Programme

This paper explores some possible explanations of why pro-immigration policy was a strong and persistence long-run force in Argentina during the age of mass migration. In contrast with the United States, Argentina remained a country open to mass migration until the 1930s (even accounting for some mild restrictions passed before and after World War One). The paper presents a new immigration policy index for Argentina in order to test different hypotheses explaining the reasons to restrict mass immigration. The quantitative evidence presented here suggests that Argentina had two main reasons to restrict immigration prior to the 1930s: quantity of immigrants and increasing inequality. However, immigration policy proved extremely difficult to change for political and institutional reasons. Political economy show how those more hurt by massive immigration could not influence policy. Benefits of immigration were concentrated and policy makers were dominated by pro-immigration interest while costs were diffused.

Along with British and Irish emigrants, German emigrants were one of the largest groups to leave Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. The vast majority of these northern Europeans went to the United States. From a dataset on 50,000 different Hessians from the principality of Hesse-Cassel, this paper examines the 11% of this emigrant group, almost 6,000, who did not settle in the U.S. and instead left for South America, Australia, and other European countries. A handful in this subset chose to begin new lives in Asia and Africa.

This work examines the motivations of those who chose uncommon paths and focuses on those who emigrated to regions in the southern hemisphere. Individuals and families who went to places other than the U.S. were different from the U.S.-bound contingent. These emigrants seem to have been economically motivated, but attracted to the particular opportunities in the places they were going to. Those bound for Australia and New Zealand, for instance, were in large part shepherds and herdsmen, seeking out employment opportunities in the burgeoning livestock business of the region. In general, a very large proportion of the emigrants bound for non-U.S. destinations were men. The exception to this is emigrants bound for South America: few people went to South America, but a higher percentage of them were women than for any other destination, including the U.S.

People leaving for non-U.S. destinations tended to come from more urban settings where the information on other European countries and the Southern Hemisphere was possibly much better than in rural villages. Most who left for South America, Central America and Australia also came from the Kreis of Kassel or a county nearby, places all close to the large capital city of the principality, Kassel. Here the flow of information on uncommon destinations may have been much better than in the rest of the principality.

This paper uses US census immigrant data from 1910 and 2000 to show that some national cultures in the twentieth century were more conducive than others to entrepreneurship. It demonstrates that a number of entrepreneurial cultures persisted over the century while others did not. Persistence at first sight suggests culture can contribute to explaining long term economic performance. But cross-country comparison indicates that a strong entrepreneurial culture is not sufficient for high GDP per capita. Without the right institutions such a culture appears at best ineffective, judging by the comparatively strong economic development of nations with low entrepreneurship culture indices.

This paper points to the discussion of international migration and development of illegal economies along the period of massive migration and economic growth in Argentina (1890-1930). Nexus between crime and immigration from Southern Italy spreaded in many receiving countries in the Americas in the first decades of the 1900’s. In the early XXth. Century, immigrants from Calabria, Basilicata and Sicily reached Argentina’s ports (Buenos Aires, Rosario), where they competed with their Northern fellow citizens in gaining ground both, in urban labour markets (public services construction, ship loading, manufacture), and in economic sectors such as building, food and banking. Criminal practices (blackmailing, kidnapping) and illegal business (gambling, prostitution) developed within large networks of Italians who emigrated from Sicily to Rosario (Argentina’s second largest city) since 1910 to 1940. We aim to discuss why illegal business failed to have control of vast sectors of Argentina’s urban markets during that period of time.

This paper builds upon the work of Herbert Klein and Samuel Baily on Italians, examining the demographic and occupational selectivity of German immigration to South America (primarily Argentina and Brazil), compared to Germans bound for the United States, and the geographic and occupational niches they occupied on the two continents. It draws upon both aggregate and individual-level data from censuses and migration records on three continents to examine occupational profiles, sex ratios, age structure, age heaping as a rough measure of “quality,” urbanization rates, and geographic segregation among Germans on the two continents.

The two nations which have been the recipients of the largest number of Latin American immigrants in the past quarter century, are the United States and Spain. The aim of this paper will be to compare the basic characteristics of these two groups of Latin American born immigrants as seen in two surveys of these populations carried out in 2007. The primary sources for this analysis will be the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey of 2007, and Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística “Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes 2007.” The similarities and differences in the origin, demographic and socio-economic characteristics of these two migration streams is examined as well as the patterns of immigrant integration in the two receiving countries.

The difficulty or inability to borrow made capital market constraints an important part of the decision to move from Europe to North America in the early twentieth century. We formalize the constraint with a life-cycle model, where agents jointly choose the optimal period of saving to finance migration and whether to migrate. Simulations of the model point to the potential role of preferences, the period of adjustment after arrival, and the direct migration costs, in determining who will migrate and at what age; and they help account for the large wage gaps between the Old and New World. Our analysis of the data from the passenger manifests of Dutch arrivals at Canadian ports in 1925, that importantly include the saving of these immigrants, points to the promise of this approach.

Attach

Abstract

The Distinctive, Indistinct Canadians in the United States

Marvin McInnis, Queens’ University, Canada

A largely overlooked element of the immigration experience of the United States has been the migration of Canadians in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is not well appreciated that between 1860 and 1900 the small country to the north contributed about ten per cent of the immigration to the United States. From the Canadian point of view the movement was more massive. By 1900 about one in four persons born in Canada was living in the United States. Despite this being a numerically significant component of the American in take of immigrants, Canadians have largely been ignored in the literature on American immigration and ethnic diversity. French-Canadians in New England attracted some attention and it is often erroneously claimed that these constituted the larger part of immigration from Canada, and that was really all that was worth noting about Canadians in the United States. Anglo-Canadian immigrants have been essentially ignored. It has been presumed that they were either just like other immigrants, or more commonly, like other Americans. Canadians have been presumed to be indistinct. This paper shows that, to the contrary, Canadians in the United States stood apart from both native-born Americans and from other immigrants. Both geographically and occupationally, Canadians were concentrated in ways that were different. They fit differently into the developing American scene than other immigrants. At the same time they were not simply “other North Americans”, indistinguishable from the native-born American population. Canadians showed some interesting distinctiveness.

During the 450 years between 1492 and 1940, Latin America was a major destination for European and African migrants, coerced and free. The immigrants came in three waves: the first involved small numbers leading Iberian colonization; the second was far bigger and involved black Africans arriving in slave ships; the third involved ‘free’ European labor arriving during the age of mass migration from about 1870 to 1940. – mostly from Iberia and Italy. Currently, Latin America has the highest emigration rate in the world. What explains the spectacular 20th century switch from Latin American immigration 1492-1940 to emigration 1950-2009?

La comparaison des réactions fiscales de pays Anglo-saxons et de la France aux deux guerres mondiales du XXe siècle et aux périodes de réarmement qui les encadrent vise autant à examiner la façon dont les Autorités politiques et économiques nationales réagissent à des contraintes exceptionnelles qu’à confronter deux « modèles » distincts, ou présentés comme tels, de pratiques privées (entreprises) et publiques (fiscalités). Elle permet de revenir sur une opposition fréquemment avancée du côté français qui distingue, d’une part, l’efficacité fiscale et le développement des comptabilités privées anglo-saxonnes et, d’autre part, les blocages structurels auxquels se heurte l’imposition des bénéfices industriels et commerciaux et la généralisation du principe déclaratif introduit par la loi du 1er juillet 1916 sur la contribution extraordinaire sur les bénéfices de guerre. Même dans les périodes exceptionnelles des guerres, des sorties de guerre et du réarmement, la fiscalité française serait paralysée par une tradition du secret et par le refus des entreprises de se plier à des règles comptables homogènes. L’inorganisation de la profession des comptables priverait le fisc et les producteurs privés des instruments nécessaires au dialogue. Un grand nombre de français déplorent la méfiance générale, qui oppose les contribuables et les agents du fisc, l’inefficacité du contrôle fiscal et l’arbitraire des décisions et vantent les caractéristiques d’un modèle anglo-saxon où la coordination des efforts économiques pour préparer, puis pour financer les conflits bénéficie de la confiance mutuelle existant entre l’Etat et les entreprises. Pour eux, l’antériorité de l’impôt sur le revenu et celle de règles comptables homogènes, appliquées par des professionnels reconnus, constituent les pivots de la collaboration avec le fisc, de l’équité fiscale et du rendement des impôts. Ces clichés correspondent il à une réalité ? Leur diffusion en France est exacerbée par les fortes pressions suscitées par les situations exceptionnelles de conflits. La communication proposée souhaite interroger la réalité de ces clichés. Faisant l’hypothèse que la fiscalité de guerre, qui cristallise les spécificités nationales, peut être retenue comme un bon indicateur des relations entre l’Etat et les entreprises, elle vise, à des échelles géographiques et chronologiques distinctes, à présenter, puis à discuter, ces poncifs en mettant en relief un acteur peu souvent introduit qui est la comptabilité privée et ses professionnels. Elle s’engage ainsi à revisiter deux prototypes originaux d’usage des chiffres en cherchant à comprendre pourquoi, alors qu’il est connu et vanté, le modèle anglo-saxon n’est pas importé en France. La comptabilité privée n’est normalisée qu’en 1942, mais le plan comptable général reste facultatif pour la majorité des entreprises. La profession des experts-comptables ne s’organise qu’à partir de cette date et de façon imparfaite. Comment expliquer ces différences et quels sont leurs effets sur la fiscalité dans l’urgence de la guerre ?

The comparison of the fiscal strategies of Anglo-Saxon countries and those of France to the twentieth century’s two world wars and to the periods of rearmament which bracketed them attempts as much to examine the manner in which national political and economic authorities reacted to exceptional pressures as to compare two distinct ‘models’ (or ones presented as such) of private-sector (business) and public (fiscal-policy) techniques. The study provides an opportunity to re-examine a contradiction, frequently advanced on the French side. This contradiction distinguishes, on the one hand, fiscal efficiency and the development of Anglo-Saxon private-sector accounting and, on the other, the structural barriers against which collided the taxation of industrial and commercial profits and the generalisation of the declaratory principle introduced by the Law of 1 July 1916 on the extraordinary taxation of wartime profits.
Our hypothesis is that wartime fiscal policy, that crystallises national specificities, can be considered a good indicator of the relations between the State and business. It aims, at distinct geographic and chronological levels, to present then discuss, these patterns by highlighting an actor infrequently introduced – private-sector accounting and its professionals. The paper re-visits two original prototypes for the use of figures by seeking to understand why, despite its recognition and praises, the Anglo-Saxon model was not adopted in France. It was only in 1942 that private-sector accounting was standardised; however, the ‘plan comptable général’ remained voluntary for the majority of businesses. The accounting profession was not organised until after this date and even then, in an imperfect fashion. We attempt to explain these differences and their effects on fiscal policy during wartime urgency.

LA GENESE DE LA DECISION
CHIFFRES PUBLICS, CHIFFRES PRIVES XIXe-XXe SIECLES

Université Paris-Dauphine
Vendredi 5 juin 2009

Session préparatoire du

15th World Economic History Congress
Utrecht – 2009


« THE ORIGIN OF DECISIONS :
NUMBERS, DATA AND STATISTICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY »


● Introduction 9h30 – 10h

► Béatrice Touchelay et Philippe Verheyde (universités Paris XII et VIII)


● Présidence Albert Broder (université Paris XII)
10h - 12h30

► Clotilde Druelle-Korn (université de Limoges) « Le chiffre dans les fichiers consulaires français, XIXe-XXe siècles »
► Anne Pezet (université Paris-Dauphine) et Samuel Sponem (CNAM) « Reporting et gouvernance : le cas du Crédit lyonnais au temps d’Henri Germain »
► Catherine Vuillermot (université de Besançon) « La grande entreprise française mise en chiffres des années 1920 aux années 1980 »

● déjeuner (12h30-13h30)


● Présidence Nicolas Praquin (université Paris-Dauphine)
13h30 - 17h

► Fabio Lavista (université de Milan) et Simone Misiani (université de Teramo)
« The origin of decisions : the italian case in twentieth century »
► Giovanni Favero (université de Venise) « On the political use and historical reliability of fascist-Italy official statistics of industrial wages »

● pause (15h-15h15)

► Alain Carry (université Paris IV) « Du chiffre mis en compte à la décision chiffrée, le cas du financement de la dépense d’éducation en Prusse (1872-1913) »
► Emmanuel Didier (CNRS- Centre d’Etude Sociologique sur le Droit et les Institutions Pénales, Paris) « Sondages aléatoires et Etat providence aux USA pendant le New Deal, accompagné d'une note sur leur importation en France.»

The Metallurgical and Mining Industries Union (UIMM) was established in 1901 in order to defend the interests of a major sector of the French economy and to influence legislation or its application for the benefit of employers. For all along the first half of the twentieth century French government continuously takes an increasing part into lawmaking, which led to change in the employer's attitude.
Aiming to influence economic and social policies of successiv governments, they used publishing economic and social datas, as a strategic weapon. The UIMM multiplies investigations among its members on issues which would be debated in Parliament and becomes the quasi-official provider of datas about factories : working hours, resting days, pensions, wages, accidents, conflicts. etc. As these statistics are used as a basis by the Parliament or by other Unions even Workers Unions, the UIMM is currently considered as an expert. Statistical datas became a very efficient tool to influence directly or indirectly governments and provide a powerfull means of pressure to the employers organisation.

The economic, social, and political reforms of the former Soviet Union gave rise to a flourishing international peddling trade. Small at first in the later 1980s, by the mid-1990s the shuttle trade expanded to include thirty million people and came to constitute the backbone of Russian consumer trade. Yet ironically, this business remained semi-legal. Presumably, traders legally brought various items in small quantity into Russia. But they claimed illegally that these items were not for resale but for personal use and consistently failed to pay customs duties and income taxes.

In the late 1980s, the main feature of the trade was its ad hoc nature; there were no more than mere hints of rules and regulations to govern the trade, aside from the Law on Individual Labor Activity, adopted in November 1986. Initially the government was willing to “look the other way” or even support the shuttle trade as a way to provide for the demising consumer market in Russia. Yet the government drastically underestimated the vast numbers of people that the trade would attract and subsequently the scale and longevity of the trade. By 1993 and then progressively into the 1990s, the government aimed to bring this highly problematic aspect of the emerging market under its control, both by the means of regulating private businesses and creating a more business-conducive environment and by improving border control in order to make the borders “hard”.

By analyzing the dialogue of legislation and the shuttle trade, as well as many intrinsic features like social welfare, my research, partially presented in this paper, exposes the difficulty of using these trade networks for creating a permanent and collective market rather than for particularistic, material and mundane individual goals. Thus, this niche of the illicit trade could not be celebrated as an example of viable and vibrant entrepreneurship, nor could it be turned into such by rigorous regulations and formalization.

En Suisse, l'élaboration de statistiques économiques et sociales de qualité est restée tout au long du XXe siècle particulièrement pauvre et lacunaire lorsque celles-ci représentent un enjeu de pouvoir entre les différents acteurs sociaux et politiques (répartition sociale des richesses, mouvement des capitaux, pour ne prendre que ces exemples). Dans le même sens, l'accès public à de telles données quantitatives demeure spécialement limité. Cette contribution vise, d'une part, à illustrer par quelques cas cette situation très insatisfaisante du point de vue du débat démocratique et de la recherche scientifique et, d'autre part, à en déterminer les différents facteurs explicatifs.

In Switzerland, the elaboration of quality economic and social statistics has been especially poor and incomplete during the 20th century when major interests between different social and political actors were at stake (for instance social distribution of wealth or capital movements). Public access to this type of quantitative data has also remained particularly limited. This contribution aims at illustrating this very unsatisfactory situation – from a scientific point of view and in terms of the democratic debate – with some examples, and at determining its different explanatory factors.

Draft programme

The paper includes a brief outline of modern tourism development in Greece from the 19th to the 21st century. It focuses on the hospitality industry in terms of types of firms, governance patterns and state policies. Along with entrepreneurial initiatives and institutional framework, financing and credit arrangements are considered an important parameter of tourism development. Details are given about special institutions and policies, both public and private during the interwar years and more so during the post Second World War period. Information is based on new archival sources and material.

