Economic History Review最新文献

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.

The late early modern period witnessed critical consumer transitions across Europe. Yet, while the explosion of the material world and the transition from an ‘old luxury’ material culture to a ‘new luxury’ model is well documented, our understanding of the underlying value systems of consumer goods is still under-developed. Building on a database of eighteenth-century advertisements for household auctions in the London-based Daily Advertiser, this article maps the value systems that characterized elite secondary markets in London. We find the language of consumption growing in complexity and sophistication as the eighteenth century progressed, but historiographically, key concepts such as fashion and modernity played minor and sometimes unexpected roles. While silverware is traditionally perceived as a store of wealth and marker of status, and hence a textbook ‘old luxury’, in the auction advertisements it is often praised for its design value. Chinaware, often attributed a central role in forging an affordable yet fashion-sensitive ‘new luxury model’, is paradoxically valued for its age and patina. In fact, the boundaries between ‘new’ and ‘old’ luxuries were never clear-cut. The intrinsic value of material culture continued to matter, and the language of consumption continued to reproduce social inequalities, much as it did in previous centuries.

What accounts for the common perception that women have contributed little to advances in entrepreneurship and innovation in Britain during the early industrial era? This paper empirically examines the role of gender diversity in inventive activity during the first and second industrial revolutions. The analysis of systematic data on patents and unpatentable innovations uniquely enables an evaluation of women's creativity within both the market and nonmarket sectors. British women inventors were significantly more likely than men to focus on unpatentable innovations in consumer final goods and design-oriented products that spanned art and technology, and on uncommercialized improvements within the household. Conventional approaches that fail to account for nonmarket activity and for such incremental changes in consumer goods and design innovations therefore significantly underestimate women's contributions to household welfare and overall economic progress.

This paper asks whether history should change the way in which economists and economic historians think about populism. We use Müller's definition, according to which populism is ‘an exclusionary form of identity politics, which is why it poses a threat to democracy’. We make three historical arguments. First, late-nineteenth-century US Populists were not populist. Second, there is no necessary relationship between populism and anti-globalization sentiment. Third, economists have sometimes been on the wrong side of important policy debates involving opponents rightly or wrongly described as populist. History encourages us to avoid an overly simplistic view of populism and its correlates.

The transplantation of European legal systems in the periphery often occurred via semi-colonial institutions, where Europeans were subject to their own jurisdictions that placed them outside the reach of local courts. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the option of extraterritoriality was extended to local non-Muslims. Drawing on Egypt's population censuses in 1848 and 1868, we show that locals did not seek extraterritoriality to place themselves under more efficient jurisdictions. Rather, legal protection mitigated uncertainty about which law would apply to any contractual relationship in an environment where multiple legal systems co-existed and overlapped.

This article explores the conception and execution of paper currency schemes in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). Paper currency was widely used as a form of local money in early modern Japan, but has received close to no attention in Anglophone scholarship even amid a recent upsurge in interest in the global history of money. From the perspective of monetary history, Tokugawa paper currency presents an intriguing puzzle. Even as paper currencies repeatedly collapsed in value, they remained in common use as an essential component of the early modern monetary system. Using the case of Sendai domain, a large fiefdom in northeastern Japan, the article argues that the monetary practices and expectations of ordinary subjects transformed paper money, created through partnerships between the samurai ruling class and powerful merchant financiers, from a tool meant to serve the interests of state finances into a low-denomination currency convenient for everyday transactions, resulting in the bills’ surprising longevity as a form of small change. Drawing on approaches that centre the role of non-state and marginal actors in the making of money, it sheds new light on the political economy of late Tokugawa Japan and offers new insights into the global history of money.

At the centre of the debate on pre-industrial economic growth is the study of market integration, a topic that has increasingly been the focus of intense scientific interest in recent decades. However, this has remained limited to the early modern and modern periods, mainly due to the availability of relevant data. New grain price series have been constructed for several Flemish cities dating back to the early fourteenth century. As one of the most populated regions in the late Middle Ages, the case of Flanders shows that the extraordinary sequence of price shocks in the mid-fourteenth century had a positive impact on the degree of price integration in the grain market. The Flemish grain market functioned better in times of crisis, but caused prices to rise steadily across the entire integrated system during the prolonged crisis period. Whereas many studies have labelled the late Middle Ages – particularly the fifteenth century – as an age of economic contraction with more isolated trade networks, this study shows that Flanders remained a highly economically integrated region.

Whether the ‘democratization’ of consumption during the early modern period was specifically a characteristic of the European economic shift or observable in other parts of the world remains a central question in understanding the early roots of consumerism, as well as explaining pre-industrial growth and divergence. However, the scarcity of quantitative evidence from the non-Western world limits our ability to make comparisons and grasp the nature of changes that occurred in the material environment. Based on a sample of 380 probate inventories from the Ottoman town of Üsküdar, this paper examines the change in possession of domestic goods from 1700 to 1850. It reveals that, from the 1760s onwards, ordinary Ottomans in the town, who were neither wealthier nor better positioned in the social hierarchy compared with their ancestors in 1700, owned a greater quantity and variety of domestic goods. As a result, they enjoyed richer and more elaborate domestic interiors. The findings strongly suggest that democratization of consumer goods, a hallmark of the early modern consumer revolutions in Europe, was experienced in the Ottoman town of Üsküdar during the second half of the eighteenth century.

This article studies Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) in late imperial and Republican-era Shanxi province, China, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It investigates how communal finance fostered pre-industrial economic growth and commercial activity. Drawing on previously unused, original materials from historical Shanxi ROSCAs and households, it makes several important discoveries. First, it finds widespread ROSCA participation, estimating no fewer than 7.1 per cent of Shanxi households participated in ROSCAs. Second, it estimates expected internal rates of returns on ROSCA membership at 2.55–6.01 per cent annually. This suggests that ROSCAs were economically competitive with other Chinese traditional financiers, which often charged more for loans and offered less to savers. Third, it finds a surprising degree of liquidity for ROSCA shares. Finally, it uncovers commercial entities participating in ROSCAs, suggesting ROSCAs could be useful to for-profit enterprises. The article concludes that ROSCAs and communal finance may have played an important role in supporting pre-industrial economic activity.

Circular migration has played a substantial role in the assimilation process of rural–urban migrants in Spain across the twentieth century. This paper analyses the short-term impact of the temporariness of this type of migration in the economic assimilation of migrants during the rural exodus, 1955–73. More specifically, I study this process in one key scenario – the Spanish tourism boom. Using a novel micro-dataset, results show that the temporariness was a key factor that constrained the capacity of migrants to achieve income growth. Thus, the incentives to persist with circular migratory movements and the socio-economic constraints on permanent settlement had significant adverse consequences. These migrants sorted into lower-income occupations and had lower incentives and chances to acquire host-specific human and social capital in comparison with permanent migrants. As a result, circular migrants registered lower occupational attainment leading to a higher income gap with natives and permanent migrants as the years of circular migration increased in number. These results indicate that most migrants had fewer chances than natives of taking advantage of the process of rapid structural change not solely because of lower human and social capital factors but also because of the temporariness of their migration.