Douglass North and Barry Weingast's seminal account of the Glorious Revolution argued that specific constitutional reforms enhanced the credibility of the English Crown, leading to much stronger public finances. Critics have argued that the most important reforms occurred incrementally before the Revolution; and that neither interest rates on sovereign debt nor enforcement of property rights improved sharply after the Revolution. In this article, I identify a different set of constitutional reforms, explain why precedents for these reforms did not lessen their revolutionary impact, and show that the evidence, properly evaluated, supports a view of the Revolution as a watershed.

By the 1700s Europeans dominated the gunpowder technology, which was surprising, because it had originated in China and been used with expertise throughout Eurasia. To account for their dominance, historians have invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies with a simple tournament model of military competition that allows for learning by doing. Political incentives and military conditions then explain why the rest of Eurasia fell behind Europeans in developing the gunpowder technology. The consequences were huge, from colonialism to the slave trade and even the Industrial Revolution.

This article explores the pattern of land rents and agricultural productivity across nineteenth-century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the “Little Divergence” between European regions. We argue that agriculture reacted to urban and industrial development rather than shaping it. In the spirit of Johann von Thünen and Ernst Engel, we develop a theoretical model to test how access to urban demand affected agricultural development. We show that the effect of urban demand is causal and that it is in line with recent findings on a limited degree of interregional market integration in nineteenth-century Prussia.

Globalization, if defined as the integration of international commodity markets, started in the eighteenth century and progressed gradually and with some setbacks into the nineteenth century, instead of suddenly appearing at some point after the 1820s. We use grain prices in Europe and the Americas to determine the extent and dynamics of market integration throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An innovative methodology, with special attention being paid to changes in residual dispersion of the univariate models of relative prices between markets, permits us to obtain a measure of market integration over time.

The Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 is regarded as central turning point in nineteenth-century trade policy, inaugurating a free trade era in Western Europe. We reexamine this story and put it into global perspective with a new database covering more than 7,500 data points for 11 categories of manufactures in 41 countries and colonies around the world between 1846 and 1880. It reveals that bilateralism after 1860 reinforced a process already underway before. Nevertheless, we highlight that trade liberalization was a global phenomenon over most of our period, so that the prominent British case appears as typical rather than exceptional.

How do property rights evolve when unoccupied areas attract economic use? Who are the first claimants on the frontier and how do they establish their property rights? When do governments provide de jure property rights? We present a conceptual framework that addresses these questions and apply it to the frontiers of Australia, the United States, and Brazil. Our framework stresses the crucial role of politics as frontiers develop by identifying situations where the competition for land by those with de facto rights and those with de jure rights leads to violence or potential conflicts.

This article analyzes the effects of parliamentary representation on road infrastructure expenditure during the Spanish Restoration. Using a panel data set of Spanish provinces in 1880–1914, we find that the allocation of administrative resources among provinces depended both on the delegation characteristics (such as the share of MPs with party leadership positions, and their degree of electoral independence), and the regime's global search for stability. These results point to the importance of electoral dynamics within semi-democratic political systems, and offer an example of the influence of government tactics on infrastructure allocation.

We examine the strategies interwar working-class British households used to “smooth” consumption over time and guard against negative contingencies such as illness, unemployment, and death. Newly discovered returns from the U.K. Ministry of Labour's 1937/38 Household Expenditure Survey are used to fully categorize expenditure smoothing via nineteen credit/savings vehicles. We find that households made extensive use of expenditure-smoothing devices. Families' reliance on expenditure-smoothing is shown to be inversely related to household income, while households also used these mechanisms more intensively during expenditure crisis phases of the family life cycle, especially the years immediately after new household formation.