The paper deal with the evolution and the standing out features of the hotel industry in 20th century Italy. There can be little doubt that the most dynamic component of the Italian economy during the years following the Second World War was represented by the nation’s small and medium-sized companies, in both the manufacturing and service sectors. The hotel sector was no exception to this rule; in fact, the most competitive element has always been that of the small, family-run hotels.
The paper will try to investigate the role played by government policies, by Hotel Keeper’s Associations lobby pressure on policy makers and by companies’ strategies in the hotel industry dynamics. More precisely we will analyse the performance of the biggest Italian companies in the hotel sector all over the XXth century. The investigation will be based on Imita.db, a database which collects from 1911 to 1980 the balance sheets of Italian private and publicly traded companies which at the end of the year had a share capital above a given threshold (in the hotel sector 657 companies are included). Secondly we will take into consideration the Hotel Keepers’ Association modernizing strategies and their impact on the hotel industry organization. Thirdly we will analyse the government enterprise policy in the hospitality industry.

Banks have always had an important role in the hotel trade. Different hotel infrastructures, from small provincial B&Bs to the large palaces in spa towns and tourist cities, have turned to banks to finance their activity and their development. In addition, the development of leisure consumption has encouraged financial institutions to create their own specialised subsidiaries targeting this sector of activity, or even to take stakes in hotel groups.
Consequently, the Société Générale archives offer an interesting prospect when it comes to studying the history of the hotel industry in the 20th century. With business interests that cover the planet (North Africa, Europe, South-East Asia), the bank has provided funding for various forms of hotel, from granting loans to local clients or investing in major hotel projects, or in subsidiaries like Finexhotel with its international reach. As a result, it is possible to use the records of these funds to create a typology of the hotel sector based on the type of funding, the size of the establishments involved and their impact on economic and social activity.

This paper addresses the impact of hotel construction on tourism demand and market segmentation in Portorož, an Adriatic coastal resort in Slovenia. It discusses the correlation of type and volume of accommodation facilities, and tourism development since late 19th century when first tourists visited Portoroz. The research shows that the impact of accommodation availability on tourism development changes in time. It suggests that the provision of adequate variety and volume of accommodation is more important during the early stages of tourism development, while further development of tourism destination requires focus on the quality of services, accessibility and development of complementary services. The analysis also suggests that destination managers can use accommodation mix as a tool for tourim destination repositionning on the tourism market.

This paper tries to supply a way to estimate the economic impact of the Spanish Civil War and the II World War in the Portuguese hotel establishments.
Taking advantage of the Portuguese neutrality, these two events were responsible for the high profits in an industry that, in the beginning of the Thirties, was facing very great difficulties due to a deficient tourism chain of clients (especially foreigners) once Portugal was a peripheral country that could not compete with significant tourism destinations like Italy, France or England.
From 1934 onwards Lisbon and other Portuguese cities were “invaded” by foreigners that were running away of political persecutions in their countries.
We will survey the figures of all tourism statistic analyses related with the movement of nationals and foreigners clients (these by nationality) in the Portuguese hotels,
We will make a closer approach to the Tivoli Hotel figures - one of the most distinguished Lisbon hotels - in order to show how the political events were crucial not only to the surviving of the unity and, afterwards, for its great improvement, renovation and modernization.

The historiography dedicated to tourism has emphasized how some socio-economic evolutions such as urbanization, mechanization of transport or the advent of leisure time in society have supported pleasure trips and therefore the development of the hotel industry. On the contrary, the research has too often neglected or at least minimized the impact of the hotel sector on a region development. This contribution seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the Geneva Lake region, one of the most important birthplaces of the European tourism. In this space not much touched by the 1st industrial revolution, the hotel business has in fact played the role of an economic motor, stimulating investments and employments. This dynamism provoked a domino effect on several other sectors of the economy.
To please their customers, the hoteliers have not only given impulses on housing modernization, but also to the revitalization of transport, energy and communication networks. They have equally made sure to renew constantly the occasions of recreation, the sanitary and medical facilities and the aesthetics of the visited sites. The necessity to remain on the state-of-the-art of technical issues, with the concern of competitiveness, has called forth an acceleration of the technology transfer and stimulated the constitution of a technical know-how, facilitating the emergence of an industrial network in connection with the 2nd industrial revolution. The influx of wealthy tourists also supported the production and the business of luxury goods as well as the regional food industry. Still let us mention the demand created by hotel business in the building and financial sectors. Finally tourism has widely contributed to shape a positive image of the Geneva Lake region abroad, assets the fallout from which was doubtless multiple, even if noticeable with difficulty by the historian.

For several decades, geographers have written interesting articles about geographical repartition of hotel industry in the urban landscape. They have made maps about their localisation in big cities and have tried to define some explanations on urban hotel trade development. This spatial and cartographic approach has yet rarely been used by historians. This communication’s purpose is precisely to develop this interdisciplinary perspective: using geographer’s methods to study and to analyze dynamic evolution of geographical hotel’s repartition in Brussels since 1880 until the eve of Second World War. In order to exceed the lack of official and reliable data about this subject during the chosen period, we have recourse to Brussels commercial almanacs. However their content isn’t surely exhaustive, nor free from errors, this almanacs make it possible for the researcher to index a broad range of establishments, from luxurious palaces to small boarding houses managed by widows. Thanks to other multiple sources (taxes and population registers, guides, censuses, police archives…), this maps’results (approximately 1900 listed establishments) inform historians about Brussels hotel industries’ localisation and evolution, the early specialisation of some of its districts, their attractiveness or the progressive disaffection of foreigners and Belgian travellers for some parts of the town. More than “simply” creating several maps, this communication wants to draw up the different profiles of hotel-keepers and their customers in the different hotel districts of Brussels, the most important political, economical and cultural city of Belgium at that time.

Originally, any serious scientific publication, whatever its subject matter, entails endless hours of archival documents research which often looks more like the quest for the Holy Grail than like a leisure cruise…
The Swiss Hotel Archives were created in order to shortly enable the access to a maximum of documentary sources held in public or private patrimonial institutions.
The objective of the Foundation created in March 2008 is to open up an online portal dedicated to the knowledge of hotel business and tourism in Switzerland. We do fieldwork throughout all of Switzerland, our Zurich-based filing databank is called STAR (in its smart version...), it was outsourced in Bern and made secure through a system similar to e-banking, so that it can be accessed through Internet from any hotel or institution. Our task comprises the research of and expertise in hotel and tourism archival collections, the location of collections, their protection or even their transfer in the respect of the two essential principles of archives handling: origin and relevance.
Switzerland has three main national languages – without mentioning English as a lingua franca between linguistic regions – and this multilingualism must be taken into account when writing our inventories; adapting our descriptions while at the same time respecting the original designation is essential.
Our goal is to x-ray hotel and tourism archives collections, in order to provide researchers with a varied range of collections representative of Swiss hotel business. We therefore collect with the same care from luxury hotels and little family pensions, we make sure to gather data from all the Swiss linguistic and tourist regions, we strive to take into account the variety and diversity of the collections’ content, so that new research prospects can be initiated. Because ultimately, this is what you are interested in!

The paper will be based on my on-going PhD research in the economic history of Tourism. An attempt will be made to shed light on the emergence of a tourism entrepreneurial identity, arising within the framweork of more general developments of the Greek tourism industry. The period considered spans the last quarter of the 19th and most part of the 20th century.
More specifically, the relationship between travel agencies and hotels will be highlighted and positive or negative aspects will be analysed; The hypothesis that the importance of cooperation between the two sub-branches was defined and redefined during the different phases of tourism development will be explored. The paper will focus on the interwar years, the post Second World War period and later decades. Regional, national and transnational aspects will be used to assess the changes.
Key Words: Travel agencies, hotels, tourism, entrepreneurs, state policies

This paper draws the outlines of the evolution of the tourist hotel industry in the Belgian Ardennes between 1850 and 1914. This work is part of a Ph.D. research currently led on the tourist development – I use in fact the french expression “mise en tourisme” – of this region during the same period and is based on documents such as travel books and tourist guides, public and private archives, professional press and iconography such as postcards.
The first part of the study reconstitutes and analyzes the increase of the tourist hotel industry during this period and will also present the different forms of hotels and their capacity. With the help of cartography’s techniques I also will show the evolving geographical repartition of the villages and towns, where the hotel industry spread out, on the Ardennes area.
In the second part we will be interested in the profile of the hotel and innkeepers, the role played by the women and the family in this industry but also the profile, the role and the motives of the clients in the development of a specific form of hotel industry, very different from the Belgian Coast one.

In Paris, during the Belle Époque, that’s saying a good deal that the industry of the great hotel trade knows an important growth. We don’t want to relate in its intirety one of the most important chapter of the history of the french hotel trade. But, with the help of some examples, we will try to show the consequences of this development on the old generation of hotels, to prove the forms of this development and then to demonstrate the relations between the actors of the parisian hotel industry during this fundamental age.

Apprenticeship was one of the main ways in which skills and human capital were generated in pre-modern economies. Underpinning the functioning of apprenticeship was a training market that matched (mostly male) youths with masters who had the capacity to provide training. For apprenticeship to operate effectively, arrangements must have provided both parties with an incentive to invest in a long-term relationship. On paper, the operation of the recruitment market was highly regulated and contracts were enforced through a variety of formal and informal institutions. In England, the formal rules of the game were broadly stable over the eighteenth century. Yet in practice, the character and importance of apprenticeship appears to have changed substantially in this period. The roots of these developments in the decline of guild controls over the economy are better understood than their implications for the operation of apprenticeship. This paper discusses some aspects of the transformation of guild apprenticeship in London during the century running up to industrialisation. In particular it looks at what premiums can tell us about the structure of the apprenticeship training market, and at the relationship between apprenticeship, the family and the labour market.

In this paper we would like to examine the circulation of technical knowledge through the lens of apprenticeship. Traditionally, early modern apprenticeship was seen as a backward system of learning in terms of economic efficiency. From the perspective of the guilds, this pessimistic point of view has recently been qualified. Guilds and their regulations vis-à-vis apprenticeship (a fixed term to serve, an obligatory master piece, entry fees etc.) are seen now as having stimulated investment in training and favored technological innovation. According to Epstein (1998) guilds enabled masters to recover the cost of training by paying wages below the marginal product of labour while stimulating apprentices to train by means of bonds and end-term rewards. As to England Jane Humphries has pointed to enforcement mechanisms at a national scale, reducing the threat of hold-up and thus stimulating parties to conclude contracts. Although these theories are hard to corroborate empirically, they are bound to simulate further research and rethink apprenticeship as a regulatory mechanism. However, as a practice apprenticeship is still considered as having been intimately tied up with upbringing and socialization. Research based on apprentice contracts tends to stress not only the patriarchal authority of the father (which might be considered from the perspective of contract enforcing as well, cf. Epstein), but also the disciplining aspects of learning at the shop floor. Moreover, learning is not seen as a process separate from working. Apprentices were not only immersed in practice at the shop floor but they are thought to have been set to a wide variety of household chores as well. And in case learning is seen as more or less separate from working – apprentices first learning and subsequently working in order to settle their debt with their master – the skills transmitted are considered ‘transferable skills’ – applicable in a limited number of firms, for example within a specific craft guild – thus excluding not only general skills but specific and specialized skills as well.
In our paper, the ideas 1) that learning and upbringing were inseparable and 2) that training as a rule concerned transferable skills only will be qualified. Based on a sample of some 200 apprentice contracts from the gold and silversmiths in early modern Antwerp (and about 20 juridical proceeding on breach of contract), it will be shown that at least in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century apprentice contracts could be very businesslike agreements geared to the transmission of very specific skills. Depending on the background of the apprentice and the master, the contracts cold vary considerably in terms of the length of the term, the fees due, etc. Default clauses moreover suggest that learning and working could be separated in time and that learning up to a certain degree was considered a specific activity.

In the past, early modern apprenticeship was usually seen as a backward system in terms of economic efficiency. This pessimistic point of view has recently been criticised, but even than learning and working are still being considered as unseparable activities, while the actual skills transmitted are considered as 'transferable skills'. This paper however will stress 1) that learning and upbringing were separable and 2) that training was not necessarily limited to transferable skills. Based on a sample of some 200 apprentice contracts from the gold and silversmiths in early modern Antwerp (and about 20 juridical proceeding on breach of contract?), it will be shown that at least in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century apprentice contracts could be very businesslike agreements geared to the transmission of very specific skills. Depending on the background of the apprentice and the master, the contracts cold vary considerably in terms of the length of the term, the fees due, etc. Default clauses moreover suggest that learning and working were separated in time and that learning up to a certain degree was considered a specific activity. What is more, not all apprentices were bound to a master who acted in loco parentis. A considerable part of them did not board with their master, and even those who did protested carrying out simple preparatory jobs or household chores. In short, learning as it was agreed on in apprentice contracts, should in future research perhaps be seen as a particular economic activity.

The construction of gender at work through the pre-industrial and early industrial period is often assumed to have been the outcome of adult interaction with employer, family, and wider socio-political forces. Historians have less commonly investigated the way in which children became gendered. Research on apprenticeship in England has provided some fruitful leads: studies by Simonton, who exposes the way in which parish and private apprenticeship demonstrated different objectives in the training of girls and boys, and by Snell who indicates the narrowing of opportunities for girls in particular between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, are particularly valuable in this context. The consensus is that young boys were more likely than girls to acquire a formally recognised skill, a distinction which underpins the unequal gender division of labour which permeated industrial society. The purpose of this paper is to examine the processes by which apprentices became gendered workers, not necessarily or solely through differential training opportunities but rather by forces in addition to the real level of human capital they acquired. It considers the way in which industrial development through the eighteenth century needed new sets of skills and capacities and the means by which such new requirements were met. It suggests a range of ways in which apprenticeship was used for skills acquisition for both the individual and the economy as a whole. It argues that parish and charitable institutions played a crucial role in raising levels of human capital. By using evidence from a selection of English parishes and charities, this paper indicates the changing patter of apprenticeship of poor children through the period from 1760 to 1840 permitting comparisons among ‘pre-factory’, ‘factory’ and ‘post-factory’ bindings. It complements the quantitative data provided by apprenticeship registers and indentures with qualitative material, and assesses how far gender-specific acquisition of skill comprised the objective of parish and master and how these were understood by the children themselves. Finally, it provides tentative estimates of the longer term economic and social value of apprenticeship training for all parties to the transactions and to the wider economy.

Apprenticeship has long been contentious. Did it bar entry to trades and so secure monopoly rents as Adam Smith contended, or did it contribute positively to the growth and performance of the early modern and early industrial economy as some modern economic historians have dared to suggest? The rehabilitation of apprenticeship involves specifying the ways in which it contributed to growth and efficiency. Possible channels include training, mobility, and lifelines to the socially excluded. It also requires defending the institution from charges that it was exclusive and anti-meritocratic, time spent in indentures serving only to limit the supply of specific skills. This paper investigates the case for and against apprenticeship in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, a context, which provides something of a natural experiment since the repeal of the Statute of Artificers and the decay of the guilds enables the comparison of regulatory regimes. In the early 18th-century both the law and the power of the guilds supported apprenticeship. By the 19th -century both had disappeared. Apprenticeship no longer conferred an exclusive (albeit irregularly and incompletely policed) right to practice a trade. Comparison of the popularity and perception of apprenticeship in the two periods alongside more general information about the operation and distribution of apprenticeships provides a means to evaluate this intriguing institution. The investigation makes use of a large body of material extracted from working-class memoirs of the period presented in detail in Humphries (2009). It uses both quantitative and qualitative evidence to begin to answer these research questions.

“Apprenticeship … in the Pre-Industrial World” was special under the ‘Statute of Artificers’, that is under English Central Government legislation. From the Black Death in 1349 to 5 Elizabeth I in 1563 labour statutes regulated wage labour independent from the institution of ‘apprenticeship’, which remained exclusive under the government of chartered company ordinances. By contrast, from 1563 to 1814 apprenticeship in England was universal under a statutory framework, but highly diverse. This paper distinguishes two main historically diverse organisations of the labour (and related production) processes under royal charter on the one hand and under statutory law on the other. Each was associated with its related form of reproduction, by ‘apprenticeship’ or ‘bringing up’, coexisting side by side between 1349 and 1563 and under a common framework between 1563 band 1814. The argument is that the English industry developed with bringing up wage labour by ‘degrees’ whilst apprenticeship became obsolete. I suggest that the integration of contradictory forms of the labour process and their related forms of reproduction under the same framework accelerated the disintegration of production under urban charters instead of extending the outdated model of apprenticeship into the territory of wage labour relations. But this is the subject of another study.
The paper uses English labour statutes as evidence of wage labour development during its ‘infancy’ in the late Middle Ages and under the Early Stuarts.

not available.

