and private) shows that the growth trajectory is explained, mainly by the favorable performance of the external sector. Since the late 1990s, Latin America has been able to reduce its current account imbalance, and from 2002 onwards, managed to achieve a surplus. The improvement in the external sector conditions is attributable to a great extent, to a price commodity boom that benefited a subset of Latin American countries, namely those that specialize in the exports of commodity products and which comprise mainly South American economies and Mexico. The commodity boom allowed some of these countries to post surpluses in the fiscal and/or the balance-of-payments current accounts. The commodity boom reinforced an export and production structure that is traditionally natural resource oriented. During this boom period, an analysis the ten leading traditional Latin American exports products on a country-by-country basis, classified by major categories shows that most of these economies have reinforced/intensified their commodity export specialization. The commodity boom is explained in part by the increased demand for primary products from Asian countries and, in particular, China, and speculation in commodity futures. The increased demand for primary products from China, and speculation in commodity futures are determined by financial factors and more specifically by the so called financial global imbalances. This episode, whereby, commodity prices, and the ensuing export specialization pattern, responds to financial factors is not unique to the most recent sustained growth period in Latin America. In the nineteenth century (in the last three decades of the nineteenth century) Latin American economies also witnessed a commodity export boom driven in part by a wave of foreign investments starting in 1870.
The paper analyzes the role played by finance in the commodity booms and in shaping export specialization (trade) in Latin America in the 19th and 20th century. It argues that finance drives trade and not the other way around and draws the conclusion that modifying the pattern of export specialization of Latin American economies requires a change in the availability and structure of finance.

The effects of the First Globalisation on economic growth and income distribution in the New World figure prominently in the recent literature about the economic history of the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. This paper reviews the stylized facts that characterized the economic development of selected settler economies (Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, New Zealand and Uruguay) from 1870 to the Second World War in terms of growth, inequality, structural change, land frontier expansion, capital flows and prices. Besides, it discusses some analytical approaches –in the “Staple Theory” tradition– useful for understanding the evolution of the economic performance and inequality in natural resource-abundant economies.

This paper tries to reveal the chenging nature of the Colombo Plan or the transformation of the features of the Plan from capital aid programme to technical assistance, and to reconsider its implication on international order of Asia in the 1950s and the 1960s.

This paper will be to make clear the background of the formation of the Colombo Plan through the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers Conference in Colombo in 1950. This plan was very important to think about the reconstruction of the new international order in Asia, because it was the comprehensive and valid plan to improve and develop the Asian People’s living standards against the spreading Communism. There were the much heavier conditions of Great Britain as the old hegemony power and the United States as the new leader to reconstruct the international order corporately from 1940s to the first years of 1950s. When Great Britain sometimes opened the British Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conferences, they thought about the another conferences in the ministers levels, i.e. the British Commonwealth Finance Ministers Conference and the British Commonwealth Foreign Ministers Conference. Great Britain had the matters to resolve in the near future such as the sterling balances, the Japanese Peace Settlement as the head of the British Commonwealth. In Asia, the countries had not the full money and system to develop their national states, while there occurred the menace of the Chinese communism. India remained as the new member of the British Commonwealth and Australia eager to absorb the Southeast Asia in her new markets had the casting board in the Conference.

Historians have produced few analyses of precisely how host countries and territories reacted to or were affected by the Colombo Plan, once it became operational after 1951. This paper will focus upon the British Southeast Asian colonial territories, which today constitute the independent nation states of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. It assesses why the Plan had limited impact upon Commonwealth Southeast Asia. Principally, this was due to colonial status as well as the non-materialisation of US funding for the Plan. Only in the field of technical co-operation – particularly with the ‘White’ Dominions, and later Japan – did the Plan make a significant contribution to the late-colonial development effort. Even here, however, there were limitations on the scope and impact of aid schemes.

The new Soviet leadership was determined to reverse Moscow's previous policy of neglect of the Third World as a part of its new strategy of detente and peaceful coexistence. Khrushchev sought to strengthen Soviet positions in Asia and, with this purpose, to develop economic relations with the countries in the Asia-Pacific. The Soviet leaders' primary goal in assisting and trading with such countries as India, Indonesia and Burma was to solidify their neutralist sentiments and to increase Soviet influence there by strengthening feelings of sympathy and gratitude toward the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union cooperated with Asian countries through bilateral channels as well as through the United Nations aid programs, such as EPTA. Soviet efforts in developing economic relations with Asian countries and providing them aid and technical assistance and support brought Moscow visible results in strengthening its positions and influence in the region and increasing a favorable image of the Soviet Union as an impartial and sympathetic partner sincerely wishing to help. Yet, by the early 1960s, Soviet policy toward the Asia-Pacific experienced serious setbacks related to Moscow's quarrel with China and the development of Sino-Indian conflict.

The paper examines the US policy toward the Colombo Plan in the Cold War context.
I. Washington's Initial Reaction to the Colombo Plan. II. Japanese Membership, the Colombo Plan, and the US Cold War Strategy. III. The Soviet 'Economic Offensive', the Colombo Plan, and the Rise and Fall of the 'Baldwin plan'. IV. Hosting the Colombo Plan Meeting in Seattle.
Eisenhower administration officials could not agree on the scale, method and organization of a large-scale economic assistance program as proposed in the Baldwin plan which aimed at countering Moscow's economic and political challenge to extend its influence in South and Southeast Asia through exploitation of economic and political weakness in the area. On the other hand, the Colombo Plan acquired an increasing importance, particularly in relation to Japan's role in the US Cold War strategy, in the mid-1950s and thereafter during the Eisenhower administration. The significance of the Colombo Plan as one of the key components of holding back Communism in Asia reached a high point when Washington decided to host the meeting in Seattle.

Around the mid-1950s Japan started to quest for its new international role as a country that was transformed into a non-military economic power. But the room for Japanese activities in the most adjacent area, North-East Asia, was much limited: being subservient to the United States, Japan kept distance from China, and Japanese-Korean relations were very chilly in the wake of the break-up of the Japanese empire. Under these circumstances it was South-East Asia that emerged as an area in which Japan could try its hands.
Britain, which still wielded strong power in this area, could not help being sensitive to Japan’s move. Around that period as the result of the prolonged conflicts under the “Emergency”, Britain was forced to quicken the pace of granting independence to Malaya. Facing such acceleration of the process of decolonization in South-East Asia, the British decision-makers intensified their efforts to find new ways of maintaining Britain’s influence in this area and shifted emphasis to economic and non-military methods.
Bearing in mind these postures of Japan and Britain, in this paper I want to examine Anglo-Japanese relations in South-East Asia from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.

This paper will explore the changing dynamics of British overseas aid relations with regard to the transition from colonial to sovereign status in Southeast Asia and Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at a time when arrangements diversified bilaterally and multilaterally. It will be argued, in the simplest terms, that a marked transformation occurred in the nature in which Britain approached development finance rather than in its quantity. The established system of colonial development finance disintegrated from 1957 while the subsequent aid to sovereign states responded to a different logic. In this abridged version of the paper, the topic of loan finance will be given particular attention.

In the decade from 1965-1975 a range of events and processes intersected that together profoundly changed the international economic and political landscape in East and Southeast Asia. Individually, many have been dealt with in detail by historians, but with a few exceptions little effort has been made systematically to relate the economic with the political. This paper deals with the interaction between several of these influences to show the relationship between the collapse of the international monetary system and changing geopolitics in the region. This perspective also has important implications for the development of aid programmes during this decade and how they were delivered. Political/strategic events such as the UK decision to withdraw its military presence from East of Suez, the Cultural Revolution in the PRC and the separation of Malaysia and Singapore all had implications for the monetary relations of East Asian economies. Conversely, the reaction of states to these events was influenced by the shifting international monetary context, in particular the collapse of the Bretton Woods pegged exchange rate regime. The paper concentrates on Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, which from 1945-1972 were all part of the sterling area group of countries that pegged their exchange rate to sterling, denominated their reserves in sterling and enjoyed freer access to the London capital markets than countries outside the sterling area. All three were large holders of sterling assets as foreign reserves and as backing for their local currency and this tied them tightly to British policy during the collapse of the international monetary system as sterling lost value in terms of other currencies. Concentration on these states (two newly independent and one still a colony) also elucidates the role of imperialism in the ‘post-imperial’ era of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The sterling problem of the late 1940s and early 1950s dominated British and American thinking about the Colombo Plan – the scheme for economic assistance to the countries of South and South East Asia initiated at the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers meeting in January 1950. The meanings of the provisions for future economic co-operation envisaged at Colombo were profoundly ambiguous, and can be interpreted in several different ways. The leaders of the newly-independent countries of South Asia expected considerable help with economic development. The American administration had decided by 1949 that it needed an active policy to secure acceptable economic and political regimes in Asia, but this precluded becoming too deeply involved with British-led institutions. British policy-makers had considerable hopes that providing external aid for economic development in South Asia would tie India and Pakistan more closely to London’s diplomatic goals, and persuade the United States to help solve the problems of Asian poverty and British indebtedness. But London was not able to use the Colombo proposals to entice Washington into funding the sterling balances, or providing additional dollars for the British economy. In the end, the Colombo Plan for the South Asian Dominions did little more than regularise the re-payment of the war-time debts they had built up in London, and at the cost of requiring Britain to supply unrequited exports that threatened her own economic recovery.

This paper explores the development of United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) from its establishment to the mid-1960s. ECAFE was established in 1947 but remained a consultative body; it lacked funds for projects and had very few operational tasks. Therefore, ECAFE’s character and history should be evaluated by investigating its development and the policy of both regional and non-regional countries, in particular, Britain, the US and Soviet. In the beginning part, the birth of the Commission is outlined. Then three areas of its activities are addressed: inland transport, economic development planning and regional trade promotion. In the latter half, referring to the Asian members’ growing interest in regional cooperative measures, the impacts of regional changing economic and diplomatic situations from the mid-1950s on the Commission are analysed.
Putting on a broader perspective of the transformation of the post-war Asian political and economic order, ECAFE’s character and development can be evaluated from three viewpoints. First, ECAFE was engaged in the higher realms of international diplomacy and dominated by the climate of the region. Especially, ECAFE was coloured by Cold War rivalry. For newly independent Asian countries, the membership seemed to bolster their diplomatic position. Japan considered the membership as the first step of getting back to an international arena. Furthermore, the Commission provided occasions of hosting international gatherings. Some hosting governments used the opportunities for enhancing their prestige. Second, ECAFE was a meeting place of Asian countries which were struggling for state building through developing national economy as well as seeking a place in international politics. The regional countries’ economic development strategy was mainly based on ‘the savings-investment gap model’; economic development depends upon the amount of savings secured from the total national products. However, it was imperative for Asian countries to have external aid, capital inflows or trade surplus that would supplement the shortage of internal savings. Therefore, in ECAFE, regional members intensively discussed the tension between international trade, currency or aid problems and their economic development. Regional collaborative measures were expected to break a bottleneck in the development policy. Third, the presence of non-regional members was one of features of ECAFE. In particular, Britain’s involvement is worth noting. Britain, whose influence was large during the formative years, tried to utilise colonial economic relations to support the post-war reconstruction. However, after the mid-1950s, the British government came to recognise the changing diplomatic and economic scene in Asia: the ideological and economic offensive of Soviet and Communist China, the beginning of Japan’s resurgence, and US growing interest in regional economic development and assistance in contrast to the decline of Britain’s abilities and resources. The ideological battle of the Cold War, the complicated process of dismantling colonial economic relations and the membership of non-regional states gave the development and activities of ECAFE several features that were not seen in other UN regional commissions.

