Citizenship was a key concept in European state formation from the Middle Ages onwards. This article presents an economic interpretation of citizenship. It argues that such a contract increases the efficiency of the exchange between the state and its inhabitants. Next, the concept of citizenship is applied to the political economy of the Dutch Republic, which was an ‘intermediate’ stage in the process of state formation between the medieval commune (with a restricted form of citizenship) and the nation-state of the nineteenth century, when the concept became more inclusive, covering all inhabitants. The article briefly sketches the genesis of the Dutch Republic and identifies some of the key problems of its political economy.

The growth of trade after 1860 has been attributed to declining tariffs, to falling transport costs, and, recently, to monetary arrangements. However, coincident with the rise of trade the second half of the nineteenth century saw the development of the first electric communication network: the telegraph. The first successful trans-oceanic cable was operating in 1865. The telegraph remained the only direct trans-oceanic communication link until into the twentieth century. Little research has been conducted explicitly linking the impact of telegraphs on international shipping and international trade. A panel is used to show that there is a correlation between the diffusion of the telegraph, co-ordination of shipping, and the growth of world trade even controlling for the impact of other well-studied effects. The telegraph reduced the time ships spent in port and allowed ships to travel farther among ports to collect more valuable cargo.

This article examines the effect of total war on inequalities in pay in munitions industries in Britain during World War II. I present new data derived from Ministry of Labour monthly reports of changes in wage-rates, which allows for a systematic analysis of pay inequality by skill category and by gender and age. I also investigate changes in earnings equality using data derived from Earnings and Hours Enquiries and from records of the National Arbitration Tribunal. I conclude that pay differentials – defined by skill, gender or age – narrowed considerably during World War II. For men, the War represented an accentuation of a trend towards greater levelling that commenced in the later part of the 1930s and continued in the immediate postwar years. This was not the case for women workers. During the War years gender pay inequality in munitions industries was substantially reduced, but some of these gains were eroded with the coming of peace and demobilisation. Wartime labour policy was directed toward the deskilling of manufacturing work and this was coupled with both a significant expansion of unionisation (especially among unskilled workers) and institutional and legal changes that strengthened the bargaining position of trade unions. These factors suggest that institution factors worked in conjunction with labour demand effects to reduce pay inequality in those industries crucial for the war effort.

This article investigates the question of how openness affected the growth of income in the late nineteenth-century Atlantic economy. More specifically, is the tariff-growth correlation identified by O'Rourke (2000) driven by European offshoots? Is the correlation perhaps explained by the concurrent integration of intranational markets before 1914? And what can other measures of openness tell us about the growth process in the nineteenth century? This note offers some answers. The results can be summarised as follows: O'Rourke's primary finding is not altered by changes in the sample; incorporating measures of inter- and intranational market integration into the analysis again supports O'Rourke's findings, but apparently leaves no role for intranational market integration; and evidence from trade-flow data suggests that there may been a pro-growth role for tariffs in a non-reciprocal trade environment.

I review recent monographs on the history of monetary and international financial regimes, which have explored the origins of the gold standard and the extent and sources of capital market integration. The studies of the emergence of the gold standard have adopted variously long term and shorter term perspectives, and arrive at different conclusions concerning the relative contributions of technological and political factors. The histories of capital markets document the extent and sources of the openness of late nineteenth century capital markets, and reach conflicting conclusions on the role that the gold standard played in capital market integration.