The research on handicrafts in general has concentrated on study of urban artisans and guilds. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not all artisans operated in towns nor did rural artisans always constitute small marginal groups. For instance, the majority of Finnish artisans, like the majority of the Finnish population, lived and worked in the countryside, and operated within a different institutional structure than urban artisans. I argue that studying rural apprentices offers a different perspective and widens our understanding of apprenticeship: town guilds alone do not explain the rather complex apprenticeship structures of early modern societies.

Rural artisans differed from town artisans in many ways. In towns, craft guilds often directed how the crafts were practiced and controlled not only the prices and quality of the products but also the numbers of masters and apprentices. In the provincial areas of Finland, there were no guilds and no guild restrictions. Rural artisans did not have a monopoly over their craft, and they could not prevent occupational competition. Naturally, there were laws concerning the practice of rural crafts: for instance, a license to work and permission to have apprentices were needed in order to operate as an official artisan. In practice, however, the situation varied, and not all applied for these permits.

This paper studies how rural artisans organized their occupational training without craft guilds. Most artisan’s sons also became artisans, but not all had sons to pass their skills on to. Therefore, the majority of artisans in my research area did not have artisan backgrounds. Where did they come from? Was artisan training an efficient route to upward social mobility? What can be said about the general characteristics of rural artisans’ training? Can we use the conflicts between masters and apprentices as cases to study those training practices? The paper is based on extensive and diverse source material. Census records, craft tax rolls and church records have been examined, and further information has been obtained from juridical and administrative material. Because the basic approach of this study is close to collective biography, a single large Finnish parish has been selected as the object of the research, which permits us to study artisans and their apprentices more individually and systematically.

The present session stems from a research programme carried out at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “On the efficiency of markets for agricultural products in pre-industrial societies: The case of Babylonia c. 400 – c. 60 BC.”
The research programme is exceptionally important for economic history because we have an utterly unique dataset for research into the history of prices in the ancient world in the huge corpus of Babylonian cuneiform documents known as “the Astronomical Diaries”. These diaries contain meticulous daily reports of astral phenomena, the weather, the level of the Euphrates river, local history concerning political events, famines, plagues, good and bad harvests, and – last but not least – a detailed record of the monthly, and sometimes daily, prices of raw foodstuffs - barley, dates, cuscuta, cress and sesame - and wool. Alongside these diaries a series of Babylonian chronicles is preserved relating to the activities of kings, temples and local officials. In addition, some administrative archives from temples and private households are preserved. Greek and Roman authors such as Diodorus, Arrian, Plutarch and Justin provide information on the international political situation. There is also archaeological evidence. Apart from the excavated cities, many archaeological surveys have been carried out, which provide important information on occupation patterns and levels, irrigation and agricultural developments.
In this lecture I like to present some thoughts on the volatility of prices of barley and dates. These products were the main constituents of the Babylonian diet and they were more or less complementary. The harvest of barley was in April-May, that of dates in September-October. This phenomenon influenced the seasonality of the prices as the appearance of the dates on the market in October could lower the prices of barley. Michael Jursa pointed out that the consumption of dates grew at the expense of barley. There is some evidence from 221 BC, that a royal regulation existed for the planting of new date groves. Dates were more and more the raw material for the preparation of beer. In the late period only gods drank beer made of barley. This may be compared with the production of wodka: now normally produced from potatoes instead of barley. I hope to show comparative graphs of the volatility of the prices of barley and dates and the relative development of prices over time. The audience is invited to suggest interpretations.

Using a compilation of monthly and annual wheat price data, this paper examines the trend of market development in Europe from the late-Medieval period to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast to much of the existing work which suggests that markets generally improved during this time, the findings propose that markets were on average as well integrated in Europe in the fifteenth century as in the late eighteenth century. In between these two times, markets are found to have suffered a severe contraction. As will be seen, these findings enable us to build a more complete picture of markets in history, and also provides a significant challenge to our current thoughts on economic growth.

Analyzing several aspects of price behavior in Babylon, Temin (2002) concludes that over-all there is enough evidence to conclude that the prices in Ancient Babylon were affected by market mechanisms. This is in contrast with most evidence from coefficients of variation that show a clear reduction of volatility over time between 300 BC to 1900 AD. Since declining volatility is often equated with increase in market-mechanisms, this implies that there must be other factors at work.
This paper disuses several factors that influence volatility in Babylon. We find that government, nature, monetary variables all exert some influence on price volatility. We go then deeper into nature and the agricultural structure as a case study. Not only weather conditions in Babylon were considerably different from England, but also the agricultural structure was different. Where England and Italy were almost entirely dependent on grain production (barley and wheat) that took place in the first months of the years, Babylon got most of its calories from barley and dates, the latter one being harvested at the end of the year. Not only this means that barley prices were likely to go down at the end of the year when the barley harvest was replaced with dates, but also, since dates are harvested from palm trees, barley cannot be easily replaced with dates after a harvest failure.

As a rule, products regarded as superior tend to exhibit a lower volatility in prices than inferior ones. This is interesting knowledge for cases in which we want to explain differences in price volatility in an economy. In this paper, I will try to determine the superiority/inferiority of five basic foodstuffs from an ancient society: Parthian Babylonia in the timespan 141-61 BC, from which we possess an amount of price data unusually big for Antiquity, recorded in the so-called Astronomical Diaries. I will do this by assessing the nutritional value of barley, dates, cress, cuscuta/mustard and sesame; and compare them with the corresponding price volatilities. The fact that the nutritional value of barley and dates has been assessed before, will be of great help.
To get a better impression of the role of these foodstuffs in the Babylonian economy, I will also look to the potential of dates, cress, cuscuta/mustard and sesame, to replenish, to the minimum subsistence level, the maximum amount of the barley component of the Babylonian diet (c.65%), all at their recorded prices. A minimum subsistence level for an average Babylonian has been already estimated, expressed in liters of barley per person per month (the so-called barley-equivalent).
Additional evidence shows that wages often might not have been sufficient for a Babylonian to obtain the necessary barley at the prices attested, to meet this subsistence minimum. Therefore, we will inquire what the maximum amount of calories was, that he could obtain for the lowest price (maximization of kilo calories). Special attention will be given to the timespan around the closing date of the so-called Rahimesu-archive (93 BC), which contains the wages mentioned above.
By this procedure, I do not only hope to contribute to the search for factors influencing price volatility in a premodern economy, but also shed light on what a factor like superiority/inferiority could have meant for the people of that time.

This paper explores some implications of price and wage data from sixth-century BC Babylonia. Price series can be established for barley and dates, as well as for other agricultural products such as wool and sesame and for slaves, sheep and land. The price data can also be correlated with wage data, for which however the documentation is less abundant. This material has to be analysed against the background of the distinctive features of the Babylonian economy of this period. Foremost among these one should mention the comparatively far-reaching monetization of economic exchange, from which fact alone the relevance of the price data for an analysis of the economy as a whole can be deduced – in fact we are dealing with the earliest body of price data coming from the region for which this claim can justifiably be made. Second, it can be shown that as an agrarian economy, the Babylonian economy was based, not on one leading crop, but on two, dates and barley. They were of potentially equal importance for nutrition, but their cultivation had fundamentally different agrarian, social and economic implications. Further features which distinguish the Babylonian economy of this period from other economic systems of Antiquity include the ubiquitous availability of cheap water transport and the presence of a well-developed system of legal and commercial institutions (guaranteed by the state): both features which can be expected to have reduced transaction costs. The paper will suggest a reading of the price data which is informed by these background conditions, addressing also the question of market integration, price volatility, standards of living and the potential of the Babylonian economy to achieve phases of intensive economic growth.

The emergence of an integrated national economy in Indonesia has been a slow and on-going evolutionary process. Using rice price series for a number of cities across the Indonesian archipelago, this paper provides quantitative evidence to support this notion. It shows that during Indonesia’s colonial period markets were relatively well integrated and functioned efficiently. However, the Second World War and the subsequent struggle for independence resulted in disintegrated and inefficient markets. Only since the late 1970s markets in Indonesia returned to a situation that we can speak about a national integrated economy with well-functioning markets.

Although the available Babylonian price series have been analyzed in several studies, most of them relied heavily on different statistical methods (mostly descriptive statistics or smoothing and trend fitting). The main exponent of this is Slotsky (1997) whose work is further criticized for not taking proper care of the historical background (Van der Spek and Mandemakers 2003) and contains basically no economic analysis.
The only paper that tries to provide clear econometric insight (that is when statistics is driven by an economic theory) is by Temin (2002) who focuses on the question whether the observed prices were governed by market mechanisms and not by some regulations resulting from a state-led distribution of goods. He analyzed the prices, from three perspectives and concluded that, over-all he finds enough evidence to conclude that the prices in Ancient Babylon were affected by market mechanisms.
In this paper we try to advance over the work done by Temin in three ways. First, we focus on the data themselves. The series have a lot of missing data, but the possible effect of this on statistical inference has been neglected in the literature. Hence, we start by discussing this problem in detail, showing that even with a large number of missing observations, the regression techniques are reliable. Second, we formalize the analysis of Temin by testing formally if the price series are random walk processes. If so, that confirms the weakest form of an efficient market hypothesis. The previous results will, in the third step, be combined in a structural model which gives an economic interpretation to the regression analyses.

Besides comments on the presented papers, my intervention will include a discussion of the diverse post-accession catching-up performance of the countries which were relatively underdeveloped when they became European Community members in the 1970s and 1980s. Taking advantage of the longer time-span of their experience as EU-members, I will assess both their overall performance measured in GDP/capita and the factors which allowed them to speed-up the catching-up process or, on the contrary, made them lag behind the EU-average.

Most Community expansions had been preceded by previous adaptation of the acceding country to avoid too severe competition when entering into the Community’s customs union. Some countries used for that specific purpose the formula of increasing foreign competition via special international free-trade arrangements, previous to EEC membership. That was the case of Denmark and Portugal with more than 12 and 25 years (respectively) of membership in the EFTA previous to EEC membership, or the case of the Republic of Ireland which, excluded from EFTA and EEC memberships, signed an industrial free-trade arrangement with the United Kingdom in order to force on itself the progressive adaptation to a more open economic scenario. In the case of Greece, it was the Community itself that helped that country to sustain the transition to a more open economy which Community membership imposed. This was the main function of the 1962 Treaty of Association with the EEC. The accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden did not require any previous economic adaptation, since the three economies were active members of the European Economic Space which extended to them the regulations and rewards of the Single European Market. Even the accession of former Eastern European countries in 2004 and 2007 was preceded by a deep transformation of their economies to meet the strict economic criteria established in the Copenhagen European Council summit of June 1993. In sum, most of the countries that negotiated accession into the European Community had required previous adaptation and transition of their domestic economies to the circumstances of increased competition in the Community’s customs union. In the case of Spain, the bilateral trade agreement that was signed in July 1970 between the EEC and Spain, which governed bilateral relations until Spain’s membership in 1986 and which might be considered as similar to an Association agreement, was the institutional device specifically designed to bring Spain into the common market.
The paper that I presenting will assess how effective was the 1970 EEC-Spanish Agreement in liberalising trade between Spain and the members of the European Community. My findings poit out at the fact that the Spanish authorities managed not to fulfil the import-trade liberalisation programme that the 1970 Agreement implied, as well as to block any new trade-liberalisation effort by the Community previous to any accession negotiation. The main difficulty for the Spaniard was to manage in doing so without suffering retaliation by the Nine. In this sense, Spain constitutes the main exception among the set of countries that had become members of the European Communities after a period of economic transformation that had immediately preceded accession.

Ireland's economic trajectory since 1960 sets it apart from other small European countries. EU membership in 1973 provided the conditions for a transformation of productive capacity. But domestic policy choices merit closer analysis. Unlike the Mediterranean periphery on the one hand, or Scandinavian countries on the other, a strong prior commitment to export-led growth and inward FDI conditioned later policy choices. The institutional framework underlying state commitment to a distinctive profile of investment in education and skills training is explored further here.

During the late 20th century and early 21st century the world is heading towards a knowledge-based economy. Higher education investment plays an essential role in society, creating new knowledge, transferring it to students and fostering innovation. The products of higher education graduates, new knowledge and breakthrough research all fuel prospering economies. It is an essential element of an attractive and prospering community, an excellent foundation upon which to build. The European Commission is helping member states and applicant and neighboring countries in their higher education modernizing efforts through policy initiatives, discussion papers and forums, as well as through EU programs. In my paper I will address the question of the relationship between the evolution of higher education and the economic performance of some new members of the EU, namely Ireland, Portugal, Poland and Romania. The first question regards whether there is a correlation between overall economic performance (GDP/capita growth in relation with EU average) and various indicators of the development of Higher Education (% of GDP invested in HE; EUR/student; % of graduates in overall population etc.). The second issue is whether the economic performance depends more on quantitative indicators of HE or on qualitative (institutional) improvements in the system of HE. The comparative analysis is focussed on the key trends and mechanisms identified in the development of higher education and the economic catching up process in each of the four countries during their pre and post EU admission period.

We argue that the process of European economic integration has made a qualitative shift: from a Listian symmetrical economic integration to an integrative and asymmetrical integration. This shift started in the early 1990s with the integration of the former Soviet economies into the economies of Europe and the world as a whole, reached its climax with the Eastern enlargement of the Union in 2004, and now forms the foundation of the renewed Lisbon Strategy. This change is measurably threatening European welfare: the economic periphery in the first instance, and potentially the core countries as well. Two parallel processes aggravate this development: the timing of the enlargement at this particular phase of the evolving techno-economic paradigm; and the creation of the European Monetary Union along the so-called Maastricht route towards convergence and fiscal stability.

Measuring Economic Growth in the Islamic Caliphate, 650-1000.

Economic growth in contemporary societies is a subject of study for economists and speeches for politicians. Economic growth in historical societies is, unlike that of contemporary societies, a subject dominated by one theme, that of the ‘Miracle of the West’. One particular aspect of this theme, the role of institutions in economic growth, is of special interest for us here, as it is the only one which brings Islamic societies into the discussion of economic growth, even though as an example of failure. Islamic institutions are being blamed for failing Muslims in their quest for economic progress by not transforming themselves into the efficient European ones. Failure to provide legal contract enforceability, asymmetric information in the markets, hostility towards institutional property rights etc. are cited, mostly as an outcome of the rigidity of the Islamic law which built structural constraints against efficient economic behavior. While comparing, implementing and judging actual conditions by standards of a theoretical model, one which has taken centuries to evolve into its final shape, and blaming its absence on the failure of society to acculturate accordingly, may strike historians as methodologically flawed, but more fruitfully, the question needs to be studied ‘in situ’, embedded in its proper historical context in order for the conclusions to be valid.
My underlying hypothesis in this paper is that a process of economic growth did in fact occur in the Islamic Caliphate between the 8th and the 11th centuries, visible on its own and in comparative terms. In order to demonstrate that economic growth occurred we need to show that structural changes credited as being responsible for economic growth, took place. Having dealt previously with the structural changes which occurred in labour, manufacturing and trade, increasing their capacity to produce more and more efficiently, distribute more items and more efficiently, I will now study the changes in the monetary system as a stimulus of economic growth. I will present quantitative evidence on and document the increased money supply and the increased monetary circulation in the different regions of the Caliphate based on new numismatic research. Equally, I will present new evidence on the role of the Islamic State in initiating mining and minting continuously and from an early date, and the elaboration of the state fiscal institutions dealing with tax collection in cash, and analyze the effect of the increased money supply on trade, the markets, new commercial techniques and financial instruments. I will establish that monetary circulation, effective mining and minting disappeared for all intents and purposes in the Mediterranean lands, and that until resumed there in the 10th century, the Abbasid Empire and its Eastern provinces, were the only global economy based on silver currency, and where gold, the Islamic dinar, served mostly as money of account responsible for the introduction of cash transfer by suftajas. The evidence of the Abbasid and Samanid State budgets will be used to add to the debate over the size of money supply in economic growth, a role denied to the monetary system of Greece and Rome, but granted to that of 13th century Europe.

ABSTRACT

The Black Death in Egypt and England:
A Comparative Economic Analysis

Stuart J. Borsch


This talk will pose a singular but challenging question for comparative history. Why did two pre-industrial economies, faced with the same level of depopulation from the Black Death, respond so differently to the same external shock? While England recovered, Egypt collapsed.
Focusing on agrarian economics, this presentation will demonstrate that, while English landlords lost a battle with the peasants, the English economy recovered. On the other hand, Egyptian landlords won the battle with their peasantry and yet their economy collapsed. These contrasting outcomes were caused by the differences in the sociological dynamics of landholder-peasant relations. This study will show exactly how the structure of the two landholding systems determined these outcomes.

