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.

Historians often use the concept of financial revolutions to explain the rise of the Dutch Republic, claiming that innovations in government funding allowed for marked progress in the field of public finance. The article focuses on the medieval precursors of the financial revolution, which the States of Holland brought about when they introduced province-wide public debt in the sixteenth century. The relevant techniques were already known, but predominantly used for political rather than financial purposes. Therefore techniques such as collective responsibility for debt were scarcely implemented. The article hypothesizes that sovereigns made use of the corporate personality of public bodies to increase ties with the main towns of Holland, and thus they used collective responsibility for debt to create stability. This only became a major financial instrument at the turn of the sixteenth century, when a financial crisis forced both sovereign and main towns to reorganize the medieval system of debt servicing. This centralization was crucial for the large public debt the county of Holland created under the Dutch Republic and may even be regarded as a step in the direction of national debt.

Economic historians are increasingly aware of the divergence between the development of real wages and GDP per capita in pre-industrial Europe, even in affluent urbanized societies with high wage levels such as the sixteenth-century Low Countries. This article offers an empirical answer to this alleged paradox by merging living standards and real wages with income distributions in a case study of sixteenth-century 's-Hertogenbosch. It provides evidence for an optimistic reading of the living standards of this era despite the modest performance of the urban economy and a strong decline in real wages. The rich sources of 's-Hertogenbosch were instrumental in reaching this conclusion, as they offer proof that the drop in wage labourers' purchasing power was paralleled by a marked decline in social position. As such, their income experience turns out to be surprisingly atypical, and does little to capture the strong resilience of the majority of the urban populace in the face of the early price revolution.

Most questions about the sources of agricultural growth during the ‘first agricultural revolution’ are still debated. For the Prussian province of Westphalia, we estimated a translog production function to determine the contribution of intensification and technical change from 1830 to 1880. Additionally, we present evidence on the impact that neutral and biased technical change had on growth. Furthermore, we examine whether spatial differences can be identified concerning the sources of agricultural growth and whether they followed a von Thuenen pattern around the demand centre of the rising industrial belt on the Ruhr River. In addition, we explain why, under the conditions of pre-industrial agriculture, regions with the highest output growth did not necessarily have to exhibit the most dynamic TFP-growth, even if they contributed, on average, the most to output growth.

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.

This article looks at the gains from improved market efficiency in long-distance grain trade in the second half of the nineteenth century, when violations of the law of one price were reduced due to improved information transmission. Two markets, a major export centre, Chicago, and a major importer, Liverpool, are analysed. We show that the law of one price equilibrium was an ‘attractor equilibrium’. The implication is that prices converged to that equilibrium in a tâtonnement process. Because of asymmetrically timed information between markets separated by long distances there were periods of excess demand as well as excess supply, which triggered off the tâtonnement process. Over time, adjustments to equilibrium, as measured by the half-life of a shock, became faster and violations of the law of one price become smaller. There were significant gains from improved market efficiency, which took place after the information ‘regime’ shifted from pre-telegraphic communication to a regime with swift transmission of information in an era that saw the development of a sophisticated commercial press and telegraphic communication. This article is the first attempt to actually measure the gains from improved market efficiency and it demonstrates that improved market efficiency probably stimulated trade more than falling transatlantic transport costs. Deadweight losses decline significantly as markets became more efficient. The conventional view that Harberger triangles are almost always insignificant is challenged.

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.

The financial market was well developed in France in the years before World War I, and there were many newspapers that provided information to investors. Yet commentators at the time faulted the financial press for inaccuracy and biases, which they linked to the existence of payments made by companies for coverage in the editorial section. This article tests whether the payment scheme induced a systematic bias in the coverage of companies listed on the Paris stock exchanges by newspapers. The results show that, although firms' media coverage was affected, the performance of firms actually touted by the press was good. Thus, the media bias can also be explained by newspapers choosing the companies' exposures according to their editorial policy.

This article examines how globalization and industrialization offered the nations of the European periphery opportunities to develop exports in sectors where they enjoyed a comparative advantage. As a case in point, we consider Spanish exports of Mediterranean horticultural products (MHP). Two bi-equational export supply and demand models (an equilibrium and a disequilibrium model) are proposed, in which volumes and prices are determined simultaneously, to throw light on the main causes of Spain's expanding exports of MHP. The results clearly reflect the primacy of rightward shifts in the supply and demand curves in explaining the growth of MHP trade by volume. Thus, both rising incomes in the more developed countries and technological change in agriculture specializing in these products were key to the growth of this trade. Meanwhile, Spanish exporters also benefited from the increasing integration of international markets, especially through declining transport costs and, to a lesser extent, trade liberalization.

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 dating of, and explanation for, the agricultural revolution in Europe remains an elusive research task. When and why did a low-productive pre-industrial agricultural sector turn into a fast-growing, more productive one? Unique data from Sweden, consisting of more than 80,000 observations of farm production output for the period 1700–1860, are used to calculate and explain decisive changes in pre-industrial agricultural production. Our estimations show that crop production more than quadrupled during the period studied, and from the 1780s and onwards production growth by far outstripped population growth. Furthermore, the data allow us to estimate the determinants of change at individual farm level. The results show that enclosures, markets and property rights were of significant importance. Institutional changes, affecting the incentives and the organization of production, made peasants invest in production and productivity. In a general sense this shows the flexibility and awareness of pre-industrial European peasants in exploiting markets and initiating institutional change.

To date we lack reliable data on the degree of industrial investment in the Third Reich. Additionally, our comprehensive knowledge of the quantitative significance of the war-related industrial branches is extremely fragmented. Precise figures are, however, crucial if we are to arrive at a correct depiction of the political economy of the Third Reich. Based on previously neglected sources, it will be shown that, beginning in 1936/7, Germany experienced a spectacular investment boom, primarily targeted at broadening the industrial foundation for war. The findings of this article are relevant to several historiographical debates, calling into question both the older Blitzkrieg account and the conventional view of the armaments miracle.

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.

Trade is a critical component of economic growth in newly settled societies. This article tests the impact of ship traffic on the Cape economy using a time-series smoothing technique borrowed from the business cycle literature and employing an econometric procedure to test for long-run relationships. The results suggest a strong systematic co-movement between wheat production and ship traffic, with less evidence for wine production and stock-herding activities. While ship traffic created demand for wheat exports, the size of the co-movement provides evidence that ship traffic also stimulated local demand through secondary and tertiary sector activities, supporting the hypothesis that ship traffic acted as a catalyst for growth in the Cape economy.

Thomas Sargent and François Velde (2002) argue that it took government authorities centuries to solve the ‘big problem of small change’ because those authorities were constrained, first by the lack of a sound theory of small change, and then by the lack of adequate technology for implementing the theory. British experience suggests, however, that institutions also played a crucial part. In particular, the monopolistic nature of Great Britain's official coinage arrangements undermined incentives for establishing a sound system of small change even after theoretical and technological constraints were no longer present. The institutional perspective offered here helps to explain a number of historical facts that are otherwise puzzling, including the fact that a relatively successful private-sector small-change system anticipated Great Britain's official solution to the small-change problem by two decades.