The Colombo Plan provided practical assistance in two forms - capital aid and technical cooperation. For technical cooperation, assistance was given to South and South East Asian countries in three forms — training places, experts and equipment. In addition, the UK tried to extend the field of technical assistance to India by offering to establish and staff engineering universities, that is, the Delhi Engineering College (later IIT in Delhi ) which was regarded by the UK as the major Indian project under the Colombo Plan.
　Although the UK provided significant technical assistance for India under the Colombo Plan Technical Corporation Scheme from its inception, UK sponsorship for the establishment of the IIT in Delhi was obtained later than that of the Soviet Union, West Germany and the US. Five IITs were established with the assistance of these four nations – IIT Kharagpur with all of their aid in 1951, IIT Bombay with the Soviet Union aid in 1958, IIT Madras with West Germany aid in 1959, IIT Kanpur with the US aid in 1960 and IIT Delhi with the UK aid in 1963. We will consider international aid for the establishment of higher technical institutes, the IITs in India, mainly on the relationships between the UK Government, British industry and the Government of India in the establishment of the IIT in Delhi.

Economic assistance from abroad is regarded essential today for the developing countries to develop their economies. But it was not the way of thinking in early post-war years. Rather, as far as India is concerned, India seemed to rely on its own resources to develop its economy. Furthermore, developed countries too, as preoccupied with their post-war reconstructions, thought in the same way regarding the issue of post-colonial countries. Then how did the way of thinking regarding foreign assistance to the developing countries change? Was there any gap in the process of changing perception? This research is to look into these questions through an examination of the process in which the developed states started the international efforts to aid India when the latter faced the foreign exchange crisis during its Second Five-Year Plan. It reveals the facts that they were not prepared for the nature of economic assistance needed by the developing states whose development programs proved to be commercially unsustainable, that the lending countries had shared reasons to prevent India from going bankrupt, and that the economic Cold War played the minor role compared with the problems of lenders’ own balance of payments, though the decision of the lenders to continue their commitment to the assistance for another Five-Year Plan was more affected by the Cold War as the new administration led by John F. Kennedy was installed in the United States.

This paper examines the evolution of Ottoman economic institutions during the early modern era. It shows that the Ottoman state and society showed considerable ability to reorganize as a way of adapting to changing circumstances in Eurasia from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. This does not mean that Ottoman institutions came to resemble those that gave rise to capitalism. The paper argues instead that Ottoman society and Ottoman bureaucracy brought about institutional change in selective areas, in military technology and organization, in public rather than private finance, for example, and such selective institutional change enabled the Ottomans to maintain their rule and the empire to survive a much longer period.

In addition to an analysis of the fiscal policies and institutions in Mughal India, this paper will deal with the monetary policies and institutions at work during the Mughal period. This is not only because there were strong interrelationships between the fiscal and the monetary domains, but also because between the two, these domains significantly affected nearly all areas of economic endeavour, including internal as well as international trade.

Institutions are studied both as a "top-down" and a "bottom up" phenomenon. Seen from the bottom up, the economic institutions of the Dutch Republic appear well adapted to the needs of a market society. Viewed from the top down, the state's role in institutional development appears oddly stunted. The Republic has long been criticized as insufficiently nationalistic and resistant to centralizing reform. This paper assesses the validity of both the (excessive) praise and (overly) critical dismissivness to which Dutch institutions have been subjected by historians.

Because our session seeks to compare how economic institutions are determined and why they vary across countries, this paper sketches the political economy of institutions in early modern France, including those that affected money, land holding, factor markets, trade and manufacturing, and taxation and public finance. The perspective is synthetic and wherever possible comparative. It also explores possible links to economic growth.

he Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled early modern Japan from 1603 to 1868, provided considerably effective judicial system with the commodity market and the short term local government bond market. Under the governance, the impersonal trades expanded rapidly in the commodity market and the specific financial market, and the national economy was integrated. On the other hand, the shogunate did not provided the farm land market with third party enforcement, and tried to regulate the labor mobilization. This led to an early modern economy where the commodity market and the public financial markets were well integrated while the land and the labor market were segregated and were governed by local communities in the personal manner with long-term relationship.

Using the British case as a comparator for an ideal type Weberian state my short presentation will offer a stage theory of fiscal state formation in the West and the East. I will pursue the meta question of why confederated republics (such as Venice and the Netherlands) and centralized monarchies (e.g.Britain) constructed effective fiscal and financial institutions long before composite monarchies (like France and Spain) and the underfunded weak agglommerated empires of Habsburg Austria, Romanov Russia, Mughal India, Qing China and Ottoman Turkey. I will conclude by provoking discussion of the assertion that new institutional economic history without a theory or general narrative of state formation is about as tenable as medecine without cardiology.

One might see Venice as a city where rulers exercised the political power, administered justice and were largely engaged in economic activity. This should have brought about severe social and political strains in the city. A caste of rulers exercising political and judicial powers would have heavily been able to affect the economic sphere, not being subject to legal constraints. This however did not occur, at least until the sixteenth century. It is instead probable that the very identity between political rulers and economic protagonists laid at the base of the Venetian economic growth. This autocratic model, nevertheless, does not suffice to account for the Venetian success: one has to set it against a context where the ruling group was able to largely distribute profits generated from international trade.

Looked at in comparative perspective, among the most striking features of Qing political economy are the combination of highly commercialized agriculture with the strength of peasant land use rights -- both through smallholding and through various forms of secure tenancy – and the very small share of the population dependent on wage-earning. This paper begins by analyzing some reasons for this pattern, focusing on the intersection of customary land rights, agricultural practices and community organization in China’s wealthiest regions. It argues that in the Yangzi Delta in particular, different types of property rights – both of them tradeable and heritable – were guaranteed in different ways. Subsoil rights were tied to payment of land taxes and protected by the state. Surface rights, though sometimes also protected by the state, and frequently transferred by formal contract, also rested in part on recognition by communities; this recognition, in turn, often rested on the cultivator’s participation in community projects (including the maintenance of local works for water control).

Having outlined this system, the paper then argues that it interacted with both the Qing fiscal system and prevalent patterns of family formation to create a highly productive and commercialized agriculture and large-scale development of rural industry, and to keep the rate of urbanization surprisingly low despite a large agricultural surplus. Consequences for internal migration and inter-regional trade are also discussed. The final part of the paper seeks to explain why, after two centuries in which these institutions provided both social stability and moderate prosperity, the system came apart catastrophically in the 19th century

This paper proposes a trans-national perspective for the study the political economy of the Early Modern Spanish Empire. It suggest to interlinking two different institutional logics: the local proto-national rationale of the different polities within the composite monarchy and the international dynastic rationale. The emphasis is put on the impossibility of the Hapsburg Spanish Empire to build a coherent mercantilist proto-national policy on the grounds of a system of global networks and clashing mercantile “national” interests. The outcome of this was huge protection costs of which the kingdom’s economies received small benefits and a conflictive negotiation between the Crown and the social actors of each area, which consecrated inefficient property rights. This, rather than absolutism on which recent literature has put the accent, were the main reasons for economic decadence in the 17th century.

Our paper is focused on the function of French investment banks as “pathbreakers” to accompany and stimulate the rebirth of French economy after WWII.

First we’ll find out why investment banks escaped to the move of nationalisation which was achieved in 1944-1946 and which involve Banque de France, banks and insurance companies. The balance of powers, the networks of influence, the commitment of investment bankers to the rebuilding of France within an internationalised economy, and the issue of the connections to be re-established with the City and the US bankers and financiers will be at stake through our scrutiny.

Second, whe sall assess the strenghes and weaknesses of investment banks (Paribas, Banque de l’union parisienne, Rothschild, Lazard), precise the emergence of new competitors (Banque de l’Indochine, the Francès group, etc.), and as a consequence we shall determine the strategy followed by these players. We shall for example precise the effects of the nationalisation of numerous big companies and the dwindling of the financial market on their issuing and brokering activities.

Third whe shall consider the evolution of the portofolios of strategic activities and skills within the “classical” investment banking services. We shall gauge their ability to regain momentum in favour of corporate customers (merchant banking, corporate banking), either nationally or internationally.

Fourth we shall reconsider the “pathbreaking” activities of investment bankers on the international market of structured finance, as a leverage force of French industrial investments abroad.

Fifth, we shall reconstitute the competitive edge of investment banks on the imperial/colonial market, and argue about the priorities fixed, either “obsolete strategies” or the involvement of colonial sectors into internationalised and modern business models.

Sixth, we shall tackle the issue of investment bankers as “pioneers” about the new credit and financial products and techniques which were being either transferred mainly from the US or engineered in Paris, as a way to find out new sectors of activity to balance those being assumed by the public institutions, or as a way to establish bridges on promising activities in connection with real estate development, the restart of outlets for bourgeois building, and the construction of the society of affluence.

The rise of investment banking, from the late nineteenth century onward, has been put into relation with the issue of financing industrialization, especially as capital and technological intensive new industrial undertakings and public utilities are concerned. In fact, the financing of modern industries emphasised a dilemma, namely how to make capital investments stable and ‘permanent’ as a whole, while coping with the unwillingness by the single investor to commit to ‘illiquid’ investment purchases. A solution to that could be found in the organization of proper markets in which these investments might be easily traded. Investment banks fulfilled the function of solving that dilemma, because by acting as intermediaries between borrowers and lenders, and as such performing delegated monitoring over borrowers, they were able to enhance investors’ confidence, and thus to rise new capital and to allocate it to new industries and investments; moreover, by creating and issuing tradable securities representing those investments, and organizing secondary markets wherein to trade them, they increased the willingness by individual investors to purchase capital assets. In Italy, these functions were performed by universal banks until the crisis of the early 1930s swept them away, imposing a restructuring of the entire financial and credit system. Thus, a new legal and institutional framework emerged after the second world war, aimed at guaranteeing higher degrees of stability trough the imposition of banks’ specialization and a stricter control over the credit and financial system. The paper retraces the peculiar features of the Italian postwar financial system trying to figure out how the ‘liquidity dilemma’ had been addressed during the decades of the fastet and highest economic growth Italy has experienced ever.

