After 1870 Swedish agriculture was transformed in the direction of more animal husbandry. Small farmers in particular specialized in animal produce. Agricultural protectionism, which was installed in response to increasing imports of overseas grain in the 1880s, primarily served the interest of large landowners specializing in bread-grain production. The impact of agrarian tariffs on the factor rewards of landowners, capitalists and workers is explored by means of a Computable General Equilibrium model of the Swedish economy in 1913. Landowners predictably benefited from agrarian tariffs, the more so if they specialized in bread-grain, as did rural workers. Urban capitalists would generally gain if agrarian tariffs had been dismantled. Real wages of workers in urban industries would most likely also improve, but the gain of urban workers was less clear-cut than for urban capitalists, being dependent on the degree of rural–urban labour mobility in response to wage changes.

This article organizes an economic analysis of the effects of colonial rule on capital market access and development. Our insights provide an interpretation of institutional variance and growth performance across British colonies. We emphasize the degree of coercion available to British authorities in explaining alternative set-ups. White colonies, with a credible exit option, managed to secure a better deal than those where non-whites predominated, for which we find evidence of welfare losses.

We investigate the trend and the regional variation in height among German military recruits born during the first half of the nineteenth century. The results show a downturn in height, as in many other parts of Europe and America, particularly substantial for those born at the end of the 1830s. At a regional level, however, major differences emerge from the analysis. First of all, a major height difference between recruits from southern and northern states emerges, probably due to the lower population density and to the specialization in dairy farming in the north. Secondly, time trends reveal at least three different patterns, probably related to the different underlying economic structure: in Bavaria, where the production system was more backward and changed relatively little in the early nineteenth century, heights almost stagnated at very low levels for the whole period under study; in the southwest, characterized by a more dynamic proto-industrial structure, height declined in years of declining grain prices and slightly increased when food prices recovered; in the agricultural north, where the peasants were mainly cottagers working on big estates cultivated with intensive practices, the overall decline in height is much less marked than in the southwest, and the trend moves in a countercyclical fashion with respect to food prices. A separate analysis for Prussia reveals a further differentiation between the west and east Elbian regions: the height of eastern Prussians appears to increase during the 1820s and the early 1830s. As the present sample is mainly representative of non-agricultural workers, the positive trend in the east may be due to both an improved food supply, fostered by a stronger application of the agrarian reforms, and a lower degree of competition among industrial workers, due to a delayed dismantling of the guild systems.

This article revisits Bairoch's hypothesis that in the late nineteenth century tariffs were positively associated with growth, as recently confirmed by a new generation of quantitative studies (see O'Rourke 2000; Jacks 2006; Clemens and Williamson 2002, 2004). This article highlights the importance of the structure of protection in the relation between trade policy and its potential growth-promoting impact. Evidence is based on a new database on industrial tariffs for the 1870s. The results show that income, factor endowment and policy independence are important for explaining regional asymmetries between tariffs and growth. At a global level, increased protection, measured by total and average tariffs on manufactures, implied more unskilled inefficient protection and less growth, and this is especially true for the poor countries in the late nineteenth century. Protection was only positive for a ‘rich club’ if we include in this group new settler countries, which grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century and imposed high tariffs mainly for fiscal reasons.

The study of monetary phenomena and an understanding of price determination in modern Europe are too often limited by scarcity of good-quality data sets on the evolution across time of such variables as money holdings, income, or wealth. In this article we show that information contained in probate inventories can be extremely useful in circumventing this problem. In particular, we combine a data set of 116 inventories from Palencia (in northern Spain) between 1750 and 1770 with census information (Catastro de Ensenada) in order to create a cross-section estimate of money demand, a first for any period before the nineteenth century. Results provide meaningful insights about relationships among money demand, wealth, urbanization and structural change in a pre-industrial economy; they also highlight the potential of probate inventories for improving our general understanding of the monetary history of modern Europe.