Programme

Far trade companies and business communities played an important role in the phase of the European expansion. Using a semantic method the author has accumulated data on the world-wide network of commercial players that formed the proto-Globalization in its earliest phase.

By far the most outstanding feature that distinguished the Dutch East India Company from its principal fellow European commercial enterprises operating in Asia in the early modern period was its large-scale participation in the port to port trade within the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.While certainly related to its Euro-Asian trade, the Company's Indian Ocean trade had a distinct identity and importance of its own and contributed handsomely to the VOC's overall prosperity through the seventeenth century. This paper analyses some of the key elements that contributed to the Ccmpany's overwhelming success in this domain as also the circumstances which limited this success essentially to the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth century.

Estimates of the trade volume of the port of Amsterdam during the 18th century have largely been based on levies on incoming ships and the goods they imported. Less clear is the share of local merchants in the outward maritime trade of Amsterdam and in which overseas markets they were active. For a better understanding the archive of the water bailiff might prove helpful. From 1747 onwards, this archive holds tens of thousands of so-called "monsterrollen" from ships that mustered new crews in Amsterdam. These documents not only provide the names of ships, captains, sailors and ports of call, but also shed new light on the evolving scope and structure of early modern maritime business networks.

The paper focusses on the concrete case of a diamond network that existed in the 1740s and 1750s. It extended itself geographically between Antwerp, Lisbon, Amsterdam and London with ties to India and Brazil. The merchants that were involved in this informal but stable circuit of trade were of different nationality and religious background, amongst them Sephardic Jews, an English Catholic, French Huguenots, English and Dutch Protestants. In analyzing the correspondence these merchants maintained, one can distinguish different elements that made the network operate.
In the absence of a complete body of law enforceability or a shared kinship or background, these merchants constructed different ways to establish and maintain trust between them. Reciprocity, credit extensions and a regular trade correspondence were most important. This paper aims to show how different social and commercial mechanisms worked to establish a stable and cross-cultural trade network.
In a second part, the paper also shows how the study of human networks can contribute to historical issues concerning globalization. Firstly, it emphasizes human agency in the development of global interconnectedness. Secondly, it also hints at different aspects of human interaction. Cross-cultural commercial interaction indicates that globalization was a larger phenomenon than the establishment of spatial connections through human contact. It was also cultural, in the sense that trade between merchants with different backgrounds increasingly had to take place on a shared logic. The study of cross-cultural trade circuits analyzes such logic, as one element next to social and spatial ties. In focussing not only on external elements of human relationships, but also on the internal requirements for such relations to take place, the merchants involved in the diamond network, such as James Dormer, became increasingly "citizens of the world".

Geographers and social scientists investigating present-day economic globalisation have shown that cities are nodes in global networks which transcend the national level. Such networks nowadays are especially generated by advanced producer service firms (banks, insurance companies, accountancy firms etc.) producing intra-firm flows of information, knowledge and capital between their different offices. Consequently, the study of the spatial organisation of these multi-locational firms allows to measure the connectivity of cities in this interlocking network. But are such transnational city networks limited to our contemporary society? My research investigates the existence of a transnational city network generated by the activities of business organisations in late medieval and early modern Europe (ca. 1300 – ca. 1600). More concretely, data on the spatial organisation of ca. 100 trade and banking firms have been collected. Through the aggregation of these data, the structure and dynamics of the city network can be investigated. In the past, the study of such large-scale, transnational city networks has mostly been neglected. This research attempts to fill this gap through the application of the concepts developed by geographers and social scientists investigating current world city networks in a historical context. This allows us to question whether globalisation and the so-called network society are as new as often conceived in the literature.

Peri-articular pathologies offer a particular scope for examining different forms of transnational policy in health at work. They have their source in the movements made and the postures adopted by labourers. Referring to the difficulty of individuating what part of these pathologies can be imputed to work, states have for a long time avoided letting them feature on lists of illnesses for which compensation can be paid. The first part of this paper examines the first steps towards a European Economic Community policy in the 1960s. At this time, the EEC placed health at work on its agenda and invited member states to elaborate new common regulations, including musculo-skeletal disorders among the problems to be dealt with. But at this time, the plan only came to a official recommendation. The second part relates to the 1980s and 90s, when the majority of industrial countries saw a spectacular rise in the incidence of peri-articular work-related illness. This phenomenon shook up the experts, the social groups and the political powers. Trade unionists and researchers attempted to understand the phenomenon and brought about recognition on an international scale. Both of these movements raise questions about the role of experts and the relationship between national politics and trans-national dynamics. In general terms, the trans-national scale seems to be scope for progress in the assumption of responsibility for work-related health problems, while the national level seems more to favor its rejection. Above all, national states preserve their powers of decision-making when international dynamics strengthen their authority.

Since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, numerous efforts have been made by government entities to enact regulations limiting employees’ allowable working hours. In Great Britain and the United States, policy makers often were motivated to adopt protective legislation out of concerns about the deleterious effects of long hours on workers’ health. Debates about permissible working hours in the U.S. and Britain typically have been couched in the context of deeper struggles about employer control over employees’ wages, job security, and working conditions. The original Factory Acts in Great Britain and the Ten-Hour Day Movement in New England during the Industrial Revolution pitted capitalists’ interests against workers’ demands, reflecting deep-seated antagonisms and class differences between management and labor. Bitter struggles over control of working hours continued into the Progressive Era in the United States. Proposals for protective legislation in Britain and the United States often have been played out against the backdrop of demonstrations, strikes, and labor unrest. In general, proposals to regulate allowable working hours in Britain and the U.S. have been initiated in response to underlying conflicts between labor and management.

Against this historical framework, it is interesting to consider the manner in which the European Commission has developed and promulgated its working time regulations during the past twenty years. That recent history is marked by a surprising absence of labor-management conflict. Although there is a continuing high level of ongoing debate about the establishment and enforcement of specific working time limits under the European Working Time Directive (EWTD), there is little evidence that the original development of the EWTD was motivated by labor unrest or union-management disagreement. Rather, the record suggests that Europe’s most recent version of working time regulation is an outgrowth of governmental interests to protect jobs, restrict unemployment, create a level paying field among EU members, and otherwise enact a set of basic social and employment norms that can be instrumental in coordinating and stimulating European economies within a common EU structure. Although the EWTD has been criticized and concerns have arisen (e.g., regarding the United Kingdom’s “opt out” of some EWTD requirements), those concerns generally have involved divergent national interests among EU members rather than reflecting underlying class-based or management-labor conflicts as was the case in previous historical attempts to enact similar protective legislation.

In this paper, the basic trends mentioned above will be described in detail, highlighting differences between the historical enactment of protective working hour legislation in Britain and the U.S. with the development and implementation of the EWTD in Europe during the past twenty years. The factors and special circumstances underlying the European experience will be considered, and perspectives offered about what that might mean for the effectiveness and sustainability of the EWTD.

Something of an ‘orthodox view’ has emerged within the historiography of west of Scotland industry regarding industrial relations and health and safety at work. In what is now becoming an accepted view, heavy industrial employers in the Clydeside region – the most industrialized area of Scotland in this period – are perceived to have been authoritarian and anti-trade union in outlook, while presiding over workplaces which were dangerous and unhealthy. In this paper we argue that this interpretation needs re-evaluation, and that a more nuanced approach is required. The paper reports on the latest phase of our research into the history of workplace health and safety in the UK, and examines managerial approaches across a range of industries in a changing industrial economy – focusing on the post-1945 period to the 1980s. We illustrate the complexities underpinning the provision of health and safety at work, and the difficulty of generalising on managerial approaches. We illustrate that a range of employer strategies can be identified, ranging from negligent to welfarist. The paper is based on a broad range of archival evidence and on interviews we recently conducted with occupational health professionals working in Scotland.

Le XIXème siècle est le siècle est celui de l’avènement de l’hygiène publique. Paradoxalement, c’est également le siècle durant lequel les questions sanitaires ont été négligées à l’intérieur des ateliers et des usines. Pour bon nombre d’historiens (un point sur l’historiographie de cette question sera abordé), la figure de Villermé incarne l’ambiguïté de ces hygiénistes du XIXème siècle, à la fois préoccupés par la santé des travailleurs, mais qui refusaient d’accorder une grande importance aux causes professionnelles, leur préférant des causes sociales. Bien qu’ils étaient de caractères et de philosophies différentes, il a souvent été associé à Villermé le médecin Parent-Duchâtelet, célèbre pour ses études sur la prostitution parisienne. Leurs publications des décennies 1830 et 1840 eurent en effet un grand retentissement, au point que le mouvement hygiéniste parisien fut pris en modèle en Europe.
Il convient de resituer le rôle de ces deux grands hygiénistes dans le contexte de création des Conseils de salubrité des grandes villes de province, où la minimisation des affections liées au travail fut loin d’être acquise. L’hygiénisme français devint pourtant progressivement influencé par le travail du Conseil de salubrité de Paris. Vingt ans après la création des Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, dont le comité de rédaction était composé pour la moitié de parisiens, l’hygiénisme se structura de façon plus cohérente et, en 1848, l’ensemble des départements fut doté d’un Comité d’hygiène publique. Tous n’abordèrent pourtant pas la question de la santé au travail de la même façon. Au contraire, plusieurs médecins s’offusquèrent des interprétations de Parent-Duchâtelet et de Villermé, relançant le débat sur la cause professionnelle de nombreuses maladies.
Toutefois, l’action des Comités d’hygiène de province influa très peu sur les politiques de santé publique nationales. Au contraire, ces dernières se calquèrent sur l’action de celui de la Seine. Comment comprendre cette proximité entre les hygiénistes parisiens et le pouvoir ? Il faut remonter au début du siècle pour en comprendre les ressorts. Très longtemps, le Conseil de salubrité de Paris a été le seul à exister. Dès 1802, il fut composé de savants prestigieux (Parmentier en fut le premier président) et ses avis furent suivis énergiquement par le Préfecture de police, qui avait l’autorité de la régulation des nuisances industrielles et des établissements classés dans ses attributions. Les deux premières décennies de son existence furent décisives pour la création d’une doctrine sur la santé ouvrière : si Villermé et Parent-Duchâtelet gagnèrent en notoriété pour la postérité, ils reprirent en fait bon nombre d’analyses de leur collègues et prédécesseurs au Conseil de salubrité, notamment Cadet de Gassicourt, Deyeux et surtout Darcet, qui insuffla au Conseil de salubrité, entre 1814 et 1842 une direction déterminante, comme en témoignent les rapports manuscrits de ce Conseil entre 1806 et 1828. Mais cette orientation ne fut établie qu’après un débat interne, qui dura près de quinze ans (1806-1822).