The paper considers the evolution of investment and merchant banking in Italy after the Second World War. In particular, it deals with the special role played by Mediobanca, a well internationally connected institution and the only real merchant bank in Italy for a long time. From the late 1940s Mediobanca actively supported the few largest firms, issuing bonds or equity capital, providing advisory assistance for M&As, consulting for long-term strategic alliances, assuring ownership or management turn-over vis-à-vis difficulties or crisis. From the mid-1950s Mediobanca was able to connect major Italian firms with international financial centres, mainly thanks to its legendary ceo Enrico Cuccia. From 1956 Lazard Frères & Co. and Lehman Brothers of New York, as well as the Belgian Sofina and the German Berliner Handels-Gesellshaft, became influential shareholders of Mediobanca. Outstanding technical expertise and unique international connections were relevant competitive advantages. In the 1960s Mediobanca financed a number of firms operating in the most dynamic and innovative sectors of those years, while designing some international long-term alliances (like Montecatini and Shell, Fiat and Citroën, Pirelli and Dunlop). Within an overregulated banking system, Mediobanca seems to act as a path-breaker for the largest manufacturing groups. From the late 1960s large industrial firms needed more external financial support whilst the Italian banking system proved to be unable to provide an adequate allocative efficiency. After the oil crises of the 1970s the Italian economy became more fragile in reacting to changes in factors’ prices and technological upheavals. In the ensuing decades, indeed, following a rather conservative attitude, Mediobanca organised a number of rescues and reorganisations of manufacturing firms providing a nonetheless valuable financial assistance. This paper will cope with this issue by analysing balance-sheets’ data and industrial sectors aggregated by capital and technology intensity from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. Quantitative data suggest that Mediobanca ceased to be a genuine 'path-breaker' by sustaining the most innovative and dynamic sectors and turned into a 'follower' of the evolutionary trajectories of major manufacturing groups and sectors.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, were founded important banks in Madrid and Bilbao what worked as universal banks. Banking concentration grew up since 1946, as new foundations were very restricted until 1962. This year a new Banking Act intended to separate investment and commercial banks, but the most important ones set up industrial banks as branch companies.

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We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging, and signaling. We find that the market setup experienced a radical transformation in the recent period, and we interpret this as resulting from the rise of liability insurance provided by rating agencies. Underwriters have given up their former role as gatekeepers of liquidity and certification agencies to become aggressive competitors in a new Speculative Grade market.

This paper analyzes the information structure of European financial markets on
the eve of the Baring crisis in 1890. We argue that Baring was in a privileged
position by having a lead on information about Argentina through its long-term
relationship and through investing in information production. This situation
led to conflicting interests because business advice and proper investors’ advice
were not always compatible. I demonstrate that, while secondary market prices
between Argentina’s long-term sovereign bonds and the U.K. consols remained
stable throughout the 1880s, underwriting banks demanded higher fees and
Argentina’s government accepted leaving more money on the table by
underpricing its IPOs as its fiscal position deteriorated.

Conquered since 1830, Algeria had to wait two decades to be in peace and know the beginning of "development” of its wealth. Set apart the Algerian situation, the development rhythm depended on the willing of the metropolitan fund owners and their strategies. The discovery of the mine wealth of the Algerian East which could be a springboard to annex Tunisia, incited the big capital to make a commitment in this part of the Colony within a general optimism context created by the second Empire and the determination of the Emperor.
Three types of banking investments were engaged in the Constantine region: railroads, mines and agricultural colonization. The main banks of the place of Bets, in particular the new bank and the Protestant bank, took part in such operations. The Bank of Algeria contented itself with the commercial credit, thus refusing to take as the "privileged bank", the risk of venturing into mining or railway investments.
The crisis which struck Algeria at the end of 1860 shook mainly the traditional economy and the Arabian-Berber society. As for the crisis that the East Algerian faced in 1875, it impacted the economy with fatal effects on the Bank of Algeria whereas the metropolitan investments (mines and railroads) intensity didn’t decrease.
The advent of the III Republic changed the situation since the metropolitan investments suffered from the negative consequences of the depression by the end of the century and from the misdeeds of the new power which was hostile to the big capital. In that time, the colonization was a victim of the credit policy of the Algerian issuing institute which has been threatened itself. Hence, Algeria was facing a succession of crises which almost shook all the colonial system especially that it was the first time that Algeria asked for its autonomy.

Most discussions of globalization and multinationals do not address specifically how changes in financial markets and banking have helped differentiate our era’s globalization from previous ones. Given the turmoil in capital markets, this lacuna in the literature is particularly odd. Insofar as the effect of the growth of multinational financial conglomerates on the financial system is discussed in technical and more general financial literature, it is generally focused on the internalization of international sources of funding and its impact on bank and market liquidity.
This paper focuses on two distinct literatures. The first deals with the theory of multinationals, especially foreign direct investment in the financial sector. The second attempts to explain and respond to the current financial crisis. Many commentators have asked why so many economists failed to foresee the current financial crisis and we argue that part of the explanation lies in that discipline’s failure to understand institutions and, by implication, the evolution of those institutions.
We highlight how the development of international banking has helped reconfigure international relations and markets. We do this from a broad historical perspective. Indeed, we will emphasize that the development of multinational financial conglomerates have transformed finance from an international to a supranational activity. In effect, multinational banks have created an institutional platform, which has virtually eliminated national borders in finance and reduced the importance of individual public, national markets. By operating branches and subsidiaries in key markets with highly automated systems for trading foreign exchange and other products as well as for applying modern risk management, and by maintaining cross-border teams for deal making and distribution of securities, these giant public banks have internalized many cross-border and domestic financial activities that were once done among independent entities and in public markets. This transformation may have resulted in increased inefficiencies and reduced transaction costs, but it also entails huge upfront expenditures and greater risk. The story of this transition is a complex mixture of technological, economic, and political changes, with a little path dependency thrown in for good measure.

This paper analyzes investment banking in pre-revolutionary Russia in terms of its origin, general quantitative appraisals, risk management, relations with the state. In addition to these objectives the research includes a regression analysis, which reveals ties investment banking in the 1890s with the international banks’ syndicates for Russian government securities issues and stock market banking specialization in the 1880s. It also proves investment banking integration into universal banking by 1914.
The paper also contains a case-study on making of Hartmann’s Russian Machine-building Society in the South of Russia with the assistance of Dresdner bank and St. Petersburg International bank. The case uncovers a struggle for government order to this plant in 1895-1896. The case acquires special historical importance due to personal sources supported this sample: 1) memoirs of engineering and building project’s author — German engineer and industrialist Gustav Hartmann; 2) business correspondence of St. Petersburg International bank’s director Adolph Rothstein, who won in a hard struggle for signing of contract between Russian government and Hartmann; 3) Sergey Witte, Russian minister of finance, supported this contract, also the author of the one of the famous Russian memoirs.
This case displays that the first large investment banking experience was caused by wrong assessment of state role as a source of guarantees and orders for a new engineering plant. The government order appeared really not great, bank received only short-term State Bank’s support in the most hard period of crisis in 1899-1903. Thus the State Bank, controlled by the government, just played the role of creditor of last resort. But in middle- and long-term perspectives bank had to find its own risk management strategy, and it evolved towards universal banking.

This keynote for the session will introduce some key issues and questions that arise in the history of investment banking, to set the stage for the papers that follow.

Capital movements, more intensive up to the First World War, lead to establishing relations between nations. Those relations are generally based on investments in the first place, within the context of industrial and trading projects, and on finance in the second place: limited liability credit companies were founded, securities were invested, such as government bonds, annuities, mortgage, etc., thus creating interdependence between nations, through contracts and legislation. In that sense, the French banking groups take up a significant place in Bulgarian history, because of their structure and influence on the social organization. They integrate into the market and favour its development through different know-hows. Studying investment banks thus implies to consider the financial groups’ role and impact, first in the formation of the Bulgarian nation, and then in its institutional reorganizations. Why did Bulgaria attract French bankers? What techniques and strategies did they use to develop their policies? What was the French intervention in Bulgaria? The groups got involved through French policy, answering Bulgarian economic and financials needs. What were their pretexts and mobiles?

Although Hamburg was one of the most important cities in trade and in finance in early modern Europe, nevertheless, the role of Hamburg has been underrated, or sometimes neglected. In this paper I will try to estimate the importance of Hamburg from its role as gateway uniting the Continent and the Northern Seas.
In the long-eighteenth century Hamburg was the third largest port next to Amsterdam and London in the trade with the Americas and the Far East. A lot of colonial goods were imported into Hamburg via Bordeaux, London, Cadiz and Lisbon from the Atlantic World. With the rise of the Atlantic economies, the significance of Hamburg increased dramatically in the eighteenth century.
Although at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Hamburg’s most important trading partner was Amsterdam, it changed to Bordeaux in the late eighteenth century. A lot of colonial goods were imported from the French colonies especially the Antilles to Bordeaux, and from there much of the colonial goods were re-exported to Hamburg. Additionally, the hinterland of Hamburg was so vast that colonial goods from Americas were transported from this city via overland and river routes -mainly the Elbe-into the hinterland of the Continent.

Swedish shipping business did play an important role in development of Swedish trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. From a quite insignificant actor during the first half the 17th century, even in the Baltic Sea, the Swedish merchant fleet grew to one the biggest European marines by the late 18th century. External and internal factors are studied here to explain this growth. The internal factor was the mercantilist policy, primarily the major measure of the 18th-century Swedish mercantilism—the Swedish Navigation Act. The external factors were: first, demand for Swedish staple goods, iron, tar and pitch and sawn goods, as well as the tonnage-requiring salt imports, second, the international situation of Sweden and its neutrality. Here the focus is on the role of Swedish carrying trade during the Anglo-French wars (1689-1815) that made it possible for the Swedes to exploit the gap in demand of carrying capacity. In this way the development of the Swedish shipping business is related to the rise of the Atlantic economy.

The importance of the Atlantic Ocean in the development of Early Modern economies has been stressed in a growing number of studies since the 1960s. Some aspects of the contacts between different cultures and continents however, have enjoyed little attention. One of these is the individuals behind the Atlantic economic system: merchants, businessmen and entrepreneurs.
The histories of families and business networks engaged in the Atlantic have to be mainly classified as monographic and often focus on a specific economic activity, such as the trade in sugar, tobacco, slaves, or a specific religious congregation. We miss however, a comprehensive study on business networks in the Atlantic as a whole and their impact on the construction of the Atlantic system, on the one hand and on the rise of European colonial powers, on the other hand.
In order to fulfill this void in the current literature, we propose to study the business networks that contributed to the building of the Atlantic system. Contrary to most of the studies on Early Modern business networks, we wish to engage in the analysis of cross-cultural business networks and not so much on business networks built on kinship, religious or professional affiliations. We will pay special attention to the partnerships established among ‘Dutch’ (including Dutch and other Northern Europeans settled in Amsterdam) and Portuguese Jewish merchants operating from Amsterdam between 1580 and 1674, that is to say, since the Union of the Crowns until the bankruptcy of the First Dutch West India Company (WIC).
Bearing in mind the cross-cultural partnerships for the Atlantic operating from Amsterdam, we will look into their participation in the Baltic trade having two main goals. In the first place, identify the cross-cultural partnerships and individual merchants investing simultaneously in the Atlantic and the Baltic. In the second place, analyze the differences and similarities between these two investment areas.