The administration of the Early Islamic Caliphate was largely based on the institutions and the administrative structure of the political entities that controlled the Near East before the Arab conquest. Prior to this conquest, Iraq was subject to the authority of the Sasanian dynasty. The continuity between the institutional framework of the Sasanian Empire and that of the Islamic Caliphate is sometimes striking, but remarkable changes occurred as well. In order to understand the process of continuity and change in State administration we must analyse the evolution of the institutional framework in connection with the economic, social and even ecological challenges faced by the Middle Eastern Empires. Land tax administration is a very important example of how such factors were interconnected. Both the Sasanian Empire and the Islamic Caliphate relied heavily on land tax income. At the beginning of the sixth century, the Sasanian Emperors were able to implement an important tax reform, which introduced a tax assessment based on a fixed amount of money or crops per surface unit and led to an increasingly centralized tax administration. This system aimed to create a stable financial basis for a government that was involved in continuous wars. The Islamic Caliphate based its land tax on a similar system, but step by step several innovations were introduced, as a result of different factors, such as deteriorated water management, pressure from elites, growing urban population.

Utilizing historical as well juridical sources, this paper will focus on two questions: how Medieval Islam understood the Quranic prohibition of usury and how this prohibition influenced the practice of commerce. I’ll argue that the Islamic jurisprudence reacted to the law of usury developing legal instruments necessary for the extensive use of mercantile credit which was crucial in the rise of Medieval Islamic commerce and entrepreneurship. The shortage of cash together with the risks of transporting large sums of money across perilous routes also contributed in the growth of a sophisticated system of credit instruments.
The Quran censured the practice of ribâ (usury, considered as the practice whereby the principal sum was doubled and redoubled) very early and denounced it in unprecedented strong terms. The Prophetic tradition and the Islamic jurisprudence felt the need to include in the ribâ ban other forms of transactions. They extended the law of usury to all exchanges of gold, silver, wheat, barley, dates, and salt; besides, they demanded not only an immediate delivery of the two lots which were being exchanged, but also absolute equality in quantity if the two lots belonged to the same species In the course of time a vast and expanding literature on the subject accumulated categorically forbidding ribâ. At the same time legal devices (hiyal) proliferate in order to violate the letter of Islamic law on interest.
According to Islamic economic ethics usury as well as any return on capital are sources of evils in the economy such as stagnation, unequal accumulation of wealth, and increase in the gap between rich and poor, whereas zakat (alms), wages, profit and profit-share recreate an equitable balance. Muslim jurisprudence reacted to the prohibition of interest providing adequate legal instruments for the commercial need of both investors and traders. Partnerships took mainly the form of mudaraba or of musharaka. Mudaraba was an arrangement between a capital provider and an entrepreneur, whereby the entrepreneur can mobilize the funds of the former for its business activity. The entrepreneur provided expertise, labour and management. Profits made are shared between the capitalist and the entrepreneur according to predetermined ratio. Musharaka was an agreement between two parties or more, who contribute capital to a business, and divide the net profit and loss pro rata. Along with the institutions of formal credit, Muslim merchants and businessmen developed a network of informal credit mainly based on their trust and creditworthiness or reputation in society. The records of Geniza archive in Cairo as analyzed by S. D. Goitein still form one of the best sources of evidence about the nature of informal credit in Medieval Islam.
The partnerships and the informal arrangements created strong cooperation feelings and mutual exchanges among merchants. They allowed dealing on credit reducing the economic incidence of loan and interest in the context of Medieval Islamic economic life. In so far Medieval Islamic trade could flourish without incurring in the strict law of usury.

Commercialization is seen as a process that in- volves increased economic exchange based on specialized production. It is argued that in the early Islamic period this included a change in the nature of commercial agency, the commercializa-tion of agriculture, public bathing, and the annual housing markets at Makka and Madina, the involve- ment of merchants in mining, and the development of a slave trade. The causes of commercialization are argued to have included the fact that the early Islamic empire was created and ruled by people with a merchant background or who were involved in commerce as government officials, the lack of restrictiions on commerce and on who could engage in it, the stimulation of commerce by a monetized economy, the development of credit instruments, tax breaks, and the annual hajj, and the facilitation of commerce by merchant networks provided by religious communities. The two main hypotheses are (1) a change from government control of commerce to government facilitatiion of commerce from the sixth to the eighth century C.E and (2) a change during the seventh century from government distribution of necessities to the commercial provision of commodities by merchants through market exchange.

The territory of the modern Catalonia was submitted by the Umayyad army during a brief period of time, from the penetration of al-Hurr (717-718) up to the stabilization of the Carolingian frontier by Charlemagne in 810. We want to call the attention on the fact that the early Catalan private documentation contains allusions to the payment of a tax called "tasca”.
This voice, which in current Catalan has still the meaning of “work” or “task” (i. e. poll-tax) was introduced at the beginning of the Islamic conquest as a key element of a new tax system implemented in the process of occupation, organization and defence of a frontier land in the journey Umayyad army towards the Gallia. Tasq, a peculiar fiscal element, and the tax system introduced by the Islamic conquest survived for centuries in Catalonia, until the end of the middle Ages, as the Catalan documentation reflects. The consultation of the oriental sources is fundamental for the knowledge of the meaning of these taxes in origin, in Mesopotamia, where the first fiscal measures were applied in the construction of the Umayyad power. Only from the experience of conquest in East we can illuminate the application of these taxes and the transfer of a fiscal system from East to West in the first years of the expansion of the Islam.

Since Joseph A. Schumpter published his "Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung" in 1911 an important role in economic development has been assigned to entrepreneurship. Thanks to three large initiatives (the Observatory of European SMEs, belonging to the European Union; the Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs and Local Development, belonging to the OECD; and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor or GEM) and some surveys, such as the Eurobarometer or a very recent one for the World Bank (Klapper et al., 2007), it has been possible to make progress in the last years in dealing scientifically with the concept of the entrepreneurship. These researches have been of interest to governments, particularly those from European countries. Thus, in 2003, the European Commission brought out the "Green Paper on Entrepreneurship in Europe", which based mainly on research by David B. Audretsch (Audretsch et al., 2002), proposed to debate on several initiatives to stimulate entrepreneurship in Europe.

Reflecting this concern, the Spanish Consejo Económico y Social (CES) published in 2005 a report entitled "El proceso de creación de empresas y el dinamismo empresarial", which to a great extent was based on GEM reports. The report gave special attention to factors involved in creating businesses where public policies can take action. The CES analysts attached great importance to the relationship between education and entrepreneurship. Both the Green Paper and the CES report have provided a basis for the Spanish Governments and the Autonomous Communities to make every effort in recent years in initiatives completely unheard of in the field of education. Given the interest shown recently by public policies in the relationship between education and entrepreneurial spirit, we shall devote this paper to investigate the evolution of the training of entrepreneurs and managers between 1964 and the present time through the available bibliography on the subject and the data provided by the official survey on the working population (the "Encuesta de Población Activa").

This paper is the first product of an ongoing research on the determinants and the role of entrepreneurship in Italian economic development. Its primary aim is the creation of a data-set of Italian entrepreneurs for the period encompassed between the Unification of the Kingdom (1861) and the end of the XXth century. The main source of the research is a collection of 390 entrepreneurial biographies, prepared for an ongoing Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs. The first part of the paper presents a descriptive analysis of the main peculiarities of the country’s entrepreneurship on the basis of a few standard variables traditionally used in economic analysis. The second one refines the descriptive approach through a methodology – Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis – usual by now in standard statistics, yet not very familiar to scholars in economic and/or business history. This has allowed us to single out a few entrepreneurial typologies of the history of Italian capitalism which partly confirm the “traditional” features already emphasized by historiography; such as the prominence of northern entrepreneurs, the strong relations both with own and partner’s families, the almost total absence of female entrepreneurs and an essentially middle-class rooted entrepreneurship. However a few novel interesting aspects emerge, the most surprising being the good level of formal education of the sample: a neat majority (60%) has a medium/high degree and almost one third an university degree

Almost thirty years ago the Business History Review published an essay of mine under the title, “Entrepreneurial Typologies in the History of Industrial Italy”. That paper underlined the differences between a State-oriented entrepreneurship identified with the city of Genoa and the contrasting market-oriented entrepreneurship more commonly associated with the city of Milan. Actually three typologies were outlined: the “private” entrepreneur, the “supported” entrepreneur and the “public” entrepreneur as my work determined that, even with this overwhelming presence of the State, it was possible to single out the concept that we define as entrepreneurship.

This current paper is a reconsideration of that article in light of the progress achieved in the past thirty years as regards Italian business history. Able to call upon the wealth of data to be found in the unpublished Biographical Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs (with its six hundred entries of entrepreneurs who operated in Italy from its Unification in the middle of the 19th century up to the beginning of the 21st century), this time the typologies are much more articulated. Furthermore, the paper incorporates the last four decades of the 20th century unlike the previous paper which terminated with the years of Italy’s “economic miracle” in the Fifties.

From this reconsideration as well as the new issues now examined, it is now possible to have a snapshot of the conquests-- as well as the limits-- of Italian capitalism. Furthermore, the great varieties of Italian entrepreneurial forces and their troubled relationship with public institutions are another issue subject to scrutiny.

Focusing on the historical determinants of entrepreneuship in Latin America, and in particular, the influence of cultural factors, this paper is aimed at an analysis of the eventful path of the literature dealing with the role of values (from "traditional" to "modern") and its relationships to entrepreneurship in Latin America between 1850-2000, and to examining the potential growing business historiography on this region of the world offers to advance its understanding. For this purpose, the papers draws selectively on surveys of the field and explores the challenges and opportunities confronting future research into the historical explanation of entrepreneurship in this part of the world; in particular, its potential for conducting studies of entrepreneurial typologies are also delineated. With this in mind, key features and patterns of Latin American entrepreneurship based upon business history research output are also identified. Within Latin America's broad scope and diversity (the region consists of 21 countries), this paper encompasses Mexico and seven South American nations (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Perú, Venezuela and Uruguay), with particular emphasis on an Andean country (Colombia). The contents of this paper could prove useful to policy makers fostering entrepreneurship in Latin America, as well as to business schools engaged in needed discussion about the extent to which culture, and in particular values are key in today's concerns to foster entrepreneurship.

Recent literature on entrepreneurship stresses the fundamental role played by networks in achieving innovation, competitiveness and internationalization (Cassis and Minoglou 2005). On the other hand, longevity has been claimed by A. Chandler Jr. or Y. Cassis, among others, as an ideal measure of the performance of firms, and thus, of entrepreneurship. And it is precisely longevity and networks the two most important features that characterize successful dynasties. Political scientists and economists have coincided in outlining the otherwise underestimated role of dynasties in the advance of entrepreneurship in both developed and underdeveloped economies (Landes 2006). In order to shed light about the role played by dynasties in the creation of social capital and the accumulation and transfer of entrepreneurship, this paper looks closely at the role played by Catalan dynasties from the late 19th century through the late 20th century. Economic historians have stressed the historical leadership of this region in the Spanish industrialization process. Moreover, hundreds of biographies have revealed the existence of many Schumpeterian innovative entrepreneurs in the region, able to see opportunities and gather resources to establish businesses in a wide variety of economic activities. There is, however, comparatively less work, with a cross sector approach, on the social and institutional dynastic networks that made entrepreneurship such a historically available, and adaptive, resource in this region. Interestingly, in Catalonia a considerable number of Schumpeterian dynasties have managed to transfer entrepreneurship from generation to generation, thus leaving a valuable bequest for the future of the region. Many of these dynasties are indeed leading the internationalization process of many Spanish firms in quite a successful way. In our paper we present advanced results of a research in progress about large family firms in Catalonia. We will place the Catalan dynasties in a theoretical framework that takes into account the social capital of the region as a factor that helped to build the networks through which information, goods and persons have flowed over time.

This paper tests the strength and persistence of cultural influences on entrepreneurship over the best part of a century. Comparison of self-employment propensities of US immigrant groups in 1910 and 2000 suggests a number of stable customary stimuli, deduced from national origins. In accordance with the ‘cultural critique’, the English were less prone to entrepreneurship than other US immigrant groups, once controls for other influences are included. The Dutch were consistently about averagely entrepreneurial, not as precocious as might be expected if the predominant Protestant religion encouraged entrepreneurship. Conversely Weber’s identification of nineteenth century Catholic culture as inimical to economic development is not born out in the twentieth century by the sustained entrepreneurship of Cubans and Italians in the United States. The strongest entrepreneurial cultures were exhibited by those originating from the Middle East, Greece and Turkey, though some historical interpretation is necessary to establish who these people were. The inference from these patterns is that entrepreneurial culture must be of minor significance for economic development compared with institutional influences.

This paper discusses the approaches and typologies of entrepreneurship in the emerging markets, using the case of India. Theoretical issues around the use of foreign technology vs. traditional knowledge are examined. Then, typologies of entrepreneurship are examined over different phases of history. The discussion is organized chronologically - pre-British era, British colonial era, early independence mixed economy era, and reforms era. The real-world facts assembled, and insights gained are pregnant with meaning for entrepreneurship in the emerging markets.

This paper examines entrepreneurs(hip) in Greece between National Independence in 1830 and 1909, the year of the ‘peaceful revolution’ of the bourgoisie. Following Foreman-Peck (2005), the formation of new companies is perceived as an outcome of entrepreneurial initiatives. The analysis here is based on an exciting new database constructed from the 251 founding charters of the total population of 303 joint stock company type Société Anonyme start-ups established between 1830 and 1909. This database offers information on the identities and actions of company founders. It also gives a unique opportunity to conceptualise the general contours of entrepreneurs(hip) in the macroscopic context of Greece, a latecomer economy/young nation state.
This essay argues that the mercantile diaspora, modern nation building and the legacies of the past were the most important determinants of entrepreneurship in the nascent ‘corporate sector’. It also proposes that entrepreneurship was multifacted; it did not fit within one single theoretical typology. Moreover, the analysis here makes the case that incorporation unleashed new entrepreneurial forces that fostered new economic activities and spaces while also developing synergies with the sphere of tradition in business. Finally, this paper unveils the rich mosaic of founders of Société Anonymes. In examining the body of company founders we could perhaps speculate the following: had Westerners been the (sole) direct physical carriers of foreign technologies and capital the synergies between tradition and modernity would have been less pronounced.

Entrepreneurial studies are proliferating and a question which is cropping up often is: what moves entrepreneurs? is it just a matter of genes, or are there more general factors (social, psychological) which move people to become entrepreneurs; and not only this: what makes entrepreneurs successful? What makes some behave in a certain way and others differently? Using a sample of English and Spanish entrepreneurs, the paper tries to show that
economic role of education and its role in the formation of the entrepreneurial spirit are very important.

Studies of entrepreneurship in nineteenth century Japan typically focus on the activities of large, family owned conglomerates know as zaibatsu due to the lack of documentation for smaller independent firms. Nevertheless, it may be possible to broaden the scope of analysis by using data drawn from corporate genealogies, which provide a more complete cross-section of entrepreneurial activity. Using these genealogies, I develop a new dataset of firm entry during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) for a wide range of industries, allowing me to analyze aspects of Japan's early industrialization that heretofore have relied on anecdotal or case evidence. I also propose a game-theoretic model of entry appropriate for late developing economies to exploit the qualitative nature of these data.

This paper is the first product of an ongoing research on the determinants and the role of entrepreneurship in Italian economic development. Its primary aim is the creation of a data-set of Italian entrepreneurs for the period encompassed between the Unification of the Kingdom (1861) and the end of the XXth century. The main source of the research is a collection of 390 entrepreneurial biographies, prepared for an ongoing Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs. The first part of the paper presents a descriptive analysis of the main peculiarities of the country’s entrepreneurship on the basis of a few standard variables traditionally used in economic analysis. The second one refines the descriptive approach through a methodology – Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis – usual by now in standard statistics, yet not very familiar to scholars in economic and/or business history. This has allowed us to single out a few entrepreneurial typologies of the history of Italian capitalism which partly confirm the “traditional” features already emphasized by historiography; such as the prominence of northern entrepreneurs, the strong relations both with own and partner’s families, the almost total absence of female entrepreneurs and an essentially middle-class rooted entrepreneurship. However a few novel interesting aspects emerge, the most surprising being the good level of formal education of the sample: a neat majority (60%) has a medium/high degree and almost one third an university degree.

