Some world historians attach globalisation ‘big bang’ significance to 1492 and 1498. Such scholars are on the side of Adam Smith who believed that these were the two most important events in recorded history. Other world historians insist that globalisation stretches back even earlier. There is a third view which argues that the world economy was fragmented and completely de-globalised before the early nineteenth century. None of these three competing views has distinguished explicitly between trade expansion driven by booming import demand or export supply, and trade expansion driven by the integration of markets between trading economies. This article makes that distinction, and shows that there is no evidence supporting the view that the world economy was globally integrated prior to the 1490s; there is also no evidence supporting the view that this decade had the trading impact that world historians assign to it; but there is abundant evidence supporting the view that a very big globalisation bang took place in the 1820s.

‘The year 1500 marks an important turning point in world history . . . The European discoveries made the oceans of the earth into highways for their commerce . . .’ William H. McNeill 1999, p. 295.

Estimates of employment structure, agricultural output, and agricultural labour productivity are developed for the leading European countries from 1300 to 1800. The employment estimates are developed from estimates of the total, urban, and rural populations. The output estimates are derived by positing a demand curve for agricultural goods.

The purpose of the article is to present the statistical reconstruction of a series of per capita output in central–northern Italy between 1300 and 1913. The various phases of both the statistical procedure and the results are presented and discussed. From the Renaissance until the 1880s, when modern growth starts, the curve of per capita GDP is downward bent. Output series together with three robustness tests, are collected in the Appendices.

One important recent theme emerging from the literature on early modern Europe is that some of the key structural and institutional changes that are responsible for the increases in incomes may have taken place rather early, in the late medieval period or in the era of the Black Death. This study makes use of the recently compiled real wage evidence for different parts of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean to gain further insights into this period. The era of the Black Death witnessed a series of important long-term changes in demographic behaviour, in agriculture, in manufacturing, trade and technology. Real wage series reflect the productivity increases from these changes. They also suggest the Low Countries and England were able to resist to a greater extent the general tendency for wages to decline during the second leg of the demographic cycle that began with the Black Death. A wage gap thus began to emerge between the northwest and the rest of the continent after 1450. The last section of the article explores the reasons for this divergence.

This article examines energy consumption in Sweden, Holland, Italy and Spain over 200 years, including both traditional and modern energy carriers. The analysis is based on totally new series of energy consumption including traditional carriers along with modern sources. Our main purposes are a closer examination of the process of the energy transition in Europe and a revision of the prevailing idea of there being, over the long run, an inverted U-curve in energy intensity. Changes in energy consumption are decomposed into effects from population growth, economic growth and energy intensity. The results on energy intensity challenge the previous suggestions of most scholars. An inverted U-curve does not exist whenever we include traditional sources of energy in our analysis.

For individuals to enter mutually beneficial exchange relationships they have to recognise them as such and they have to be able to commit to fulfil their contractual obligations. The ways in which a society's institutions mitigate this fundamental problem of exchange determine its efficiency and distribution. This article calls attention to the need, ability, and promise of studying the historical evolution of institutions that mitigated the fundamental problem of exchange. It elaborates on the essence of this problem and the related institutions, and demonstrates the ability and importance of studying them by drawing on various studies of historical institutions. Our understanding of the different economic performances and evolutions of various societies over time can be greatly enhanced by studying how they mitigated the fundamental problem of exchange.

This study offers the first anthropometric estimates of the biological standard of living in Europe during the first millennium AD, and extends the literature on the second millennium. The overall picture drawn from our data is one of stagnant heights. There was no large-scale progress in European nutritional status over the period studied, not even for the period between 1000 and 1800, for which recent GDP per capita estimates indicate increasing development. We find that heights stagnated in Central, Western and Southern Europe during the Roman imperial period, while astonishingly increasing in the fifth and sixth centuries. Noteworthy also is the similarity of height development in the three large regions of Europe. In an exploratory regression analysis of height determinants, population density turns out to have been an economically (not statistically) significant and negative factor, indicating the relevance of decreasing marginal product theories and Malthusian theory for the pre-1800 period. Of marginal significance, however, were climate (warmer temperatures being favourable for a good nutritional status), social inequality and gender inequality (both reducing average height). Lastly, we also discuss the limitations of our approach.

A short answer is, not very. In contrast to economic growth, where the free market is commonly viewed as a prime mover, mortality in the last two centuries has not been greatly helped by market forces. The classic sources of market failure – information failures, externalities, public goods, principal-agent, and free rider problems – have been pervasive. Nor has economic growth itself been behind the worldwide improvement in life expectancy. In the primitive state of nineteenth century health knowledge, the immense rise in urbanisation engendered by economic growth largely vitiated any positive level-of-living effects by increasing exposure to disease. Instead, public policy initiatives, based on new knowledge of disease and new institutions, have been essential to the improvement of life expectancy, both in urban areas and nationwide.

Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood. – Jonathan Swift, A Description of a City Shower, 1710

How important was coal to the Industrial Revolution? Despite the huge growth of output, and the grip of coal and steam on the popular image of the Industrial Revolution, recent cliometric accounts have assumed coal- mining mattered little to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast both E. A. Wrigley and Kenneth Pomeranz have made coal central to the story. This article constructs new series on coal rents, the price of coal at pithead and at market, and the price of firewood, and uses them to examine this issue. We conclude coal output expanded in the Industrial Revolution mainly as a result of increased demand rather than technological innovations in mining. But that expansion could have occurred at any time before 1760. Further, our coal rents series suggests that English possession of coal reserves made a negligible contribution to Industrial Revolution incomes.

Much as Paul David described the invention of the mechanical typewriter – it was invented 51 times before being patented by Christopher Sholes in 1867, licensed to the Remington Company and successfully commercialized – the connections between the gold-exchange standard and the Great Depression have been discovered repeatedly. They were discovered by Ehsan Choudhri and Levis Kochin in a seminal article in 1980. They were discovered by Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey Sachs in articles published in 1985 and 1986. They were discovered by James Hamilton in an insightful article published in 1988. They were discovered by Peter Temin in his Robbins Lectures published in 1989. They were discovered by the now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in his 1994 Journal of Money Credit and Banking Lecture. Moreover, these contributors to the contemporary literature had important antecedents, including Robert Triffin in the 1950s, Ragnar Nurkse in the 1940s, and Leo Pasvolsky in the 1930s.

Between 1870 and 1913 economic convergence among present OECD members (or an even wider sample of countries) was dramatic, about as dramatic as it has been over the past century and a half. What were the sources of the convergence? One prime candidate is mass migration. This paper offers some estimates which suggest that migration could account for very large shares of the convergence in labour productivity and real wages, though a much smaller share in GDP per capita. One might conclude, therefore, that virtual cessation of convergence in the interwar period could be partially explained by the imposition of quotas and other barriers to migration.

The exportation of labourers and capital from old to new countries, from a place where their productive power is less to a place where it is greater, increases by so much the aggregate produce of wealth of the old and the new country.… Colonization, in the present state of the world, is the best affair of business, in which the capital of an old and wealthy country can engage.

–John Stuart MillMill (1929 [1848])

It must be emphasized that without the change in the proportions of the factors of production that occurs as a result of migration or population growth, differences in factor prices in various countries will persist, and the factors of production of the world as a whole will not be used to their best advantage.

–Eli F. HeckscherFlam and Flanders (1991, 59). Heckscher understood that with impediments to trade or with specialization outside cones of diversification (a failure of ‘harmonic equilibrium’, in his words), factor price convergence would be incomplete and factor migration necessary to obtain factor price equalization.

This article shows that the interaction between economic and demographic variables in England before the onset of modern economic growth did not fit some crucial assumptions of the Malthusian model. I estimated a vector autoregression for data on fertility, mortality and real wages over the period 1541–1840 applying a well-known identification strategy broadly used in macroeconomics. The results show that endogenous adjustment of population to real wages functioned as Malthus assumed only until the seventeenth century: positive checks disappeared during the seventeenth century and preventive checks disappeared before 1740. This implies that the endogenous adjustment of population levels to changes in real wages – one of the cornerstones of the Malthusian model – did not work during an important part of the period usually considered within the ‘Malthusian regime’.

It is argued that the study of the development of the living standard of large segments of the European population between 1500 and 1800 should make use of the available evidence on prices and wages. On the basis of wage data for about twenty European cities and regions, the geographical patterns in silver and grain wages and their development over time are studied. This leads to the conclusion that there is no clear relationship between economic development (measured for example by the urbanisation ratio) and changes in the standard of living in Europe in this period. This also has implications for the hypothesis that an ‘industrious revolution’ occurred in Western Europe during this period. Alternative explanations for the fact that the per capita consumption of certain market goods increased in this period (such as changes in relative prices and an increase in labour effort as a result of falling real wages) are suggested.