The growing importance of an ‘Atlantic economy’ and the declining importance of the Baltic area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been stressed in a number of studies in the last decades. Recently, Acemoglu et al, argues that the rise of the Western World after c. 1500 was closely linked to the growth of Atlantic trade. Their model suggests that this regional growth pattern induced political and institutional changes within Western Europe that favoured countries with access to the Atlantic Ocean, and where late medieval institutions already placed some check on the ruling monarch. For some countries, in particular the Netherlands and England, the Atlantic expansion was boosted by induced institutional changes in a way that secure property rights were provided to a broader segment of society and allowing free entry into profitable business. For other countries, institutional inertia caused by entrenched rent seeking groups limited the possibilities to trade. As emphasised by Acemoglu et al, the status of a nation as an Atlantic trader is therefore endogenous, i.e., the ex post outcome of political and economic processes. In this paper, I follow the growth trajectories for three major commercial cities engaged in the North Sea/Baltic trade - Hamburg, Lübeck and Danzig - in the early modern period and try to explain why only Hamburg became an important Atlantic trader, while the other two followed a path of stagnation and decline.

The paper provides a brief historiographical review of three possible positions on the impact of the Atlantic world on Europe and the world-economy. The claims involved are placed alongside the evidence of trade flows and utilised shipping tonnage for Britain and the Netherlands. The argument moves on to consider institutional change and commercial reorganisation, followed by the impact of the energy crisis and environmental problems.

In the 17th century France used its advantages to emerge as the main European power. The reign of Louis XIV marked the success of the French political power. The country’s borders were pushed outwards in the North as well as in the East and the South. At an economical level the authorities took measures in all fields in order to make richer the country. Colbert’s name was thus synonymous with State intervention. Concerning the maritime activities the target was to use all the geographic and natural advantages of the country to create the biggest maritime fleet in Europe. This paper will try to go deeper into the economical politicies of the State, politicies which are often guided by external constraints especially financial ones.

Recent research has argued that the early modern shift in economic weight from the Baltic/North Sea area to the Atlantic in terms of volume, value and thus shares in world trade, or a relative decline of the Baltic at the expense of the Atlantic, ought not to be equated with a general loss of the Baltic in terms of importance for the nascent “world economy“. In terms of economic actors, products and commodity flows, the emergent Atlantic economy and the more traditional North Sea/Baltic economic region remained interrelated and interlinked during the hey-days of the Atlantic economy (c. 1660–1780). Also, the rise of the Atlantic economy, most prominently the trade in colonial foodstuffs and non-essentials such as tobacco, sugar, cocoa, coffee, ginger etc., had a strong political component from its very beginnings, but particularly after the mid-seventeenth century. Production and trade in these new goods were actively encouraged by the Mercantilist state, frequently in combination with building a commercial and political empire, seeking new and profitable, and easy-to-tap resources of taxation
The following contribution intends to trace this process “bottom up”, using a small open economy, analysing the changing weight of the Baltic in Scotland’s commerce 1660–1760. After 1707 the Scottish colonial trades grew much faster than the traditional ones, of which the Baltic had always formed an important part. From the statistical evidence it even appears as though the Baltic declined absolutely, as well as in relative terms, both as a source of imports, as well as a destination for Scotch (re-)exports, 1660–1760, whilst overall trade levels expanded. The rise of the Scottish colonial trades at the expense of the Baltic in Scotland’s gross total trade was part of a very peculiar eighteenth-century Scottish trade pattern. It will be argued that this was a direct result of the new Mercantilist framework of taxation “imported” in turn from England into Scotland by the Act and Treaty of Union (1707) (section 3), combined with a weak export sector of Scotland’s domestic economy. Thus the dominance of the colonial trades in Scotland’s commerce after 1700, or the takeover by the Atlantic economy, in Scotland’s case was the result of a combination of domestic economic and institutional factors, as well as global political connections, most prominently the rise of English Mercantilism.

To say that the Swedish iron industry has been the backbone of much research in Swedish economic history is almost an understatement: From the onset of the discipline, in the interwar years, studies of many different aspects of the industry have been omnipresent, but it is fair to say that most of this research have remained attach to the national paradigm. Few studies have attempted to link Swedish iron making to global perspectives and developments. Bearing in mind that Sweden, together with Russia, was the only European country during the early-modern period with an iron industry solely directed towards foreign markets this narrow perspective must be viewed as problematic. The fact that Swedish iron were to be found on most European markets, as well as being an important commodity in the colonial trade, ought to make the global perspective an obvious one.
The aim of this paper is to initiate a discussion in which Swedish iron making regains its rightful position in a global context in which empires, slaving and the slave trade, war making and the gun trade, etc. are important pillars for a fuller understanding of global developments. This shall be done with an analysis which proceeds outside of the frames set by earlier research, of just viewing the volumes of Swedish iron export and its geographical destination. This will be done with an analysis that follows iron from two important Swedish ironworks onto the global market. So called Voyage Iron from Gammelbo bruk ended up along the African coast as exchange for slaves, and so called Öregrund Iron was converted to steel in Birmingham and the North-East before being turned into commodities later to be used by slaves in the American colonies. Such an analysis implies that we cannot really talk about a shift from the Baltic to the Atlantic, as Baltic commodities remained of utmost importance during the expansion of the Atlantic economy in the eighteenth century.

The paper begins with an overlook on some globalizing outcomes of the industrial revolution. The favourite area of analysis: the European East with case study: Romania. Here- as it happens in general- industrial revolutions have settled in a joint situation for numerous countries, economic interests, objectives and means, economic instruments. Industrial revolutions could confer assessments with a larger area of generality both for resources and for some finite products mainly industrial ones and agricultural too. Home and foreign trade developed, complementarities in development….Progress- carried out in enlarging the productivity, polishing the activities in this part of the world was mainly induced by the industrial revolutions started in the West. They have triggered out the economic trajectory of the East. Eastern political and economic revolutions after 1989 had similar grounds directly or indirectly. From the view of some economic gains they have coerced less flexible societies to follow the course for the general progress of the world. The contribution of some Eastern European states to the ” planetary development” might be a natural end of the respective evolution. Figures, dynamics, economic facts, conceptions within the economic, social thinking, and cultural are therefore being highlighted.

The Jiu Valley, or Petroşani coal basin, is an important economic region of Romania, situated at the springs of the Jiu River, between the Eastern Carpathians.
It is a geographical area that emerges and develops from a social, economic and cultural point of view after mid-nineteenth century, as a result of the industrial revolution. The influence of the industrial revolution on this mountain area will occur on two coordinates:
• the extraction of the most important natural assets in the underground - coal – the energy resource that underlies the development of the first stage of the industrial revolution;
• the implementation of technical methods and technologies without which the coal deposits in the Jiu Valley could not be turned to account by primary extraction and processing.
As a Transylvanian region, it will be part of the Hapsburg Empire by the end of 1918 – the Austrian –Hungarian Empire since 1867 - and the industrial revolution, the political and economic interests of the state and of private capital will boost development. The state will be involved by developing a stimulating legislation - primarily the General Mine Law of 23 May 1854 - and through direct investment, and private capital by mining companies: Societatea de Mine şi Cuptoare de la Braşov (The Company of Mines and Furnaces in Braşov); „Salgótarján”; „Uricani-Valea Jiului” (Uricani-Jiu Valley), „Valea Jiului de Sus” („The Upper Jiu Valley”).
Work force will come from different parts of the Empire - which will trigger a population increase from 6,670 inhabitants in 1854 to 49,971 inhabitants in 1910. This population will live in workers neighborhoods from which the present day cities will develop. Being highly professionalized, it will change the social, economic and cultural characteristics of the Jiu Valley by developing a modern industrial complex, production coal increasing from 853 tons in 1868 to 2,229,850 tons in 1913.
The Jiu Valley coal will be used mainly for railway propulsion, in steel works, for household heating, etc., contributing to the development of other industries and to the comfort population.

Key words: Romania, Transylvania, Jiu Valley, industrial revolution, coal.

Following upon the Russian-Turkish wars and the peace treaty of Jasi, in 1791, the Black Sea was opened to the merchant navies of the Mediterranean Sea. By this time onwards the towns of the Mediterranean Sea can rely at last in a regular way for their supply upon the arrival of the corn of the Black Sea, which production raises thanks to the colonization of the lands of Ukraine and Southern Russia. The foreign merchants and sailors installed in Odessa, beginning from its foundation at the end of the 18th century, soon become the principal go-betweens of this trade. Many of them come from the sea-ports of Southern Italy. The navigation in the Black Sea constitutes an extent of consolidated relations existing between this area and the sea-ports of the Ionian and the Eastern Mediterranean Seas. The kingdom of Naples had, first in Italy, interest for the Black Sea routes and its navy had a great development in the first half of the 19th century just because of trade with the Black Sea.

Germany was during the interwar period one of Romania's important trade partners. The economic relations in South-East Europe during the economic depression (1929-1933) were complex. Germany tried to break the Little Antante and it's struggle to create a South-East European Economic block, because this could rouin the German plans of economic expansion in the mentioned area.
During the great depression Germany highered its vamal taxes, planing to develop its agriculture. This determined a fall of the German-Romanian goods exchange. Germany continued to be an important supplier of industrial goods. A part of these were industrial machines and parts of machines used for the development of the Romanian industry.
Until the end of the '30s Germany became Romania's most important trade partener.

The oil business was already a big business in 1914. Connections, flows and networks covered the world. Some well-known Majors were already there: Royal Dutch Shell, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now Exxon) and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) for instance. But Nobel, the biggest Russian company before 1914, has disappeared.
Russia was a declining producer but still exerted influence before the First World War. Thanks to their holdings in the Empire, the Paris Rothschilds set up a global business that spread from Baku to Asia and from Batum to Western Europe, involving providers from England, France, Central Europe and Russia. Producer, refiner and retailer, the House sewed connections on a worldwide scale. If globalisation is a «word that refers to the trend for people, firms and governments around the world to become increasingly dependent on and integrated to each other1», the oil business of the Rothschilds exemplifies this.
In the oil business, competitors easily became partners and partners, enemies. CEOs never stopped to talk and negotiate, but they were always arguing about agreements and disreputable behaviours. They stated that competition might lead to bankruptcy, but they never halted in the search for competitive advantages to annihilate competitors. In the end ententes were sealed when companies were unable to get rid of each other.
It is still possible to define some constant groups. The Deutsch de la Meurthe had always been a sure ally. The Deutsch and the Rothschilds formed merely the Rothschild Group. Nobel was an ally and a competitor at the same time. Both companies had indeed put all their energies into negotiations to share the Russian market as well as the European one. Actually, Nobel and the Rothschilds stood together when Rockefeller threatened their positions and fiercely competed when they faced up to each other.
When the Rothschilds settled in Baku many Russians feared that they would become the Standard Oil of the Caucasus. This they never achieved thanks to or because of Nobel. Above all, Nobel never became a second Rockefeller because the House impeded him from doing so. The Rothschilds saved Russia and the Caucasus from a monopoly.
The Royal Dutch Shell Group (the Group) sided with the barons who were strong shareholders. They succeeded in an alliance with the Deutsche Bank through the Europaïsche Petroleum Union.
The big problem remained that Standard Oil competed fiercely with the Rothschilds, while the Rothschilds always hoped to reach a worldwide agreement with the American firm. The House indeed followed a policy that aimed at becoming a such an important competitor that the others would have been compelled to set up compromises in order to share the world oil market.
The Rothschilds managed businesses in Russia, in Europe and in Asia. These businesses were simultaneous and interdependent since oil production was located in the Caucasus whatever the market. However the biggest market was Russia for which the House bought the Mazut Company from the Pollak brothers out in 1898. Then, along with their partners, they participated in the setting up of firms (such the SAIC, the EPU and above all the Asiatic) which shaped the world market for a while.