Dans les années 1960-1973 le développement de l'ergonomie de langue française a influé sur les positions du patronat et des syndicats ouvriers de la métallurgie (CGT et CFDT) . Mais cette influence a surtout marqué les doctrines. Le patronat, au lieu d'attribuer les accidents du travail au seul facteur humain, a cherché les causes multiples que généraient les conditions de travail et les moyens ergonomiques de les éradiquer. Les syndicats ouvriers, sous l'influence de la CFDT qui a collaboré avec les ergonomes du Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), obligés également de répondre au programme patronal en ce domaine, ont inclus l'ergonomie dans l'amélioration des conditions de travail qu'ils revendiquaient. Mais lorsque s'est déclenchée la crise économique de 1973, les réalisations patronales dans les entreprises (par exemple USINOR et Marius Berliet) restaient très partielles, tandis que la crise ötait aux confédérations ouvrières leur pouvroir de négociation.

La fabrication et l’usage de la peinture au plomb se sont considérablement développés au cours du XIXe siècle, jusqu’à devenir un facteur important de morbidité au travail : le saturnisme professionnel des ouvriers de la céruse et des peintres en bâtiment est considéré vers 1900 comme l’une des principales maladies du travail, en Europe comme aux Etats-Unis. Cependant, au cours de la première moitié du XXe siècle, l’attention portée à cette affection, les débats suscités autour de la question de l’empoisonnement industriel et les modalités de l’irruption de la question sanitaire dans le champ du travail contrastent fortement de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique. Si la France apparaît comme pionnière dans son combat contre le saturnisme des cérusiers et des peintres, tant dans le monde ouvrier ou médical que dans la sphère politique, les Etats-Unis s’illustrent au contraire par une attention tardive et limitée à l’épidémie saturnine. La comparaison menée ici permet de réinterroger l’articulation prohibition/dissuasion entre deux modèles industriels et économiques divergents qui aboutissent tous deux, selon des chronologies décalées, à l’extinction progressive de l’agent pathogène.

Revealing Failures in the History of School Finance
(Peter H. Lindert, University of California - Davis)

ABSTRACT

This essay proposes a set of non-econometric tests using data on wage structure, school resource costs, public expenditures, taxes, and rates of return to explain comparative anomalies in which richer political units deliver less education.
Past meta-analyses of postwar data have found that private and social rates of return on extra schooling are systematically higher for primary education than for higher education, and also higher in poor countries than in rich countries.
Although this generalization is valid, the private rates of return have been consistently over-estimated. Correct treatment of the fiscal side of
education shifts emphasis away from mysteriously high private rates of return toward a new emphasis on collective underinvestment in primary education.
Postwar cases in which richer countries deliver less education reveal a mixture of inefficiency and insufficient tax support. For earlier centuries, the evidence points more clearly toward political barriers to tax support. Pro-growth public education could have emerged a century or two earlier than it did. Government underinvestment in mass education is demonstrated for England and Wales between 1717 and 1891.

Using a new dataset on Indian railway companies, we study the effects of ownership structure on performance between 1882 and 1912. Over this period, new public-private partnerships came to dominate the scene as former private companies were bought out by the State but were allowed to retain operations in most cases. Moreover, any new companies created in these decades managed the operation of State owned lines. By exploiting the switch from private ownership and operation to state ownership and private operation within the same railway lines, we find state ownership and private operation lead to significant efficiency gains. This shift contributed to India’s success in developing one of the most efficient railway networks in the world by the early 20th century.

How did the British colonial government provide public goods in India? Using a new micro dataset of public spending on infrastructure, schooling and medical services, this paper explores the relationship between spending and local district characteristics across early 20th century Indian districts. The historical literature has generally emphasized the centralized nature of revenues but the local analysis reveals significant heterogeneity both across and within provinces in spending. Districts with a larger proportion of upper castes are correlated with higher public goods provision perhaps due to their greater political representation on local councils or higher economic status. The patterns broadly mirror the social hierarchy of the Indian caste system but it is unclear whether the British exacerbated existing socio-economic differences between groups or whether Indian elites successfully lobbied to influence the provision of public services.

NOTE: The paper to be presented at the WEHC will depart significantly from the version posted here. I hope to update this version by the end of July.

What role did the supply of primary schooling play in Russia's slow pace of economic development in the late 19th century? This paper introduces new district-level data from across European Russia to explore the relationship between local economic, population, and institutional characteristics; the supply of primary schooling; and enrollment/literacy rates. I find suggestive evidence of a linkage between low school availability and poor human capital outcomes that is consistent with Russia's slow economic development. The paper presented at the WEHC will go on to explore whether differences in the sources of primary school financing or variation in local educational expenditures help explain enrollment or literacy rates at the end of the 19th century.

The proposed book performs a systematic investigation of the evolution of political structures and public finances in Europe over the long term. By 1913, many states had struck an institutional balance that not only enabled central governments to gather large tax revenues, but limited executive discretion over expenditures. The book’s central task is to fuse arguments that highlight fiscal centralization with those that emphasize parliamentary reforms into an integrated analysis of institutional change. To do so, the book develops an innovative statistical framework that tests the effects of structural changes within and across polities. The results, which suggest that political transformations had remarkable effects on public finances, shed new light on the role of institutions in the process of long-run growth. Moreover, since its forms of fiscal governance have been widely implemented, an understanding of the European historical experience translates into useful lessons for today’s emerging economies.

Using a new data set from 1890 to today, we estimate how the adoption of proportional representation affects policies in Swiss cantons. We show that proportional systems tilt spending toward public goods like education and welfare benefits but decrease spending for targeted transfers like roads and agricultural subsidies.
However, we find little evidence that proportional representation increases the size of government. We also demonstrate that compositional changes of the legislature, i.e. party fragmentation and better representation of left-wing parties, are associated with more spending, while the direct electoral incentives of proportional rule appear to reduce government spending.

Of the many campaigns brought to fruition by the economic prosperity of the High Middle Ages, few have left evidence as permanent as those to build (or rebuild) cathedrals, abbeys and other major church buildings in the Gothic style. Between the 12th and early 16th centuries a massive public and private investment was made in these soaring monuments to both human ingenuity and the glory of God. This project draws upon the extant financial accounts of numerous Gothic building campaigns to explore three interrelated questions: how did a building campaign get activated; in what combination of ways were they paid for; and who served as the beneficiaries of the investment represented by a completed Gothic structure? I argue that the cooperation between private donations and public expenditures to these campaigns represents not only a stunning testimony to the success of the combined agricultural and urban medieval economy, but also a significant investment in public infrastructure with a centuries-long stream of benefits.

Elementary schooling in North America in the early 20th century underwent major changes with the spread of graded schools with multiple classrooms and teachers to semi-urban and rural areas. Detailed schooling records from British Columbia indicate that pupil attendance responded strongly to the introduction of additional teachers in one-room schools. The attendance impact of grading a school dominated alternatives such as employing more highly qualified teachers, or building additional schools to reduce catchment areas. Changes in the provision of schooling can account for about a quarter of the 30 percentage point increase in attendance rates between 1900 and 1930.

In 1863, the English Parliament set in place a system of elementary school finance in which national level funding for individual schools depended in part on the outcomes of student examinations conducted by school inspectors. It came to be known as payment by results. This system remained in place for roughly thirty years through the early 1890s. At the height of the system in the 1870s and 1880s, on average, roughly half of the national level funding a school received depended on the outcome of student examinations. Did the system result in a leveling up in the funding available to all schools who persisted or did it result in a widening in funding gaps between successful and poorly performing schools? In contrast with previous studies by historians of education which have considered national level impacts of the policy, this paper employs county level data to look at trends between 1870 and 1890. It will consider the extent to which disparities in both funding and educational level outcomes widened or narrowed across the 42 counties of England and Wales in conjunction with the system of payment by results. It thus aims at an evaluation of a Victorian educational policy that has resonance with current school policy debates and discussions in the U.S. and elsewhere.

This paper provides the first detailed quantitative study of labour productivity in an east European country in an international comparative framework covering both the interwar period of private enterprise and the postwar period of communist rule. Czechoslovak industrial labour productivity fluctuated around two-thirds of the UK level during the interwar period and from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. During the high period of mass production in the early postwar period, Czechoslovakia’s productivity position even improved to around three-quarters of the UK level. During the 1980s, however, Czechoslovakia’s productivity position deteriorated sharply falling to around one third of the UK level by 1991. The relationship between institutional regime and productivity performance was historically contingent. Central planning allowed Czechoslovak industry to improve its comparative productivity position temporarily during the era of mass production, but could not adapt to the requirements of flexible production technology during the 1980s. The ensuing crisis contributed to the end of communist rule and the break-up of the Czechoslovak state.

Income gaps between countries can be explained by three effects, namely, a labour participation effect that is determined by age and gender structures of population and working hours per person employed, an industry-specific productivity effect, and an industrial structure effect. Due to its “industry-of-origin” nature, the production-side purchasing power parity (PPP) approach is an ideal approach to address the research problem because it enables not only the conversion of national income and labour productivity into a common numéraire but also the decomposition of income gaps between nations.
This study for the first time constructs the production-side PPPs for China, Japan and the US with the US as the reference country for circa 1935. Three steps are involved in this exercise. Firstly, we construct industrial PPPs for these countries, which extends our earlier PPP estimates for manufacturing in these countries (Fukao, Wu and Yuan, 2008) to mining and utilities. Secondly, we construct agricultural PPPs using a newly constructed dataset containing output quantity and value for major farm products in these countries. Lastly, based on the expenditure-side PPPs estimated by Fukao, Ma and Yuan (2007), we estimate PPPs for service sectors. Reconciliation between the production and the expenditure PPPs shows that our aggregate production PPP estimates are plausible. For a sensible decomposition of the PPP-measured income gaps, we further make adjustment for the coverage of the traditional sector, estimate working hours by sector, and examine the impact of trade prices. The preliminary decomposition results show that the lower income of China and Japan compared with that of the US is mainly (over 80%) attributed to the lower productivity of individual industries rather than differences in industrial structure (only about 20%). The results also suggest that high labour participation rate in China and in Japan helped narrow down their income gaps with that of the US by about 15% and 30%, respectively.
[JEL References: L60, O47, P52]

The manufacturing productivity gap between the U.S. and the U.K. became much larger during the interwar period than existing estimates suggest. This paper presents two benchmark estimates for respectively 1910 and 1935 of levels of real value added per working hour based on the official industrial census reports. A structural shift methodology is applied to analyze comparative productivity movements for industrial branches in the period 1900-1957. U.S. manufacturing shows high comparative levels and growth rates for chemicals and engineering. These results support revisionist accounts of Robert Gordon and Alexander Field on the Depression’s strengthening of American productivity leadership.

