We present new estimates of the British industrial unemployment rate for 1870–1913, which improve on the Board of Trade's prior estimates. We use similar sources, but our series includes additional industrial sectors, allows for short-time working, and aggregates the various sectors using appropriate labor-force weights from the census. The resulting index suggests a rate of industrial unemployment that was generally higher, but less volatile, than the board's index. We then adjust our series to an economywide basis, and construct a consistent time series of overall unemployment for 1870–1999.

In the post–Second World War period the floor fell out of the market for films in the United States. However, while the average revenue of films fell, the “hit” end of the market sustained itself. The growing inequality in the distribution of revenues meant that the risks associated with high-budget productions could no longer be balanced against the steady earnings of medium-budget films. During the 1950s the “majors” all became distributor–financiers as they reduced their exposure to the risks associated with film production. In doing this they retained their dominant position in the industry.

How—and how well—do food markets function in famine conditions? The controversy surrounding this question may benefit from historical perspective. Here we study two massive famines that struck France between 1693 and 1710, killing over two million people. In both cases the impact of harvest failure was exacerbated by wartime demands on the food supply; we ask whether the crises were exacerbated yet further by a failure of markets to function as they did in normal times. The evidence, we conclude, is most consistent with the view that markets in fact helped alleviate these crises, albeit modestly.

Aujourd'hui ces matières paraissent d'une telle aridité qu'elles provoquent le vide, même au sein du parlement, si par hasard on les y discute…On ne voit plus des écarts de prix comparables à ceux des grandes années de famine de la fin du règne de Louis XIV: 1693 et 1709.Germain Martin (French historian) in 1908[Today these issues seem so stupifyingly dull that they produce an empty house, even in parliament, if by chance they are discussed there…. One no longer sees gaps in prices comparable to those of the years of famine at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, in 1693 and 1709.] Martin, “Famines,” p. 150.

This article addresses two related questions. To what extent did cities and towns provide African Americans adequate water and sewer services during the era of Jim Crow (1880–1925)? What motivated local governments to allow African Americans access to water and sewerage services? In light of the treatment African Americans received from state and local governments in areas such as education and police protection, it seems odd that blacks would have received any water and sewer service. Two explanations considered focus on fear of epidemic disease, and variation in the extent of residential segregation over time and across cities.

Racial or ethnic wage differentials are common in labor markets composed of easily identifiable groups. This article analyzes a rare source of historical wage data for nonwhite populations. An American labor-market survey of Manila in 1900 revealed that average Chinese wages were about a third higher than Filipino wages. This differential appears to have been in large part an overtime premium that compensated Chinese for their longer workdays; partly it reflected Chinese segregation into higher-paying industries. It is, by contrast, very hard to identify any “pure” ethnic wage premium.

We examine the extent and correlates of part-year manufacturing during the late nineteenth century using unpublished data from the manuscripts of the 1870 and 1880 censuses of manufactures. These are the earliest comprehensive estimates available on this topic. Although the typical manufacturing plant operated full-time, part-year operation was not uncommon. Indeed, the likelihood of part-year operation varied across industries and location and with plant characteristics, and workers in such plants received higher monthly wages than those in firms that operated year-round, compensating them for the loss of work and possible inconvenience.

This study estimates the size of the so-called “informal,” or unintermediated, credit market in one Swedish city through a period of economic transformation. In the early 1840s promissory notes accounted for more than half of the total credit market, and almost four times the value of credit channeled through the banking system. Even in the 1870s, the promissory-note market was twice the size of the loan volume of the banking system. By 1905 bank-based credit had finally surpassed the informal variety; but even then, outstanding promissory notes were almost three-fifths as great as total bank credits to noncorporate borrowers.

Using recently collected examination data from a sample of Texas state-chartered banks over the period 1919–1926, the role of moral hazard in increasing ex-ante asset risk is explored. Analyzing individual bank-level data, we find that the existence of deposit insurance for state-chartered banks increased their likelihood of failure. Increases in loan concentrations followed declines in capitalization at insured state banks. However, we find no statistically significant relationship between loan concentrations and capitalization at uninsured national banks or at state banks before the introduction of deposit insurance. These results show a moral-hazard effect at work.

ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION: REGISTRATION REMINDER

EHA RESEARCH GRANT AWARDS FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS

CALL FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS: ECONOMIC HISTORY SOCIETY ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Those unfamiliar with the earlier volume in this series, on “sources for the economic and social history of the Middle Ages” (of western Europe), all edited by the distinguished French historian Robert-Henri Bautier and the archivist Janine Sornay, will find this title confusing. The first tome, published in three subsidiary volumes (so far) from 1968, provides the archival sources for the economic and social history of the medieval French principalities of Comtet-Venaissin, Dauphiné, and the estates of the house of Savoy. The second and current tomes concerns the archival sources for the economic history of the southern and northern domains of the French ducal house of Burgundy; it too is being presented in a series of fascicules. To date, the editors have published just two parts of the first volume, whose overall title is Les archives centrales de l'État bourguignon (1384–1500): archives des principautés territoriales. Adding to the confusion, their first publica-tion in this series, presented in 1984, was also vol. I, part 2: Les principautés du Nord. It covered some (not all) of the Burgundian principalities in the Low Countries: the county of Flanders (and its seigneurie of Malines, within Brabant); the county of Artois (along with the “villes de Somme,” now all part of France); the duchy of Brabant; the duchy of Limburg and the adjacent lands known as the “terres d'Outre-Meuse”; the county of Hainaut (now also part of modern France); and the duchy of Luxembourg (with the county of Chiny). That choice therefore had a certain commendable logic, since this region commands a far greater importance in the economic history of medieval Europe than do the southern principalities, even though the latter provided the foundations for the Burgundian realm.

This volume consists of papers presented at a 1996 conference. Its professed remit, to contribute an internationally and chronologically wide-ranging discussion on the nature of urban decline across Europe from Roman to Reformation times, raises high expectations. And the book does indeed embrace many parts of Europe and includes some extremely useful regional overviews. Especially notable are Roger White's summary reinterpretation of possible archaeological continuities into post-Roman times at the Roman city-site at Wroxeter in England; a valuable discussion of the changing fortunes of the civitas capitals of late antique Gaul by S. T. Loseby; an illuminating tour d'horizon of the cities of the central Danube region between 100 and 1600 provided by Peter Csendes; and, in the most distinguished essay of the volume, an original and deeply considered discussion of the interconnections between decolonization and urban change in Ireland between 1300 and 1550 by its leading medieval urban historian, Howard Clarke.

For a decade, thanks to the works of Heinz Schilling (Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1991) and Andrew Pettegree (Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), we have known about the extensive network of poor relief that characterized Emden during the second half of the sixteenth century, a time when the town's importance for Reformed Protestant refugees from the Netherlands proved so paramount. This book, however, provides the first detailed analysis of how this wide-ranging system of social welfare came into existence and how it operated. Timothy Fehler starts his story before the Reformation, with a survey of late-medieval charity in Emden, before dealing with the system poor relief that was introduced in the period immediately after the city was officially reformed in 1529. This was clearly a Reformation from the top, introduced by Count Enno II along Lutheran lines and managed by Lutheran preachers imported from Bremen. Despite confiscating most goods and income belonging to the Catholic Church, and despite providing general instructions for the financing of a system of poor relief in East Frisia and Emden in his Protestant Church Ordinance of 1529, Count Enno did not provide any funds for the poor from his secularization of church properties; nor did he introduce a common chest, normally a significant part of Lutheran social reforms. It was simply left to lay parish officials, as supervisors of the poor, to collect from their fellow citizens what they considered necessary. Not surprisingly, many of the medieval Catholic institutions (such as the Franciscans) and a number of confraternities (such as the St. Clement's Shippers Brotherhood) continued to play a significant part in providing relief for the city's poor for decades after the Reformation.

