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.

During World War II the Allies controlled Spain's oil supply in order to limit Spain's support for the Axis. This experiment with sanctions is unusually informative because a wide range of policies was tried over a long period. Three episodes are of special interest: (1) a total embargo on oil for Spain in August 1940 that was surprisingly successful in dissuading Spain from joining the Axis; (2) a period of reduced supplies in 1941–42, which we call ‘the Squeeze’, that was only partially successful in reversing Spanish policies favouring the Axis; and (3) a second total embargo early in 1944, which proved a disappointment for the Allies, and that produced a rift between Churchill and Roosevelt. Our analysis is based on new monthly estimates of Spain's imports of gasoline and other petroleum products that we describe in the text and report in the Appendix. These estimates allow us to draw a clearer picture of the oil sanctions than has been possible in the past.

We show that, because the cost of the war had been so high in France, the size of the French public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible to stabilise immediately after World War I, even on the anti-Keynesian assumption that a stabilisation would have had no negative effects on income. The reason for the immediate postwar inflation was then not mismanaged policy but a wise choice in the French context; nevertheless, a stabilisation was historically possible from early 1924, and it would most likely have benefited not only France but the entire international monetary system.

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.

This article attempts to quantify the decline of Spain over the period 1500–1850. In contrast to earlier estimates that focus almost exclusively on Castilian agriculture, we look at trends in urbanisation and construct new measures of agricultural and aggregate output at both regional and national levels. A distinctive long-run behaviour is found across Spanish regions that rejects the identification between Castile and Spain. Per capita income grew in the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while contraction and stagnation occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the long run, output per head did not improve until the early nineteenth century. At the time of its imperial expansion Spain was a relatively affluent nation and, by 1590, was only behind the Low Countries and Italy in terms of per capita income. Spain's decline has its roots in the seventeenth century while its backwardness deepened in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This article examines patterns of structural change and labour productivity growth in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. Using shift-share analysis and a set of basic measures to account for the contribution of physical and human capital growth, it seeks to address three questions. First, what was the role of labour productivity growth in per capita income growth? Second, to what extent can structural change account for the comparatively slow growth of the Habsburg economy in general, and Austria's, in particular? Third, how important were physical and human capital stock growth in aggregate labour productivity growth in Austria-Hungary as compared to Germany? The article argues that, in contrast to the Hungarian experience, the size and performance of the agricultural sector imposed a severe burden on Austrian aggregate growth. Further, the evidence points to a significantly smaller contribution of TFP growth to aggregate and industrial labour productivity growth in Austria and Hungary than in Germany. A proximate cause for the TFP growth differential may be found in far smaller positive externalities derived from lower initial human capital endowments in the Habsburg lands.

Simulated optimum tariff policies to achieve plausible government targets show objective reasons for the failure of international trade cooperation during the Slump of 1929 to 1933. For the largest players, the US and UK, benefits from foreign cooperation were small or negative. France and Germany would have been the principal beneficiaries of international cooperative policies. Since cooperation on one issue, tariffs, was difficult, cooperation on many – through the cross-issue bargaining attempted at the 1933 London Conference- was well nigh impossible. Optimum coordination across policy instruments within one country, on the other hand, would have yielded high returns for policy. A corollary is that lack of internal coordination (poor domestic policies) was a more important cause of the Great Depression than failure to harmonise policies internationally.

Were eighteenth-century financial markets efficient? Neal (1990) shows that the London and Amsterdam markets were integrated. Yet some scholars find that the London capital market was either not integrated across various classes of securities, or was comprised of ignorant investors who were not knowledgeable enough to arbitrage across securities with different maturities, or was even irrational at times. In this article, we demonstrate that these London capital market inefficiencies suggested by previous scholars arise from an incorrect comprehension of the pricing of the financial instrument they use. After examining certain features peculiar to India bonds overlooked by previous authors, we make it clear that the London domestic market was perfectly integrated and that investors were capable of handling and pricing sophisticated options.

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.

The purpose of this article is to re-evaluate the military spending dynamics leading to the First World War, namely to explore the impact of the declining military and economic leadership of the UK and the economic emergence of the USA. Individual countries responded to threats from perceived enemies and spillovers from potential allies rationally, yet often going beyond the bounds of traditional alliances. In a sixteen-country system, the military reticence of the UK and USA encouraged higher military spending by other states, which suggests that Germany was not responsible for the arms race alone. Aggregate systemic military spending also incurred higher individual spending levels, whereas alliance impacts were not consistent.

This article examines the impact of endowments, property rights and political conflict on the diffusion of cream separators in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Favourable endowments, access to finance and owner-occupancy promoted the spread of cream separators, while in areas with more small farms political conflict slowed down the diffusion of separators as well as of cooperatives. The structure of property rights and political conflict help explain why Irish agriculture was less successful than Danish agriculture during this period.

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 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.