A previous reconstruction of French industrial accounts for 1931 pointed to a possible overvaluation of industrial output at the beginning of the 1930s and hence cast doubts on the series used by Maddison for his international comparisons. Maddison has French economy-wide productivity not only reversing its decline vis-à-vis the US in the 1920s, but also more surprisingly catching up further in the decade of the Depression in the 1930s. Since this assessment relies on a single, somewhat ancient benchmark for 1938, the construction of which is examined in detail in the paper, a revision seems in order. Besides, whereas the existing series were constructed from the output side, a different approach, from the income side, is attempted here. First, we estimate domestic industrial product at the national level using the wage bill and labour output ratios for the 15 branches of industry and second, we proceed to the same exercise at the departmental level using a new database on employment, working hours and earnings to obtain a new estimate of industrial (and services’) output for 1936 and 1938. While the latter offers a benchmark against which to match existing estimates, the former can be more conveniently used in an Anglo-French-German comparison. Preliminary results appear extremely sensitive to the wage ratios used to compute the wage bill. Following the Popular Front electoral victory in June, wages were upgraded across the industrial sector after new collective contracts were enforced in the second semester of that year. We test many options in turn. It appears in any case that the suspicion of industrial output being inflated for 1936 by a wide margin was ill-founded. The attention then turns to the service sector which, in the original accounts was reconstructed on a very slim base indeed. For this purpose we use a heretofore untapped source: the records of the patente (a business tax) – as well as employment data again for the 90 departments. Here again the assumption of full employment in the tertiary sector for the year concerned seems unrealistic and ignores the historical background. Therefore wide-spread unemployment and underemployment point to a decisive reduction of French productive capacity as a result of the Depression and economic policies introduced in 1936.

This paper establishes comparative levels of Swedish labour productivity in the manufacturing industry vis-à-vis the UK and the US for three benchmark years, 1909, 1924 and 1935. The method used is the industry of origin approach, mostly Rosatas’ physical output per worker, but also net output per worker. Time series of labour productivity are used to cover the entire 1869-1950 period. The results show that Swedish convergence in labour productivity was manifest around the turn of the century and in the 1930s and 1940s. The Swedish catch up thus contrasts with Stephen Broadberry’s long-term US/UK and Germany/UK evidence, which indicated that the comparative productivity ratios, despite great swings during especially wars, always gravitated towards a long-run path of stability. The Swedish case tends to bolster the argument, prevalent in an older convergence literature, that a significant component in the process of income convergence is technology spillover. It also lends support to theories attributing a crucial role to the manufacturing industry. The paper seeks to briefly outline the possible causes of Swedish acceleration in productivity, with particular emphasis on the first episode of catch up around the turn of the century.

The different organizational structure of the Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires affected their ability to monitor workers. I test the theoretical implications of these differences using micro data of overseas workers' compensation from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The two merchant empires used significantly different compensation structures: working for the king of Portugal corresponded on average to a bonus-wage ratio two-thirds higher than that of the Dutch East India Company. These results are consistent with theoretical implications and provide additional support to the historical evidence we have on the organizational structure of merchant empires.

This paper builds upon Pamuk's (2006) study of economic growth in the Middle East from 1820 and offers alternative estimates of Palestine’s, Jordan's, Lebanon's and Syria's per capita GDP in 1990 international dollars for the benchmark years 1820, 1870, 1913 and 1950. The estimates are based are studies of each country and first hand reports of the conditions of the areas from the end of the 18th century through 1950. Based on these estimates, the economies of the four areas began to grow slowly in the 19th century and for the period from 1913-1950 they were some of the fastest growing economies in the world.

This study estimates the number of working days per year of a representative household required to obtain a basic consumption basket for the period 1500-1800. These are compared with independent estimates of days worked per year in London and Paris. While Parisian workers had to engage in a year-long grind to buy the fixed basket, London workers display a widening gab between days worked and days required to get the basket, especially between 1600 and 1750. This suggests that an industrious revolution and a consumer revolution were a stimulus to the England’s Industrial Revolution, whereas no such episodes were detectable for France.

The relationships among the weather, agricultural markets, and financial markets have long been of interest to economic historians, but relatively little empirical work has been done. We push this literature forward by using modern drought indexes, which are available in detail over a wide area and for long periods of time to perform a battery of tests on the relationship between these indexes and sensitive indicators of financial stress.
The drought indexes were devised by climate historians from instrument records and tree rings, and because they are unfamiliar to most economic historians and economists, we briefly describe the methodology. The financial literature in the area can be traced to William Stanley Jevons, who connected his sun spot theory to rainfall patterns. The Dust bowl of the 1930s brought the climate-finance link to the attention of the general public. Here we assemble new evidence to test various hypotheses involving the impact of extreme swings in moisture on financial stress.

The relationships among the weather, agricultural markets, and financial markets have long been of interest to economic historians, but relatively little empirical work has been done. We push this literature forward by using modern drought indexes, which are available in detail over a wide area and for long periods of time to perform a battery of tests on the relationship between these indexes and sensitive indicators of financial stress.
The drought indexes were devised by climate historians from instrument records and tree rings, and because they are unfamiliar to most economic historians and economists, we briefly describe the methodology. The financial literature in the area can be traced to William Stanley Jevons, who connected his sun spot theory to rainfall patterns. The Dust bowl of the 1930s brought the climate-finance link to the attention of the general public. Here we assemble new evidence to test various hypotheses involving the impact of extreme swings in moisture on financial stress.

We use a 75-year panel of U.S. state information to identify the effect of weather fluctuations on the prices and quantities of cotton and corn. Corn is chosen to represent crops for which there are local markets as well as national markets, while cotton prices are set primarily in a national market. The paper shows how prices and output respond in these markets to weather shocks before and after federal agricultural subsidies are introduced.

We consider the impact of weather on farm values through U.S. history. Using both cross-sectional and panel methods, we document economically and statistically significant differences in the response of farm productivity to weather over time. In recent decades, farm value has been (weakly) increasing in temperature and rainfall. On the other hand, high levels of temperature or rain depressed farm value in the 19th century. This suggests an important role for technological adaptation in reducing the impact on farm productivity of hotter and wetter weather (a possible outcome of climate change in some places). One particular adaptation---the eradication of malaria---accounts for a substantial fraction of this difference over time. These results also suggest that malaria reduced farm productivity by a factor of 2-3 in the most malarious parts of the South relative to the Plains in the late 1800s.

We look at several recent estimates of climate in Europe and find that climate in northwestern Europe between the 13th and 19th centuries was essentially constant, so that whatever variations in economic growth that occurred at this time were not due to climatic change.

Providing greater historical perspective would enlighten current discussions about future human responses to climatic variation. During the 19th and 20th centuries, new biological technologies allowed North American farmers to push cropping into environments previously thought too arid, too variable, and too harsh to cultivate. We document these changes for three major staple crops noting that the climatic challenges that previous generations of farmers overcame often rivaled the climatic changes predicted for the next hundred years in North America. Further analysis is needed to understand the timing, causes, and costs of these adjustments.

The severe drought in 1936 revealed an advantage of hybrid corn not previously recognized – its drought tolerance. This revealed ecological resilience motivated some farmers to adopt hybrids despite their commercial unattractiveness in normal years. But that response to climate change had a tipping effect. The increase in sales of hybrid seed in 1937 and 1938 financed research at private seed companies that led to new varieties with significantly improved yields in normal years. This development provided the economic incentive for late adopters to follow suit. Because post-1936 hybrid varieties conferred advantages beyond improved drought resistance, the negative ecological impact of the devastating 1936 drought had the surprising, but beneficial, consequence of moving more farmers to superior corn seed selection.

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In the Cold War period when Soviet bloc of countries was organized, a unified and centrally planned (the center was in Moscow) system of arms production and deliveries inside of that bloc was formed. This was an example of military-economic integration of a whole group of countries of Eastern and Central Europe.
Starting from the early 1950s the Soviet Union concluded agreements with the countries of Eastern Europe to supply them by armaments and military techniques on preferential terms: 2/3 of value had to be paid at the expense of credit, provided to the "partner" country by the Soviet Union, 1/3 of value - at the expense of commodity circulation.
After the Warsaw Pact was created in 1955, inside of the Soviet bloc each country specialized on production of specific types of weapons. Joint plans, standartization merits and specialization were determined by joint planning organs (Commission for Cooperation in Defense Industry of COMECON) and approved by political leadership (Political Consultative Committee of Warsaw Pact countries).
In this system, the predominance of the Soviet Union, unequal relations, secrecy restictions took negative effect. From the other part, the basement of mutual planning and cooperation of a large number of European countries in the military-industrial field was still laid down.

Studies of the development of local economies often point to large-scale World War II military spending as a source of long-term economic growth, even though the spending declined sharply after the demobilization. We examine the longer term impact of the temporary war spending on county economies using a variety of measures of socioeconomic activity: including per capita retail sales, the extent of manufacturing, population growth, the share of women in the work force, housing values and ownership, and per capita savings over the period 1940-1950. We find that in the longer term counties receiving more war spending per capita during the war experienced extensive growth due to increases in population but not intensive growth, as the war spending had very small impacts on per capita measures of economic activity.

In preparing to fight the Second World War, contemporaries appreciated, and historians have analysed, how the mobilisation of the civilian population - especially the industrial workforce - represented a crucial factor in developing economic capacity. The debate over how far Britain was able to prepare for war in 1939 continues to oscillate between those take a 'declinist' view of national political-economic resources and those who emphasise British economic and military power in the interwar years. However the condition of Britain's political economy is characterised, it is generally assumed that resources were allocated on a co-ordinated basis because of a high level of tri-partite co-operation between government, employer bodies and organised labour. This facilitated the re-armament drive and helped Britain enter the war unified. This paper seeks to examine the question of industrial mobilisation, by an integrationist and interventionist British state, in the context a region - the West Midlands - that was of particular importance for the re-armament effort. Combining technologically-advanced manufacturing with traditional metal-working interests, the region was able to escape the worst elements of the Depression. The particular expertise in engineering and metal fabrication of motor manufacturers made this industrial conurbation an obvious choice for the development of the shadow factory scheme from 1936 and, with aircraft production made a priority, the location for an array of dedicated facilities.
Although engagement in this vital strategic role helped to sustain high levels of employment, it was universally believed that the effects of enemy bombing at the outbreak of war would be so devastating that the region's civilians would be in the 'front line'. In these circumstances, it is important to establish how conflicting ideological and political issues involving both foreign and domestic affairs were resolved in relations between workers and employers. This study should contribute, therefore, to an understanding of how the British state organised the economy for war in 1939.

We are working towards filling the last remaining gap in the historical national accounts of Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century. This gap is formed by the final year (1913) of Gregory's national accounts for Tsarist Russia, and the initial year (1928) of Bergson's national accounts for the USSR, both on a GNP basis. The gap includes World War I (1913 to 1917), the Civil War (1918 to 1921), and postwar recovery under a mixed economy (1921 to 1928). Our work builds on that of our predecessors including Gatrell, Gregory, Kafengaus, Litoshenko, Prokopovich, and Vainshtein, and also returns to a number of original sources. Our preliminary findings are that the economic performance of the Russian Empire in wartime was somewhat better than previously thought; that of War Communism was correspondingly worse. Our figures confirm the persistence of losses associated with the Civil War into the postwar period, or the failure of the New Economic Policy to achieve full recovery, or some mixture of both. Our findings remain tentative.