The volume collects the revised proceedings of a conference held in 1994 to discuss Robert Brenner's views on the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” in the Low Coun-tries c.1350–1550, a topic that was largely ignored by the original “Brenner debate” published in Past and Present between 1976 and 1982. The 1994 papers are topped and tailed by a substantial editorial introduction and by additional essays by the editors, Jan de Vries, and Brenner himself.

This book has an important message. Conventional wisdom has it that nationalized industries were a particularly inefficient part of the British economy in the three decades or so after the Second World War. Chrisafis Iordanoglou has produced an extremely thorough demolition of this notion, at least in so far as it relates to productivity performance. His conclusion, after several hundred pages of detailed statistical analysis, is that the record of the nationalized sector (largely transport, communications, and fuel) over the period 1954–1979 was better than that of British manufacturing, which was largely private, and the comparable infrastructure industries in the United States.

Alan Booth has produced a textbook for (British) first-year undergraduates, the traditional structure of which belies its passionate motivation. It was “written in a mood of growing disenchantment with the level of debate on recent British economic performance” (p. ix). Although such a perspective ensures that the writing is often challenging and never dull, it is not clear that it is the best way to write a core textbook. The aim may have been to produce a first-year-level version of Sidney Pollard's classic Development of the British Economy, 1914–1990 (4th ed., London: E. Arnold, 1992), but at times it comes closer in tone to his Wasting of the British Economy (London: Croom Helm, 1982).

This book is a masterpiece. The author has marshaled a massive amount of information, and in the tradition of the best history writing she uses this to cast new light on our knowledge of eighteenth-century seamstresses and the society in which they lived. The meticulous detail is such that Clare Haru Crowston's work on this topic is unlikely to be superseded. Moreover, the book is beautifully produced. The illustrations educate. The dustcover alone is a delight.

First, it must be said that the publication of this and its two sister volumes on the urban history of Britain represents a magnificent achievement, for which all concerned—publisher, editors, and contributors—should be congratulated. Volume III covers the period during which Britain truly became urban. Even if all of its people were not living in towns by 1900, relatively few were directly engaged in agriculture and could be said to be part of a rural society in every sense. This is a social, economic, and environmental history of urban places which by 1950 must have encompassed, or at least severely impinged upon, the entire British population (82 percent of which lived in towns in 1951, according to Table 2.1). As the editor himself asks, What then is particular about the urban history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Friedrich A. Hayek is generally regarded as the principal intellectual architect of the revival of classical liberalism, as the most effective critic of socialist doctrines, and as one of the preeminent social philosophers of the twentieth century. His life (1899–1992) witnessed all the dramatic episodes of this eventful century, including the eventual collapse of the communist empire. His publications spanned the decades from the early 1920s to the late 1980s, and extended far beyond his original field—economics—into law, politics, philosophy, psychology, and evolutionary theory.

Karl Marx put the relations of town and country at the core of the processes by which capitalism arose in Europe: division of labor, commercialization, formation of the bourgeois class, changing (power) relations of production, the whole lot. Today too, the student of emergent capitalism must focus on that nexus, even though to do so is to wrestle with some of the most enduring puzzles, as well as the complexities and varieties, of Europe's early modern age. The collection edited by S. R. Epstein adds to our knowledge of how these urban–rural relations evolved over much of Europe, though it will certainly not resolve the puzzles, nor lay bare the mechanisms, of the run-up to industrialization and sustained economic growth. More disappointing is the lack of comparative perspective, despite the editor's dutiful call for more of it.

This book is the most recent contribution to the somewhat arcane subfield of “Monnet Studies.” Research for it was undertaken in the mid-1990s, at about the time when the two big biographies of “l'Inspirateur” by Francois Duchene and Eric Roussel appeared, but apparently competed before the publication of the next landmark in the literature, the anthology edited by G. Bossuat and A. Wilkens (Jean Monnet, l'Europe, et les chemins de la paix. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998). Since in a number of important cases the individual articles written for the latter delve much deeper into the topics that Fransen covers in this short book, The Supranational Politics of Jean Monnet is unfortunately already rather dated.