Based on information related to the Stop of Exchequer, 1672, this article calculates the current yields of sovereign debt and examines the effect of the Glorious Revolution on the government’s credibility. The results show that even though the interest payment had not been paid for years, when Parliament authorized the resumption of payment, the current yields fell not only below the level when the interest payment was made by Charles II, but quickly converged to the rates of return of alternative investment. The movement of current yields supports that the constitutional change of 1689 did enhance the government’s credibility.

The successful establishment of the European Common Market on January 1, 1959, has renewed interest in the tool by which this most ambitious of all economic integration projects has been accomplished. The interest is the greater as this is only the first of three attempts to integrate economic development on a continental scale. The others are the common markets envisioned for Africa and Latin America. This article is an attempt to convey in the briefest possible space the history of economic integration that preceded the current drive toward common markets.

There has been comparatively little research into regional prices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and historians have customarily relied upon indices of London's wholesale and contract prices to indicate the fluctuations and trends of British prices as a whole. Our knowledge of price movements, and especially of retail price movements, in other parts of the country is therefore scanty. It is not suggested that this situation may easily be altered, but evidence of bread prices in Glasgow at least may add further brush strokes to those which “supplied the first rough outlines on an otherwise blank canvas.”

I Take it that what lies in the back of the minds of most of us when a subject like this comes up is the problem of the relation between economic unrest and political and social change, and more especially, the kind of change we call a revolution. We all know those for whom the solution of this problem is very simple: they say “look for the economic motive” as innocently as if they said “cherchez la femme.” Even at a more mature level of thinking the problem is still often put in such a way that something economic always lies at the bottom, or pulls the trigger, or provides the main impulse, or—and this is the precious word—“determines” everything.

The literature of economic history abounds with studies of nineteenth century banking. Unfortunately, most of these studies have drawbacks which make them of limited use to the modern student of economic history. The most serious drawback is their almost unanimously institutional character, punctuated here and there with biographical sketches of past bank presidents and directors. Those studies which do offer solid quantitative evidence on banking practice and performance are often based on aggregate statistics compiled by state or national banking commissions and thus preclude the study of individual institutions or small groups of institutions which may have played a key role in the development of early banking practices. This article represents a detailed investigation of the largest non-chartered bank of the early nineteenth century, the Bank of Stephen Girard.

The most recent representation of “British” economic development over the century from 1855, as given in Kuznets’ Modern Economic Growth, does not suggest much vitality in this important economy. This representation is not new. Since it became fashionable to villify the “Britain” of the 1950's and 1960's as the laggard country of Europe, attempts have been made to justify or rationalize recent British performance by claiming that recent slow growth rates have been long established. The justification is based merely on the fable of the tortoise and the hare: slow but steady growth in Britain versus the erratic path of foreigners. Kuznets’ picture of Britain over the past century would, however, suggest a country in which population growth competed only with France for lowest place among developed countries; omitting Netherlands from his list because of its limited period, Kuznets showed that the decade average rate of increase of British gross product, at 21.1 percent, was third lowest and only slightly above that of France with its special population experience; and British increase in product per head, at 14.1 percent decade average, ranked only above that of Australia, with its very low rate of growth at 8 percent. No race was being won here; rather the judgment on the recent past, from the perspective of a century of growth, is that Britain has always had it so bad. The question is whether this perspective is open to reasonable doubt.

The current controversies about production and yields of medieval agriculture may give an outsider the impression that on this subject historians are more at variance than they actually are. Some historians may still cling to the Victorian belief that things economic were perpetually on the rise; historians thus minded are inclined to take it for granted that both the aggregate product of agriculture and agricultural output per head improved all through the Middle Ages. Other students, for example, Beveridge or Bennett, derived from the imperfectly selected data of the Bishop of Winchester's manors the impression that output per acre, and probably also per unit of seed, stayed put all through the Middle Ages. More recently other historians, including myself, have argued that output per acre tended to slump in the earlier, that is, pre-Black Death period, and may have picked up somewhat in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The concert of historians may therefore strike the ear as being even more cacophonous on this theme than on most other medieval themes.