We are working towards filling the last remaining gap in the historical national accounts of Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century. This gap is formed by the final year (1913) of Gregory's national accounts for Tsarist Russia, and the initial year (1928) of Bergson's national accounts for the USSR, both on a GNP basis. The gap includes World War I (1913 to 1917), the Civil War (1918 to 1921), and postwar recovery under a mixed economy (1921 to 1928). Our work builds on that of our predecessors including Gatrell, Gregory, Kafengaus, Litoshenko, Prokopovich, and Vainshtein, and also returns to a number of original sources. Our preliminary findings are that the economic performance of the Russian Empire in wartime was somewhat better than previously thought; that of War Communism was correspondingly worse. Our figures confirm the persistence of losses associated with the Civil War into the postwar period, or the failure of the New Economic Policy to achieve full recovery, or some mixture of both. Our findings remain tentative.

WAR AND ECONOMICS: THE FINANCE OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR REVISITED.

Pablo Martin-Aceña (Universidad de Alcalá-Madrid)
Elena Martínez Ruiz (Universidad de Alcalá-Madrid)
Maria A. Pons (Universidad de Valencia)

Economic conditions affect the development and the outcomes of wars. The amount of resources available to the warring parties is usually a determining factor of the final result. The superiority in resources can be readily transformed into military superiority in order to better meet the needs not only of the war effort, but also of the rearguard, essential to maintain the moral of the population. The superiority of resources usually reflects a higher level of economic development, that in turns allows for a greater flexibility in adapting the productive structure to the necessities of the war. This general idea has been confirmed for the case of the two world wars and this was also certainly for the case of the American Civil War where the Union’s more developed markets and industrial base are considered key factors in the final outcome of the conflict since the North was able to spend roughly twice as much resources on the war effort than the South.
The Spanish conflict seems to contradict this general conclusion. When the war broke out in July 1936 and the Spanish economy was divided in two, most of the industrial base and the financial wealth were concentrated in the area controlled by the legitimate Republican government. And yet Republicans lost the war. The prevailing explanation for this apparent contradiction has been that the Republican defeat was partially due to a grossly mismanagement of the resources at their disposal. We argue that, contrary to the established knowledge, there was no much different between the two sides either in the quantity of funds used or in their financial strategies. Both sides were forced to resort to all possible means to meet the huge expenditures requirements of the three years conflict. Taxes, requisition, confiscation, payment moratoria, sale of assets, borrowing and money creation were used to finance the war effort. External sources were also significant. Franco borrowed from Germany and Italy, while the Republicans depleted their holdings of foreign exchange reserves. All in all the volume of financial resources spent by the two parties were similar. We also argue that external factors and the course of the war, and not the economic management of the Republican Government, were the determinant factors that explain the final result of the war. While Hitler and Mussolini sustained Franco, the Republicans did not count with the help of the democratic nations, and only Stalin was ready to supply them with arms. Moreover, the Republicans` continuous military setbacks during the first year trimmed down its economic capacity and changed the economic balance in favor of the rebels` administration and army. And once the war began, the military developments had a greater impact in the economy, as the other way around.
The paper reviews how the Spanish civil war was financed. We present new evidence and new data that allows us to offer a detail and more balance analysis of the financial strategy and the volume of resources employed by the two combatant parties. In the first section some background facts are presented. The second section offers quantitative evidence about the war expenditures of both sides. In the third section we examine the internal and external sources used by both the Republican Treasury and the Franco’s administration to meet the cost of the war. The paper finishes with the conclusions.

The paper reviews how the Spanish civil war was financed in order to analyse how economic conditions affected the final outcome of the conflict. We present new evidence on the financial strategy and the volume of resources employed by the two combatant parties. Our analysis suggests, contrary to the established knowledge, there were no significant differences between the two sides neither in the quantity of funds used nor in their financial strategies. The available evidence shows that the volume of the financial resources spent by the two parties were similar. We also argue that external factors and the course of the war, and not the economic management of the Republican Government, were the determinant factors that explain the final outcome. Republicans` continuous military setbacks during the first year had a decisive impact on the expectations on the outcome of the war, and therefore on the credibility of the their currency which limited the capacity of the Republic to finance its war effort. This suggests that once the war began, it was military developments, which influenced the development of the economy, rather than the other way around.

The Japanese aircraft industry, which had been in a very small scale before the
Second World War, became the largest manufacturing industry at the end of the War.
In this paper, we explored the basis of the growth of the aircraft industry during the war,
focusing on No.5 Works of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Co.. It was made clear that the
supply of basic inputs sharply increased. Labor force and “machinery parts” were
sufficiently supplied and either of them was not a binding constraint of production. The
binding constraint was given by supply of “special parts.” To put it differently, expansion
of aircraft production was realized, as the supply of “special parts” increased. Increase
of “special parts” supply and still faster increase of “machinery parts” supply were
achieved thorough expansion of supplier network both in terms of number of suppliers
and the geographical area they were located.

According to estimates made by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey after World War II, German industrial labor productivity grew significantly during the war, especially in 1940 and 1941. These estimates are based on the assumption that the intermediate input to sale ratios in the different industrial sectors remained constant over time. However, after the beginning of the war, German armament producers started to outsource the manufacturing of intermediate goods to other companies, especially to firms in occupied Europe. In order to trace the impact of such outsourcing, this paper re-estimates German imports on the basis of information given about payment flows. Official German import data are highly distorted, suggesting that German net imports during the war were almost insignificant. The re-estimation presented here, however, shows that Germany imported a tremendous quantity of goods from occupied countries, especially intermediate inputs for armament production. Consequently, it reveals that Germany’s industrial labor productivity grew much less than the United States Strategic Bombing Survey assumed.

For nearly forty years, the mainstream interpretation of the West German economic miracle has been built on the reconstruction thesis, developed by the Hungarian economist Ferenc Jánossy to explain the extraordinary growth performance of war-shattered economies during the 1950s and early 1960s. Jánossy and his advocates in German historiography, Werner Abelshauser in particular, argued that World War II and the post-war settlement generated a labour-quality adjusted shortage of capital in the West German economy. Consequently, reconstruction growth in the 1950s was driven by capital deepening. Contrary to this widely accepted view, I aim to show that urban industry, which served as the engine of the economic miracle during the 1950s, faced labour scarcity, not capital shortage, after the war.
Upon constructing a regional dataset which reports figures at the local-district level, I demonstrate econometrically that the geographic pattern of demographic expansion in the late 1940s was determined primarily by differences in the scale of wartime destruction in residential housing. The rate of expansion in industrial employment between 1939 and 1950, in turn, depended upon the rate of population growth, i.e. on labour-supply constraints. Finally, differences in the rate of economic growth can, to a large extent, be explained by regional variation in the rate of employment expansion in industry and handcrafts, not by not capital accumulation. Throughout the analysis, I apply instrumental variables to account for endogeneity and robust regressions to adjust for outliers.
Based on my results, I argue that low levels of industrial production in urban agglomerations at the start of the economic miracle resulted from labour scarcity, while the growth of rural industry was fuelled by labour expansion. Inasmuch as wartime dislocation led to the underutilisation of existing machinery and equipment in urban industry and yielded declining levels of capital intensity in rural areas, it must also be seen as largely responsible for the productivity meltdown of the late 1940s.

The CED was the most prominent business organisation of the 1940s, and is credited with influencing major tenets of US foreign economic policy (Bretton Woods and Marshall Plan). This achievement is remarkable given that from the outset the CED was at odds with the government over its core post war aim of immediately liberalising world trade. From its creation in 1942 at the behest of the Commerce Department, the CED fixed its gaze exclusively on devising internal methods of securing domestic employment when the bonanza of war production stopped. This was due to the theoretical mindset of the CED leadership, which subscribed to the Keynesian view that a nation’s overseas activity could only successfully be expanded after high domestic employment had been achieved – clashing directly with the Administration’s vision for the post war liberalisation of trade. Consequently, between 1943-45 the CED faced increasingly firm challenges from government circles over the role of international trade in achieving high domestic employment, the most notable being Will Clayton, Under-Secretary of State and a CED trustee, but also Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department and economist Jacob Viner. What emerges is that remarkably, despite some forthright prodding from government circles, rigorous debate and not a little soul-searching, the CED withstood the encroachments of the liberal orthodoxy and ended the war not only endorsing – with only the barest of caveats – but also directly implementing the Keynesian mantra of prioritising domestic over foreign mechanisms for achieving high national employment and productivity.

That the CED was able to do this, and remain influential upon the Administration is remarkable, as is the fact that this feat was achieved early in 1945 well before the end of the war and the major shift in the international context which took place during 1946-47. Indeed, in the climate of the ‘cold war’ CED’s influence grew as its philosophy of Keynesian interventionism and stabilisation matched the needs of a war torn world and lifted several CED activists into high government office.

The article analyses the attitudes of publicly engaged entrepreneurs in Moravian capitol town Brno towards the local possibilities for improving the material lot of the working class, towards the developing workers' and trade union movement and towards projects for the building of social infrastructure. The primary focus at the local level is on the attitude of entrepreneurs to the question of building a society with improved social benefits and their contribution to the creation or indeed the elimination of the main points of friction between the bourgeoisie and working classes.

Manager Paul Kupelwieser (1843-1919), managing director of Vítkovice Coal and Ore Mining (1876-1892), was one of the first modern industrial managers in iron metallurgy and coal mining in the Czech lands and the Habsburg Monarchy. He was one of the pioneers of the idea, that successful and effective operation of a company must be ensured among others by the businessman’s activities outside the company, especially on a municipal policy level. He therefore showed direct activity or activity through the company management personnel, leading to the transformation of the industrial village of Vítkovice into a modern industrial town with all attributes. He prepared an urbanistic-architectural project of separating the manufacturing and residential spheres (construction of the so-called New Vítkovice – Westend with quality workers’ housing, construction of markets, a town hall, hotel etc.), the cultural and social infrastructure (schools for the workers’ children, hospitals, a Roman Catholic church etc.). He engaged a group of significant Viennese architects into these initiatives. The paper also solves the question, what motivated the manager to participate in municipal policy: /1/ the fact, that the dynamic development of the Vítkovice iron works threatened with a functional collapse, the solution of which would be beyond the control of municipal councils, made up of small townsmen, farm owners etc. /2/ The discharge of the communal-political office meant the acquisition of certain prestige and it was considered in the public opinion as evidence of responsibility for the development of the municipality. /3/ the membership in municipal councils offered the businessmen the chance to participate in deciding, how to dispose of taxes and contributions which were paid to the municipality by the companies. Private business plans were therefore carried out under the veil of public interest (social expenditures, construction of infrastructure, educational institutions). K. used his experiences in Vítkovice in the year 1919 when drawing up the project “Vorschläge für die Gestaltung Deutschösterreichs”.