This paper uses previously classified archival data to track the development of the Soviet labour market in the period 1940-80. It analyzes the effects of institutional shifts on economic behaviour and draws some conclusions in light of the stagnation in the last decades of Soviet rule.

The world is experiencing a new revolution – the knowledge revolution – fuelled by the technological change. In the same time, globalization and competitiveness are two concepts used to explain modern trends in economic development. The relationship between globalization, technology and competitiveness is analyzed in this paper based on the major transformation of economy and society in the past centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Globalization and technology are linked and they have generated great shifts in the national competitiveness of countries. In a broad sense, industrial revolution can be seen as a change of technologies used to produce goods, services and information. Looking back at the last two centuries we see industrial revolution as a transformation in four stages: first stage – textiles; second stage – steel and railway; third stage – chemicals and electricity; fourth stage – information and communication technologies. In all these stages countries have experienced specific forms of globalization and the engines of growth and competitiveness have changed. In our study we address at least three questions: where we are – in the knowledge age, what we want – competitiveness, and what can be learned from the other stages of industrial revolution.

We find ourselves in a year of crisis: an economic, banking and financial crisis, an over-production crisis, a real estate crisis, a crisis of the global system. For a good period of time, we will not see economic growth, but an even higher rate of unemployment, price raising and a higher level of social revolts. It is also the time for deeper meditations. Let us not forget that the Earth is constantly experiencing a crisis situation. The shaping, and later the modernizing of the human environment has lead to structural changes as far as the natural habitat is concerned. The trials of the human being to build a more comfortable home, to ensure a more comfortable existence, these simple things at a first sight, have triggered a large number of major ecological unbalances and have determined the abusive usage of energy and resources, and the debates could go like this forever. The protection and the improvement of the environment, meant to support a durable development, no longer represent a desideratum, but a must of the modern world. Institutional policies, governmental strategies and international agreements are initiated in the area of globalised economy and society. However, as many local projects, citizen initiatives and individual standpoints are required in the subtle micro-sphere of collective behaviour and civic consciousness, human obligations and mutual interests. The main concerns of environment-related approaches focus on the necessity to fight against the destruction of the surroundings, fully aware of the irreversibility of the cycle of development towards obvious and continuous economic progress.

The industrialization of Romania represents one of the most significant chapters of the economic history, as well as of the history of the national economic thought. The process of industrialization comes to invalidate the theory of a "signally agrarian Romania", marking the beginnings of a diversification concerning the structure of the Romanian economy. Moreover, the industrialization also constitutes a premise of the modernization of our economy/society, sustaining at the same time political interests concerning the national assertion.
The present paper wants to present the origins of this process, to describe the effervescence created in the Romanian society by the principle confrontation between those who were sustaining agriculture and those sustaining industry, respectively to debate upon the place and role that have been granted to the Romanian industry since its beginnings. We are also interested in showing how did change the perspective upon the significance of the industry in the interwar period. In fact, we talk about one of the most "tempting" periods of the Romanian history, the agitated relation between agriculture and industry being brought back into discussion and gaining new dimensions.

The Industrial Revolution was the period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that has changed almost every aspect of daily life in Britain and, some decades later on US and the Continent (Western Europe). The period of time covered by the Industrial Revolution varies with different historians. Everyone agree that it has marked the emergence of the modern free market economy and was the process of deep economic and social changes in industrialized economies, that leaded to quite new economies and societies. We point out two main effects: earnings focused on (foreign) exchanges and the massif accumulation that hoard the next “revolutions”. We argue that the Central and Eastern Europe have achieved it only after the WWII when their economies and societies shape towards nowadays developed economies. The need to enlarge the new “raw material” (the consumers’ buy power) has generated the globalization process. As Europe Steal and Coal Community has as an antecedent the between WW European Steal and Coal Cartels, with their US and Continental forerunner of 890’s, the after WWII political structure, might have put the Eastern Block under communists command to accomplish the Industrial Revolution along this space, process fulfilled by ‘70s. A qui prodest analyze will refine the subject. Romania is an eloquent example.

This paper examines the role of Internet, information and communication technology in the globalization and developing the industrial revolution at the end of 20 century. Informatics, computers and the Internet are some of the most recent and important segments for the process of globalization. These new factors discovered recently develop the industrial revolutions and allowed the spreading of some important parameters in the growth of world economy.
The findings are presented, including the role of the Internet in the globalization of business processes. Furthermore the role of the Internet as a knowledge building tool is discussed, and areas for future research are presented.

The interwar period was a time when Romanians had to re-organize institutions founded long time ago, to re-examine respected traditions and confront the problems of a rising bourgeois society, on the way toward modernization, industrialization and urbanization. This paper investigates the tension between the modern conceptions, treating Romania as an integral part of Europe and insisting for the road beaten by the industrialized and urbanized West and the traditionalist conceptions, based on the belief in the prevalent rural character of Romania’s historical development.
Rethinking this controversy from the present globalization perspective, the paper concludes that it was actually a false problem, since Romania had entered the European trade circuit and the new capitalist relations had been changing the traditional aspect of the country. Under the globalization impact, the most different societies become increasingly homogeneous and the world becomes increasingly united.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify evolution of corporate patent management in Japan, which is one of the institutional frameworks for international technology transfer.
Before World War I, although patent and other industrial property rights laws had been institutionalized, patent application and enforcement by Japanese companies were inactive and immature. It was during the interwar era when corporate patent management was established in leading electrical companies, and in which international patent management contracts with US companies played a decisive roll. These contracts attempted to build up an institutional framework to promote large-scale technology transfer to Japan. Corporate patent management had been broadly diffused via Japanese companies and generalized after World War II. Japanese companies had to prepare a suitable environment for acceptance of technological assistance from foreign companies. During this period, the patent management method was transferred from leading electrical companies to other companies generally through the systems and activities of the Japan Patent Association.

This paper focuses on technology transfer in the watchmaking industry from Switzerland to the United States and Japan from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. It especially sheds light on the way technologies were transferred to both countries and explains why it took different forms (within multinational enterprise in the case of the US and through copying in the case of Japan).
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Swiss watch makers held a dominant position on world market with a share of 90%. Nevertheless, during the interwar, some Swiss companies began to export parts and disassembled watches instead of finished watches, due to the raise of tax duties throughout the world. This process especially occurred in the US and in Japan, where it helped newcomers to enter the business of making watches, thanks to technologies acquired in the plants set up for assembling watches. In order to stop this practice and to protect their dominant position, Swiss watch makers organized a cartel in the 1920’s which strictly controlled the export of watch parts and of special machine-tools. However, the policy adopted by the cartel organization towards the US and Japan differed substantially.
As the US appeared to become the main market for Swiss watches after 1930 (12% of exports in 1930 and 33% in 1960), the cartel adopted a pragmatic policy and signed some special agreements with American MNE which had some plants in Switzerland, allowing technology transfer to the US. Unlikely, the policy towards Japan is one of strict opposition to the export of both machine-tools and parts until the 1960s. The reason is that the Japanese market was not freely opened to Swiss watch makers until its liberalization of 1961. Due to this policy, Japanese watch makers had to acquire Swiss technologies through copying them.

According to its title, the aim of this paper consists in characterizing the internationalization of technological information in the course of the twentieth century (modernization of the diffusion of technology : publication, type writer, computer…). The investigation is limited to three countries who have a long history of technological cooperation : the United States, France and the United Kingdom. First, the article tends to show how this internationalization has affected the ways by which actors who are engaged in innovating projects (scholars and scientific institutions) speculate about the new directions of technology transfer and recognize the importance of information and knowledge as key factors for industrialization. According the acceleration of the second industrialization, the purpose of the paper is to explore the nature of the relationship and to circumscribe some conceptual approaches to the changes in technological information and the character of the technology transfer. In the rapidly change of the western industrial world, technological information became one of the most essential tool for the transfer of knowledge. Within this general concept, a second part provides a general framework for understanding how information dynamics may shape the evolution of institutional environment (Schools of engineering, Universities) in France and the United Kingdom, considering the interaction between institutions, knowledge and learning within the conversion of the technological systems. It reveals the difficulties in adopting the necessary institutional and socio-technical environment to lead information and technological knowledge toward Hight-tech industries.
This paper tends to show how the institutionalization of knowledge and globalization of Technology represent one of the most important economic process of the twentieth century. On the other hand, it reveals how technological information and the transfer of knowledge, within competitive international markets, represent a permanent challenge for scientific institutions that play a key role to promote (in the case of specific firm, to promote the commercialisation) R&D and the new forms of technical knowledge.

Switzerland was one of the most industrialised countries from the beginning of the 19th century, heavily using technology transfer in order to develop products of consumption, such as textiles, watches and food, as well as machines and vehicles, which were exported throughout the world. However, at the dawn of the 20th century, the second industrial revolution offered a new challenge to the Swiss economy which was how to quickly realise the transfer of newly developed technologies from Germany and the USA with the aim of developing new productions and obtaining more efficient capital goods.
Confronted with this situation, the political authorities, at the different levels of State, cantons and municipalities, and public sector did not remain indifferent but, on the contrary, played an important role in the transfer process, intervening in a variety of ways. These were notably in legislation frameworks, the protection of markets, the mobilisation of technical know-how etc. While the production of certain new technologies established themselves on a permanent basis in Switzerland (electrical engineering, chemistry, bicycle and truck manufacture), others weren´t so successful (aviation and automobile manufacture). But did the attitude of the public institutions play a role in such a selective process?

The so called Independent Chinese Automobile Manufacturers (ICAMs), such as CHERY, Geely and BYD, emerged at the end of 1990's as new entrants to Chinese passenger vehicle market and have achieved remarkable growth. The phenomenon of these autonomous Chinese Automakers is drawing increasing attention not only from academia but also from business and government circles.
This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between emergence of ICAMs and International Technology Transfer. Many scholars indicate the use of outside supplies (of engines and other key-parts), as a sole reason for high-speed growth of ICAMs. However, the internal approach, at a level of how companies act, is also necessary to outline all the reasons and factors that might contribute to the process. This paper, based on organizational view, starts from historical perspective and clarifies the internal dynamics of the ICAMs.
The key phenomenon to be considered in the context of internal effects is a long term undersupply in China's automobile market since 1949. It is important for two reasons: 1) insufficient amount of investment form the Government and 2) weak technological capabilities. This paper will focus mostly on the latter one giving an answer to the question "what role has international technology transfer played in the emergence of ICAMs (e.g. CHERY, Geely)?"
This paper provides a brief analysis of the history of Chinese automobile industry within three main phases: Closed Autonomous Development Period (1949-1984), Transition Period (1985-2000) and Global Economic Period (2001- ). Then, the focus is made on the transition period and a phenomenon which could be called as " capability lock out” for autonomous development based on independent design as well as innovations in R&D (research & development), which can be attributed to Chinese automobile makers engaged in joint ventures. However, in conclusion it becomes clear that as a result of direct or indirect spillover from joint ventures, ICAMs began to construct the core competitive abilities they needed autonomously.

