Showing papers in "The Economic History Review in 2001"

Farm wages and living standards in the Industrial Revolution: England, 1670-1869.

Abstract: Md oruch has been written on agricultural wages in England from 1670 to 1869, but this information has never been formed into one national series of agricultural wages. Wilson Fox provides good evidence based on farm accounts for 1850 and later. But for the years 1770-1849 the only national series available is the one Bowley constructed in 1898 mainly from wage surveys.2 While Bowley's index is well founded in the years after 1824, for the earlier period it relies on considerable interpolation, and takes no account of manuscript sources that have become available in the past hundred years.3 In an unpublished doctoral thesis, Eccleston calculated the day wages of workers on large agricultural estates from five midland counties from 1750 to 1834, and gave an annual day wage series for these counties.4 In another unpublished thesis, Richardson

Business Networking in the Industrial Revolution

Abstract: organization studies, and business history.2 Despite the scepticism of some-that networks are exceptional or transient phenomena, a sign of market failure in young economies-it is now widely argued that networks are an integral part of economic activity, which is moulded by social, cultural, and political influences as well as by market mechanisms.3 Some authors have made a useful distinction between the everyday personal relationships within a group-the activity of networking itself-and the 'institutional arrangements' which are produced by this activity, including custom and contractual devices designed to discourage malfeasance.4 Moral attitudes and value systems shared by members of a network, as well as rules and regulations, can reduce the risk, and therefore also the cost, of commercial transactions. Few economic actors rely solely on either institutional arrangements or a generalized morality to guard against the risk of opportunism, free riding, or cheating. Instead they prefer to deal with individuals of known repute and to base their decisions to trade on information about reputation from reliable sources, and on their own past dealings with the same individuals. However, the greater the level of trust, the greater the potential gain from malfeasance. Thus, institutional arrangements for contract enforcement are seldom dispensed with entirely.5 In general terms it can be said that business networking

The costs of coercion: African agency in the pre-modern Atlantic world.

Abstract: V iolent resistance by Africans forced on board slave ships in the VAtlantic and Indian Oceans has received far less attention than has the same phenomenon on plantations-the ultimate destinations of those vessels. In the last third of the twentieth century, in which perhaps 95 per cent of the total scholarship on slavery has appeared, there have been published just five articles on the topic, to which might be added a few obligatory descriptive pages on slave revolts in each of the general histories of the slave trade from Mannix and Cowley in the 1960s to that of Thomas in the late 1 990s.1 Resistance by slaves in the Americas, by contrast, has provided the focal point of whole scholarly careers. Given the fact that slaves spent an average of 11 weeks on a vessel and the rest of their lives in bondage in the Americas, this may at first sight seem appropriate, but some new data, collected as a spin-off from a much larger project on the transatlantic slave trade, in fact suggest the opposite. What happened on board transatlantic slave vessels now appears to have been central to the shaping of the early modem Atlantic world and warrants much closer attention. The article is divided into three sections. Section I briefly describes the data on which the article is based, explores key features of shipboard slave revolts, and investigates possible explanations of them. Some aspects of revolts, notably variations in the incidence of revolts by African region of embarkation of slaves, are difficult to explain and require further research. In section II insurance and shipping records are drawn on in an attempt to calculate the impact of shipboard resistance by Africans to enslavement on the cost structure of slaving voyages. Section III then sets resistance in the wider contexts of the costs of coerced labour in the Americas and of Euro-African power relations in pre-colonial Africa. It also estimates the impact of African agency on the number and coastal origins of slaves carried across the Atlantic and thereby on the location and size of slave systems of the Americas.