It is necessary to adapt the concept of businessmen to the specific situation of a small town. Businessmen are seen as the economically successful parts of middle class and differ from the petty bourgeoisie that enter a state of crisis at the end of 19th century. Businessmen can be found in three different subgroups of middle class: the bourgeoisie, an „urban economic elite“ and the well of businessmen and manufacturers. Members of the bourgeoisie were present in urban social life only as patrons of associations and festivities as well as donors of endowments. Moreover they enjoyed high prestige by their living-style as for example their luxurious mansions. They were not active as members of the managing committees of urban associations. Their social relations were supra-regionally oriented. The urban economic elite, on the other hand, was active in urban and regional politics but its members did not play an important role in the managing committees of local associations. They mainly supported the liberal idea, were very active in funding the local public relief and cultural activities. The members of the „urban economic elite“ also took part in the local festivities.
The group of the well of businessmen and manufacturers was very active in urban politics and in the managing committees of the association. Together with members of the petty bourgeoisie and the educated middle class they supported the radical German nationalist, anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic political movement that began to be successful in Hallein after the turn of century.

Within the Czech environment, businessmen and self-government were inseparably linked. It would be possible to find similar examples of the symbiosis between enterprising individuals, i.e. Czech self-made men and municipal activities in every Czech town. Enterprise and self-government complemented each other and even sought each other out. A wealthy, or wealthier, merchant, factory owner or a mere tradesman, like today, expanded in one phase of their business dealings their area of activities from commercial or industrial activity to a wider community. Simultaneously they utilised consumer opportunities in their community as well as their earlier entrepreneurial, credit and organizational experience. Mayors – businessmen very often considered the administration of a community and its finances as the management of a prosperous enterprise. The post of mayor or merely their participation at the meetings of the Municipal Council provided them with respect, economic information, connections and perhaps a market for their products. In many instances municipal politics was also the starting block towards becoming Land Deputies. Yet, only rarely were these representatives of small and middle businesses willing to expand their political activities to the Assembly of Deputies of the Viennese Imperial Council. They mostly left this political activity, carried out beyond their own town and region, to the so-called free professionals, primarily Prague lawyers and notables.

The first generation of businessmen from northern Hungary (1. the dominant Hungarian and German businessmen, 2. mostly assimilating Jewish businessmen, 3. foreign businessmen few in number, but of considerable importance, 4. marginal Slovak businessmen) already contributed to various features of the public activities. We can assume that various stimuli influenced their behaviour. The first was examples from contemporary cities, where measures to limit the worst forms of poverty had already functioned for a long time. Very varied forms of charity also existed among the richest citizens. The second stimulus was the way of life and behaviour strategy of the nobility, which were imitated by members of the rich city and business communities. A third stimulus was foreign influence. A fourth stimulus was the wish to gain noble status and achieve a high social position. Clearly, this only came into account in the case of non-Slovak businessmen. On the other side Slovak businessmen placed themselves in the service of the national movement, which meant that all the activities he developed were oriented towards the benefit of the “whole nation”

The study deals with main spheres of the public engagement of the Moravian entrepreneurs in the 19th century. The public activity is perceived as the end in of the social function i.e. role of the entrepreneurs in the society. This role was determined by the position or the employer, and generally a prestige position ensuing from the ownership economic, cultural and social capital. Analysis of public activity of the entrepreneurs is divided in two parts in this article. The first part deals with activity immediately connected with professional interests and position of the entrepreneur: with building of company social systems motivated by rational reasons, imposing pressure on local administration, publicity activity having a task of establishing favourable perception of the entrepreneur at public, making blunt the pressure of social democracy, and further the activity in commerce and business chambers. The second part deals with activities of the entrepreneur, which resulted rather from their growing position at the social ladder, then from the affiliation to the upper stratus: execution of the mandate in the country diet or empire counsel and political activity generally, charitable activity, association’s activity, support of art, and engagement in religion communities.

The Ostrava-Karviná mining district concentrated an enormous number of workers, especially in mining, metallurgy and the textile industry. The numerous working class was a relatively restless part of the population, as is testified by the number and size of strikes which took place in this region, especially at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Literature of Marxist origin accredited this fact to the bad policy of separate businessmen towards the working class. Today’s research concieves this issue as a more complex interaction of many factors.

The present article attempt to present the differences in the embourgeoisement of the three main national groups in Transylvania (the Romanians, Hungarians, and Germans/Saxons), the various possibilities of and paths taken by the entrepreneurs, their public engagement and role in the public life, the mentality underpinning it, and at what extent did nationality and religion influence their role in the public life.
Economically, during the nineteenth-century, Transylvania could not close the gap that separated it from the more developed regions of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The Transylvanian bank system had a specific development. The three ethnic groups – the Hungarians, Romanians, and Saxons – developed a parallel network of financial institutions.
The paper presents the career of three bank managers. The career of all three was multi-dimensional, while their role in the public life was multi-facetted. The relatively small elite in Transylvania was active in several domains. All three flirted with politics for a shorter or longer period, played an active role in the public life, and accepted a role in various cultural and scientific associations, as well as in the leadership of their Churches. The reasons behind their decision to play a role in the public life are somewhat dissimilar, a common reason being the “desire to serve their nation.”
While the elite strove to handle the major “national issues” centrally, the issues of urban development and landscaping remained local everywhere, insofar as the locals worked without national distinctions. Urbanization and infrastructure development were those areas where the interests of all three nationalities coincided and where there was room for collaboration.

Suffrage both active and passive was limited only to smaller part of the population of Habsburg Empire – liberal constitution both from February and December in 1867 preferred in the access to the civil rights those who brought greater values to the state both materially and spiritually. Austrian Silesia was interwoven of industry network. On the West, it was particularly textile factories (flax, cotton, and wool enterprises), leather industry, also stone industry, machinery and chemical industry. On the East, black-coal mining complexes, iron works, and chemistry plant and textile factories again were spread. General examples of engagement of the entrepreneurs in the communal and land politics of Austrian Silesia may be divided into three spheres of activity: effecting on the communal level, effecting on the land level, and the role at establishing of political associations and parties.

The first generation of continuous professional study of West African economic history focussed on the extent to which resources in precolonial economies were allocated in accordance with a logic of relative scarcity, as envisaged in market economics, and as advocated by the ‘formalist’ as against ‘substantivist’ schools of economic history and economic anthropology. In the 1970s this debate was essentially resolved in favour of the ‘formalist’ position, expressed in a classic synthesis by A. G. Hopkins (1973). Following that, research moved on from a focus on the calculus of individual decision-making to the structures conditioning individual transactions. Meanwhile, however, without attracting much attention from synthesisers or theorists, monographic research has revealed a lot more about market behaviour and institutions in these periods. This paper argues that the formalist understanding of precolonial economies has been reinforced and refined by this research. Sections 1 and 2 briefly review the original debate and subsequent contributions, and argues that after 1973 a perhaps surprising degree of de facto consensus emerged behind the main formalist propositions, from scholars with rather diverse disciplinary and ideological perspectives. The paper proceeds to explore the issues further. Section 3 considers the implications of the last 36 years’ research for the analysis of the ‘structure and function’ of markets in the domestic economies of precolonial West Africa (‘structure and function’ was the sub-title of Hopkins’ chapter on the domestic economies). Section 4 makes a rather speculative attempt to advance the cause of properly historicising the subject, by inquiring into the origins of the relatively high level of market-orientation in West African economies that was evident by 1650 or 1800, and considering the internal dynamics of domestic markets in interaction with apparently exogenous forces as the nature and extent of market activity evolved from over the period preceding colonization. The presentation will link the analysis more precisely to the issues of rural institutions and 'the Great Divergence' which are the focus of the session.

African economic development is stifled because most countries are notional states. The notional state must not be confused with rhetoric of corruption and failed states. Rather, the effective reach (in a spatial sense) of the African state is efficiently attenuated in virtue of the benefits and costs of extending coherent governance beyond the capital city. This stands in stark contrast to the concept and the practice of nation building and the state as it evolved over centuries in Western Europe. In Europe, strong states evolved out of a necessity to protect valuable agricultural assets during an era in which land-based wealth was paramount. European states became strong because they could not afford to be weak. African states are weak because they have no good reasons to be strong. The “mask of citizenship” reflects reciprocal estrangement between citizens and the government. Colonialism in Africa did nothing to extend the effective reach of the state, and post-independence governments have found no good reasons to do so. The essential step to extend the reach of governance beyond the capital city is the tax bargain in which all individuals would contribute to the public purse. This will gradually mobilize revenue for the provision of missing collective consumption goods and services. Of greater import, the tax bargain will give “voice” to those in rural areas and will force central governments to listen to demands for coherent governance. Only then will economic development be possible.

This paper uses the factual approach to challenge the conventional wisdom and argues that traditional Chinese villages were based on near-universal private ownership. Landholding concentration was not obvious until the 1930s. Rent was light by medieval Japanese and European standards. Villages were highly autonomic in internal administration, law and order and external security. There was also internal division of labour and sectors. The head of the village was elected and did not even have to own land. After 1978, China’s villages gradually rebuilt its timeless institutions which contributed China’s explosive growth in the past 30 years.

All these findings make many ideology-laden claims on circulation, Maoism in particular, very shaky.

This paper begins from the assumption that, contrary to the conclusions of much of the earlier literature on Japan’s rural history, the development of the rural economy can be viewed as successful, over the long term, in terms of output growth, improving living standards and relative equality. However, a number of Japanese scholars are now coming to argue that this success was heavily conditioned by institutional structures originating in the pre-modern period, with the result that the path of economic development and industrialisation that Japan was to follow differed in significant respects from that described in the standard narrative of the industrial revolution on the western side of the Great Divergence. The paper provides brief surveys of English- and Japanese-language research into the economic effects, from the pre-modern period into the era of modern industrialisation, of (1) the institutions of government and taxation; (2) land tenure, inheritance and cultivation rights; (3) the village as an institution; (4) household labour and the labour market and (5) technology and the organisation of production. It thereby seeks to show how the pre-modern institutional structure generated a pattern of economic growth within which the small-scale, multi-functional household unit was able to survive and develop, over the course of industrialisation. The implications of this for the position of the Japanese case in the Great Divergence debate are briefly suggested, as a prelude to the session’s comparative discussion and analysis.

The issue of the decline and disintegration of the demesne on the one hand, and the consolidation of the peasant economic sector on the other, have been a subject of some notable scholarly debate. A number of explanation has been offered, all of them related to endogenous and institutional factors affecting both seigniorial and peasants’ decisions.
In recent years, however, there is more and more scholarly awareness regarding exogenous, chiefly environmental factors, as prime movers of late-medieval economy. This notion, in my view, can also be partially applied on this issue. At the same time, however, it will be argued that one should look at both institutional and ecological factors, to get the full appreciation of the phenomenon.
Contrary to the commonly held opinion, the decline of the English demesne had actually begun several decades before the Black Death of 1348-51. The first clear signs can be traced in the early 1320s, shortly after the agrarian crisis of 1314-7 and, more importantly, the Great Cattle Plague of 1319-20. The latter prompted many lords to lease out parts of their cow stocks and dairy houses to their better-off tenants. The dairy sector was soon followed by the poultry one. Both dairy production and poultry farming were labour-intense sectors, and they were suitable better for the tenants’ rather than the seigniorial sector at that period. It was a combination of ecological vagaries, on the one hand, and of mutual seigniorial and peasants’ decisions, on the other, that stood behind the phenomenon.
The both sides went one step further during the deflation of the 1330s, when a small number of demesnes were leased out to the tenants in toto. This was, however, a short-lived and perhaps failed experiment, and by 1340, the leased demesnes were taken back in hand.
The Second Phase of the process came after the other biological disaster, the Black Death of 1348-51. The period between c.1350 and 1380 has been often regarded as the “Indian Summer” of the demesne farming. In reality, it was much more complicated phenomenon. While some lords indeed tended to lease out their demesnes either partially or entirely, some others decided to retain the demesne at hand, at least until c.1370, to profit from still high grain and livestock prices. After c.1375, after the first successful post-plague harvest, and, consequently, falling prices and raising real wages, we can discern the sharp divergence between the demesne and the tenancy. The former became strongly biased towards extensive forms of management, most notably sheep husbandry and rabbiting, while the latter expanded more labour-intensive sectors, most notably arable, cattle, pig and poultry husbandry.
The Final Phase of the process can be dated c.1400-1450. During that period, we witness a virtual disappearance of the demesne, which was the natural expression of this increasing dichotomy and divergence between the two sector of rural management.