The composition and correlation in number of the communities of west European merchants in Russia changed greatly during the 18th century. At the beginning of the century there existed three communities: Dutch, a rather influential and active one; Hamburg, inferior to the Dutch in number and influence, but similar in status; the English, forfeited its former importance, but still leaning on Russia Company in London. At the end of the century the English community stands out clearly, exceeding all others by the scales of trade, having essential privileges. The Dutch community nearly disappears, many of its members fuse with the world of German merchants anyway, the latter includes now not only natives of Hamburg and Hanseatic cities, but the representatives from many German cities and lands. In the second half of the 18th century French community is formed, first of all in the milieu of small and retail business. Its representatives arrived from miscellaneous cities of France, mostly provincial, being descendants from non-commercial families. National communities of the time had a transnational character. It is obvious in reference to German merchants. The English community gained transnational character due to its privileges, which members of Russia Company enjoyed.

In the early modern period, just like the Dutch, the English, too, developed merchant colonies abroad and they did so for the same reasons: to develop and maintain new markets. The colonies kept that innovative function as long as structural changes occurred in the English commercial system involving the development of new combinations of markets and products. Shifts in regions of supply and demand and shifts in the composition of the commodity package caused the English merchants to maintain a lead in market knowledge, particularly knowledge of the details of changing demand and supply. The colonies became redundant when such dymanic structural changes no longer took place and trade became routine. In that case, local merchants abroad could catch up and take over.

The Portuguese empire ("seaborne", to quote a famous expression by the common ancestor of all Brazilianists, Charles Boxer) became more of a reality in the ultramarine deployments than in its own territory. Isolated from the rest of Europe and facing the seas, the Portuguese got used to certain isolation, as if they lived in a mythical island anchored on the historical density of the surrounding liquid masses. As they surrendered themselves and their territories to the History of the Atlantic and the nearby seas, their small region developed into a piece of primary importance in the complex historical relationship that would embrace the connected poles: Asia, Africa, America, whose relations were symbolized on continental scales by precise historical references, almost all of which are shore sites like Goa, Macau, Luanda, Angola, Recife and Salvador. The dream of the empire in Asia was good, yet short-lived. With a few exceptions, it did not sink its roots deeply, even if it fed the peninsular imaginary for centuries, relinquished before Asian eyes from where all the good things came: spices, art, science, oniric images. More durable, concrete relationships were built by transoceanic bridge between the European continent Asia and Brazil, forming a mosaic indispensable to the existence of the empire, independently from the importance each of those poles may have acquired at specific historical periods. It is thus a reflection about the nature of the Portuguese empire on the confluence of three strategic lines: historical trajectory realized within the limits of our perception based on existing research; visions produced by the main interpreters grounded on precise moments of the historical phases they research about, and the relation among the visions and historical moments as lived out by such interpreters, a constellation of interacting historical, ideological and cultural ingredients that is what we call to produce a real historiographic analyze.

This paper aims to show the economic role of Florentine and Genoese merchant colonies in Late Renaissance Venice. During that period (1570-1620) Venice was still an important commercial gateway in the Mediterranean and Europe, thanks also to the development of new manufactures (mainly luxury production) and the growing interest for international financial market by local noblemen. Given the troubles of local merchant class in Levantine trade, especially in the first part of 17th century, an important role was played by some foreign merchant colonies, as the Dutch, German, Portuguese and Milanese. Among them, economic activities of Florentine and Genoese merchants were very complex, including not only commercial intermediation and maritime insurance, but also manufactures and public and private finance. Thanks to their complex network across Europe, these merchants controlled the import/export of strategic raw materials, financing manufacturing activities (as silk and woollen) and encouraging migration of human capital (craftsmen, engineers, inventors). On the other hand, they collected a great amount of moneys by local merchant and noblemen, putting them in the main financial centres as Lyon, Bisenzone and Bolzano.
The purpose of this paper is to identify social and economic factors allowing Florentine and Genoese merchants to settle inside the Venetian society, playing a central role within the Mediterranean and European trade, sometimes replacing Venetian merchants and dealing with other foreign traders. The paper also aims to identify the different ties (kinship and non-kinship, “strong” and “weak”) that ensuring their network across Europe and inside Venice. Finally it will examine the different strategies used to resolve conflicts (legal and extra-legal), paying particular attention to relationship with local institutions, which sometimes sought to limit the freedom of economic action for mercantlistic purposes.

My new book and DVD, will be published in Swedish in the beginning of June 2009, and are dealing
with similar questions as in the session.
Abstract
Christina Dalhede, Resourceful Immigrants. Mixed-Europeans and Merchant Families in Early
Modern Europe. Connections, Credits, Culture. (An Early European Market 1). Preindustrial
Research Group, Department of Economic History, School of Business, Economics and
Law, University of Gothenburg. Göteborg 2009. Ill. 208 pages. ISBN 978-91-978210-0-1.
Christina Dalhede, Families, Connections, Credits, Culture 1540–1820. DVD. (An Early European
Market 2). Preindustrial Research Group, Department of Economic History, School of Business, Economics
and Law, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg 2009. Ill. ISBN 978-91-978210-1-8 DVD
Resourceful Immigrants will discuss questions and thoughts concerning possibilities and problems
that immigrants to Sweden faced in early modern history. The book will contribute to new
knowledge by providing examples of how practical problems were solved during that period. A
family with European family roots in their luggage, who immigrated to 16th Century Sweden, will
shape the read line in the book. We will accompany Nicolaus and his family from the 16th Century
Southern Germany to the 17th and 18th Century Sweden. We will take part in their everyday
life as well as festive celebrations through out generations, in their meetings with other people
from different geographical, social and economic environments. Family context, geographical
contact networks and international ties played a central role in the Early-Modern society. So have
also capability, loyalty, trust, credits and capital. The question of success or failure as an immigrant,
no matter what occupation, depended on how and to what extent the individual, the family, the
home/ the house/ the company/enterprise, through their abilityand loyalty, could shape trust around
the family and their activities. Admittance to geographical contact networks, international connections,
capital and credits were built on trust. In particular, immigrants with mixed-European family
roots and merchant backgrounds, are shown to have been resourceful immigrants in economic,
social and cultural aspects in Early-Modern Sweden. The book is written in a popular science style.
Key words: Immigrant, resources, Mixed-European family, Merchant families, Early Modern Europe,
bills of exchange, capacity, capital, credits, European Market, family roots, geographical contact networks,
goods, home/house/ company, international Merchant Relations, loyality, merchants, middle
men, occupation, trust, Estate Inventories, Merchant Account Books, Business Letters, Antwerpen, Augsburg,
Arboga, Bergslagen, Bressanone (Brixen), Flögfors, Finnåker, Gimo, Göteborg, Hamburg, Karlstad,
Klatthammar, Klockhammar, Ljusnarsberg (Nya Kopparberg), Lindesberg, Lü beck, Mälaren, Nora,
Rostock, Stettin, Stockholm, Sverige, Venedig, Värmland, Örebro, Österby bruk, Merchant families:

By the end of the fifteenth century, England had long been a
center for international trade that was both prolific and profitable because
England was strategically located and could claim the finest wool in Europe.
These two characteristics made England an irresistible magnet for the
Germans and Italians who came, stayed and formed individual colonies. Each
possessed individual qualities that required creative strategies to maximize
profits while co-existing with the requirements of the host country. The
Germans, a collection of profit seeking cities, were given special
privileges to administrate a separate city-like zone in England while the
Italians, highly individualistic, true to their Italian sources, formed a
tightly closed society allowing no others to penetrate.

This paper follows the formation of Greek merchant “colonies” in the Mediterranean that came as a result of the expansion of Greek-owned shipping during the eighteenth century. Greeks in the eighteenth century, who were Ottoman or Venetian subjects, linked the Levant, or the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea to Western Europe through maritime and commercial networks that started to expand mainly to Western Mediterranean, and the northern European seas, and to a lesser degree to the other side of the Atlantic and the Indian oceans. These developed, on the one hand through the sea, by the development of a dense web of sea routes that linked the Mediterranean maritime regions, by seafarers based in the Aegean or Ionian islands and port-towns; and on the other hand, by land, that is via mobile groups of organized Greek entrepreneurial families involved in international sea-trade and the establishment of a chain of Greek merchant “colonies”, or paroikies, that handled it.

The operations of Russian merchants in 17th-century Sweden were strongly encouraged by government policy and typically recognized as a key precondition of success for the government’s ambitious Derivation policy. The triumph of reason over inertia and short-term opportunism was, however, slow and tentative and, moreover, frequently reversed. In the end this meant that the Russian presence in Sweden, albeit inconsistent, underwent a considerable structural transformation in the course of the 17th century. At the beginning of the century, the Russians of the newly conquered territories of Ingria and Karelia constituted a bridge – indeed the key connection – to their friends, relatives and business partners in the Novgrodian lands and the Pskov region.

Over time, however, the numbers and importance of these “indigenous” Russian declined and Swedish-Russian commercial interaction became increasingly dependent on government policy and the facilities created for Muscovite Russian visitors in Riga, Stockholm, and Narva. The economic renaissance of the Novgorod lands contributed to this process by giving Russian merchants the means to operate over longer distances and on a grander scale. The German, Swedish and English burghers of Narva supplanted their once-so-important Russian brethren in Ivangorod as the key counterparties of Russian merchants in southwestern Ingria. The pattern played out in Nyen which was one of the leading lights of the Swedish colonization and Derivation policies alike. Riga’s revival in Russian trade was above all driven be the reincorporation of the Smolensk lands into Muscovy and the dramatic take-off of hemp and timber trade on the Düna/Dvina route. This trade was able to thrive because of the logistical and regulatory support provided by the Swedish authorities.

Stockholm’s Ryssgården was the most concrete and impressive case of the triumph of politics over geography, especially since the leading light Swedish-Russian trade at the close of Sweden’s Golden Age was the capital Stockholm and not the Neva port of Nyen. The extraordinary expansion of trade was in neither case driven by local indigenous Russian populations but engendered an increasingly regular and ongoing Russian presence in these key commercial centers.

The big commercial areas of the Ancien Régime, in particular the major ports, attracted capital as well as people and became the driving force of the economic activity in Western Europe. The migrants were first of all the inhabitants of near regions who came looking for work and better living conditions but also populations from afar who were attracted by the desire to speculate and to make their fortune in commerce and trade. In France, in the 18th century after the death of Louis XIV new foreign colonies reformed. These colonies had very different features from the old communities of the 17th century both at the level of their activities, their importance and their integration in the society.

Between the mid- 19th and early 20th centuries, Norwegian brewing was transformed from a handicraft activity typically carried out in individual households for private consumption to an industrial activity organised in specialised breweries serving national and international markets. A key feature of this transformation was a substantial increase in the quantities of beer produced by individual firms. The increased scale of production was made possible by the introduction of new technologies that, on the one hand, led to the mechanisation of key production processes, and on the other hand, improved the quality and consistency of the beer.

This paper studies these innovation processes from an institutional perspective, suggesting that the emergence of trade mark legislation was of major importance for the breweries’ ability to benefit from the new technologies. Building on the work of Mira Wilkins, it is argued that trade marks - as a tool for attracting consumers - were crucial for the creation of volume sales, and thus for taking advantage of the economies of scale made possible by technical innovation.

Much research has been devoted to the role systems for the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) played in supporting technological change during the early industrialisation of Western economies. The main focus has however been on the patent system, one main argument being that patents may have encouraged firms to innovate by providing them with a mechanism for appropriating the economic returns of their innovations.

While Norway got its first patent legislation in 1839, patenting by domestic breweries was almost negligible before 1920. All in all, no more than 14 patents were taken out. The breweries did however make extensive use of trade marks. The first trade mark legislation was passed in 1884, and by 1920, more than 20 breweries had registered a total of just under 100 trade marks. By looking into this development and relating it to the technical changes that occurred, the paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the hitherto little studied relationship between innovation and trade marks.

Plant breeding was a growing industry in Britain throughout the long 19th century. A veritable tide of new plant varieties appeared in this period, by 1900 Britain was home to no less than four international seed merchants all of which bred their own plants. Yet in Britain new plant varieties were not considered to be intellectual property until the 1960s. So how did British plant breeders make money from their innovations if they could not patent? One answer is that as plants have the ability to virtually self replicate, real novelty was highly prized and could be charged for accordingly. As methods of producing novelties developed a system of giving prizes and certificates also blossomed. When these marks of merit were awarded breeders would consciously tie the identity of their varieties with their own. Using eponymy encouraged growers to buy from the originating breeder rather than any other who had copied the variety. However, this wasn’t the only way growers were encouraged to buy new stocks of seed rather than producing their own. Breeders also employed several methods of temporarily improving existing varieties, encouraging growers to return once this improvement had degenerated.

We might usefully (though not dogmatically) think about breeding methods in this period as falling into two groups, those which produced novelties and those which produced improvements. Both types of breeding method delineated ways in which breeders could make money out of items traditionally thought of as a ‘gift of god’ rather intellectual property. At the very start of the 20th century a further development in plant breeding arrived on the scene – Mendelian hybridisation. This was a new and supposedly more scientific method of producing novelties. It also made a very effective vehicle for the Cambridge scholars responsible for its development to argue for the need to publicly fund their plant breeding. Once again the methods by which innovative breeders made money depended upon their breeding methods. Mendelian hybridisation was viewed as suitably scientific, and so powerful, to be ‘bought’ by the government in one of the first instances of public funding for scientific research in British history.

This paper charts the development of some of the more important plant breeding methods that were used increasingly in Britain during the long 19th Century. For each breeding method I describe the allied method of raising funds for the costs of breeding. I argue that the move to public funding for breeding did not represent a radical break in the history of plant breeding but rather continued a tradition of breeders tailoring their fund raising methods to the types of breeding they were undertaking.

This project provides a systematic assessment of inventive activity outside the patent system in the United States during early industrialization. My paper analyzes inventions that were submitted for annual prizes in the United States during the course of the nineteenth century. The data have been linked to censuses to obtain information on characteristics of the inventors, including wealth and occupations. The inventions and inventors were also traced in patent records, which allows us to estimate the propensity to patent. The results measure the extent to which technological change was occurring outside the U.S. patent system, the nature of these inventions, and their variation across industry, sector and region. These patterns for unpatented inventions are compared to those for patenting activity. Moreover, the paper estimates the factors that influenced whether specific inventions and inventors attempted to appropriate returns through the protection of intellectual property rights, or through alternative institutions.

The purpose of this study is to present an interesting example of innovation without patents at the beginning of the 19th century, through the survey of a network of inventors and improvers who were connected to a powerful learned society, the Society for Encouragement of National Industry, which was created by Chaptal, in 1801.

The invention of the airplane was achieved after decades of effort by experimenters in many countries. The experimenters, inventors, and authors who contributed to the airplane’s development acted like open source software developers in the way they shared information. The Wright brothers depended on information on aircraft available in the public domain. Hundreds of relevant persons can be identified by citations in an 1894 survey book, by the Wrights’ publications, and by historians afterwards. Each one’s importance can be inferred by the frequency with which each one is cited. Many aircraft patents were filed in the 1800s but they are not cited afterwards and so do not seem to be important. This study describes some aspects of information sharing and discusses a formal model of open-source technology development by creative technologists. Sharing through a network of information advances a technology, which then eventually makes it possible for technologists to become entrepreneurs and create an industry. In both history and model, when the technology is primitive, players are willing to share their findings, but when the technology is on a clear path to commercialization, some participants cease to contribute to the public pool of information. We see many firms offering aircraft related goods and servicess starting around 1909, and intellectual property is then more important.

A lack of data on innovations without patents has made it impossible to determine whether patenting rates vary systematically across industries and over time. This issue, however, is essential to our understanding of empirical analyses of innovation, which typically use patents to measure innovation. This paper takes advantage of a newly-collected data set of more than historical 8,000 innovations to provide the first quantitative estimates of patenting rates - the share of innovations that are patented. The data indicate that only a fraction of innovations (about 11 to 15 percent) are patented, and that patenting rates vary substantially across industries (from less than 5 to nearly 50 percent). Patenting rates are lowest in industries where innovations can be easily kept secret and highest in industries where they can be easily reverse-engineered. Comparisons over time reveal that patenting rates increased in response to scientific breakthroughs that lowered the effectiveness of secrecy, both over time and relative to other industries.