‘Prodigious Riches’: The Wealth of Jamaica Before the American Revolution

Abstract: W hen eighteenth-century Britons contemplated their possessions in W the West Indies what struck them most was the wealth of these small tropical islands. They were particularly impressed by the wealth of the largest British colony in the Caribbean, Jamaica. Despite Jamaica's well-deserved reputation as a white person's graveyard, Europeans flocked to the island in order to acquire great fortunes. Both for individuals and for the British government the wealth of Jamaica was its greatest attraction. As Charles Leslie wrote in the mid-eighteenth century, 'Jamaica is a Constant Mine, whence Britain draws prodigious riches.' Its wealth and strategic importance in the Caribbean made it, as Marshall notes, the most valuable colony in the eighteenth-century empire, and the colony whose loss the British could have least afforded.' This article reports new estimates about how much wealth Europeans possessed in Jamaica on the eve of the American Revolution. Historians have been interested in this question before, but mainly in order to assess the contribution of the West Indies to British economic development. In an article published in this journal in 1965, Sheridan presented data on the wealth of Jamaica supporting Williams's thesis that the economic contribution of the British West Indian slave colonies to British prosperity in the late eighteenth century was considerable. Sheridan's contentions elicited a fierce response from Thomas who used a counterfactual model derived from Sheridan's own data to deny that Jamaica had made a positive contribution to British economic development. The theoretical arguments as to whether or not Williams was correct will not be addressed in this article. I agree with the recent findings of Eltis and Engerman that sugar cultivation and the slave trade did not form an especially large part of the British economy, although, as Solow has shown, profits from the slave trade comprised nearly 8 per cent of total British investment in 1770 and a remarkable 39 per cent of commercial and industrial investment, assuming that all profits went into these channels. What this article concentrates on is the economic importance of Jamaica within the British American empire before the American Revolution. It revises Sheridan's set of statistical measures about the wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution, empirical data that have hitherto been accepted

Infant Mortality in Victorian Britain: The Mother as Medium

Abstract: r he decline in infant mortality in some regions of Europe may have been prolonged. Levels of infant deaths of 200 to 300 per 1,000 births were recorded in France, Sweden, and England in the eighteenth century and by the 1840s they were nearer to 150. This trend was then halted and reversed in those areas experiencing the worst blights of rapid urbanization so that the undisputed long-term decline is, for Britain, commonly put at the beginning of the twentieth century-some 40 years or so after the downturn in overall mortality. Similar turning points have been observed in the southern German states, Austria, and Russia.2 From British evidence, however, it seems that deaths from diarrhoea related diseases may have masked a pre-existing downward trend in other sources of infant mortality. There is evidence of a rise in infant diarrhoea at the very end of the nineteenth century which has been linked to a succession of hot and dry summers and, by at least one writer, to the surge in horse transport, and hence street manure and flies.3 Estimates by Williams and Galley suggest that in rural areas in this period diarrhoea accounted for fewer than five infant deaths per 1,000 births, and work by Lee and by Williams and Mooney has demonstrated that these areas experienced little interruption in the long-term decline in infant mortality.4 Indeed, explanations for the decline in rural infant mortality are difficult to find. Infant deaths from diarrhoea in urban areas have been linked to poor sanitary and other environmental conditions. It seems that there were, on average, about 20 to 30 infant deaths from diarrhoea per 1,000 births in urban areas in the late nineteenth century. Hence, even allowing that this may not have been a precisely defined disease category, there still remained a large number of infant deaths in urban areas which were attributable to other causes. If diarrhoea related deaths are excluded, a clearer long-term downward trend emerges for urban as well as rural areas so that the long-term trend cannot be explained simply as a matter of cleaning up the urban environment. Again, no explanation has been offered in the literature.

The British balance of payments, 1772‐1820: India transfers and war finance

Abstract: A lbert Imlah's justified skepticism should not deter us from re-examining, as more evidence is uncovered, major issues surrounding the British balance of payments during the French wars. The present attempt arose from ongoing work on British overseas trade and services in the period 1765-1820. The courage was mustered from the unexpected consistency of the new estimates with independent conjectures on Britain's external position in benchmark years. The main purpose is to facilitate corrections and other input with ample disclosure of sources and procedures. Recent subject literature has sought to downplay the importance of exports as a causal factor in British industrialization. But 'small ratios' arguments in terms of national income aggregates have been challenged on several counts, and debate on the dynamic roles of overseas trade confronts insurmountable problems of measurement.4 This article will tackle the relative importance of Britain's external sector from a different angle. It will suggest that, without the accumulated credits from India transfers since 1757, Britain's financing of land warfare during the French wars could have been compromised.5

The economics of marriage in late medieval England: the marriage of heiresses.

