It is commonly believed that not much happened in the transmission of information before the introduction of the electric telegraph. This article, however, argues that this was not the case, that quite a substantial improvement in the speed of information transmission had already taken place a few decades before this technical breakthrough. Between 1820 and 1860, global dispatch times diminished remarkably, on average to about a third of what they had been around 1820. This implies that on most routes the improvement during these three decades amounted to more saved days than was achieved after the introduction of the electric telegraph. The development can be described as an evolution which started in Europe in the 1830s and was diffused gradually all over the world. The first transcontinental communications to benefit were those across the North Atlantic and to the Far East, with South America, Africa and Australia clearly trailing behind. The ‘take-off’ was initially connected with the introduction of steamships on coastal or short sea routes and subsequently on increasingly long ocean voyages. However, even traditional overland mail-coach connections improved as also did sailing-ship (‘packet’) connections over the North Atlantic until the late 1830s. It was only in the late 1840s and 1850s that railways started to shrink distances within Continental Europe.

This article presents a quantitative test of the oft-repeated view that Italy's backward and poor South suffered from low ‘social capital’, a tendency to defect from co-operative engagements. The problem with such assertions is that they run the risk of taking as evidence in favour of the hypothesis the very observations that need to be explained. The analysis carried out in this work tries to break out of this impasse by analysing the conditions under which it was ex ante welfare-improving for farmers in early twentieth century Italy to join an unlimited liability rural co-operative bank which would give them access to cheaper credit, but also exposed them to the risk of their neighbours’ defection. These ‘co-ops’ are a prime testing ground for the cultural explanation in that they spread rapidly throughout Northern Italy in the late nineteenth century, but never gained a similar popularity in the South. I estimate the switching function for these co-ops in different parts of the country to test whether Northern and Southern farmers faced significantly different choice sets when making the decision to join. Identical choice sets but differential responses would of course favour the cultural explanation of the South's backwardness. The results suggest that for the same parameter values, the choice sets for North and South were indeed different.

This article challenges the established orthodoxy concerning industrial growth in Greece during the interwar period. A Paasche quantity index weighted by value-added shares for 1938 is constructed and then compared to earlier estimates. The new index indicates rapid growth though not free of interruptions in the 1920s, an early and robust recovery from the Great Depression and high rates of growth in the 1930s. By contrast with earlier estimates which imply that Greece escaped the Great Depression unscathed, the new index shows that industrial output plummeted after 1929. These findings, backed up by alternative tests, suggest that the new index gives the best possible assessment of industrial production in Greece in the interwar period. The article also explores mechanisms that stimulated industrial activity and provoked cyclical collapses of industrial output in Greece in the interwar period.

This article analyses the effects of globalisation on wage inequality in a group of eight now-developed countries during the century prior to 1970, using the same dependent variable and methodology as research on the impact of globalisation since 1970. The results suggest that the impact of globalisation on wage inequality before 1970 was confined largely to the effects of the pre-1914 mass migrations in the United States and Canada. Powerful domestic forces – expanding native supplies of skilled labour, the growth of new skill-intensive industries, and fluctuations in the level of aggregate demand – were the main influences on wage inequality for most of the period.

This article revisits the German system of fiscal federalism between unification in 1871 and hyper-inflation in 1923. I argue that the ill designed fiscal system led to systematically excessive debt for the Reich. The system was the outcome of overlapping distributional conflicts between centre and states, and between capital and labour. It was also responsible for the debt problems arising in World War I and the unsuccessful attempts at fiscal reforms during and after the war. Ultimately, these distributional conflicts contributed to the hyper-inflation in Germany. The German example also has implications for the debate about fiscal federalism in the European Union.