I use the rents and prices of land held by charities in England to estimate statistically nominal and real farmland rental values, including payments for tithe and taxes, from 1500 to 1912. The series measures rental values when land was rented in a competitive market, not the average rents paid by land occupiers which would often be lower because of customary leases. An advantage of the methods used here over older ones is that the sampling error in the series can be calculated. The series show rapid shifts of income toward landowners and away from wages around 1600 and 1800, but back toward wages after 1870. Land rental values are much higher before 1820 than in the recent series of Michael Turner, John Beckett and Bethany Afton. This implies that agricultural productivity was high before 1800: higher than could be consistent with an agricultural revolution either alongside or before the Industrial Revolution.

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.

A set of historical national accounts for the province of Holland in 1510/14 is estimated, including estimates of the size and composition of the labour force. This evidence shows that the economy of Holland was already very modern at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the result of a transformation of its economic structure between 1350 and 1500, and that structural transformation and per capita growth between 1510/14 and the beginning of the nineteenth century were limited. These results are confirmed by independent evidence about the long term development of real factor prices (rents and wages).

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.

A general equilibrium arbitrated by prices arising from consumers and firms interacting in markets is a core idea in economic analysis and provides powerful insight into many historical issues. Modern computational models permit investigators to exploit the insights of general equilibrium. This article outlines the ideas of general equilibrium and of computational general equilibrium models. In the process, strengths and limitations are discussed. The discussion is given focus by using the Harley-Crafts model as its focus and explores briefly the consequences of changing the allocation principals in the agricultural sector of the model from a capitalist arrangement to a peasant arrangement.

This article presents a model of the transformation of the Central European economy between the years 1000 and 1800. On the basis of assumptions about the social environment, the actors, and the relations between them, deductions are made that are compared to actual historical developments. The model explains why competitive markets emerged in the high Middle Ages, why anti-competitive corporations and states developed in the period up to the seventeenth century, and why institutions safeguarding market exchange began to be introduced in the course of the eighteenth century.

By contrasting the optimal with the actual location of Spain's main production centre in Bilbao, we have tried to resolve the enigma that mislocation introduced an important welfare loss in Spain's industrialisation. This analysis considers the optimal location for integrated steel mills in Spain from their origins (1880s) until the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The first part of this article introduces the relevant aspects for formalising a model, while Section 2 applies the methodology. The numerical results show how the major technical change – the reduction of coal consumption – affected each of the alternative sites. They also allow us to identify ‘the overall optimum site’, which was not Bilbao. Our final conclusions confirm that the actual centre of iron and steel production during the period considered was a second-best location. The cost in terms of direct welfare loss, in terms of captive markets and rent-seeking used to maintain this second-best solution, and the ultimate consequences of mislocation, point to an inefficiency which has changed the course of modern Spanish industrialisation.

At the end of the nineteenth century some of the less developed countries of Southern Europe often faced major problems when they sought to increase their exports of primary products. Such problems were a consequence of the tariff policies implemented by a number of their trading partners. In this article we analyse the case of the Spanish exports of ordinary table wine during the period 1890–1935. The expansion of wine production outside Europe meant that some countries in the American continent raised their tariffs to protect national production, which caused serious damage to exporters. Much more serious was the discriminatory trade policy initiated by France in 1891 which gave priority to the tariff-free importing of Algerian wine, as against the high tariffs that had to be paid by other exporters. This policy, as well as protecting French production, aimed to support her colonial policy in Algeria and seriously affected Spanish exports, as shown by our data and the econometric analysis we have carried out. The Spanish response resulted in a greater penetration of other European markets, thanks to the competitiveness of Spanish wine, but this did not prevent a serious crisis in the sector.

The Irish Famine killed over a million people who would not have died otherwise. The nosologies published by the 1851 Irish census provide a rich source for the causes of death during these catastrophic years. This source is extremely rich and detailed, but also inaccurate and deficient to the point where many scholars have given up using it. In this article we try to make adjustments to the death-by-cause tabulations and provide more accurate ones. These tables are then used to analyse the reasons why so many people died and why modern famines tend to be less costly in terms of human life.

Self-selection mechanisms are important because they shed light on what has been relevant to those who migrate, especially in the nineteenth century. Using new micro data gathered from emigrant permit lists and census data in the homeland, I compare over 10,000 German emigrants to those who stayed at home. I find that artisans were over-represented and farmers and labourers both under-represented. The emigrant population was positively self-selected in terms of skills, but negatively self-selected in terms of financial wealth.