Economic rather than political forces appear to dominate inequality trends in Spain. Inequality evolution fits a Kuznets curve. Wars increased inequality but had non-permanent effects, while progressive taxation had no impact until 1980, at odds with Atkinson, Piketty, Saez and associates' findings. A substantial fall in absolute poverty resulted from growth but also from inequality reduction in the interwar period and the late 1950s. Rising inequality and extreme poverty are not found at the roots of the Spanish Civil War. Between the mid 1950s and 1974, inequality contraction and absolute poverty eradication represented a major departure from Latin America's performance while matching the OECD's.

I reconsider the growth of Western Europe during the Golden Age of European Economic Growth after the Second World War. The preceding thirty years of conflict and depression impeded the normal path of industrialisation in these countries, and they had too much labour in agriculture for their level of income and stage of development at the end of the war. The disequilibrium added to other more ordinary forces to produce unusually rapid economic growth. This hypothesis explains the speed of economic growth during the Golden Age, differences between growth rates in these years, and the end of this historical episode.

The height of the French male population of the Ancien Régime is estimated, on the basis of military records, to have been about 162 cm in the seventeenth century. This extremely short stature implies that ‘the crisis of the 17th century’ had an immense impact on the human organism itself. The improvement in climatic conditions at the turn of the eighteenth century had an ameliorating effect on the human organism, increasing its size by nearly 4 cms within a span of 12 years. Improved weather had a beneficial impact on agricultural conditions as well as a direct effect on biological processes. The physical stature of men increased until the birth cohorts of the 1740s, to decline thereafter, in keeping with the European pattern, although the decline of the second half of the eighteenth century was not more severe than elsewhere in Europe. France was not suffering from a prolonged period of malnutrition of unusual severity, and the threat of a Malthusian crisis was mild compared to seventeenth-century conditions. Hence, the anthropometric evidence supports the notion that the French economic malaise was not a fundamental cause of the political turmoil. To be sure, there were very large social differences in the biological standard of living, which clearly fuelled the fires of revolution. The height of the French upper classes was 7 cm above average, but that, too, was standard for contemporary Europe.

This article analyses the long-term development of the skill premium in western Europe in a global perspective, on the basis of data on wages of skilled and unskilled construction workers in more than a dozen European countries and regions, and in a number of non-European countries such as India, China, Japan, Russia, Korea and Indonesia. It shows that already in the late medieval period the skill premium in western Europe had fallen sharply and became, from the fifteenth century onwards, much lower than in most other parts of the world economy. Only in southern China, and perhaps also in nineteenth-century Japan, did the skill premium fall to an equally low level. The explanation for these global patterns focuses on factor proportions, the quality of institutions and demand-related factors. Moreover, it is argued that the skill premium measured in this way is also a predictor of long-term economic performance.

This article considers the sources of long-term economic growth for Turkey over the period 1880–2005. The period in question covers the decline and eventual dissolution of the former Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the new Turkish Republic in 1923. Hence, the article provides a unique look at the growth experience of these two different political and economic regimes. The article examines in detail the evolution of factors that led to growth in output across broad periods, including the post-World War II period and the era of globalization beginning in the 1980s. It also considers output growth in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors separately and allows for the effects of sectoral re-allocation. The lessons from this exercise have important implications for Turkey's future economic performance, for its ability to converge to per capita income levels of developed countries, and for the viability of its current bid for European Union membership.

The article compiles measures of the Human Development Index and also growth rates of real GDP/person adjusted for changes in mortality and leisure for 16 advanced economies since 1870. It is argued that relatively low life expectancy implies that the high income countries of 1870 had lower living standards than most of today's Third World but that since 1870 imputations for reductions in market work time have added more to growth than decreases in mortality. Overall, it seems clear that conventional measures of economic growth seriously understate the rate of improvement in living standards since 1870.

It has become common for authors to argue that government commitment to repay debt depends upon institutions. In this article I present new econometric evidence which shows that in one prominent case, Great Britain after 1688, credibility depended more immediately upon partisan preferences. The ‘revolution’ in British public finance may indeed have been spurred forward by the constitutional changes of the Glorious Revolution, but it was only consolidated in 1715, almost three decades later, during a ‘Whig Supremacy’ where a single party established unchecked control over British political institutions. It mattered a great deal for the final outcome that the Whig party was intimately associated with government creditors while their opponents, the Tories, were not. I provide evidence of a structural break in both government costs of borrowing and Bank of England share prices that is consistent with this argument. Using an ARCH-in-mean model, I then show that the evolution of the Whig majority in the House of Commons provides a better explanation for the evolution of government credibility than does either the assumption of a simple structural break in 1715, or an explanation focusing strictly on political stability, and ignoring partisan preferences. These findings have broad implications for our understanding of the determinants of credibility.