Economic History Review最新文献

The year 2022 again saw a significant number of publications in late medieval economic and social history, including a bumper six articles in this journal which at least partly covered this period. Political structures and their economic impacts were a particularly popular topic. Angelucci, Meraglia and Voigtländer examine the development of self-governing merchant towns in England using a dataset of 555 boroughs which existed before the Black Death. They demonstrate that a combination of involvement in trade and being in royal hands caused specific towns to seek ‘Farm Grants’ (conferring rights to self-governance including in tax collection and law enforcement) from the crown. They argue this process was triggered by the Commercial Revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which towns sought more flexible institutional arrangements to handle commerce. They further show that towns with Farm Grants were more likely to be represented directly in parliament, creating a virtuous re-enforcing relationship by which urban autonomy led to a stronger nationally representative body. This leads to their wider argument that this relationship helped create stronger constraints on rulers in early modern England than elsewhere in Europe. Lantschner examines city states across the Mediterranean world, comparing Christian and Islamic regions. He challenges previous assessments that have seen Italian city-republics as a stage in the development of western-European democracy and as imperfect versions of modern states. Instead, he argues that city states thrived in areas of political fragmentation and are best seen as ‘brittle regimes’ in which actors including political organisations and city-based lords, often in alliance with external agents outside the city, vied for control.

Two articles focused specifically on Tuscan city leagues. Caferro calls for a deeper understanding of these leagues beyond their military function in marshalling collective armies. He highlights their significant economic role, through creating tariff-free zones among participants and cancelling reprisals between members (where a whole city would be held responsible for the fraudulent behaviour of bad actors from that city). Caferro also argues that the share of troops provided by each city in a league can act as a proxy for its relative wealth, allowing for cross-city comparisons which are hard to make using other sources. Martoccio looks at the role of leagues as collective organisations to respond to the threat of bands of mercenaries in the late fourteenth century. While previous scholarship largely based on chronicles has presented leagues as collapsing due to rivalries between member cities, he argues that leagues were often effective in breaking apart mercenary companies by organising collectively raised bribes for specific captains and marshalling military forces for short periods.

Other stu

There has still been too little detailed work on the protectionism that emerged in the wake of the Great Depression. In this paper we explore the experiences of two countries that have been largely neglected in the literature, the Netherlands and Netherlands East Indies (NEI). How did these traditionally free-trading economies respond to the Depression? We construct a detailed product-level database of tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade on the basis of primary sources. While ad valorem tariff increases in the Netherlands were largely due to deflation, the country protected agriculture and textiles in a number of ways. Once quotas are taken into account, trade restrictiveness indices suggest that protection in the Netherlands and NEI was comparable to protection in the UK and India, respectively. The NEI quota system was largely geared to protecting Dutch exporters, and succeeded in doing so, but the reverse was not true.

This article traces trends of income inequality in Mexico City from 1770 to 1930 by measuring the gaps between urban real estate rents and unskilled wages. The article presents the first long-term series of real estate values and rental income for Mexico. One series summarizes the price of an apartment in tenement housing (the prevalent type of popular housing in Mexico), while the other relies on newspaper ads, notarial records, and other sources to estimate property values and rental yield (rental revenue relative to property values). From these wage and rental income series, we calculate rental–wage ratios that are broadly representative of the income gaps between the wealthy and unskilled workers. We find that, at the end of the eighteenth century, inequality moderately increased, followed by a more egalitarian period in the first half of the nineteenth century, and a ballooning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that persisted into 1930. While inequality receded after the insurrection in the 1810s, it remained high after the Mexican Revolution. We hypothesize that inequality was sensitive to economic growth, and that generalized violence did not universally temper inequality.

This paper studies the history of contractual choice in coffee plantations of São Paulo, Brazil. It focuses on the consolidation of non-captive labour markets in the early phases of the transition from slavery in the country, particularly in the 1840s–50s. Vis-à-vis the alternatives of fixed rents and fixed payments per time worked or piece rates, the paper examines the rationale for the adoption of sharecropping arrangements with European bonded labourers. New archival evidence suggests that sharecropping had no obvious productivity advantage over alternative labour–rental arrangements in this period, and that the adoption of sharecropping arrangements resulted from the positional advantage of its first proposers, who influenced later choices of contractual design. A credit-labour tie-up long outlived the original sharecropping arrangements, in turn allowing for the immigration of poor and credit-constrained Europeans, paving the way to insert Brazil into the circuits of mass migration without promoting institutional reforms to attract non-bonded immigrants.

Evidence from more than 40 000 voyages shows that labour productivity growth for sailing ships in the London coal trade was rapid but quite irregular between 1700 and 1860. These granular data permit us to examine various dimensions of change, showing that ships made more voyages per year, had smaller crews, carried more coal per ship ton and had longer working lives. Some changes resulted from what happened on land rather than on the sea, notably a marked reduction in the seasonality of trade as wagonways were built in the northeast in the early eighteenth century and a pronounced dip in voyages per year due to congestion in the port of London during the 1830s and 1840s, partly caused by the operation of the coal cartel. These results for the coal trade suggest that shipping, being neither spectacularly modern nor doggedly traditional, made a respectable contribution to British economic growth.

Limited knowledge of African historical inequality trajectories hampers our understanding of inequality outcomes today and leads to a major omission in debates about global inequality. Economies in colonial Africa were characterized by a process of export-oriented commercialization. We hypothesize that this process itself, the capital intensity of the commodities produced, and the relative importance of European and Asian expatriates and settlers in the economy shaped heterogeneous inequality outcomes. We evaluate these hypotheses using 33 social tables from six predominately agricultural countries between 1914 and 1969. Social tables capture income across the full distribution, aggregated in classes. We assess and improve the commensurability of the different social tables. We then apply different inequality metrics, and find that Gini and Theil coefficients and Inequality Extraction Ratios rose over time. Gini coefficients moved in conjunction with the real value of commodity exports per capita. Using Theil decompositions, we observe a trade-off between inequality among African classes on the one hand, and among non-Africans and between races on the other. Whenever present, non-Africans captured a large share of the export profits. Inequality patterns towards the end of the period suggest that capital-intensive commodities were associated with higher levels of inequality in the agricultural sector.