In this article we investigate the relationship between structural change – defined as the distribution of value added between the industrial branches – and transformation pressure in Swedish industry 1870–1993. The objective is to investigate signs of a change in this relationship during the 1970s. Quite surprisingly, the investigation showed the change occurred in the early 1950s. The rate of structural change is estimated by using an angle measure and is then compared with the dispersion of gross profit shares (GPS) between nine branches of Swedish industry. The dispersion of GPS is used as an indicator of the transformation pressure. A good correlation was present until the early 1950s, when a change in the relationship between GPS dispersion and actual structural change was observed. Furthermore, we suggest that the change in the relationship may be understood either as the result of institutional factors affecting the resource allocation or as an outcome of growth itself, supported by the hypothesis that a higher capital intensity led to market concentration and natural barriers to entry, possibly reinforced by a higher degree of specialisation

Previous researchers argue that the legal and regulatory environment helped shape the German financial system in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the damaging effects of the stock exchange law of 1896. This article finds that the stock exchange law of 1896 exerted little measurable impact on the growth and concentration of the universal banking system or on the business turnover of universal banks relative to securities markets. The article also shows that the English commercial banking sector and the German universal banking sector underwent similar movements toward concentration between 1884 and 1920 (both accelerating after 1912), despite no corresponding regulatory changes in England – further suggesting that consolidation of universal banking resulted from factors other than the 1896 law.

Everyone in the profession knows Angus Maddison. He has written dozens of books and articles on a myriad of issues, and, above all, three books (Maddison 1982, 1991 and 1995) which rank among the major modern interpretations of long-term economic growth. His books, however, stand out even within this literature because of their Statistical Appendices. They contain the most comprehensive data set available on historical trends in GDP (and on much else), and thus, they have become in all likelihood the most quoted books in economic history and perhaps in economics as well. In fact, his latest book (Maddison 2001) is hailed by Paul Krugman as ‘an essential reference for anyone interested in global economic development for many years’ (www.sourceOECD.org). Maddison sets out to accomplish three main tasks: (1) To revise and update to 1998 the data for the ‘industrial’ period (after 1820); (2) To present comprehensive estimates for pre-industrial times, since 0 AD (so the subtitle is not boastful at all); and (3) To explore the main causes of long-term trends.

This article presents revised estimates for the Human Development Index (HDI) for the benchmark years 1870, 1913, 1950, 1975 and 1999, based on the latest available data for real gross domestic product per person and on the recently modified formula for HDI. The results indicate that HDI in most of today's less-developed countries exceeds that of Western Europe in 1870 and that the gaps in HDI between Western Europe and each of Africa, China and India were smaller in 1999 than in 1950. Both these outcomes have been heavily influenced by widespread gains in life expectancy.

Every two years the European Historical Economics Society awards a prize for the best dissertation in economic history submitted in the preceding two years. The Prize is named after Gino Luzzatto (1878-1964), one of the most distinguished Italian economic historians. Luzzatto, a professor at the University of Venice, was forced by fascism to resign as Rector (President) of the University on account of his Jewish origins. He was reinstated after the war. Luzzatto's scholarship, spanning two millennia, was devoted to the history of the Italian economy and to that of the Republic of Venice. The prize was endowed by Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia and by Sistemi Operativi s.r.l.

The 2001 prize was awarded jointly to Yadira Gonzalez de Lara and Liam Brunt, with Regina Grafe as runner-up. Summaries of these dissertations appear in the following pages.

My dissertation uses historical records and a context-specific mechanism-design model to investigate the institutional and contractual arrangements that facilitated long-distance trade in late medieval Venice.This dissertation was awarded by the Department of Economics at the European University Institute under the inspiring supervision of Professors Avner Greif and Ramon Marimon with support from the Social Science History Institute at Stanford University. I also wish to thank Andrea Drago, Gavin Wright, Jaime Reis, and Leandro Prados de la Escosura for their help in various ways. The mobilisation of capital and the sharing of risk in long-distance trade could potentially promote economic prosperity, but it required that merchants were able to commit ex-ante not to breach their financial contracts ex-post. Financial contracting entails the exchange of tangible funds for the promise of future payments, but promises can be broken. Therefore, the set of financial relations that actually transpire in a society depends on the society's institutions for contract enforcement, meaning the constraints that ensure compliance with the promised future payments.Institutions are viewed as constraints that enable merchants to commit. For a definition of institutions, see Greif (forthcoming) and North (1990). Distinct institutional arrangements enforce different sets of contractual forms, among which particular ones can be chosen. The selection of various contracts, and their underlying institutional foundations, has significant efficiency effects. The dissertation thus integrates a historical institutional analysis of the emergence and transition of various contracts with the study of their efficiency attributes. This approach enables me to address the following questions: What institutions for contract enforcement enabled the Venetians to commit to the sea loan (a debt-like contract) and the commenda (an equity-like contract)? What caused the transition from the former to the latter? Did the Venetians attain an efficient allocation of risk?

A defining feature of the Industrial Revolution in England is the transfer of labour resources from the agricultural sector to the industrial sector.Crafts (1994, pp. 44–59). This transfer was exceptionally early by international standards.Crafts (1985, pp. 57–60). It was facilitated by high labour productivity in English agriculture, which enabled the industrial workers to be fed without an explosion in food imports.O'Brien (1996, pp. 213–49).

Economic and historical studies have long focused on trans-Atlantic expansion as one decisive explanatory variable for the success and failure of European economies' performance in the early modern period. This is particularly true for Spain. However, more recently internal economic developments, most notably the very distinct economic paths of Spain's regions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have been emphasised as a major reason for Spain's poor economic development. Surprisingly, few systematic attempts have been made to discuss the links between the external and internal factors in Spanish economic history.