Abstract: I t is a common theme in the subject literature of English landed society that the rules of inheritance at common law tended to concentrate estates into a diminishing number of patrimonies. The most important of these rules-male primogeniture and preference for the direct female over the collateral male heir-protected estates from dissipation by partition between sons and provided frequent opportunities for families which survived in the senior male line to consume the lands of those which failed.2 Whether this aggregation was a general trend depended upon the moderating effect of other factors, chiefly the permeability of aristocratic society to non-landed wealth through the land market and the subversion of male primogeniture by paternal affection for younger sons. None the less, female inheritance taken alone, so the argument runs, was a force for the accumulation rather than the dispersal of estates. This conclusion depends in turn on the supposition that heiresses customarily married men whose inheritances or expectations equalled or exceeded their own, in other words, that they were the means by which established families increased their landholdings rather than by which new men entered the landed elite. Only in such circumstances could the effect of estate division between coheiresses be overbalanced. For most periods in the history of English landed society, this assumption is held to stand good. The landed wealth and social prestige of the leading families is generally held to have given them a near monopoly of advantage in the competition for heiresses; an advantage they exploited in the interests of estate accumulation by taking these desirable brides for their heirs rather than for their younger sons.3 This article aims to challenge this conclusion for the late medieval period, one in which heiresses had a particularly influential effect upon the distribution of real property. Drawing upon the evidence of marriage contracts and a study of heiress marriage among the parliamentary peer1 I am very grateful to the British Academy for financing the initial research for this article, and to Dr G. Bernard, Dr J. L. Bolton, Prof. R. A. Griffiths, and Dr G. L. Harriss for their comments on an earlier version.

Entitlements, destitution, and emigration in the 1930s Singapore great depression

Abstract: This article uses an entitlements approach to analyse the divergent impacts of the 1930s great depression on the diverse population groups of Singapore and its Malay Peninsula hinterland. Contrary to a revisionist argument in the literature that the depression had comparatively little effect on South-east Asia, Singapore was considerably affected. This arose more from the externality of migration of unemployed hinterland workers to the city than from a shift in the terms of trade against Singapore producers. Only the ‘safety valve' of mass emigration, promoted by colonial policy, enabled Singapore to escape the depression with a sharp, if relatively brief, drop in welfare and serious distress for its inhabitants.

Medieval farm management and technological mentalities: Hinderclay before the Black Death'

Abstract: A ssessing the progress of agriculture lies at the heart of any discussion of pre-industrial economic development and social welfare, not least with respect to England in the decades before the Black Death of 13489, when the country's population was probably higher than at any other time prior to the mid-eighteenth century. Current interpretations of medieval farming are certainly not as gloomy as they were 30 years ago, when Titow reported the low yields prevalent on the estates of the bishop of Winchester in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and Postan declared that 'the inertia of medieval agricultural technology is unmistakable'.2 But while it is now recognized that technology was in fact far from static in this period and that many yield-raising techniques were known and successfully adopted, it is also clear that such techniques were by no means universally employed. For despite growing evidence from manorial account rolls that landlords in a few regions developed comparatively intensive and productive farming systems, it nevertheless remains the case that less intensive forms of agriculture and substantially lower yields were common on demesne farms across much of the rest of the country. Unfortunately, there are no comparable records for medieval peasants, who in total cultivated a much greater proportion of the land, though it is generally considered likely that landlords and peasants in the same locality followed essentially the same system of husbandry. Consequently, Astill and Grant concluded, we still have 'a slightly depressing picture of medieval agricultural progress and productivity', in which 'opportunities for improvement may have existed but were not taken up.3 Explanations for the observed differences in demesne land use have focused in part on variations in market opportunity. The more progressive systems operated in areas with access to major urban markets, while in 'remoter parts of the country, removed from major markets and often

Forging a nation state: The Continental Congress and the Financing of the War of American Independence