This study describes the diffusion process of “PB reports” in Japan and evaluates the role of them on Japanese postwar technological development especially in chemical industry. PB reports contributed to introduce German chemical technology and enabled some Japanese companies to solve the technology gap that had been expanded during WW2 till the first stage of Japanese high-growth era.

This paper will focus on two types of transfer of penicillin technologies over two phases: mass production technologies in the first phase and licensing agreements for innovative derivatives in the second. The purpose of the paper is to examine the roles and relationships of the three actors: government officials, business representatives and scientists while also considering the implications of penicillin technologies on the long-term growth and development of the Japanese pharmaceutical industry.

The transfer of penicillin technology has a relatively long history in Japan. While official channels of technology transfer were cut off during the War, information contained in an article transported aboard a submarine entered Japan and allowed national university scientists working in close cooperation to develop their own techniques for producing penicillin in 1944. The first phase of formal technology transfer began in the Occupation period and consisted of mass manufacturing technologies as well as know-how for improving volume and quality. Thanks to these transfers, Japan succeeded in becoming a net exporter of penicillin.

Discoveries in the United States and Britain yielded innovations in penicillin technology, which were easier to administer and more effective in treating a wider range of infections. In the second phase, which began in the early 1950s, technology transfers to Japan came in the form of licensing agreements initiated by entrepreneurs. Licensing remained the dominant form of technology acquisition until the mid-1970s when new patterns of drug development began to emerge. Technology transfer via licensing agreements proved invaluable to the long-term economic growth and expansion of the pharmaceutical industry. More importantly, it enabled corporate researchers, often with assistance from university scientists, to build a strong foundation for learning and innovation.

This paper addresses changing assessment procedures for (guild-based) artisans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Discussions in and on two new educational institutions (the art academy and the medical college) in the seventeenth century (and beyond) reveals that manual skills and embodied knowledge were gradually devalued. The egalitarian guild-ethos was substituted with a more individualistic approach based on “ingenium”, which was related to both designing (drawing and invention) and theory. Paradoxically, while observation, experience and experiment grew important among an intellectual elite, the hands-on skills of artisans became perceived as being devoid of talent and genius.

Facing uncertainty : markets, norms and conventions in the Eighteenth Century.
The question of honesty in exchange constitutes a major concern for manufacturers and businessmen in the 18th century who are all confronted with the problem of opportunism. We know how quickly classical liberalism solved the problem of deceit. The reality of actual markets is entirely different, and an analysis of these markets can enlighten us about the long-standing persistence of the quality regulations, standards and specification of products so violently denounced by free-trade reformers. Rather than considering these regulations as incongruities or archaisms, I will instead be trying to understand the needs to which they answer. The idea of “quality convention,” borrowed from the school of what is called the “economics of conventions” appears to be a pertinent heuristic tool in accounting for how certain manufacturing markets functioned in the 18th century.

Facing uncertainty : markets, norms and conventions in the Eighteenth Century.
The question of honesty in exchange constitutes a major concern for manufacturers and businessmen in the 18th century who are all confronted with the problem of opportunism. We know how quickly classical liberalism solved the problem of deceit. The reality of actual markets is entirely different, and an analysis of these markets can enlighten us about the long-standing persistence of the quality regulations, standards and specification of products so violently denounced by free-trade reformers. Rather than considering these regulations as incongruities or archaisms, I will instead be trying to understand the needs to which they answer. The idea of “quality convention,” borrowed from the school of what is called the “economics of conventions” appears to be a pertinent heuristic tool in accounting for how certain manufacturing markets functioned in the 18th century.

The paper falls into two sections. It first sets out the analysis of products, demand, commerce and labour in early classical economic theory, notable that of David Hume and Adam Smith’s. This section of the paper demonstrates that there was a great deal more socio-cultural discussion among these early classical economists than we now think. The second section of the paper develops a comparative case for a product-driven route to industrialization and de-industrialization. This part of the paper will argue for a quality road to industrialization in Britain as conveyed through the luxury trade in Indian textiles. This trade also, however, created an ‘alternative economics’ in India leading there into industrial decline.

The intention of this paper is to encourage a broader consideration of the culturally specific values and contexts we place upon ‘old’ things. How deeply do we think about the different values of an object within the culture that made it, that used, kept and collected it? Is it possible to identify changes in attitude to objects as they aged? As an historian of material culture I am fascinated by the relationship between objects and words, how things are described, and how their value (in the broadest possible sense, economically, culturally and socially) changes over time. We will enter this rich terrain with a particular focus, wrought silver, made in England in the eighteenth-century, a period of fundamental change in manufacture and consumption, that heralded the birth of ‘modern Britain.’

I would like to consider the mechanisms for the fixing of prices in Early Modern Europe to show that these operations, which were social transactions, reflect not only the forms of political economy in preindustrial Europe, but also those of society. I will therefore firstly address the reasons why bargaining was the main characteristic of markets in the early modern age, and I will show how credit and the action of the State modified its nature and practice. Secondly, I will consider the way in which the noble statute translated into a trade relationship, and thirdly I will explore how aristocrats succeeded in entering the market covertly as a consequence of the passion for collecting.

A widespread interpretation maintains that, in the 19th century, in contrast to the Ancien Régime , the qualities of traded products were not specified by referring to guild regulations but to the terms of the contract. Disputes could be settled by comparing the business correspondence with the product actually delivered. On this ground, Reddy opposed the Ancien Régime, when product qualities were defined prior to trade, to later periods in which the process of definition took place during or after trade. We are going to put this assertion under question. For, although disputes about quality indeed arose under the Ancien Régime, similarly, in the 19th century, proof of fraud required a comparison between the product characteristics defined prior to trade and those resulting from contract performance. Hence the possibility of negotiating and changing some of these characteristics, even after an agreement was reached. This also means that the uncertainty about the quality of traded goods did not necessarily imply information asymmetry, but it could also result from shared uncertainty. Indeed, the aspects of labour and product specifications are inseparable from the operations used to define quality at the time of trade. It is this latter process that assigned a market value to the product characteristics as defined at the time of production. This analysis should be pushed farther; in a capitalist economy, exchange does more than verify production strategies, as all the schools of thought inspired by the classical English and Marxist approach have asserted. Product characteristics are defined not only at the moment of production, but also and above all at the time of trade . This is not only to say, in the wake of neoclassical economics, that consumer demand determines the strategy of producers, but rather that establishing an equivalence between price and use value and exchange value expresses the tensions and hierarchies between the various actors in a given industry. This is the scope in which we are going to study the definition of product quality; we will show that in the agri-business and food history as well as for manufactured products, standardisation was historically designed to meet the interests of wholesale traders in controlling the industry and to respond to the rise of international markets and their demand for standardised products. In the case of foodstuffs, hygiene and health concerns were also to contribute to the standardisation of these products. On the contrary, as regards other products, this issue, even if sometimes important, was not necessarily the most important. Indeed, many areas of negotiation entered into the process of standardising products at the local, national and international levels. The varying interests of the actors explain why, beyond technical constraints, product standardisation was never definitive but always partial and negotiated; it sometimes concerned certain characteristics and sometimes other aspects of the product.

Les difficultés d'adaptation du nouveau système fiscal issu de la Révolution repose en partie sur le choix de conserver pour les villes et en particulier pour Paris, l'impôt foncier de l'Ancien Régime, le vingtième. Des calculs extrêmement complexes ont conduit à gonfler la "masse imposable" des bâtiments publics. En 1806, le directeur des Contributions directes tente de revenir aux évaluations initiales (celles du dernier vingtième en 1790) pour retrouver une estimation-test d'une part, et pour mesurer le glissement des valeurs foncières au cours des quinze années suivantes. Cet exercice difficile le conduit aussi à s'interroger sur la contribution foncière urbaine.
Cette analyse prend place au cours des années de débats ouverts depuis 1791 par les Constituants, et qui ne seront véritablement clos qu'en 1811 après le vote de la loi sur le cadastre parcellaire, et l'édition du Recuiel méthodique.

The amazing dispersion of the price of land transactions in rural pre-industrial societies is still difficult to explain. The different parameters to understand the price of a property are often difficult to establish. Some parameters (the weight of relationships, family and the charges ( noble or not) that affect the expected income land, soil quality, etc..) are not always easy to be taken into account. In an environment free of some of these uncertainties (with the emergence of a simple definition of property as a result of the introduction of the Civil Code 1804), the Napoleonic cadastre seems to provide a framework for the accurate assessment of the value of the property. Theoretically it assigns, to each plot, income commensurate with his qualities.
That is what we would like to verify from the cadastre of the Township of Vernon (Eure), established in 1826. The proposed approach is simple: to compare price dispersion of transactions (and prices of m²) before and after the establishment of the cadastre based primarily on “Actes civils Publics” and possibly on notary data. Does The cadastral tool implies a homogenization of the market price? In this case, beyond the fiscal goal, we will wonder how the cadastre provides a good framework to the development of land market because it makes land transactions more secure by promoting the dissemination of the "Land Information".

L’objectif de cette contribution est de présenter les caractéristiques des différents cadastres utilisés en Lombardie aux 18ème et 19ème siècles, à savoir l’«Autrichien» (introduit au 18ème dans la partie occidentale de la Lombardie appartenant à l’Autriche jusqu’à l’arrivée de Napoléon), le «Napoléonien» (introduit sur l’ensemble du territoire lombard par la République Cisalpine et ensuite par Napoléon), le «Lombardo-Vénéto» (introduit par les Autrichiens pendant la période de la Restauration et resté en vigueur jusqu’à la fin du 19ème siècle lors de l’arrivée du nouveau cadastre du Royaume d’Italie). On exposera en particulier les raisons expliquant le choix de certaines modalités d’évaluation des biens immeubles (basées sur une estimation précise de leurs dimensions et caractéristiques) ainsi que les longs travaux qui permirent de réaliser les estimes et de rédiger les cartes et registres (plus de trente ans dans le cas du cadastre le plus détaillé, à savoir le «Lombardo-Vénéto»). De plus, on identifiera les objectifs atteints par les gouvernements grâce à l’introduction de ces cadastres donnant une description détaillée des terres et de leurs mesures et y attribuant une valeur liée à la productivité du sol (ainsi qu’aux bâtiments).