The topic will present a current research project where I try to understand the ways in which the dissemination of useful knowledge depended upon lay support and participation, which was expressed, for instance, through the rise of subscriptions for technical devices and schemes. Through a comparative approach of markets for inventions in France and in England, I will focus here more on subscription system as micro-social studies. My aim is to study how the social milieu which supported innovative activity, acted as a resource for inventors, improvers, and entrepreneurs in planning technological projects. These new practices stimulated new form of public patronage. In printed advertisements, the authors of inventions or improvements who wanted to find financial support would describe their projects (machine, processes, school…) and detail the expected effects of the device in question. It shows us how economic for innovations could be considered as social interaction. I will question how far these strategies of legitimating and funding of inventions based on public good rhetoric and on the mobilisation of the public sphere were connected or opposed to the privatisation in knowledge by patents and privileges.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Latin America was particularly fertile ground for cultivating numerous forms of bilateral commercial arrangements – known then as “reciprocity” arrangements. The history of U.S. commercial relations with Colombia offers an outstanding example of reciprocity’s several forms and functions. Colombia’s control of the Isthmus of Panama from independence through the end of the nineteenth century attracted the constant attention of the United States – not least because it attracted similarly the attention of Spain, Britain, and France. For reciprocity’s advocates in the United States, the arrangements were seen sometimes as a means of extending commercial freedom, but more often as a means of protecting certain domestic commercial interests as well as keeping the other Great Powers at bay in a crucial area of the Western Hemisphere. For Colombia it was a means of attending similarly to certain special interests, but was also, and more importantly, a way of guarding the nation’s sovereignty by playing the U.S., Britain, and Europe against one another. There was no fixed formula for achieving these goals by way reciprocal favors in commerce or navigation. The purpose of my essay is to show how the standard most-favored-nation and national-treatment provisions of reciprocity arrangements (and sometimes less standard provisions) sprang from varying motives and were adjusted to changing circumstances.

The political economy of trade policy is, for the most part, related to the way in which economic and political factors interact to shape the foreign economic policies of governments. It is, by itself, a major challenge to infer the impact of political economy on trade policy in a country more than a hundred years ago because modern political economy models ignore the heavy data constraints present in historical data as well as the differences in the existing political process.
As in other countries at the time, trade policy, and particularly the tariff structure in Colombia, was essentially viewed, as an instrument to guarantee revenues for the State. This paper argues that, although, fiscal policy was a key policy instrument, the political economy process was important in shaping the evolution of trade policy between 1886 and 1931 in Colombia.

Albert Hirschman (1945) suggests that the big economies have a better negotiating capacity for stabilising commercial agreements with small becomes. Due to this, small economies can’t establish adequate commercial relationships, and ultimately they become export economies dependent on a big economy and based mainly on goods with little or no value added. Therefore there is dominance from a big economy to a small one through commerce. Hirschman thesis can be proven for Colombia during the 1910-1930 period, but not for the previous period (1850-1910), due to little integration of the Colombian economy with the international economy, and the internal dynamic of power relations between the local elite.

Until the appearances of coffee at the end of the XIX century, Colombian exports were sporadic, changing the export good depending on the international demand. The most relevant products of this system were tobacco, “quina”, and mineral products (gold, and silver). For the second part of the XIX century the enthusiasm the country once produced on English investors had disappeared and the constant political instabilities and violence didn’t promote immigration to the country. Diverse investment projects by English and northamericans failed or were planned but not executed. The only projects that had some success were the ones that had importance (political and economic) for the big economies. Some of those projects were gold mines, Panama’s train and canal. Also there was not a single hegemonic power in the region. During the XIX century the US struggled with other powers (specially the British) to become dominant and establish the Monroe doctrine. Due to the small economic integration of Colombia to the international economy, and the absence of an hegemonic power in the region, a dominance using trade didn’t happen as Hirschman thesis suggests.

With the boom of the export economy at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX, Colombia integrates better to the world economy. Also during that period the US consolidates its economic power and leadership in the region, reducing the European influence. With the discovery of petroleum in Colombia, the US congress approves the economic compensation due to the canal incident, and this restarts the trade between the two. This brings an astonishing amount of US capital to Colombia, and as a response the local elite concentrates on having good relationships with the US. Eventually most Colombian exports (specially coffee) are headed to the US. In this moment a new phase of Colombian trade relations is established, in which this country is more integrated with the international economy but also more dependent of it. In this new phase the US starts doing political pressure through trade policy and direct investments. For this period Hirschman thesis can be confirmed: there is a big economy dominating a small one through better negotiation power and commerce.

Colombia experienced in the 19th century and particularly during the world globalization -1870 onwards a dynamic expansion of coffee production which became the chief export product. The expansion took place in the midst of a frontier expansion based in the concessions or granting of vacant lands located to the west of the eastern mountain range. Most of the newly occupied territories turned into coffee production areas. How was this process? What was the policy that helped the consolidation of coffee production? To what extent the trade policies of Colombia during the globalization era were linked to or prompted the consolidation of coffee producers as an influential political group? How the rise of coffee producers changed the political equilibrium inherited from the Colonial times and Independence? How the fiscal needs of the government gave birth to policies that favored coffee producers? We will examine in particular whether the land granting policies favored the consolidation of coffee producers in the northwest and their relationship with and their influence over the coffee trade policy. We hypothesize that coffee producers transformed the existing political equilibrium and were supported by the Conservative government inasmuch as the national tax burden started to depend upon coffee trade.

(Discussant)

In surveying American enterprise in China during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, two important changes are visible: the change in commercial management and the change in merchandise that the American firms sold. With regard to management, American enterprises depended on Chinese buyers from the late 19th century; eventually they built their own distribution and sale systems under the direction of their headquarters in the United States. These enterprises would become the first generation of multinational companies before the World War I. The Standard Oil Company and British-American Tobacco Company are the two representative cases of such a management system. With regard to merchandise, American enterprises not only sold their own merchandise, but also came increasingly to re-invest in the Chinese market. One famous case is that of the Standard Oil Company, which invested in the excavation work of Zhili oil field, the navigation of interior rivers, the construction of highways, and so on.
The case of the Standard Oil Company is not unique. There are many other cases of American industrial entrepreneurs taking great interest in China’s industrialization. This article focuses on a selection of them in order to illustrate in detail the political economy of the U.S.-Chinese economic relationship from the late 19th to the early 20th century. It attempts to answer the following questions:
1. What were the essential contents of U.S.-China commercial treaties and Chinese business regulations, and how did they affect American business and trade in China?
2. What explains the lack of success of several attempted partnerships between American entrepreneurs and the Chinese government from the end of 19th century into the 1920s?
3. What complications arose for the U.S. government and American entrepreneurs from international competition in Chinese markets – specifically the overlapping privileges granted by the Chinese government to foreign investors?

This paper seeks to answer two questions: were the coinage debasements in Burgundian Flanders (1384-1482) undertaken principally as monetary or fiscal policies; and were they beneficial or harmful? In a recent monograph, Sargent and Velde (Big Problem of Small Change: 2002) contend that monetary objectives governed almost all medieval, early-modern debasements, especially to remedy the chronic shortages of petty coins. Despite overwhelming evidence that Burgundian Flanders, along with most of north-west Europe in the later 14th and 15th centuries, experienced severe monetary scarcities and liquidity crises, especially in the periods ca. 1390 - ca. 1415 and ca. 1440 - ca. 1470, both periods of severe deflations, there is no compelling evidence that the Burgundian rulers debased their coinages on the basis of any such monetary policies. My thesis is that the Burgundian rulers of Flanders, in competition with neighboring princes, undertook their debasements primarily as aggressive fiscal policies, specifically to finance warfare. Their goal was to increase their seigniorage revenues, the tax imposed on bullion brought to their mints, by two means: by increasing the tax rate itself, and by enticing an increased influx of bullion into their mints, both by the debasement techniques themselves and by auxiliary bullionist policies. Those policies were successful so long as three conditions were met: (1) that merchants supplying bullion received more coins of the same face value and thus with a greater aggregate money-of-account value than before (or than from other mints); (2) that the public accepted such debased coins at the same face value, by tale; and (3) that the merchants spent their increased supply of coins quickly, before any ensuing inflation eroded those gains. This study further demonstrates that the inflationary consequences of debasements were always less than those predicted by mathematical formulae – possibly because those debasements failed to counteract the prevailing forces of monetary contraction and deflation. Because so many princes pursued similar fiscal policies, many others engaged in debasement for purely defensive reasons: to protect their mints from foreign competition and to protect their domestic money supplies from influxes of debased and also counterfeit imitations: i.e., to counteract Gresham’s Law. If many debasements were retaliatory measures against a neighbour’s bullionist policies, those policies in general, and not just debasements, were also products of late-medieval warfare, which was also the primary culprit responsible for periodic monetary contractions: by impeding coinage circulations and bullion flows, and by provoking increased hoarding. The answer to the final question is that debasements were usually far more harmful than beneficial.

This paper employs a new method and dataset to estimate the effect of currency unions on the integration of financial markets in late medieval Central Europe. The analysis reveals that membership of a union strongly and significantly correlated with well-integrated markets. We also examine whether currency unions were endogenous. Our results indicate that markets were significantly better integrated prior to the formation of a union. In addition, we show that currency unions established by autonomous merchant towns were better integrated than unions implemented by territorial rulers. The overall implication is that late medieval Central European monetary diversity was a corollary of weakly integrated markets.

This paper examines the money of independent Bengal prior to its integration into the Mughal Empire, and for the most part before the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Even at this early period, Bengal was significant as a linking node between the maritime trade of the Bay of Bengal and the overland trade of northern and eastern India. As a populous country blessed with a consistent surplus production of agricultural commodities and textiles, Bengal was also a supplier of trade goods for the Indian Ocean trade.

Bengal’s monetary system was dual in nature: a heavy, high purity silver coin served the purposes of statecraft and commerce, while cowry shells met the needs of low-value transactions for the bulk of the population. A private financial industry assured the convertibility of the two denominations. Over time these moneychanger/financiers became strong enough to challenge the state’s pre-eminence in managing the money supply. The paper finds that, over the almost four centuries that this system was in place, it was successful in meeting the needs of an expanding economy and in linking the diverse requirements of the macro and micro spheres.

Bengal’s money appears to have been almost exclusively domestic in circulation and impact. However, neither of the commodities which comprised the circulating media, i.e. silver and cowry shells, were available locally, and both had to be imported. Along with other key imports, notably horses, they paid for the export of Bengali products to foreign markets.

Despite a lack of indigenous precious metal supply, the volume of Bengal’s metallic currency was comparable in scale to that of contemporary Europe. The high capacity of Bengal to absorb silver into its money supply must have been a significant driver of Indian Ocean trading patterns between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.

It is best to approach monetary by disaggregating individual monies to the maximum extent possible. It is a mistake to lump diverse monies together. Moreover, individual monies need not fulfill all three monetary functions (medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value). This essay takes disaggregation a step further, and argues that there are two distinct types of unit-of-account-only monies: (1) the imaginary monies used for accounting purposes, and (2) a ratio-unit-of-account money that serves a crucial role in a proposed Price Theory of Money. This Price Theory of Money (PTM) differs fundamentally from all Quantity Theories of Money, and is far more useful than normal QTMs for understanding monetary history and economic theory generally.

In the "Essai Politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne" (Paris 1808) Alexander von Humbodlt recalled that when he was in Mexico in 1803-1804, 1152 cacao beans were equivalent to one peso of eight rials--the famous piece of eight. Going back to the middle of the sixteenth century, the ratio of cacao beans to rials declined from 200:1 and 180:1 to 150:1, 100:1 and 80:1 in the late sixteenth century. The use of cacao beans in New Spain as currency is a phenomenon similar to the diversity of means of payment in Peru or the use of so-called "monedas de la tierra" (coinage of the land) in the La Plata region. The Spanish Crown was unable to introduce copper coinage ("vallon") in the American territories. The exportation of silver and gold was the fundamental source of large profits for American businessmen. The need for currency for local use, wheter as big payments or small change, depended on regional resources. In the case of New Spain, colonizers accepted the institution of cacao beans dating from Pre-Hispanic times, as a source of liquidity for small transactions. Using unregulated means of payment, including cacao beans was cheaper than copper, implied less taxation, and provided a money supply outside royal control.

The evolution of the Chinese monetary system usually has been portrayed as a shift from a low-value bronze currency that served as the standard state-issued money since the fifth century B.C.E. to a de facto uncoined silver standard that emerged in the fifteenth century and endured down to modern times. Between these two monetary regimes there was a transitional period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century that was especially noteworthy for the appearance of the world’s first viable paper money. More precisely, however, throughout the late imperial period the Chinese empire was divided into a number of distinct currency zones in which multiple forms of money—coin, silver, and paper money—circulated. The role of silver has received particular attention. An uncoined silver standard was gradually adopted as the basis of the imperial fiscal system between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, and the massive influx of silver during the “Silver Century” of 1540-1640 stimulated a rapid expansion of the commercial economy. By contrast, the role of silver in the multiple currency system of the Song has been underappreciated.
This essay compares three cycles of silver in late imperial China to illustrate how the changing function of silver in the Chinese monetary system between the twelfth and the nineteenth century reflected fundamental changes in money use within the domestic economy on one hand and changes in China’s relationship to international circuits of monetary exchange on the other. These three cycles are: (1) the initial development of silver in the Southern Song fiscal and monetary system, in tandem with the emergence of a paper money standard; (2) the impact of Chinese demand for silver on global circulation of silver during the “Silver Century”; and (3) the development of a new silver monetary standard (yuan) based on the Spanish peso in the nineteenth century.

Given the economic anxiety since the financial meltdown on Wall Street in October 2008, the debasement and inflation of the Roman world during the third century A.D. has suddenly seemed far more relevant. Debasement of imperial silver coinage, and its consequent price rises, has been seen by scholars as a primary force that changed imperial Rome, propelling her out of the Classical world into Late Antiquity. Continental scholars, writing during the Great Depression, argued that the price surges were comparable to the inflation of the 1920s and 1930s, and so ruined the savings classes. It was also argued that the imperial government changed its fiscal policy by collecting taxes in gold or kind rather than in coins from the mid-third century through the fifth century. This premise has been the basis for scholarly discussion of imperial currency and fiscal policy ever since. In this paper it is argued that debasement of the silver currency in 238-270 led to the creation of a fiduciary coin, struck in bronze with a silver coating of 5% fine that could be exchanged against gold coins. With these coins, soldier emperors between Aurelian (270-275) and Diocletian (284-305) financed imperial recovery. Aurelian replaced the antoninianus, a base metal coin with a surface coating of silver 2.5% fine, with a superior aurelianianus 5% fine. The coin was tariffed at 5 denarii communes (d.c.)–the imperial unit of account. In 293, Diocletian replaced this aurelianianus with a larger silver clad nummus also 5% fine (and so containing 50% more silver content). The nummus too was initially tariffed at 5 d.c. Each reform required a massive recoinage and regulation of production. The imperial government understood that too many coins in circulation drove up prices so that it responded to price surges by revaluing upwards fiduciary coins or issuing price controls. The rate of inflation is difficult to estimate, because documentary papyri from Egypt cite prices in local units of account, the Attic drachma and talent, rather than in coins. Hence, the deceptively large figures have misled many scholars to cite them as evidence of run-away inflation comparable to the Great Depression. Instead, units of account, whether the imperial denarius communis (d.c.) or local units, provided a convenient means for reckoning prices or tax obligations in coins during a period of fluctuating exchange rates. Finally, there is no evidence that the late imperial government demanded tax obligations in gold or commodities rather than in its fiduciary coins. Instead, in can be demonstrated from tax registers recorded on Egyptian papyri that the imperial government accepted its fiduciary coins. In conclusion, the soldier emperors Aurelian and Diocletian created a fiduciary coinage that financed a remarkable political and military recovery. Furthermore, these two emperors set imperial monetary policy down to 367. Civil wars and invasions led to debasement of the fiduciary coins, but, once each crisis had passed, emperors reformed the fiduciary money. If a modern analogy is needed, it may be more relevant to compare the currency reforms of Aurelian and Diocletian to the replacement of United States silver coins with cupro-nickel fiduciary coins since 1965 and the issuing of federal reserve bills (which are not backed by silver or gold in contrast to the early gold or silver certificates). For any fiduciary currency to work, it must be acceptable for negotiation of all debts, public and private.

This paper looks at monetary circulation, public policy and economic debate in Aragon during the seventeenth century. Rising market demand for money with a lower metal content encouraged the appearance of counterfeit and foreign coins. Though they facilitated transactions, these flows had adverse effects on the economy and kindled disputes between institutions with regard to the advisability of a devaluation of local coins in the second half of the century. The failure of this debate after 1675 prevented the emergence of an autonomous monetary policy aimed at stimulating economic recovery and facilitated increasing state intervention in the eighteenth century.