The so called “second serfdom” In Russia and eastern Europe was a much more flexible and efficient system than usually believed. In the estates, the “agency” problems were solved not only on the ground of economic considerations but also in response to the peculiar way institutions and actors interacted. Peasants’ leaders, landlords and bailiffs were much more in coordination than in opposition between them. Evidence suggests that the output of both agricultural produce and proto-industrial products increased throughout the 18th and 19th century; in turn, this sustained the demand for manufactured goods that was mostly satisfied by local proto-industrial activity utilizing labour-intensive technology.
These outcomes confirm similar recent issues on Eastern Europe agriculture under serfdom. In Prussia, Bohemia, Lithuania and Poland the period from 1650 to 1800 saw a fundamental transformation “serfdom”. Taken together, these experiences lead to the conclusion that legal constraints on labour mobility dictated much less by “scarcity of population” than by increasing demand for agriculture produce and proto-industrial products encouraging a “Smithian” growth. Labour and other institutions (seigniorial estate and justice, commune, guilds) were flexible enough to guarantee at the same time a stable set of rule and the procedures to adapt them to changing economic and social environment. Labour services were not opposed to market development, quite the contrary, they enhanced one each other. Unlike Kula’s, North’s or Wallerstein’s argument, the rise of markets in the west did not oppose to autarchy and serfdom for exports in the “east”.
Once admitted that “second serfdom” did not exist as such, and that it was not opposed to capitalism, then, discontinuities in the space (East and West) and in time (the transition from feudalism to capitalism) loose much of their meaning; we rather find gradation within the same world. A common labour-intensive path of growth was at hand in Eurasia during the 17th-end of 19th century; a great divide (according to Tawney) occurred only at the turn of the 19th and 20th century (and not with the first industrial revolution), with the second industrial revolution and the raising of the welfare state; to this strong discontinuity in time corresponded a great divergence (Pomerantz) between the “east” and the “west” (that, again, occurred one century later than Pomerantz’ scheme).

This paper examines property institutions in the nineteenth century in the German principality of Hesse-Cassel to investigate the variety of customs used and the effect that these institutions may have had on urbanization patterns and on the socioeconomic structure of the villages and towns. Data on over 1,000 towns and villages has been assembled from a 1850s community survey. In the principality of Hesse-Cassel, inheritance as a property institution mattered in important ways and affected the economic and social aspects of people’s lives. Impartible villages had larger families, and possibly less population growth. The economic structure of the two types of villages differed as well, as there were more artisans in partible villages and more laborers and farmers in impartible villages. With higher populations, more factories, higher land prices, greater numbers of “other” artisans, and more regular markets, partible villages had a more urban character. Land distributions also varied by inheritance tradition: impartible villages had land distributions where the average farmer had more land, but where land holdings were more unequal than in the partible communities. Lastly, religious minorities congregated in different places, whereby Jews tended to be in the partible villages and in cities, while Catholics tended to be in the impartible places at high elevations.

This paper gives a short introduction to the session Re-inventing the European City: Challenges and Responses since 1950. Three aspects are considered: (i) challenges posed by major urban transformations during the turn to post-industrialism, (ii) trends in West European urban population growth rates since 1950, and (iii) how globalisation, deindustrialisation, European integration, and other processes as well may have affected the West European urban system. The findings indicate a switch of urban growth centres from south to north, and on the transnational level a weakly integrated urban system throughout the period. Besides, a time schedule for the session is enclosed.

Based on the commercial guides of the 1950s I will attempt to map the industrial activity along Pireos Street, which is the most important industrial axis of the Greek capital. The 10km-long Pireos Street connects the city of Athens with the city’s port Piraeus. In the first decades that followed the end of the Second World War, manufacturing plants were built along this street leading to substantial population concentration. Towards the end of the 20th century the use of these industrial buildings changed with significant repercussions for Pireos Street, which is now used to carry the residents of Athens and Piraeus in large and crowded nightclubs.

This paper focuses on urbanization and territory. It is the result of research carried out by historians, sociologists and anthropologists and applies a ‘trouble case studies’ methodology. On 13 January 1998, the ‘Discoverer Enterprise’, a floating oil rig under construction in the dockyards of the city of Ferrol (NW Spain), cast off its moorings and finally crashed into the most important - and practically the only - bridge that connected the city with its estuary and region, cutting off traffic for more than two months. The collapse of the local road network engendered a number of problems in terms of production, reproduction and consumption. It highlighted more general insufficiencies in communications, and the underlying contradictions affecting territorial organisation and regional urban development over the last fifty years. This case study enables us to review several ideas about the impact of the transition to democracy and membership of the EU on Spain’s urban system.

In my research on the recent history of the municipality of Umeå, a regional capital in Northern Sweden, documents highlighting the importance of local professional networks in the epoch 1950-2000 has been gathered. Such networks apparently made it easier to create viable policies or projects in various fields, e.g. education, health, town planning and transportation. However, the local policy-making capacity of professional networks did not just depend upon their exclusive professional knowledge. As will be demonstrated, even more important was the agents’ previous experience of networking. Local government was characterised by a specific kind of political know-how, where tactics and social capital were at least as important as ideology.

To what extent do these micro-political practices assist efforts to build creative cities? On the basis of the case study of Umeå, I try to answer this question by exploring theoretical issues and also point at the need for comparative transnational studies of the dynamics of urban professional networks.

This paper explores Amsterdam’s struggle with modern and ‘post-industrial’ times. After the Second World War Amsterdam, more in particular its urban government, was at odds with the city’s socio-economic status and its need to metropolise. In the 1950s and 60s an ambitious urban government envisioned a future for Amsterdam as a centre for industry and as a metropolis with a population around one million at the end of the century. In order to keep up with ‘modern’ times, Amsterdam needed to rebuild its historic City in order to lure big businesses, had to improve its infrastructure – roads, railways, subways, tunnels and bridges – build new residential districts and improve the old neigborhoods within the 19th century city limits. Whereas urban government almost unanimously saw the modernization of Amsterdam as both inevitable and imperative in order to improve the city’s national and international competitive position, the citizenry at times opposed many of the ‘megalomaniac’ future plans. As such, the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a remarkable involvement of parts of the citizenry in the debate about the future of their city. Their argument centred around the notion of livability; the city’s livability was said to be threatened by the government’s plans to attract chemical industries or its willingness to destroy parts of the old city centre in order to improve the infrastructure. All in all, the 1970s in particular turned out to be a decade of disillusionment for the Amsterdam governors: they finally had to acknowledge the fact that Amsterdam was not equipped to be an industrial city and, yielding to public pressure, played down their ambitions for the future development of the city. This paper discusses this tension between on the one hand the aim to create a ‘livable’ city and on the other the urge to modernize and metropolise Amsterdam.

No abstract

We believe that diversity fosters innovation. From Jane Jacobs to Richard Sennett, urban theorists have emphasized that diversity and tolerance to diversity are essential prerequisites for creativity, which in turn is a major driving force behind dynamic urban development. In her influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs advocated dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods where buildings varied in age and condition and where streets bustled with people from all walks of life. Three decades later, in 1993, when her book was re-published and when cities were facing new challenges posed by globalization, Jacobs prescribed the same medicine as in the early 1960s – neighbourhoods that support urban diversity. Richard Sennett emphasizes that creating diversity and complexity is only the first part of what we need to do to create better cities. We also need to make the complexities a city contains actually interact. If cities want to become more creative, it is important that people come together – and they are brought together – in different ways and for different purposes, and that they learn to live with strangers.


The starting point of this paper is Sennett’s idea: society gains immensely if people can make a life with those who are different from them in terms of class, race, and ways of life. The aim is to look at Stockholm and Helsinki which in recent years have boasted about their creativity and increasingly also about their tolerance to diversity. In practice, however, attitudes towards diversity have been ambiguous. Diversity of urban life has been seen as a fertile ground for new ideas and innovations, but at the same time much concern has been expressed that celebrations of different identities may also result in conflicts, segregation and the fragmentation of society. Therefore, city governments and other important urban actors are at the moment – and have often been in the past – in the situation where they seek to find a balance between enhancing diversity on the one hand and regulating and repressing it on the other. This paper will contribute to these discussions by examining how diversity and difference have been constructed and treated in Helsinki and Stockholm since 1970. To what extent, if any, has globalization made the Nordic cities more tolerant to diversity? What differences (class, ethnic etc) have been seen as worth preserving and cultivating, what differences have been defined as “unacceptable” and “disruptive” and how these disruptive differences have been accommodated or repressed?

The aim of this paper is to describe the changes experienced by the Lisbon’s Metropolis in its very beginnings after 1950. Industrialization and population growth were, until the end of the sixties related to an import substitution process. Investments were concentrated in the heavy industry both in the south bank of Tagus and in the East of Lisbon.. In the seventies export oriented industries developed as de-industrialization began in Europe.
With the 1974 crisis and decolonization the growth of services and their expansion outside Lisbon became important. The housing problems were slowly solved and the population growth in the metropolis was maintained.

abstract
The paper aims at presenting an explanation for the complete absence of public municipal banks in the Southern Low Countries between 1400 and 1800. The reasons were complex, lying in a combination of the presence of adequate substitutes such as money-changers, cashiers and town exchange offices (stadswissels) and of countervailing factors (adverse economic conditions, insufficient financial resources, special interests of persons and lobbies). It is also argued that strong government control of Antwerp urban debt prevented the municipal authorities from experimenting with a municipal bank.

During the end of the XVIth century, the Lyon fairs secure the national as well as the international payments in France. Early XVIIth century seems to be a turning point in the organisation of the French payment system as it gets more and more linked, first to the Antwerp, then also to the Amsterdam and London exchange.

Accounting handbooks and bankers’ archives (ledgers, journals, letters) allow analysing this process.

Tracking the payment patterns used by French and Flemish bankers on the Antwerp and Paris money markets, it is possible to show how French business men could do without a central bank, by making use of different clearing mechanisms. This leads us to outline the role of private bankers, cashiers, and even of post officers ("messagers de ville").