Abstract: I n July 1776 the Continental Congress declared that the former British colonies were to have all of the political and economic powers associated with free and independent states. Having done so, however, Congress was committing itself to undertaking simultaneously two very daunting tasks. First, a necessary condition for a nation to be independent is not to be under the military occupation of a foreign power. For the Continental Congress this meant the formidable undertaking of expelling the powerful, experienced and, during wartime, extraordinarily well financed British military. In addition, Congress was committing itself to the development of institutional arrangements for government which would provide for the production of public goods such as defence, administrative bureaucracies, and judicial systems. Since the provision of public goods has to be financed in some manner, the process of nation building also involved the creation of institutional arrangements for public finance such as the establishment of credit, monetary, and tax systems. The political outcome of the onset of the War of American Independence was the beginning of a decade-long process of developing an institutional structure to finance the war. Over time the process involved redefining the financial powers of the Continental Congress vis-a-vis the states. Although the waging of war and the creating of governing institutions are national activities usually considered separately by historians, this article will explore their interrelationship.2 Having taken on the responsibility for gaining independence, Congress was not initially given

Nazi economic imperialism and the exploitation of the small: evidence from Germany’s secret foreign exchange balances, 1938-1940†

Abstract: This article re-examines the hypothesis of Hirschman and Child that Nazi trade policy before the Second World War exploited the smaller European countries. Archival evidence on foreign exchange balances for 1938-40 shows that trade policies alone had only a small effect. Earlier dependence of south-eastern Europe on Germany was caused partly by the collapse of south-east European trade with the Soviet Union. Adjusted figures reveal a regional pattern similar to that of 1913. Generally, exploitation began with military occupation, but was then on a massive scale. Results again confirm Milward's findings on the westward orientation of the German war economy.

Market solutions for social problems: working-class housing in nineteenth-century London.

Abstract: F inding a policy framework within which to reconcile social welfare objectives with market economies has been a major concern of politicians and social commentators for over a century. In the early twentieth century these concerns culminated in a set of 'New Liberal' welfare reforms in which the state assumed a larger role as the agency through which market imperfections or failures could be addressed.2 Early welfare subject literature presented these changes as part of a unilinear trend towards the inevitable development of a 'welfare state' in which public provision replaced the outdated and inadequate efforts of charitable agencies.3 More recently, this 'whig' interpretation has been revised and the state is presented as only one provider among others within a 'mixed economy of welfare'.4 )While the 'old' welfare subject literature premised the inevitability of state intervention upon an implicit story of market failure, the 'new' literature has a tendency to forget the market altogether as a possible provider of social welfare. Although Daunton suggests that 'voluntarism and the market may be seen as alternatives to taxation', revisionist historians have focused attention on the relationship between the voluntary sector and the state, while neglecting to consider ways in which the market may offer alternatives to public provision.5 Historians have explored the shifting boundaries between public provision (implying the state) and private welfare (denoting the individual, the family, or the voluntary association).6 This article makes a contribution to the welfare subject literature by considering an example of a social problem-insanitary and over-crowded housing-where joint-stock companies pioneered the most extensive attempts to reconcile the operation of the market and the social objectives of society.

New revisionists and the Keynesian era in British economic policy

Abstract: This article surveys the literature, which has argued that post-1945 British economic policy should not be described as Keynesian. It attempts to apply explicit definitions of ‘Keynesian', ‘influence', and ‘the Treasury view'. It suggests that in post-1945 monetary and fiscal policies, in the treatment of the balance of payments, and in attitudes to public expenditure, strong Keynesian influences can be detected. The idea of a ‘Keynesian era' should not be rejected and it is hinted that the failure to accelerate the growth rate, rather than the external dimension, caused the Keynesian era to unravel.