Although the total real cost of World War II to the Soviet people has yet to be fully tallied, there can be little doubt that it exceeds that of any other major participant, per capita as well as absolutely. The objective of this paper is to compare and evaluate the real war costs reported by the Soviets with those implied by Soviet pronouncements and those using Soviet national income data. Our purpose is to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.

Richard Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth (2016) find that biases in height by age imposed by traders versus non-traders were negligible. Importantly, their method of identifying traders differs from that of Jonathan Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger (1992). Using a sample of inward coastwise manifests for the port of New Orleans, we show that Steckel and Ziebarth made errors classifying shippers, that they underestimate the relative number of slaves shipped by traders, and that their empirical estimates of selection bias are attenuated towards zero.

This article reconstructs the history of mutual assistance among Federal Reserve Banks. We present data on accommodation operations through which Reserve Banks mutualized gold reserves in emergency situations between 1913 and 1960. Reserve sharing was important in response to liquidity crises and bank runs. Such cooperation was essential for the cohesion of the U.S. monetary union. But fortunes could change, with emergency recipients of gold becoming providers. Because imbalances did not endlessly grow, instead narrowing when region-specific shocks subsided, mutual assistance created only limited tensions. These findings speak to the current debate over TARGET2 balances in Europe.

This article attempts to explain why the adoption of potentially productive institutions is delayed and why inefficient ones persist by exploring the dynamics of institutional change in a particular historical case—the closing of the Georgia open range in the late nineteenth century. A closed range policy would have generated net benefits for specific regions of Georgia, but distributional conflicts, coupled with high transaction costs, made a voluntary agreement to do that unattainable. The article describes the Georgia legislature's important role in facilitating the adoption of a policy that led to more rapid agricultural development in the postbellum period.

We apply disjoint principal components analysis to study institutional influences on the course of poverty in the nineteenth century. Classificatory data summarize varied facets of economic and noneconomic institutional structure and change.Four sets of countries are distinguished by characteristics of the course of poverty. The components models show that the impact of economic and demographic changes (export expansion, marketization, industrial expansion, immigration) have consequences for poverty that vary greatly between and within country sets, depending on the character of institutions: above all, land systems, dependence relationships, and political institutions.

Today's less developed countries maintain that high instability in export prices is a serious obstacle to their economic development. History shows, however, that some of today's developed countries also experienced high price instability in the international markets they served when they were at a comparable phase in the development process. Current recommendations to institute a network of international commodity agreements for the most important primary products exported by the LDCs seem beside the point in light of this evidence.

Unlike the English country squire and the Prussian Junker, the French gentilhomme campagnard has been stereotyped by literature and history as idle, dull, and poor. Without rejecting Molière's picture of the court fop or La Bruyère's caricature of the proud but impoverished hobereau, attention must be turned toward the more typical provincial nobleman of the Old Regime. Here is a social type that was neither congenitally frivolous nor hopelessly rustic. Historical research, especially in local and private archives, is uncovering the existence of an active, shrewd, and prosperous landholding nobility who were not, as Arthur Young too often suggests, a thoroughly urbanized class of absentee proprietors leasing their domains at fixed money rents to bourgeois tenants. On the contrary, personal estate management not only was the best way of assuring a gentilhomme campagnard a good income but it was also recognized as his profession, and, in contrast to retail trade and purely. commercial speculation, a perfectly respectable noble enterprise.

Scholarship on African “underdevelopment,” its antecedents, manifestations, and consequences, is now limited in focus and method. This article suggests a broader approach and emphasizes insights that might come from combining aspects of economic anthropology with analysis of institutions. A modest case study then sketches some monetary perceptions and policies of Tanganyika's colonial bureaucracies (German and British) and their reception by Tanganyika's diverse population. Indigenous reaction to alien media was rational within a neo-classical tripartite demand-for-money framework. The combined consequences of all parties'actions for both the territory's “underdevelopment” and “under-growth” receive final but not definitive scrutiny in the last section.