Abstract: Silver in England 1600-1800

This paper draws attention to the survival and interest of quantitative information in the records of the London Company of Goldsmiths relating to the weight of silverware hallmarked each year. This data can be set alongside mint output figures and data for the export of bullion by the East India Company to offer a more complete picture of the uses of silver in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The market requires that exchanges are voluntary and the law may restrict the workings of a given market. This is the case with Castile bullionist regulations, which led to an illegal bullion market in Early Modern Cadiz. This paper focuses on the structure of this illegal bullion market in order to understand the logic of silver outflows. Arbitrage is explained by the presence of an oligopsony power that depressed the price of silver in Cadiz and created a systematic bias between domestic and international market prices. The lesson that emerges from this paper is that understanding the specie-flow mechanism in the Early Modern Period demands the comprehension of the bullion market structure for the place and time examined.

Traditionally the monetary reforms of the Holy Roman Empire have been regarded as a failure by monetary historians and numismatists. My paper will elucidate the communication processes between the Reichsstände (princes and cities) in Northern Germany and the reformers working on behalf of the Emperor. In particular, the differing interests between princes and cities and their strategies to gain support on the imperial diet (Reichstag) will be examined. Despite these struggles the monetary policy of the Roman Empire and its institutions (such as Reichskreise and Kreismünztage) contributed at least to short term monetary stability in the northern parts of the Holy Roman Empire.

When the influx of American silver into Western Europe started it provoked immediately a dispute among scholar’s about its “macroeconomic” effects in the mid-sixteenth century. In the 18th century, especially in its second half, American silver output rose again at even higher growth rates without inciting similar discussions. When American silver production reached its first maximum (1590-1625), all over Europe copper coinage became a common feature. In Spain and the territories of the Holy Roman Empire there were periods of massive copper coinage that had to be stopped just when silver production dropped. In the 18th century European economies copper or vellon coinage presented no longer a problem. Now paper money was discussed. Like in Europe, in the Americas silver coinage was always scarce since the sixteenth century. In Spanish America despite all complaints and petitions to the Spanish crown there was almost no legal copper coinage, not even in the 18th century. Thus current money for every day payments in North and South America alike consisted of non metallic materials, such as paper, playing cards, buttons and the like, besides different forms of credit and even fiat money. Thus, which were the functions of silver in these early modern Atlantic economies. A look at the relationship between silver production and prices at the markets of Mexico, Sevilla and Amsterdam perhaps offers some more insight.

Contemporaries, and economic historians, have noted several features of medieval and early modern European monetary systems that are hard to analyze using models of centralized exchange. For example, contemporaries complained of recurrent shortages of small change and argued that an abundance/dearth of money had real effects on exchange, especially for the poor. To confront these facts, we build a random matching monetary model with two indivisible coins with different intrinsic values. The model shows that small change shortages can exist in the sense that adding small coins to an economy with only large coins is welfare improving. This effect is amplified by increases in trading opportunities. Further, changes in the quantity of monetary metals affect the real economy and the amount of exchange as well as the optimal denomination size. Finally, the model shows that replacing full-bodied small coins with tokens is not necessarily welfare improving.

Thomas Sargent and François Velde (2002) argue that it took government authorities centuries to solve the ‘big problem of small change’ because those authorities were constrained, first by the lack of a sound theory of small change, and then by the lack of adequate technology for implementing the theory. British experience suggests, however, that institutions also played a crucial part. In particular, the monopolistic nature of Great Britain’s official coinage arrangements undermined incentives for establishing a sound system of small change even after theoretical and technological constraints were no longer present. The institutional perspective offered here helps to explain a number of historical facts that are otherwise puzzling, including the fact that a relatively successful private-sector small change system anticipated Great Britain’s official solution to the small-change problem by two decades.

Debasement, Prices and Wages in the1480s in the Burgundian Netherlands.

I shall use the debasements of the 1480s in the Netherlands and of the 1540s in England as case studies of the effects of debasement on prices and wages.
The key to reactions to debasement then was not the extent of the debasement itself (which was kept secret), but the extent of the increase in the mint price offered for silver (which was deliberately publicised). The most immediate effect both in England in the 1540s and the Netherlands in the 1480s was the change in exchange rates.
It was through the changes in exchange rates that prices were effected. In England in the 1540s the principal effect was on the prices of imported luxury commodities. In the Netherlands in the 1480s not only were these effected, but also the prices of bread, meat and salt, since the Netherlands in the 1480s was not able to feed itself, and depended on imported food, grain shipped from the Baltic, cattle driven from Denmark, and salt shipped from Bourgneuf. All these were effected by the exchange rates. Home producers of grain and meat naturally also benefited from the increased prices, particularly because rents fixed for longer periods of time could not react rapidly. Landlords and those dependent on the income from the renten issued by cities were naturally worse off, since they, like their English counterparts 60 years later, were the prime consumers of imported luxuries which reacted directly to the changed exchange rates. In England in the 1540s the reduction in the export price of woollen textiles brought about an expansion in exports, based on the use of English wools. In the Netherlands in the 1480s it was not so simple. There was considerable urban unemployment, so that wages did not rise. The urban wage-earner therefore suffered directly from the rise in foodstuffs. The cities themselves, outside the war zone, were however gainers, since the amount they paid out on renten remained fixed, whilst the income from local excise dues increased, along with food prices.

Though the various coins called ducats issued between 1285 and 2001 were not always of a consistent weight or fineness, nor did they all resemble the original Venetian prototype, they represented the closest thing the Western world has had to a unified coinage standard since the age of Charlemagne.

The paper aims at exploring to what extent the Amsterdam Wisselbank of the 17th-18th centuries was an active agent in realizing the Financial Revolution of the Low Countries, which took place during the Early Modern Period, between the Financial Revolution in late medieval Italy and the Financial Revolution of 18th-19th century England.
As fas as innovations in the domain of financial techniques was concerned, the Amsterdam Wisselbank was a rather conservative institution, taking over in essence the Italian tradition of the 14th-15th centuries. In the domain of long-term credit, the Estates Provincial and the Estates General, during the Early Modern Period, took over the late medieval urban techniques of Flanders, Brabant and Holland. The real innovators in the domain of the financial techniques, therefore, were the cashiers and merchant-bankers, active on the Antwerp money and capital market during the 16th century, and the cashiers and merchant-bankers, active on the Amsterdam money and capital market during the 17th-18th centurie.
The Amsterdam Wisselbank, nevertheless, did innovate, but it occurred in other domains than the domain of financial technique. In the monetary domain, the Wisselbank played a crucial role in stabilizing the Dutch monetary system. In its banking function, the Bank became the first multilateral clearing house of the world for settling international balances. As a dealer in precious metals the Bank, after 1681, was the first public institution to be instrumental in making exchange rates less volatile. Finally, the Bank, by respecting the restrictive regulations, imposed by the municipality upon its functioning, spurred the private sector to alleviate the tension between vigorous Dutch commercial expansion and the restrictive statutes of the Wisselbank by introducing new financial activities and new financial instruments.

It is well known that the earliest coins were made of electrum. Much less clear are the circumstances under which these early coins were initially made. This paper will look at the recent archaeological excavations from Sardis and Ephesos to explore the questions when the earliest coins were made. Until recently, most numismatists agreed that the first coins were first minted around 600 BC in the Lydian capital Sardis. The local river Pactolus provided gold, and the notion of nugget-like coins can be understood within a monetary tradition in which precious metal were weighed. The invention of coinage can be interpreted as a step towards facilitating and ultimately eliminating such practices, although cut metal, jewellery, etc. was used continuously in antiquity for payments. What was less obvious was the choice of electrum for the first coins, when most of the Mediterranean economy of the archaic period depended on silver as medium of exchange. The prevailing scholarly accounts describe a decline of electrum coinage after the introduction of silver and gold coinage under King Croesus. From the available numismatic evidence it is clear that electrum coinage continued as the currency to store value.

In early monetary systems the unit of account was separate from the medium of exchange. Commodity prices and prices of coins were quoted in terms of a fixed quantity of metal that was embodied by an 'index coin'. Coins circulated at their metal value because coinage was imperfect and fixed exchange rates would have interfered with the operation of bimetallism. An indication that the exchange rates of coins were market determined is the absence of value marks on coins. During the Industrial Revolution, improvements in the quality of coinage led to the fusion of the unit of account and medium of exchange function of money. As a consequence, pre-industrial bimetallism gave way to nineteenth century bimetallism, in which the make of currencies alternated between silver and gold.

After co-operation in the first decade of the 20th century, the Nordic countries revised their laws of marriage. The Nordic wife’s extended civil citizenship and economic rights has been described as a near democratic jack-pot by some earlier researchers. The aim of this article is to analyse how the sections of family support, within the marriage and after a divorce, were discussed in the process of legislation. What was the pronounced “problem” that the new law was supposed to solve? The results of the analysis indicate that the regulation of a new formal, mutual and equal obligation to support the family, during and after a divorce, was created with the objective to achieve order in an explicitly disordered community. The prevailing law was reinterpreted and both spouses´ different duties towards the family were defined in the new law. The results also show that the legislated obligation to support within the marriage, as well as after a divorce after 1921 was neither mutual nor equal. The law was in this matter built on ideas of gender differences which positioned spouses into different economic citizenship. Economic independence was seen as an inherently male characteristic and therefore of superior importance to protect in the marriage as after a divorce.

Keywords: law of marriage, support, obligation, alimony, unilateral rule of adjustment, economic independence

The divorce rate is a poor indicator of marital instability because it only captures marital disruptions that become divorces in court. A body of anecdotal historical evidence suggests that many marriages ended in desertion or separation and thus were not included in the divorce statistics. The newly available estimate of all marital disruptions in Cvrcek (2008) (whether by divorce or by desertion) shows a significant increase in desertions relative to divorces after 1900, indicating that many unhappy marriages ended without a legal follow-up in the form of a divorce. The potential causes include the late-19th century reform movement that made divorce laws more stringent in many states, an increase in marriage rate following the declining costs of setting up a new household, growing ease of transportation which facilitated abandonment and growing immigration which was somewhat skewed towards single young men. Also, overall marital instability was more sensitive to the business cycle than divorce statistics would indicate and the conditions at the time of marriage were an important determinant of the lifetime cohort disruption rate.

Divorce was prevalent among peasants in early modern Japan. Some researchers believe that it was even considered a welcomed experience at the time of remarriage. This attitude has persisted until the turn of the nineteenth century, when the government legally enforced a rigid rule against divorce as an effort to “modernize” the country. Despite this obvious prevalence of divorce, there are only few demographic studies that have dealt with the detailed patterns and mechanisms governing divorce in early modern Japan. This paper considers three complimentary approaches to uncover the prevalent practice of divorce: Socially accepted attitude toward “trial marriage,” divorce as adjustment to economic hardship, and divorce in the logic of stem family organization.
Drawing data from the local population registers in two northeastern agricultural villages, 1716-1870, this study demonstrates how economic condition, domestic organization and individual position in households influenced the likelihood of divorce among females. Almost half of the first marriages of these peasants dissolved in divorce before they reached age 50, surpassing the proportion becoming widows and widowers. Event history analysis reveals that having a child, or having obtained household headship, significantly reduced the risk of divorce. Different mechanisms were at work for virilocal (wife came to live at the native household of husband) and uxorilocal (husband came to live at the native household of wife) marriages. Economic hardship and non-intact stem family, for example, significantly increased the risk of divorce but only for virilocal marriage, while conjugal relationship was the dominant factor for uxorilocal marriage. The findings suggest the importance of the practice of divorce in individual life course as well as in achieving the collective goals of peasant families.

Often considered similar at the macro level and referred to as the Nordic model, the countries observed show different trends of marriage and divorce’s registration . Our research seeks the determinants of these variations by studying in depth the differences and similarities between four Nordic countries, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden through the massive family law reforms –and more specifically the divorce laws- that took place in the ‘20s. We will investigate the differences between the norm and the law and how national contexts shape the laws.
The differences and similarities between those countries are scrutinized through the divorce laws in regards with all the evolutions that touched the society by this time. Marriage at first, but also considerations that are closely linked, such as the status of women, what we would called nowadays, the unions mode, betrothals by then and cohabitation, and births out of wedlock.

We thus show how the new divorce laws reflected the conception the Nordic societies had on all features related to family issues. We also look at how and why the countries differed on these points. For this purpose, we analyse not only the laws per se and the way they are embedded in a social system, but the legal texts and the debates around their adoption and put this material in parallel with numerical trends in divorces, marriages and births.

Swedish divorce research has almost exclusively focused on the development from the 1970’s to the present. Although statistics show that the growth in the divorce rate was already well established in the early part of the 20´th century, the long-term increase has not been analyzed in detail, nor has the multiple reasons for it. The purpose of this paper is to examine chronological and spatial trends in Swedish divorce behavior, in a longer historical perspective. Using statistical data collected by Statistics Sweden between 1911-1975, the characteristics of the divorce couples are examined, and the aggregated trends in divorces are analyzed in relation to political, socioeconomic and demographical changes in Sweden during this period. The connections between marital stability and changing structural conditions in economy, labor market, family law and gender regime in Sweden during the course of the 20´th century are discussed. The findings arrived at are also compared to results generated from historical research on divorce patterns abroad.

This paper combines a micro and macro approach in understanding the history of divorce in industrial Sweden. The impact of industrialization, female wages and education on divorce rates are examined, with the main finding that divorce is in much driven by economic independence of women. On the micro level, the process appears more complex. An ideological battle was fought in the judicial arena when new norms were established. We conclude that the association between economically oriented structural transformations and cultural changes on the normative level shaped the individual constraints on action.

The literature in financial history usually considers London as the only centre of the late 19th century’s financial globalization, and explains it at least in part by the efficient organization of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The LSE is characterized as having been a softly regulated market, where entry was easy both for traders and issuers [Michie (1998), Neal (2004), White (2006)]. The LSE microstructure is also considered as the natural and optimal one by much of the theoretical literature on stock markets, which argues that free entry decreases transaction costs and increases both liquidity and diversification, resulting in economies of scale and externalities attracting traders, issuers and investors. Our paper tries to explain why the Paris Bourse was able to be so successful in spite of the supposedly inefficient monopoly and regulations that the State imposed it. We focus on the fact that the Paris market actually included several different market organizations: the Parquet (the official Bourse, organized by the agents de change), the Coulisse, the Marché libre, and inter-bank direct operations. We argue that this multi-polar organization, was efficient, relying on the specialization it allowed, and the complementarities it helped develop among markets. We incorporate in the discussion the recent theoretical literature that shows that no single market can satisfy the heterogeneous preferences of all issuers and investors, so that a multi-polar organization can be a superior solution.
We demonstrate our claim by looking not only at the rules but also at the actual functioning of the Parquet thanks to its archives which we recently classified. These archives also allow us to build new statistical series which permit evaluating the performances of the Parquet during the 19th century: volumes traded, seat prices, transaction costs, and operational risks. If one supposes that the Parquet was the least efficient segment of the Parisian market, this will provide us with a lower bound for the global efficiency of that market, which should be compared with other markets on similar concrete grounds.

How persistent are the effects of legal institutions adopted or inherited in the distant past? A
substantial literature argues that legal origins have persistent effects that explain clear
differences in investor protections and financial development around the world today (La Porta
et al, 1998, 1999 and passim). This paper examines the persistence of the effects of legal origins
by examining new estimates of different indicators of financial development in more than 20
countries in 1900 and 1913. The evidence presented does not yield robust results that can
sustain the hypothesis of persistence effects of legal origin, but it is not powerful enough to
reject it either. Then the paper examines if there were systematic differences in the extent of
investor protections across countries, since that is the main channel through which legal origin
affects financial development, and shows that all the evidence supports the idea of relative
convergence in corporate governance practices across legal families circa 1900. The paper
concludes that, if the evidence presented is representative, the variation observed in financial
development around the world today is likely a product of events of the twentieth century
rather than a consequence of long-term (and persistent) differences occasioned by legal
traditions.

