The old-regime monarchy, particularly during the reign of Louis XIV, did much of its borrowing through the mediation of privileged corporate bodies that sought lenders on the private market and then acted as guarantors against royal default. After comparing the creditors of various privileged bodies and considering the reasons why some were more successful than others in attracting a wide circle of creditors, this study argues for a reconsideration of the constitutional-absolutist dichotomy in the historiography of the early modern financial revolution.

The factors regulating the production and distribution of material wealth cannot be reduced exclusively to market relationships. This being the case, the economic historian cannot limit his borrowings to economics alone. The present article uses meteorology both in its theoretical and historical dimensions to show the interaction between economic and meteorological fluctuations. The attempt of W. S. Jevons to find a theoretical connection between solar cycles and trade cycles is well known. Economic historians of preindustrial Europe have identified weather patterns as a primary independent variable determining prosperity or depression. The impact of meteorological fluctuation on economic activity has also been noticed for the nineteenth century, acknowledged by theorist and historian alike as one of the major variables inducing trade cycles. But in these accounts weather patterns are introduced as a run of good or bad luck, affecting essentially regional or national economies.

Asset specificity can have profound influences on the economic structure of a country. An example is post-colonial Cuba. This article demonstrates that the existence of site specificity in assets generated problems of holdup for sugar mill owners in their contractual relations with cane suppliers. Recognition of that incentive structure offers an institutional explanation for the post-1900 concentration of U.S. investment in the eastern provinces. To reduce transaction costs, mill managers avoided investing in the western part of the island where the sugar industry was well established. A consequence was the relative decline of the western region.

Concepts of the terms of trade as a means of measuring a country's gain or loss from exchange of goods have been discussed by students of economic theory for a hundred years or more. Until comparatively recently they have remained concepts only, without substantive application, but the tremendous disturbances in trading relationships and monetary standards in the last three decades have quickened interest in the subject. The various formulas devised for the measurement of relative movements of prices and quantities of exports and imports are now used with increasing frequency for the study of relatively current situations. They have not been applied much as yet to illuminate earlier trading history, largely because of the labor involved in deriving and organizing the limited data available. Apart from this difficulty there seems to be no very strong reason why they should not be as useful for economic history as for current analysis.

This article examines the causes for the relatively high degree of vertical integration in the German cotton textile industry before 1914. Underdeveloped input and output markets exposed German textile firms to price risks not faced by English firms that had access to highly-developed cotton, yarn, and cloth markets. In addition, tariff protection may have prompted integration by its impact on market development. In the weaving sector in particular, the response to this structure of markets was a more diversified product line and integration of both spinning and weaving.

Strangely enough, up to the present day, commercial documents have contributed almost nothing to our knowledge of trade between Europe and India or China in the Middle Ages. The actual management of a voyage to “the Indies,” as India and China were designated in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, has remained obscure because our evidence about commerce has come from sources mainly concerned with other matters.

The study of mass production has been strongly influenced in recent years by two dissimilar bodies of work—that of Alfred D. Chandler and that of Harry Braverman and others who argue that mass production helped managers “deskill” and “control” industrial workers. The history of the U.S. tire industry between 1910 and 1930 underlines the value of Chandler's analysis and the limited applicability of the deskilling and control hypotheses.

All sovereign governments face a commitment problem: how can they promise to honor their own agreements? The standard solutions involve reputation or political institutions capable of tying the government's hands. Mexico's government in the 1880s used neither solution. It compensated its creditors by enabling them to extract rents from the rest of the economy. These rents came through special privileges over banking services and the right to administer federal taxes. Returns were extremely high: as long as the government refrained from confiscating all their assets (let alone repaying their debts) less than twice a decade, they would break even.

Colonial societies exhibit peculiar institutions frequently attributed to the unequal and exploitative nature of the relations between colonizer and colonized. Repartimiento has been depicted as a coercive system of production and consumption designed by Spaniards to draw reluctant Amerindians into the market. An examination of repartimiento through the lens of New Institutional Economics provides an alternative understanding of this credit system. Characteristics of the repartimiento most often identified as exploitative are better explained as institutional adaptations designed to facilitate contract enforcement and economize on transaction costs in this cross-cultural trade. Consequently, this peculiar colonial institution served to expand trade.

