This article discusses agency problems in a period of market boom. It takes Portuguese trade with Brazil as a case study to discuss the impact of colonial market expansion on social capital. The hypothesis is that social capital depletion prompted an uneven distribution of information and a limited access to honest individuals, who might afford a premium to certain forms of agency. Given the states' inability to provide legal sanctioning in colonial regions, this article focuses on private-order mechanisms which were effective for selecting reputable individuals. The exploration of network analysis identifies the mechanism that responds to such an adverse environment and supports the argument that business organizations which counted on the geographical mobility of agents had comparative advantages. The approach followed in this article brings new insights on informal institutional arrangements and on itinerancy in contexts of low levels of social capital.

We analyse the Swedish general elections that took place in spring and autumn 1887. Our aim is to discover which groups of voters supported free trade and which protectionism. We find that while capital owners and wage earners consistently favoured free trade, in the spring election only the largest farmers supported protectionism. By autumn, political preferences among smallholders and middling farmers had shifted in favour of protectionism too. As these groups were not specialised in the production of import-competing goods, we assume that the political landslide in the autumn elections can be attributed to a loss of trust in the government.

We explore the association between income and international capital flows between 1880 and 1913. Capital inflows are associated with higher incomes per capita in the long run, but capital flows also brought incomes down in the short run via financial crises. Countries just barely made up for these losses over time, so that there is no conditional long-run income loss or gain for countries that experienced crises. This is in contrast to the recent wave of globalization when capital importing countries that experienced a crisis seemed to grow relatively faster over fixed periods of time. Some countries avoided crises and were able to raise incomes with foreign capital. We discuss some possibilities why.

This article argues that market integration should be measured as σ-convergence over the largest possible sample of markets. Its focus is the European market for wheat, rye and candles from the middle of the eighteenth century to the eve of the first globalization. Price dispersion for cereals remained constant until the outbreak of the French Wars, then it increased abruptly. It began to decline after the end of the wars, and the process continued steadily until an all-time low was reached in the 1860s. Domestic and international integration contributed in roughly the same proportions to integration in the long run, but the latter was much more important in accounting for medium-term changes. These results suggest that the level of integration was determined for most of the period by war and political events, with a substantial contribution from a fall in transport costs in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. By contrast, there is very little evidence of integration in the market for candles.

This article presents an analysis of British urban working-class housing conditions in 1904, using a rediscovered survey. We investigate overcrowding and find major regional differences. Scottish households in the survey were more overcrowded despite being less poor. Investigating the causes of this overcrowding, we find little support for supply-side theories or for the idea that the Scottish households in our survey experienced particularly great variations in income, causing them to commit to overly modest accommodation. We present evidence that is consistent with idea that particularly tough Scottish tenancy and local tax laws caused excess overcrowding. We also provide evidence that Scottish workers had a relatively high preference for food, rather than housing, expenditure, which can be at least partly attributed to their inheritance of more communal patterns of urban living.

This review article looks at the recent books on the British Industrial Revolution by Robert Allen and Joel Mokyr. Both writers seek to explain Britain's primacy. This article offers a critical but sympathetic account of the main arguments of the two authors, considering both the economic logic and the empirical validity of their rival claims. In each case, the ideas are promising but the evidence base seems in need of further support. It may be that eventually these explanations for British economic leadership at the turn of the nineteenth century are recognized as complementary rather than competing.