Based on an analysis of the leading trading markets for bonds in the United States I document the expansion that took place in the scale and scope of the country’s bond market from 1885 to 1930. I compare the overall expansion of the bond market with developments in the US stock market and highlight substantial and important differences. I also reveal how the growth of the US bond market was accommodated by a rather different balance in the relative importance of the stock exchanges based in New York, the regional exchanges and the over-the-counter market to that which facilitated the expansion of the stock market. I consider the capacity of today’s fashionable theories, which link the development of bond markets to improvements in minority investor protection, to explain the growth of the U.S. bond market and find that they cannot account for the historical patterns that I identify. Instead, I suggest, there are other arguments that are worthy of further consideration. First, there were factors, besides minority investor rights, that led to changes in the demand for corporate bonds during this period, especially an increase in the demand for bonds by institutional investors, notably banks and insurance companies, as well as the emergence of a retail market for bonds after World War 1. Second, there were important developments in the supply of corporate bonds which also seem to have played an important role in driving the expansion of the U.S. bond market during this period.

This paper explores the evolution of Belgian bourses from "bourses de commerce" into real "stock exchanges" in the period 1801-1867. These Belgian bourses (following the Paris bourse model) were initially focused on commodity trading and trading in state bonds with trade in stocks only gradually increasing in importance. Hence they can hardly be called "stock" exchanges from the beginning. Due to their role in the French empire for state credit they started as heavy state-regulated bourses around 1801. They were a public institution and had a limited number of official agents with a monopoly position. The successive Dutch (1815-1830) and Belgian governments from 1830 on continued along the same lines. The French Napoleonic bourse model proved to be more or less the continuation of the French Ancient Regime model as far as a strongly government controlled and highly regulated system is concerned. However it was not the only model. The London stock exchange e.g. was not a public institution. Towards the end of our period the Belgian stock exchanges (in the meantime there had been a rather fundamental shift in the main activities of the bourses from commodity trading to trading in stocks and bonds making them gradually really “stock” exchanges) would move into the direction of that more liberalised London model. From 1867 on, the Belgian stock exchanges were transformed into an almost completely unregulated system. Belgian stock exchanges thus left the old French inspired bourse system and adopted a more modern stock exchange system. They were adapted in a way they could act as a well-organised part of the financial system that served the development of the increasing financial needs of laissez-faire industrial capitalism, the needs of joint-stock companies and the growing international expansion of capitalism. Until then financing new industries had been mainly the task of the Belgian mixed banks; from now on this financing system would provide an additional source for financing capitalist development. It allowed Belgian capitalism to finance its own development as well as to make a huge amount of foreign investments in the decades to come until the First World War. The more so as (due to the capital favourite fiscal system) this reform was so attractive that a lot of foreign capital came to Brussels after 1867. The liberalised system stayed in place until the crisis of the 1930s when it was radically re-transformed into a government controlled and highly regulated system in 1934-35. It would prove to be a struggle that was not definitely finished. This ongoing struggle between regulation and laissez-faire was repeated at the end of the 20th century when a new wave of deregulation and freedom for stock exchanges set in.

Institutional and technological changes caused government bond trading to migrate from the New York Stock Exchange to the over-the-counter market during the 1860s. The Civil War increased the quantity of bonds outstanding and the associated rise in trading volume induced many dealers to enter the market. However, network externalities and scale economies quickly caused order flow to converge on three dealers: Jay Cooke & Co., Vermilye & Co. and Fisk & Hatch. The National Banking Act caused institutional investors to populate the government bond market because it required that banks purchase these securities to secure a national charter, receive government deposits and issue currency. These institutional investors preferred to trade government bonds over-the-counter because they were less vulnerable to asymmetric information than smaller retail investors and did not need the transparency provided by the organized stock exchange. Finally, the telegraph and telephone lowered the holding, order-processing and asymmetric information costs of dealers and allowed them to undercut NYSE commissions by reducing bid-ask spreads and offering greater depth, breadth and immediacy.

The paper analyses the development of regulation and microstructure of stock
markets in Spain until the Spanish Civil War. It examines the transfer of French
legislation in the 1830s and its implications for the final configuration of the regulatory
framework. It studies the choice and bargaining processes, the law enforcement and
the configuration of a mixed system: an étatiste model in Madrid and Bilbao, a free
market in Barcelona, and small traditional markets in the rest of the country.

How much of the short run volatility of asset prices is due to the arrival of news and how much can be accounted for by factors unrelated to the arrival of new information like trading frictions, changing preferences for risk, behavioural factors and asymmetric information? Because the arrival of news to the market is difficult to measure, this question is difficult to answer with modern day data. I use a natural experiment provided by financial history to address the question. During the 18th century a number of British stocks were traded on the Amsterdam exchange and all relevant price information from England reached Amsterdam through the use of mail packet boats. I can precisely identify the arrival of boats, and thus the flow of information, and I use this to measure the influence of news on the volatility of the British stocks traded in Amsterdam. Results show that the volatility of stock prices after the arrival of news was significantly higher than the volatility that was realized in the absence of news. Still, price movements in the absence of news were considerable. They amounted to between half and two thirds of the volatility that was observed during periods with news. This suggests an important role for factors not related to news in the day to day movement of asset prices

In 1986 the London securities market was transformed in an event known as 'Big Bang.' This completely altered both those permitted to trade on the Stock Exchange and the way the market was structured. Banks from around the world were given access to the trading system for the first time in the Stock Exchange's almost 200 year history while the physical trading floor was replaced by computer screens and telephone links located in bank offices. Following on from that event further fundamental changes took place in the ownership and structure of the London Stock Exchange transforming it out of all recognition. To many this event is seen as the inevitable consequence of the changes that took place on the New York stock Exchange in 1975. to others it was the product of changes forced on the London Stock Exchange by politicians seeking to make the City of london more competitive. However, what is shown here is that a relatively modest proposal for reform produced dramatic consequences that nobody had foressen because of the connections it had to the microstructure of the market.

In this paper, we study the institutional evolution of the French Stock Exchanges during WWII and its aftermath, focusing on both the Paris and the regional market places. This analysis relies on new archival records (from the Paris, Lyon and Marseille stock exchanges) and shows the long term impact of the war on French markets. We argue that the war distorted the competition existing among French stock exchanges and momentarily reshaped their hierarchy. We further suggest that the war facilitated the merger of the Parisian curb and official market, whereas at the same time it delayed the eventual merger of the provincial stock exchanges.

Improved information technology and higher volume should drive orders to be concentrated in one market, lowering the costs of transactions. However, the opposite occurred during the bull market of the 1920s when rapid technological change spawned a flood of new issues. This paper employs newly recovered data for 1900-1933 on the volume and seat prices of regional exchanges to examine how these rivals successfully competed with the NYSE, leading to its relative decline at the zenith of the market.

This paper has three aims. The first is to outline and define the revolution in non-Western economic historiography that occurred during the later twentieth century, and to elaborate a little on the very limited reception afforded to that revolution by the end of the century in disciplinary economic history journals and books series. The second is to examine the efforts over the last decade to integrate evidence and ideas from the study of several centuries of African, Asian and Latin American economic history with evidence and ideas from the longer-established economic historiography of the West. Finally, in a very preliminary way, the paper will ask what has been achieved, what are the pitfalls and possible false trails, and what remains to be done in working towards a truly global economic history.

Following the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration sponsored by the Portuguese and Spanish governments and European colonization of the Americas, there were expansive economic activities which simultaneously affected all regions of the Atlantic basin from 1500 to 1850. The impact of these economic activities on long-run socioeconomic development in the Americas and Europe during this period, which led ultimately to the establishment of the integrated nineteent-century Atlantic economy, is the focus of this paper. The paper observes that economic historians on the western shores of the Atlantic have studied the development processes in the Americas with an Atlantic perspective, but the mainstream literature on the eastern shores pays little attention to Atlantic perspectives on European development during the period. The paper argues that studying the European development process at the micro-regional level, as opposed to the more fashionable national narrative, is the most realistic way to uncover the importance of Atlantic perspectives on European economic history of the period, because for several decades the most dynamic European regions were more firmly tied to the evolving Atlantic economy before they were much later strongly connected to the other regions within the political boundaries of their respective countries. To substantiate this point, the paper presents empirical regional details for the development process in England. The successful industrialization of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, based largely on the strong ties of those regions to the Atlantic economy, is compared with the decline of East Anglia caused largely by the loss of its markets for manufactures in continental Europe. Although it is shown that the case of England is somewhat unique because of its disproportionate share of the Atlantic based trade of the time, the paper concludes that the evidence shows a good amount of similar impact on the rest of Western Europe, all of which became ultimately integrated into the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy.

The writing of imperial histories is a field where rightfully the shortcomings of Eurocentric history have come under very intense attack. And yet, as a result today we have at least three historiographies that seem often almost entirely unconnected. Firstly, cultural and intellectual historians have substantially rewritten the histories of the colonized with a much deeper understanding for their agency. But by re-engaging colonial histories with post-colonial and national historiographies they have reinforced a concentration on the locationally specific in say Mexican colonial history rather than larger comparative themes. Secondly, historical social scientists have developed an intense interest in the comparative history of Empires. But they have done so in curious isolation from more recent historical research. We argue in this paper that this unfortunate divorce in historiography is particularly obvious in the use of the Spanish Empire in notionally comparative work as the quintessentially ‘unsuccessful’ Empire. A biased characterization of Spain and its rule over the New World, as absolutist, predatory, fanatical and intolerant goes back to the days of the Black Legend. Yet we show that enough of this caricature has survived to serve as a convenient strawman on which very powerful (ad hoc) explanations for the Anglo superior institutional - and economic – performance are pinned. This device was most effectively used by D.North and his followers. It had a seminal influence in the development of economic theory, political economy, sociology and political sciences, in the last 20 years and still provides the conceptual and ideological umbrella for the contemporary recipes of policy making and supra governmental interventions worldwide. We show, however, that its success was crucially dependent on a voluntary disengagement of cultural and intellectual imperial history from historical social sciences. The third and most promising development in the field in recent years, the emergence of global history, has finally reoriented the conventional euro-centric interpretation of a linear history of the world without ignoring the larger frame of global connections. However by focusing predominantly on divergences within Eurasia global historians have treated the Spanish New World as a passive force in the development of the world in early modern times. We thus conclude this paper by outlining a research agenda that can bring the New World back into the narrative of Global History.

Historical methods can be applied to conventional and unconventional sources to retrieve the history of cotton textile manufacture in West Africa. West African cottons were currencies, commodities, and luxury goods that circulated in interlocking networks of varying markets and consumer groups. The history of production and trade of cotton textiles in West Africa can shed light on aspects of pre-colonial social and economic history, perhaps along the lines of what has been shown for woolen manufacture in early modern western Europe. The evidence also reveals that the production and trade of cottons in West Africa integrated peoples of differing religions, food production systems, and speech communities into larger units that were defined by regional and inter-regional currency zones.
Written sources for pre-colonial African history are unusually scarce. Africanist historians have therefore had to be inventive and resourceful by creating new forms of evidence and archives -- a model that scholars in other historical areas may find fruitful for topics or social groups that are not documented in writing.

This paper explores the possibility for developing a coherent field of study on the place of empires in global economic history. The fields of world history and economic history have each developed substantially in the past fifty years. As the Global Economic History Network workshops (under Patrick O’Brien) showed, there is now hope of combining them productively for economic-historical analysis in global perspective. From the work of O’Rourke and Williamson on the “Atlantic” economy after 1840 to that of Frank and Pomeranz linking Europe and Asia before 1800, a range of methods and hypotheses has now encouraged debate and further research. The theses of Acemoglu on long-term impoverishment call for analysis linking these periods.

Since empires are institutional structures that have periodically formed , dominated, collapsed, and reformed, it makes sense to allocate some effort to identifying their place in the global economy. Much of the economic-historical work by economists and historians still defaults to national frameworks, leaving empires as institutions known to be important but which tend to escape analysis. At a larger scale, world-system analysis in the hands of such sociologists as Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn has escaped the national paradigm through focus on whole systems; again, however, imperial units tend to escape specific analysis.

Substantial data have been developed for all of the twentieth-century empires. (Debate on these empires has tended to focus on costs and benefits of empire.) For empires that expanded in the seventeenth century, substantial data are now available not only on the Dutch, English, and French, but also on the Romanovs, Mughals, and Qing. Similarly, substantial data are also available on the sixteenth-century imperial expansions of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottomans. (Debates on early modern empires have focused on the gains to trade, issues of money and finance, and policy questions.) For earlier times data are scarce by comparison, yet there remain important economic-historical questions about empires from the Mongols back to the Achaemenids.

Chairman for first session

When doing global comparisons, economic historians tend to discuss Bengal as one of the more advanced and integrated regions of the early modern world. A long coastline, huge riparian highways of goods traffic, alluvial soil and plenty of water, and consequently high yield of land had made eighteenth century Bengal a great trading and manufacturing region, it is often believed. This picture hides a great deal of differentiations within Bengal. So much so that the very notion of Bengal as a single regional unit would seem to be influenced rather more by late-nineteenth-century political formations and recreated cultural identities in response to European colonialism than by its place in the early modern world economy.

Eighteenth century Bengal can be defined as a state, a unit of administration, a geographical zone, a linguistic-cultural entity, and as a market. These five ways of defining Bengal would refer to land areas that overlapped to a limited extent. Further, in terms of any one of these definitions, Bengal would appear to be a composite of distinct zones that followed quite different pathways of economic change. The differences are so fundamental that a notion of ‘Bengal’ as a meaningful unit in global economic history cannot be sustained, nor can it be salvaged by having recourse to a core-periphery terminology wherein one zone is defined as the core and the others as periphery.

In this paper, I propose a view of Bengal in which distance from the transportation arteries and local resource endowments mediated to create, not one, but several patterns of transaction between the region and the world economy. In this view, the western delta, the eastern delta, the mangrove forests, the dry uplands, the islands, and the eastern Gangetic plane ‘globalized’ in distinct ways while also actively transacting between themselves. The paper illustrates to the global historian the need to engage more with ‘region’ in the non-European world.

This paper discusses the nature of the emergence of multiple paths of economic development in modern global history and its consequences, by describing the course of three distinctive paths, pursued in the West, East Asia and the tropics respectively over the last few centuries. It argues that the potentiality of the rich environment of the tropics has been underexploited for the benefit of local society, if overexploited for exports, largely because most technological and institutional innovations since the Industrial Revolution occurred in the temperate zone.
The degree of ease with which technology and institutions were transferred from one region to another is a relatively underexplored factor in the economic performance of the regions involved. While different land-labour ratios between the West and East Asia played an important role in shaping their respective “path” of development, technological and institutional transfers from the West to East Asia after the late nineteenth century occurred relatively easily, because both regions were located in the temperate zone and their environmental characteristics other than the land-labour ratio was similar. On the other hand, the adaptation of Western technology and institutions to the tropics proved to be more difficult, because the nature of the tropical or semi-tropical environment could not be summarised in terms of factor endowment (and its institutional expression of private property rights), as monsoons dictated the patterns of rainfalls (hence the quality of land) and the tropical biota system governed the diffusion of infectious diseases (hence the quality of labour).
The dynamics of environment, technology and institutions in each region provides the basis for the distinctive development of the regional path, and the persistence of multiple paths provides a foundation for divergences in global history. But the outcome of these divergences varies, partly in accordance with transfer performance between the two regions. A good transfer performance could offer the growth of regional paths in two different directions, which provides further opportunities for trade and globalisation. The failure of transfer could result in uneven regional technological and institutional developments, leading to global inequality.

Thanks to the enormous amount of interest the ‘Great Divergence’ debate has advanced both inside and outside the field of China studies, historians are now beginning to (re)consider new perspectives to account for China’s place in the making of the modern world economy. Nevertheless, the prime focus of those participating in the debate remains production, thus neglecting the roles of distribution and commercial strategies in China’s long-term development, and their relevance to China’s connection to global history. This paper aims to redress the balance, and divert attention away from production to the matter of Chinese trade, both foreign and domestic. First, it examines the significance of new studies that emphasize the evolving relationships between China and other locations within East and Southeast Asia since the 16th century, and second, those publications that attempt to analyze what 18th and 19th century Chinese theorists knew about market mechanisms, and the foundation of economic behaviour—money, commerce, and prices. Here we will regard what these writings tell us about the practices of Qing dynasty officials and their conceptions of market forces. Finally, this study focuses on recent published research about the introduction of Western economics into China at the end of the 19th century, and the debates by contemporary officials and intellectuals over the value of modern economic theory to China.
We look at these three issues with the goal to free the study of Chinese economic history from the usual, encompassing framework of European comparisons and the irrepressible imputations of agency to Westerners, and to initiate an alternative approach to researching China in global economic history.