Cadastres seek to depict the value, ownership and use of properties at a given period for reasons of tax assessment. The presence of such types of documentation is obviously intimately linked to the nature of the sovereign authority exercising regal powers. In pre revolutionary France, the seigniorial system had prescinded various powers from a unified and concentrated whole into separated authorities, each exercising certain rights over the land. In Paris, a hierarchy of rights governed urban real-estate ownership. These rights did not always reflect the diverse values embodied within the urban property. Owners paid feudal dues whose value does not provide a faithful measure of construction costs, tenants paid rents, but the rental value usually exceeded the base rent since main tenants rented parts of buildings to subtenants. Sub-tenants paid sub-rents, but the latter values are difficult to ascertain as a result of scant documentation. How can we measure the evolution in the value of urban properties ? What parameters appear the most pertinent ?
The present study draws on a wide array of documentary evidence to compose a detailed history of a 30-unit cluster of rental buildings situated on the Rue Daupine in today’s 6th arrondissement of Paris.
The mains sources are documents from the French National Archives : the following series have been consulted H5-3885, H5-3892, Arch nat. H5-3893, Arch nat. LL 1471, Arch nat. Q2—118, Arch nat. Q2-122, Arch nat. S 7496; the Minutier Central of Parisian notaries; moreover the Paris Archives départementales has also provided invaluable information, the series drawn upon were DQ10—1588, DQ18—312, DQ18—313, DQ18—329, DQ18— 348.
The historical records allows the researcher to know the initial construction costs of these buildings, the subsequent maintenance and improvement costs, the rental yield obtained from these apartments and the buildings auction cost in 1790 as well as their value at subsequent sales. Moreover, it possible to know the estimated value of both unimproved and improved lots at the time of the Revolution ; these values may be compared to the prices actually obtained
Thus, the overall goal in this communication is to glean from a variety of sources the various values which cadastres seek to measure in determining the both the « assessed value » and “market value” of urban real-estate.

The main aim of this paper is to give an overview of how the cadastral administration in the Southern Netherlands/Belgium in the nineteenth century attempted to asses the value of land, on which the land tax was based. I describe the organisation of the cadastre and the land tax, and pay particular attention to the method of the first estimations after the introduction of the Napoleonic cadastre in 1808, and the later revisions of the 1820’s and 1860’s.
For this overview, I rely greatly on the work of several historians who already have pointed to the relevance of cadastral data for the study of nineteenth-century social and economic realities. The cadastral estimation is illustrated by making a case study of Langdorp, a rather large community in a transitory region between the fertile soil of Haspengouw and the infertile sandy Campine area. For that, I use the original documents of the revisions of the 1820’s and 1860’s, apart from published cadastral data. The quality of these estimations will be assessed by comparing them with the results of the 1846 agricultural census.

The study of land register Austro Estense (1786-1864) allows to ask the question of the specificity of the land taxation to Reggio Emilia by wondering why the government decides only to impose land private income (rendita fondiaria). Would he therefore like to encourage the development of the agricultural industry by investments of the landed owner in the business, in the functioning and in the working capital of the farm? This article by finding the criteria and the principles of the valuation of the taxation on the land tries to revalue the ideological role of the Austrian imperial accountancy and wants to assess the impact of this policy in the real economy by finding a strong increase of the agricultural income (reddito agrario) free of tax by a comparison between the fiscal valuation (stima censibile) and the mercantile valuation (stima venale).
See at the end of the French text, several explicative slides in English.
Key words: land private income, agricultural income or agricultural profit, working capital farm, fiscal valuation, mercantile valuation, Austrian imperial accountancy, accountancy of Italian princely states

Jeopardy in delay
Cadastral valuations and public thoroughfares
The example of Bordeaux in the mid-nineteenth century

In France, since the mid 1840’s, the cadastral values of properties had been based on officially accurate economic data : the market prices list, the actual leases, and the ten year average house letting leases. One was to discard or make as little use as possible of more uncertain data such as : farming leases, unpaid owed rents, fluctuating taxes paid by merchants and professionals, the costs of repair and upkeeping varying according to the rental value of buildings in different districts.
The cadastral values show the economic situation of real estate. They were all the more important as they were necessary to estimate the cost of the works planned to improve urban traffic on public thoroughfares.
Those cadastral values, which showed the real estate market price of the moment, were of a great economic interest in the double meaning of the word . First because it was difficult to appraise them before renovation. Secondly, because it was much more difficult indeed, to anticipate the profit a landlord could expect from the new building after the public works had been completed.

So, to appraise the accredited cadastral values accurately, one had to take into account an increasing number of other fluctuating datas : real estate prices, rents, construction costs.

We will compare the examples of two public thoroughfares in Bordeaux.
- In the mid 1840’s the private initiative of demolishing the buildings facing Saint Pierre’s Church in order to create a square.
- In the mid 1860’s the public initiative of expropriating the houses located round the corner of cathedral Pey Berland to enhance the beauty of the monument .

In both cases, our attention will be focused on how far those cadastral values can be considered as right and accurate and how they could be used by the town planning authorities.

See the paper in the Locatelli's documents

This paper will contextualise and analyse issues of tax assessment and valuation in the Istanbul cadastre of 1874. Contextualisation will involve the identification of fiscal aims of the property survey, the surveying practice, the type and categories of data that resulted from the survey, and the intended use of such data by the Ottoman urban administration. Essential for this contextualisation will be a discussion on the types of urban property found in Istanbul at this time (private, public, religious foundation), categories which were the subject of intense state efforts for re-definition and therefore severely contested by a number of urban actors within the context of the urban political economy of the empire.
The analysis will then involve the potential and actual results of these contestations in terms of their impact on the development of an urban property market in Istanbul. Some major issues in this context are: how property values and revenues from property were assessed, what types of conflicts arose out of this assessment process, what was the correspondence between the assessed value and market value (price and rent) of properties, and what implications followed for the urban property market.

Les évaluations cadastrales effectuées dans les années 1960 et au début des 1970 forment la dernière grande révision des bases de la fiscalité locale.
L'objectif de cette communication est de montrer que ces évaluations s’inscrivent dans une réforme importante de la fiscalité au cours des années 1960. Et de montrer en quoi ces évaluation constituent un véritable instrument de politique fiscale.

Cette communication étudie deux questions: Pourquoi est-ce qu'il échoue la Statistique territoriale (fiscale) dans l'Espagne entre 1845 et 1900? Pourquoi est-ce qu'il ne s'imposa pas le Cadastre? On attribue l'échec à la résistance des majeurs contribuables. Cette résistance se rend; c'est une cause de fond; mais cette cause n'est pas l'unique, ni peut-être la fondamentale.
Il faut chercher une explication plus il complète, et plus convaincant qu'il tienne compte les facteurs structuraux et conjoncturels: a) L'histoire politique: l'élevée instabilité politique; la logique des gouvernements et des ministres des Finances (percevoir avec le minime coût politique); b) Les conflits corporatifs des fonctionnaires et des experts en cadastres; c) L'histoire financière du pays, volume des budgets, équilibre ou déséquilibre budgétaire; d) L'histoire de la Contribution foncière; e) L'évolution des marchés: production agraire, prix,…
Il faut tenir aussi compte: Le degré de développement du pays. Et comment ils se développèrent les restantes statistiques économiques. Est-ce qu'ils furent abondant ces statistiques économiques? Est-ce qu'ils furent meilleurs que les Statistiques fiscales? Si la réponse est positive, il y faudrait penser que la résistance des majeurs contribuables fut un facteur décisif. Si la réponse est négative, il y faudrait commencer à trouver une explication plus générale, plus complète, pour comprendre mieux l'échec des Statistiques fiscales dans l'Espagne.

In the mid-nineteenth century a number of property surveys were embarked upon in some of the major commercial centres of the Ottoman Empire (Izmir, Salonica, Bursa, Ioannina, Beirut). Instituting a regularized taxation system is the major intention of these projects. They involved subjecting different categories of property to a uniform system of taxation for the first time. This created a substantial resistance by certain urban actors, especially in Izmir. Taxation of real property on the first level, fiscal assessment of properties on the second level constituted the major sources of the contention. The central administration faced with the difficulty of imposing and collecting taxes in Izmir decided to set up a cadastral commission into which different representatives of the city were integrated to overcome the problem. The commission produced in 1856 an Organic Statute: the tax of the city of Izmir was fixed on the capital values of the immovable property registered in the cadastral registers; the commission decided therefore that each immovable property would pay 4 per thousand on the capital value registered during the estimation process of the cadastral registers. As for the ottoman property and fiscal system, these administrative experiences led the central administration undertake a model cadastre in 1858 in two big inland commercial centers in Bursa and Ioannina. The principles of property taxation of the Izmir’s Organic Statute and the cadastral regulation applied in Bursa and Ioannina were generalized in 1860 in the form of a cadastre regulation. The regulation of 1860 proposed a survey of all immovable properties, which were found both in the rural and in the urban settings of the Empire, by the local commissions. The assessment procedure presupposed that all of the immovable properties should be registered both by their capital value and rents. With regards to the imposition, we observe also the generalization of the tax of quotité: immovable properties were taxed 4 per thousand on their capital value; incomes resulting from immovable properties, that is rents, were taxed 4 per cent on their annual income. Nevertheless the assessment and registration of capital values and rents continued to be a contested domain during the second half of the nineteenth century. The paper will discuss the implication of this new property and cadastral regime and of the resistance to it and contextualize the efforts of the commissions and surveyors in their attempt to assessing the properties held in the Ottoman provincial towns in the mid-nineteenth century.

This essay examines Norwegian monetary policy under the final decades of the classical international gold standard regime prior to World War I. While the evidence clearly demonstrates that the commitment to gold convertibility was the overall objective, the character of monetary policy was determined by the inherent tension between Norges Bank’s role as the guardian of the nation’s most important reserve of foreign exchange and the role as manager of the domestic currency. In order to solve this tension, a core point of monetary policy was to shelter the domestic money supply from changes in the balance of payments. Rather than forcefully reducing domestic circulation during seasonal or business cycle fluctuations in the flow of gold, Norges Bank operated with a relatively large reserve of notes and foreign securities which took the strain. In this manner Norway managed to master the trilemma in the sense that although subjected to a regime based on fixed exchange rates and free capital movements, considerable leverage for policy autonomy was left intact.

A common and often repeated view on the Swedish national bank, the Riksbank, under the nineteenth century is that it was a more or less a commercial bank among others, with the exception that it was owned by the Parliament. Only with the Banking Act of 1897 and the ending of the private bank note issuance from 1903 is the Riksbank considered as a central bank; fulfilling the tasks of balancing the domestic liquidity with a stable value of the currency. Consequently it was the fact that private banks no longer could issue notes and that the Riksbank because of this from this on could control the money supply that made it a central bank in its modern meaning.