The absence of a major exchange bank in England before 1694 was an unusual fact for an economically savvy Western European country. Englishmen yearned for a continental-style exchange bank but knew that the constitutional issues had to be resolved first. The 1640 confiscation of coin and bullion in the Tower of London and a major 1672 Crown default (‘Stop of the Exchequer’) were most damaging to the prospects of any bank. Until the political circumstances allowed the creation of a major bank, Englishmen wrote about banking ideas and experimented these very creative ideas in the relatively free and coin-starved American colonies. They divided their coin holdings between a decentralized system of small banks (goldsmith-bankers) and their backyards. These circumstances, so different from much of the continental experience, may have caused the English in both the Old World and the New World to be among the pioneers of public and private paper money.

The Genoese fairs inherited the features of a time-honoured institution which improved itself through the subsequent stages of Geneva, Lyon Piacenza and finally Novi. This economic and financial institution reached its zenith between the end of the 16th Century and the beginning of the 17th Century; starting from 1580 almost all European International transactions were settled right in Piacenza fairs of exchange every three months. During the 16th and 17th Centuries the Genoese bankers offered many financial services all around Europe at such high levels that not many competitors were able to contrast them. This paper aims to show that their success was due to their preminent role in financing the Spanish Monarchy from the first loans of the 16th century - the asiento - to, at least, the last years of the 17th Century. At “Bisenzone”, Genoese bankers raised money for these loans from a variety of sources reducing the risks of lending and funded the king's long-term obligations via short term loans. The prime mover of the Genoese exchange fairs was - more than International commerce - the huge volume of transactions generated by the Spanish Crown’s public debt and the financial speculations of the most influential European financial operators (Genoese and Florentine above all). Piacenza and later on Novi became the main operating market where an increasing number of operators coming from all the European trading markets were gathered together and where the volume of transactions multiplied. In 1621, the Genoese bankers decided in a high-ended manner to transfer the seat of the fair to Novi, on the territory of their independent Republic, producing a long lasting rupture in the Italian bankers’network. The exchange fairs of Novi created an efficient financial network under Genoese control and permitted arbitrage among the other northern Italian financial markets (Piacenza, Verona, Bolzano).

This paper discusses the necessity and specification of exchange banking structures in small and medium size cities. It tries to explain the absence of exchange banks as visible institutions as a matter of dimension and frequency respectively transaction costs. The assumptions to be discussed are: Money exchange was an everyday need even in small cities because of the currency diversity in17th and 18th century, and so were credit transactions. Up to a certain transaction volume municipalities handled the business internally within the exchequer, the treasurers being experts in this field of financial services. In certain cases however they had to make use of external experts. Needless to say that money exchange was not the only business of those informal banks like deposit and credit transactions.
The paper represents a case study analysis based on historical municipal records (16th to 18th century) of two Southwest Germany Cities, forming the centre of a medium size princedom. The case study will be embedded in the general context.
Keywords: exchange banks, financial services, market structures, municipality, Germany, medium size towns

Before John Law's well-known bank, France did not have any public bank, either on the Amsterdam/Hamburg or on the England model. I examine the different projects proposed from the 1550s to 1715 and explain why they failed to succeed. One reason is the existence of a primitive but efficient payments system, the Lyon payments, which I also discuss.

Widows in Northern Europe and Strategies for Survival
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to study the strategies adopted by widows in their efforts to cope without a breadwinner in urban and industrial areas with employment opportunities for women and young adults. To what extend did widows collaborate with family, survive economically through their own work and or turn to society for assistance. Households of mothers and children will be analysed to determine co-residence patterns and family size, earnings of family members and assistance from the poor relief authorities. Efforts will be made to unravel strategies for survival generated by women and the balancing of support between family and the public body, resorting to taking lodgers and manipulating food budgets. The issues will be approached mainly on micro level using socio-economic surveys of industrial workers in late 19th and early 20th century Sweden and Finland, surveys of working class standard of living from the same period and census data and poor relief documents from the year 1900.

The aim of the paper is twofold. First, to show how women attempted to cope with the material needs not only of their offspring, but also with those of other members of their family (mostly parents, siblings, etc.) for whom they were sometimes also obliged to offer the necessary assistance. We will see how difficult it was to reconcile the demands of both children and work as a result of the long working hours current in such sectors as were opened to them. In addition, the Poor Law authorities were always ready to take action when they considered that the upbringing of the children was inadequate and did not meet with their requirements. The second part of the paper will deal with the changes brought about by the creation of state social insurances, the first step being taken in the 1920s in order to help older people, but mainly with the creation in 1947 of the AVS (Assurance de vieillesse et survivants) for old people, widows and orphans.These changes partly reduced the necessity for women without a husband to work beyond the age of 65, but also benefited younger widows and to a lesser extent single women, as can be seen form the 1950 and 1960 census data.

Historians have long realized that women figured prominently on the poor relief lists of early modern England, and much research has already been done on poor women's survival strategies. This paper re-examines the issue of assistance to women through the lens of poor women's roles as mothers. I explore the degree to which the poor laws interfered with the reciprocal obligations of mothers and children that were such an important feature of prescriptive literature on the family. More specifically, I will look at the ways in which the eighteenth-century workhouse, in both theory and practice, curtailed poor mothers' use of their children's labour and support.

En 1855, la première loi de Santé Publique espagnole, ordonnait à toutes les municipalités qui comptaient au-dessus de 10.000 habitants, de procurer aux familles pauvres l'assistance médicale et pharmaceutique gratuite. En premier lieu il fallait établir les limites de la pauvreté, établir au-dessous de quels revenus les pouvoirs et la société considéraient que l'on était pauvre. Toutes les années, la municipalité publiait un rencensement oú figuraient les chefs de familles admises au rang des pauvres. La première chose qui se dégage en étudiant ces listes, c'est la bien connue féminisation de la pauvreté. Dans des proportions très considérables, ce sont des femmes, chefs de famille, qui y sont enregistrées. Des veuves pour la plupart, avec ou sans enfant.
Les stratégies étant bien sûr fortement liées aux marchés de travail, à Saint-Sébastien,ville peu industrialisée, vouée au secteur tertiaire, siège de la Cour espagnole pendant l'été, la stratégie fondamentale de survivance de ces femmes tournait autour du logement.
Les loyers étant très élevés, le problème du logement attirait l'attention de sociologues, réformateurs sociaux et médecins qui dénonçaient les conditions des foyers qui se sous-louaient en regroupant un nombre élevé de personnes qui s'entassaient dans très peu d'espace pour ainsi obtenir de revenus pour faire survivre la famille.

Nowadays the Conditional Cash Transfers Programmes (CCT), are orchestrated to overcoming the poverty. Example of these programs in Mexico, is the Education, Health and Feeding Program (Progresa-Oportunidades) established at the end of the 1990’s. Progresa-Oportunidades is centered in the “maternalism”. Poor women are incorporated in the Program’s design, but in a sense that they depends on the gender’s division for their success. Even if women could’ve been marginally empowered through handling the supports, the structure and operation of the Program reinforces the social divisions through which the gender asymmetries are reproduced. These asymmetries depend on women who carry out their “traditional” social papers and responsibilities. Progress-Opportunity is based on responsibilities normally assigned to the maternity, conditioning the cash transfers to a “good maternity”. In this paper there are analyzed referring data to the socioeconomic context of the woman in poverty in Mexico: the feminine headquarters in the poor homes; the labor inequality, the wage discrimination, the income, education and the governmental support of Progresa-Oportunidades to the women in poverty. The women in poverty who are family mothers make use of Progresa-Oportunidades with the expectation of which their daughters have access to a better life than them: in other words, it is a feminine strategy to survive.

* Researchers from the Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, UNAM. The authors are grateful to Bernardo Ramirez Pablo for his valuable assistance and technical support in this paper. Also are grateful to Hilda Caballero and Susana Merino for their opinions.

The first issue considered is just how many widows whom the authorities at the time considered to be poor actually received assistance from the Poor Law while they lived in their own households or in the households of others. A second issue addressed is the share of the household budgets of widows that was derived from earnings, either their own or those of their children, or was provided by the Poor Law. Thirdly the income and expenditure patterns of widow headed households will be compared with those of labourers, taking acount of the differences in household size and numbers of adults and children. Other issues considered will be the proportion of the earnings of children living with their widowed mother that they actually contributed to the household budget, the extent of assistance received from adult children who had their own households to support, aid from other relatives, friends and neighbours and the contribution provided from cultivation of a garden and exploitation of waste or common land.

During the mid-nineteenth century the Oriental Bank Corporation was the most eminent Eastern exchange bank (British overseas bank) which played a leading role in international banking between Britain and Asia. After the 1870s, however, this unrivalled position gradually undermined and failed in 1884. Unfortunately, the history of the Bank has not been fully told so far and still belonged to a large neglected area of scholarship in British financial history because its business records were totally destroyed at the bankruptcy.
This paper intends to focus on the Oriental Bank Corporation’s analytical history, especially its relations with financial institutions in London, from the foundation of 1842 to the collapse of 1884. It depends mainly upon the new and hitherto not well-explored records such as the Treasury Papers at the British National Archives, David McLean Correspondence deposited at the School of Oriental & African Studies Library, relevant business records of the Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London & China and the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation held at the HSBC Group Archives, and the contemporary financial press.

In Asian trade foreign exchange business had long been monopolised by great British merchant houses and companies, but they were supplanted in this sphere of business by British exchange banks around the 1850s. Their preponderance, however, was threatened by the arrival of several non-British banks in the 1890s. However, they managed to survive and became successful again in the 1900s. Among them, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation had the most remarkable success. What enabled this bank to repel the competition of the other British banks and of the non-British ones? This is what this paper tries to elucidate.

During the first globalization era, the number of banks from financially advanced Western countries with branches and subsidiaries in emerging peripheries of the world almost tripled, from 56 to 146. What drove their expansion abroad and determined their foreign location choice? The paper empirically explores this issue thanks to a unique data set that allows a global quantitative assessment of the magnitude, scope and spatial pattern of multinational banking (MNB) before 1914. The predictions of competing explanatory theories are tested on the base of an augmented gravity-like specification, comparable to the approach of recent studies of foreign direct investment and international trade of financial assets. Three main factors emerge as pulling forces of entry and expansion into foreign markets: the exploitation of rents created by trade dependence and colonial relationships; high information and monitoring costs due to geographical distance and low informational development; and macroeconomic instability. The results suggest that pre-1914 MNB was not mainly driven by gravity forces. Banks expanded relatively less into rich neighboring markets than into distant and relatively poor locations. Their decisions were influenced less by proximity (geographical, social, institutional) than diversity. Forces of spatial dependence also contributed to shape the financial geography of the globalizing economy. The paper tests this patten against the evidence of Western banks' location choices in Asia before 1914.