The Purpose of this article is to clarify some historical features of Brazilian economic development in order to gain some insight into the process of long-term growth. The recent extension of the principal macroeconomic time-series to 1920 and the publication of several specialized monographs provide the material for such an analysis. We will begin with a consideration of the timing of Brazilian industrialization and, more important, of the conditions in which it took place. Such a discussion is all the more necessary since it appears that some of the stock ideas concerning Brazilian economic development before 1939 require revision.

The Near East was subject to many of the same fiscal and monetary forces that affected Europe and parts of Asia during the early modem era. For almost two decades during the seventeenth century, debased European coinage circulated widely in Ottoman markets at values far above their specie content. This article provides an explanation in terms of Ottoman fiscal deficits, currency instability, currency substitution, and decline in local silver mines all of which led to the closure of mints. The reasons behind the conspicuous absence of Ottoman copper coinage during this period are also explored.

The debate over wage and price controls has taken a highly stylized form. Advocates of controls stress the direct effect on the obvious problem, inflation, whereas critics stress the side effects. This paper measures and compares the effects of controls during the four periods when controls have been used in the United States in the twentieth century. Although tentative conclusions are drawn concerning the price effects, the size of the administrative bureaucracies, and so forth, the clearest lesson, as usual, is that the issue warrants further investigation by economic historians because it is important, and because the historical record is surprisingly rich.

Unlike most studies of uneven development before World War I, this paper uses the region (not the nation) as the unit of study. Weak market links with the national market partially explain persisting relative backwardness in the Habsburg Empire's eastern hinterland and in the American South. Even if product and factor markets had been perfectly integrated, institutional rigidities would have greatly retarded development. In the Empire, growth emerged in the west where serfdom was weakening and spread slowly as feudal institutions decayed. In America, capitalistic institutions promoted development in the North more thoroughly than did slavery and postbellum institutions in the South.

The railroads played an important role in the economic history of the United States. It was an epic role, involving enterprise on a grand scale, evoking heated passions, and rich in anecdote and drama.

This article challenges the traditional view of French industry—that small, inefficient family firms retarded France's economic growth—by examining data for the French textile and flour milling industries taken from the industry census of 1861–1865. The evidence suggests that the average size of French firms suited the economic and technological conditions of the day. The industries studied exhibit constant returns to scale over a wide output range. France would not seem likely to have gained much from larger firms. This is consistent with revisionist contentions that French industry was as rational as that of other nations.

If successful prediction were the sole criterion of the merit of a science, economics should long since have ceased to exist as a serious intellectual pursuit. Accurate prognosis is not its forte. The real strength of the discipline lies in another direction—namely, in its apparently limitless capacity to rationalize events after they happen. This helps explain the indifference of most economic theorists to “the lessons of history”; men to whom all things are possible have little to learn from experiments conducted in the laboratory of time. It also helps explain the indifference of most economic historians to abstract theory; what have they to learn from a subject that “yields no predictions, summarizes no empirical generalizations, provides no useful framework of analysis”?

Official tax records and other documents provide the sources for an estimation of wool exports overtime. Four main points emerge: after a peak circa 1550, exports stagnated and declined for over a century before rising again strongly; political and economic developments in Spain and the rest of Europe affected both the volume and the direction of wool exports; most exports went to Flanders before 1550, then to Italy for a time, and finally to northern Europe again from about 1650 onward; and Spanish merchants controlled most of the trade until the mid- sixteenth century but lost dominance thereafter, retaining control only over the internal market supplying wool for export.

I present evidence that shocks to the Medieval English harvest persisted. Hypothesized mechanisms include varying supplies of seed corn and other complementary harvest inputs. Peasants are modeled as trading off current consumption against grain stores and sow rates so that subsistence-level shocks may persist. For my sample I find that a failed harvest increased the probability of subsequent harvest failure by 20–30 percent. Grain yields are analyzed as a strongly balanced panel by year, manor, and crop. While I reject the hypothesis that harvests were self-contained annual events, I caution against linking harvest persistence directly to runs in grain prices.

The 1858 discovery of crude oil in Ontario led to the development of a refining industry initially composed of many small firms. Ontario's refiners relied upon generous tariff protection in order to compete with cheaper, higher-quality imports. We apply a regime-switching model to the pattern of monthly wholesale prices to find the extent to which trade policy affected collusive efforts. Tariff protection encouraged collusion, but ease of entry resulted in frequent price wars. An 1877 downward revision in tariffs, while reducing the gains to collusion, also reduced the likelihood of entry and supported efforts to rationalize capacity.