In this paper I show that this indeed is a simplification of the Riksbank as an agent in the financial system. Its responsibility for the financial system, and thus for the economy, stretched far beyond that of any commercial bank. Already at the adoption of the silver standard in 1834 it had the specific and important task of preserving the specie standard, but also to provide the economy to a sufficient degree with liquidity and credit. The monetary policy tools used by the Riksbank developed during the period as a response to the different challenges that emerged as a result of the developing financial system, the growing economy, and the increased internationalization. But already by the late 1850s was the Riksbank involved in such activities as facilitating commercial bank clearing, lender of last resort and was since long highly aware of the importance of its specie reserves as its own notes was the main component in the reserves of the commercial banking system. From the 1860s the Riksbank would also systematically engage directly in exchange rate policy.

This paper analyzes the implementation process in Serbia during the second half of 19th century of the standards of gold-minting set by the Latin Monetary Union.
Further more, paper discusses the reasons owing to which Serbian authorities decided to tend towards the minting standards of the Latin Monetary Union.
In consonance with the fact that Serbia had not become a member of the Latin Monetary Union, effort is also made to disclose the causes due to which country stayed apart from this Union whilst it parallelly managed to put into effect - legaly and practically – most of the gold standards defined by the Latin Monetary Union.
Finally, the Law on Serbian National Currency (1878) recognized the exclusive right to the country authorities to mint gold coins in Serbia (thus disabling private persons from having the same right), which pointed out as a main difference in comparison with the gold standard rules of the Latin Monetary Union, where this right was restricted to the member countries only concerning minting of silver and copper coins.

Since the establishment of the international gold standard, at the end of the 19th century, the possibility of attaining monetary stability in peripheral countries has been increasingly associated with the decision to peg their currency to an external reference. By contrast, the monetary system adopted in Europe over the previous five centuries had assured stability through the articulation between an internal currency for domestic exchanges and an external currency for foreign trade. The object of this research is to study the coexistence of different standards in the early history of Bulgarian money as a peculiar instance of the passage from the dual currency system of pre-modern Europe to the establishment of a uniform, national and international, all-purpose currency in the form of the gold standard. The broader goal is to enquire, in historical and comparative perspective, how different monetary regimes affect the degrees of freedom of monetary policy.

In this paper, we adopt the Wicksellian view to monetary policy and estimate the structural Neo-Wicksellian model using the Bayesian Maximum Likelihood Methods for the Nordic countries during the period 1870-1913. Our findings suggest that discount rate adjustments were geared towards achieving price stability, although not perfectly. The impulse response analysis shows that the central bank was leaning-against-the-wind by increasing the discount rate in response to shocks that increased inflation, and thus the price level. Although the data are not always informative for pinning down the structural parameters, our results support the Wicksellian non-quantity view of monetary policy transmission mechanism.

In the 1870s the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden formed the Scandinavian Currency Union. Both the adoption of gold and the monetary union were supposed to lead to price stability in and between these countries. By drawing on new indices of consumer prices the present paper offers an examination of price stability in the Scandinavian periphery during the heyday of the international gold standard.

From the end of 19th century to early 20th century, except for China and Indochina, monetary system keeping convertibility in terms of gold had spread across Asia, regardless of politically independent like Japan or colonial like India. The period of two decades before WWI accompanied with favorable term of trade for some agricultural products which encouraged their export as industrial resources and foods for wage laborers. Asian countries increased their exports of raw cotton, soya, sesame, rice etc. which were mostly produced by small peasants. The rapidly increasing monetary demand for paying to peasants was supplied by issuance of paper monies and multi-denomination coins which had been unpopular before. In order to secure large quantities of peasant products significant amounts of ready cashes must have been transported to rural markets every harvest season. Potentially flexible monetary supplies to peasants could have a tension with the principle keeping convertibility between the standard money and paper monies or subsidiary coins. Convertibility among monies should mean no transaction cost in changing a money into another. However, it does not mean flexible supply could be guaranteed to both of monies. Extending compatible monies to small peasants in Asia heralded a new stage of world economy. However, it also meant that monetary tension which had locally solved became beyond control by local orders. Along this interpretation it is not coincidence that most of global financial crises from late 19th century to early 20th century were ignited in autumn, the harvest season.

This article analyzes the monetary and impacts of the domestic public debt in 19th-century Colombia. It shows the nature of this debt and its institutional evolution to ultimately sketch one side of the matrix of that century. The article draws upon the New Economic Institutionalism and it is derived from broader research where fiscal data and qualitative information were built by using primary sources. It points out the close link between the issuing of debt and both civil wars and monetary order.

During this century, the country operated under a bimetallic standard without a central bank which would only emerge after the free banking era. Also, the country was highly dependant on commodity exports characterized by cyclical behaviour amidst deep political instability. Although the country was a gold exporter, Gresham’s prevailed. In this scenario, public debt notes played an important role in financing civil wars and expanding the monetary base as these notes developed monetary attributes. The article displays evidence on how this debt structured and impure gold standard.

On one hand, under this impure standard, this debt had inflationary impact and reinforced the persistence of monetary chaos and civil wars. On the other hand, these notes substantially eased the constraints of metallic scarcity, permanent fiscal deficits and nonexistent financial markets. After several institutional innovations, by 1880s the country was ready to see the emergence of fiduciary money and the first “proto-central bank”. This bank raised the anchor of the gold standard and afforded the political unification of the country after seven civil wars. Unfortunately, these decisions led to unprecedented violent civil war and hyperinflation.

The Japanese economy during the interwar period faced chronic crises. Among them, the Showa Financial Crisis of 1927 and the Showa Depression of 1930-31 marked turning points. The Showa Financial Crisis of 1927 was the consequence of persistent financial instability because of the incomplete restructuring in the business sector and postponements in the disposal of bad loans by financial institutions. The crisis brought reforms in the financial sector through large-scale injections of public funds and the amalgamation of banks. The Showa Depression of 1930-31 was caused by the Great Depression, a worldwide economic collapse, which had been intensified in Japan by the return to the Gold Standard at the old parity. Japan escaped from the Great Depression earlier than most other countries through a series of macroeconomic stimulus measures initiated by Korekiyo Takahashi, a veteran Finance Minister who resumed office in December 1931. Takahashi instituted comprehensive macroeconomic policy measures, including exchange rate, fiscal, and monetary adjustments. At the same time, the Gold Standard, which had been governing Japan’s fiscal policy, collapsed in the wake of the British departure from it in December 1931. Then, Japan introduced a mechanism by which the government could receive easy credit from the central bank without establishing other institutional measures to govern its fiscal policy. This course of events resulted in an eventual loss of fiscal discipline.

There is a broad consensus that the suspension of the gold standard was a precondition for the recovery from the world economic crisis of the 1930s. Furthermore, recent papers have identified a number of factors that were crucial in determining the time of the suspension: the resilience of the banking sector, trade openness and trade structures, the international creditor status as well as some institutional and political factors such as government instability (Wandschneider 2008, Wolf 2008). In our paper, we try to expand this research by using a different model specification and by interpreting the collapse of the gold standard from a core/periphery perspective. Our preliminary results suggest that the core/periphery perspective is enhancing a better understanding of the exchange rate choices made in the 1930s. They also make it necessary to go beyond the traditional notion of periphery. In particular, we believe that not only trade, but also financial maturity defined the choices available to countries of the periphery.

Thanks to a new database, we analyse the techniques of foreign portfolio management by the first central bank having put in place a foreign reserve policy, i.e. the National Bank of Belgium. We find that a) the target of foreign reserve policy was the level of the Bank’s own liquidity, not the level of exchange rates or other macroeconomic factors, and that b) allocation of reserves to different currencies was dictated by profitability concerns.

BergenPaper08Abstract.doc

Famines are not what they used to be. By historical standards, the hunger crises of the past decades have been small crises. On the other hand the contemporary threat of a global food crisis changes our perception of the relationship between food availability and food security. Our ambition is to explain not only the ‘old’ famines of the past and the present, but also to understand ‘new’ forms of subsistence crises. By bringing together insights from historical famine studies and from contemporary interpretations of the relationship between food production and food distribution, we hope to surpass the analytical barriers between these two types of human suffering. Historical evidence, nowadays famine theories and perspectives about the fate of peasantries and food security in the 21th century inspire this tentative paper.

The price of basic staples continues to be punishingly high for many around the world, pushing tens of millions back into poverty. This paper argues that behind the observable sources of the global food crisis lie much deeper, more profound changes in the character of farming and agriculture on a world-scale. These changes can only be recognized by focusing on the contemporary relevance of the ‘agrarian question’, a 19th century analytical framework, which explores the ways in which, nationally and globally, capitalism is or is not transforming farming, food and agriculture. By tracing the history of an idea the paper argues that neoliberal globalization has reshaped the material conditions governing the rural production process, reconfiguring the relationships between capitalist farms, petty commodity producing peasants and semi-proletarians on a world-scale. This has affected processes of accumulation, which takes place within the extended reproduction of the internationalization of the circuit of capital. These have an impact on rural politics, but the way this plays out is a function of the relationship within and between the peasantry, dominant classes, and the state. So the agrarian question offers a framework by which to undertake a historically-informed and country-specific analysis of the material conditions governing production, reproduction and the process of agrarian accumulation or its lack thereof, but one that is set within the law of value and market imperatives that operate on a world scale. It offers a clearer understanding of the dynamic structural changes that have transformed contemporary rural livelihoods in the 21st century, and is thus a basis by which to understand the global subsistence crisis.

Hunger affected a large proportion of the population of Portugal for almost all of the twentieth century. The low levels of both agricultural productivity and income, which were associated with the import and public supply policies, contributed to a generalised scarcity of essential goods. At certain points these shortages were extreme to the point that they became problems with an immediate social and political impact.
While Portugal did not directly participate in the Second World War, the country was inevitably had to deal with the effects of the war economy. The threat of hunger, associated with other social, economic and political problems, led to the emergence of intense social movements throughout the country.
From written documents and from interviews that took place in several regions, this paper will concentrate on the rural areas. Since they were directly connected to the production of the essential goods, the rural population was subjected to specific policies in addition to the general policies.

In this paper I will analyse the impact of the state’s actions that were designed to combat hunger in the context of the Second World War. The paper will address three aspects: assessment of the results achieved by the agricultural productivity incentive measures; the operation of the system for rationing essential goods; and the reaction of the rural populace to the demand for food produce from their land. Our understanding the direction of political and social activities during this time of war is further enhanced through comparisons with the living conditions of the population and with the public policies that were put in place during the 1930s and 1950s.

Our objective is to examine the performance, evolution and changing geographical structure of agri-food trade in the second half of the 20th century. To this end, we have constructed a set of both aggregate series and breakdowns by region, which we shall compare with agri-food growth rates in other historical periods, the evolution of the world economy and the expansion of trade in other products.
This study is divided into three sections, followed by our conclusions and an appendix, which explains in detail the construction of the quantitative series used. The first section considers the development of agricultural trade in volume terms. It begins with an econometric analysis of the series constructed to identify growth phases in agri-food trade, and continues with a description of the situation in each period as it relates to the quantitative evolution of agricultural trade flows. We then go on to compare the evolution of total trade and agri-food trade, exploring the different effects of income growth. The final section looks at the evolution of international agri-food trade broken down by economic regions. We end the paper with our main conclusions.