British banks asserted their hegemony on the Hong Kong market thanks to the powerful thalassocracy built by British trading houses all around Chinese harbours and rivers. French banks, along with German, Russian or Dutch, then also American, ones, tried and succeeded to establish bridgeheads in southern China. First Hong Kong became a platform used by French interests in colonial Indochina to manage business in the Chinese Sea area. Second French trading and shipping companies used Hong Kong as a foothold to get access to various outlets for manufactured goods or to pick up commodities. Last, French banks got access to a share of the Hong Kong local banking market itself, and thus enriched their portfolio of skills in proximity banking, in corporate banking, and in foreign exchange activities.

This paper aims to analyze the role of a branch of a Japanese bank in the internationals financial centers and its change during the Interwar period. Branches of international exchange banks generally buy bills for goods exported from where they exist, to collect bills for goods imported to where they exist, and to transfer funds with other branches. In addition to these “ordinary” businesses branches in the international financial centers raise funds by selling bills there or by borrowing money from other banks, to makes investments for securing reserves, and to advise letters of credit issued by large banks there. This paper sheds light on these activities of the Yokohama Specie Bank, which was the largest international exchange bank in Japan before the Second World War and shows that branches in London and New York facilitated the flow of funds within the bank. The Interwar period saw significant change in international money flow as New York grew to an international financial center, which was as important as London and also saw the Great Depression and international conflicts after that. This paper analyzes how businesses of the two branches changed in order to cope with turbulence in the financial markets.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries the City of London retained its position at the centre of international banking. This was despite competition from Paris and then Berlin in the 19th century and the rise of New York as a financial centre in the 20th. To many this is seen as a product of imperial links followed by inertia. By taking Asia as a case study, and looking specifically at the relationship between the City of London and China, India and Japan, the explanation is seen to revolve around the stregth and depth of the London money market and the corresspondent bank connections that were put in place and then maintained over the centuries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the activities of the Yokohama Specie Bank in the intra-Asian trading networks prior to 1913, focusing on the foreign-trade financing operations of the Bank in Osaka-Kobe area. Most of past researches of Japanese foreign-trade financing operations before 1913 are the analyses of the foreign-trade financing operations for silk exports mainly from Yokohama. Because silk was the leading export commodity during the Meiji and Taisho period, it is nature that most past researches took up silk exports as their research topic. This concentration on silk exports from Yokohama is vividly reflected in the past researches of the Yokohama Specie Bank. After the 1890s, however, not only Yokohama but also Kobe became the leading trading port and Osaka-Kobe area became as the center of Japanese industries since the 1890s. Osaka-Kobe area was the center of the Japanese industrialization, which mainly consisted of the cotton spinning and cotton textile industries. This paper attempts to pay special attention to the foreign-trade financing operations for raw cotton trade between Japan and British India and how the Yokohama Specie Bank, especially the Kobe and Bombay branches, contributed the business of Japanese cotton merchants in order to collect raw cotton in British India and to export them to Japan.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of the business conducted by the branches of the International Banking Corporation (hereafter IBC) in London and China. In this overview on the IBC history from its establishment to the 1920s, it was shown that though the IBC could enlarge its business size during the First World War, it could not catch up with the leading international banks in Asia in the 1920s. The study on the Chinese branches of the IBC showed the following facts;
Firstly, the Beijing Branch in the 1920s supplied funds to the Shanghai Branch continuously. It means that in the Chinese branch network of the IBC, the Shanghai Branch played the pivotal role for gaining profits as was the cases of Shanghai branches of other leading international banks.
Secondly, the Tianjin Branch was located in a trading port and had business characteristics similar to those of the Shanghai Branch. As the branch was located in a trading port, it had large business relating to foreign trade and earned profit from them. On the other hand, the Guangzhou Branch had similar business characteristics to the Beijing Branch. But the Guangzhou branch also could make profits from exchange business.

The aim of this paper is to examine the activities of the Russo-Chinese Bank (Русско-Китайский Банк) from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the operations of the Bank in Russia and Asia.

The Russo-Chinese Bank was founded to perform the following three functions: investment (Chinese loans), management (Trans-Siberian Railway and Eastern Chinese Railway) and trade (discount operations). At the outset, the Bank was a genuine “international bank”, but later on it became a “regional bank”. One of the factors that brought about this change was that the most profitable field of operations changed from international trade finance and settlements to domestic loan operations.

This paper considers the famine of the immediate post war period 1946/47 in relation to the food problems experienced by the USSR in WW2 and to the impact of the weather conditions in the 1941-47 period. Many analysts claim that the famine conforms to a general Stalinist pattern of Stalin using the famine to punish the peasantry in circumstances where harsh procurements were not necessary. The evidence considered in this paper does not support such a claim. By contrast this paper argues that in terms of the timing and the nature of the extreme food problem this famine conforms to a general pattern of Soviet famines in which a number of years of urban food problems leads to pressure on the peasantry and a general reductions of stocks, which then places the country in a dangerous position when confronted by drought and harvest failure.

Centred on Henan Province, China, the North-Central Plains Famine in 1942-43 claimed about 2-3 million lives and at least a similar number fled in search of food. In the 1920-30s, famine strucked the same region several time. Less than 20 years later, Henan was one of the worst affected areas of China’s Great Leap Forward (GLF) Famine of 1958-62 that claimed about 30 million lives, the worse famine in total deaths to date. Drawing on a variety of archive and recent Chinese-language research, this paper will explore the causes and consequences of the Henan famine. According to many contemporary accounts the famine was not just the consequence of nature’s cruelty to a region that has frequently been dealt a bad hand. It was primarily a famine resulting from human action and the folly of state policy in a front-line contested zone. Analysing the 1942 Henan famine helps shed light on the dynamics of the GLF famine.

The paper invokes archival and contemporary newspaper sources in arguing the case that while the Bengal famine occurred in a time of food scarcity, the fundamental reason for the famine was its wartime context, and the refusal of the authorities to prioritize the Bengal poor over the requirements of their military campaign.

This paper examines recent research into mortality and survival during the famine resulting from the blockade of Leningrad by the German and Finnish armies that began in September 1941. With nearly three million civilians trapped in the city, rations soon at starvation level, public utilities at a standstill, and an exceptionally bitter winter, the death rate soared, producing a demographic catastrophe unprecedented in an urban setting and a developed country. Access to declassified Russian archives has made it possible to produce detailed analyses of 'nutritional dystrophy', the prime cause of death in the winter of 1941-42. At the same time, many people did not die, despite their rations apparently being incapable of sustaining life for more than a short period. The paper reviews documentary and oral sources that shed light on physiological and psychological factors that made for survival in appalling conditions.

While enjoying a long period of peace under the rule of the Tokugawa (1603-1867), associated with regional specialization and a relatively high degree of market integration, the Japanese population experienced severe famines that claimed several hundred thousands lives. The most dramatic episodes of the 18th and 19th century occurred in 1731-1733, 1783-1786, and 1833-1838. As agricultural practices, crop mix, and degree of commercialization and specialization varied across Japan, it is worth considering the possibility of regional differences of economic systems in response to exogenous shocks. This paper evaluates the degree of market integration and investigates how regional markets functioned during famines.

CCP leaders and academics have argued for fifty years over what role bad weather played in the Great Leap Famine of 1959-61. Some have claimed that it was entirely caused by natural disaster, while others have claimed that bad weather was not the main cause of the famine. However, the quality of the data presented in support of one or other argument have tended to be either highly selective or systemic biased: Liu Shaoqi's argument that weather was no more than 30% of the problem was based on the fact that the fishpond in his hometown had not entirely dried up whereas it had in a drought in his youth (sample size N = 1); Y.Y. Kueh's argument that the weather in the famine period was truly awful is based on analysis of natural disaster data, an official tally of the reported acreage where yields fell short of the highly ambitious levels set by the early Communist government.

This paper attempts a systematic analysis of the weather in China during the Great Leap Famine, using a set of monthly meteorological data. The weather patterns corresponding to several pre-49 famines are compared with those of the Great Leap Famine. Results of analysis of the meteorological data are also compared with previous studies of reported natural disaster data, and with records of anomalous weather and crop failure collated in imperial and Republican-era gazetteers.

'Famine foods' seems a self-explanatory term but careful reading of the existing literature suggests otherwise. 'Famine foods' seem to suggest repulsive and unfamiliar foods consumed only in famine situations. This paper, using the Greek famine of 1941-43 as a case study, suggests that this is not the case. Starving people continue to use foods that they are familiar with or that other sections of the population are familiar with. The very poor sections of the population may well use fodder food, which nevertheless they are familiar with and which in most cases was also used by some of their members even in 'normal' times.

Studies of men and women exposed to the Dutch famine of 1944-1945 (also known as the ‘Hunger winter’) during different periods of life (before birth, during early childhood or during adolescence) are important because they afford a rare opportunity to look at potential long-term effects of changes in the nutrition environment on health and disease. For ethical and practical reasons it is unlikely that experimental studies in humans to examine these issues could ever be carried out. The circumstances of the Dutch famine, with civilian starvation caused by conditions of war, provide a rare opportunity however to look at the impact of dramatic changes in nutritional exposures that are not normally seen in human populations.

The Dutch famine has several unique features. It was clearly defined in place and time and occurred in a society with a well-developed administrative structure and adequate pre-famine nutrition conditions. The famine was limited to the western Netherlands and particularly affected the people living the largest cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague and Leiden. It was the result of a combination of several circumstances: a national railway strike, a transport embargo on food supplies imposed by the German occupying forces, and an especially severe winter period with the freezing over of canals and waterways that otherwise were used for the transportation of potatoes and grains from the North and of coals from the South, essential for power plants and for domestic heating. The severity and widespread nature of the famine have been extensively documented. Food availability from distributed rations in the western Netherlands declined from adequate pre-famine levels to below 900 kcal per day in January 1945 and to as low as 500 kcal per day by April 1945. Some people obtained additional food from black markets and from bartering but these supplements were not generally available. The famine ceased after liberation by the Allied forces in May 1945, after which food supplies were rapidly distributed across the country. There was a 300gm decline in birth weights of infants born in hospitals in the famine cities and also a 50% reduction in conceptions during the famine. The drop in fertility was greater among the manual than the non-manual occupational classes and was directly related to poor nutrition. After Liberation, fertility was restored and birth weights rapidly returned to pre-famine levels. It is possible in the Netherlands to study famine long term effects by tracing men and women from birth to current address or date and place of death, using the national civil registry system introduced in 1811 by Napoleon during the French occupation.

We will summarize the findings of studies of developmental and adult health outcomes among men and women exposed to the Dutch famine of 1944-1945 compared to non-exposed controls. Studies have used the military examination records of recruits at age 18, psychiatric hospital records for schizophrenia in early adulthood, and screening and follow-up records from population-based samples of adults studied for cancer incidence and mortality. In addition, men and women have been traced from birth and were then medically examined for diabetes, risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and DNA abnormalities.

We will discuss the validity and the potential of these studies for several purposes: to document the severity of the famine among individuals or selected exposure groups; to establish associations between famine exposures early in life and health outcomes later in life; and to generate hypotheses regarding the biology of human adaptations and/or responses to changes in the environment that could be tested in other study populations. We will also discuss pitfalls in the interpretation of study findings in this setting.