Economic History Review最新文献

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.

This paper studies the impact of collectivization on patricide in China during the Cultural Revolution. From 1955 to 1957, nearly 96 per cent of farmers were organized into communes. Consequently, fathers lost control over family wealth. We propose that this shift decreased fathers’ bargaining power over their adult sons, which might increase family conflicts. On the basis of a novel dataset, we find that the speed of collectivization significantly increased patricide, and the result is robust by employing ruggedness to instrumenting for the speed of collectivization. Our study extends the literature on intra-household bargaining from couples to intergenerational relationships.

This paper qualitatively and quantitatively examines the development of the sovereign debt market in Prewar China under different governments. During the Beijing Era (1912–26), accompanied by the establishment of necessary financial institutions, the sovereign debt market emerged to meet fiscal needs. Surprisingly, the Nationalist government, in power from 1927, successfully cultivated a robust market characterized by its expanding size and liquidity. Setting itself apart from its predecessors, the government established credibility as a borrower in two key ways. Firstly, it demonstrated unwavering commitment to debt service by settling previous debts and offering well-structured new ones, even during challenging times. Furthermore, the government escrowed fiscal revenue, pledged for debt repayments, to a semi-independent committee of private bankers on behalf of debtholders, enhancing public confidence. Secondly, the government showcased its ability to secure tax revenues for debt repayments. However, starting from 1931/2, the debt market experienced a decline due to the government's compromised ability to pay resulting from external wars and shifting political priorities that weakened its commitment to debt repayments. Empirical evidence confirms the market's responsiveness to regime shifts and policy changes. This paper sheds light on how a nascent autocratic government can successfully borrow from the public.

The existing studies usually find that technical change was very important in constraining the economic growth of the Soviet Union. While these studies have been successful in quantifying the extent of technical change, they have been less successful in quantifying its nature. This paper moves a step closer to probing the essence of Soviet efficiency by splitting the aggregate technical change into its subcomponents – namely, capital and labour efficiency. I find that the Soviet Union registered strong labour efficiency gains during most of the postwar period, converging towards the labour efficiency level of the global frontier – the US. Labour efficiency growth did decrease over time, but labour efficiency was not a primary cause of Soviet growth retardation. That retardation was instead caused by a decline in capital efficiency. At a disaggregated level, I find that the decrease in capital efficiency was driven by structures. I hypothesize that labour shortages and an inadequate investment policy resulted in a large stock of unfinished, and hence idle, structures, distorting Soviet economic growth.

This article provides a new interpretation of Brazil's independence that relates the process of political emancipation to the Portuguese empire's fiscal crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We discuss the origins and impact of the fiscal crisis that followed the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal in 1807 and the transfer of the government to Rio de Janeiro. Quantitative evidence shows that expenditures with the palace and the army in Brazil were higher than those discussed in the previous literature. Moreover, the government was only able to finance itself by increasing loans via paper money issuances from the Bank of Brazil. Real wages show that the inflationary policy in the 1810s led to a rapid decline in living standards, fuelling dissatisfaction with the government. Our findings are consistent with views expressed in contemporary official correspondence and parliamentary debates.