Illicit business: accounting for smuggling in mid‐sixteenth‐century Bristol

Abstract: S muggling has long been recognized as ‘one of the most serious, and certainly most baffling problems’ to confront the student of Britain’s pre-nineteenth-century commercial history. The problem arises because, while the size, nature, and direction of the nation’s legitimate trade can be determined through official commercial records, it is not clear to what extent the statistics derived from these sources represent a reliable indicator of the nation’s overall trade. The difficulty is that during the centuries between the first imposition of wool duties in 1275 and the liberalization of trade in the mid-nineteenth century, high tariffs and prohibitions created many incentives for merchants to avoid the legitimate avenues of commerce. The result, as contemporaries recognized, was that smuggling could, at least in some commodities, account for the bulk of total trade. While most studies of the subject have concentrated on the eighteenth century, large-scale smuggling was not a new development in that period. Indeed, on the basis of official expressions of concern in the activity, it would appear that a substantial illicit trade had been in existence since at least the mid-sixteenth century, when the Crown began to impose greater restrictions and higher duties on external trade. Thereafter the illicit trade flourished on the back of trading prohibitions, quasi-legal royal impositions, and rising taxes on both internal and external trade. In the end, despite the development of the revenue service into the largest and most powerful arm of the civil state, all attempts to crush the illicit trade failed and its decline from the 1840s had more to do with the passage of free trade legislation than the actions of the revenue men. For those interested in Britain’s economic development in the period

Smallpox really did reduce height : a reply to Razzell

Abstract: Razzell believes that we have misunderstood the nature of his criticism and are correspondingly dismissive of it. Nothing could be further from the truth. We share every professional historian's concern for the integrity of the data. Indeed, in other work that we have done, we have 'left our computers' and have both proven keen archival historians.1 Razzell argues that the quality of smallpox recording in the Marine Society dataset is so poor that 'the impact of smallpox on average height cannot be settled by analysis of the Marine Society dataset'.2 We believe that this grossly overstates the problems of the records, and is based on a careless reading of the original records on his part. Furthermore, insofar as his claim that some of the boys who are recorded as escaping smallpox had in fact suffered the disease, the direction of bias strengthens rather than weakens the statistical evidence that smallpox reduced height. At the heart of the reliability issue is the method of recording whether a boy had suffered smallpox. The Marine Society Registrars recorded that a boy had had smallpox by placing a p in the column labelled 'spox', leaving it blank otherwise. Similarly they recorded a person as literate by placing an r in the reading column and a w in the writing column, leaving them blank otherwise. The computerized dataset likewise contains a mark where the original records have one, and a blank otherwise. Interpreting a p in the spox column is thus straightforward: the registrar clearly believed the boy to have had smallpox. The adequacy of smallpox registration thus turns on our interpretation of a blank in the smallpox column. If the registrar was conscientious, a blank in the spox column would indicate that the registrar believed that the boy had not had smallpox. If the registrar was incompetent or negligent, a blank would indicate that he failed either to ask the question or to record the answer. In claiming 'complete inadequacy of smallpox registration' Razzell is arguing that the registrars frequently failed to fill in their registers properly. He bases this conclusion on a comparison of the columns for literacy and smallpox. He argues that if the columns for reading and writing as well as smallpox are blank, it is more likely that the returning officer was negligent. Although no one can doubt that some of the thousands of I Among other work, Leunig has just collected 12,500 payroll records from the archives of a New England cotton mill, and Voth has assembled and analysed some 8,000 court records from Old Bailey Sessions Papers as well as hundreds of Northern Assize depositions: Voth, 'Time use'. 2 Razzell, 'Final comment', p. 109.

Managerial failure in late Victorian Britain?: Land use and English agriculture

Abstract: T owards the end of the nineteenth century Britain's economic lead was challenged and lost, initiating the long-running debate on the extent and causes of relative decline. Some of this decline was inevitable, but some might have been avoided: what opportunities were missed and by whom? To what extent were opportunities missed through manifest incompetence; to what extent, less reprehensibly, through failure to identify and avert market or institutional perversities? Debate has focused on the industrial performance: tertiary activities have received less attention and agriculture, the focus here, has been largely neglected. Both Aldcroft's article attributing industrial decline to entrepreneurial and managerial failure, and that of Fletcher explaining agricultural depression in the arable south east in terms of 'a certain rigidity ... of mind', an obsession

Patterns of morbidity in late medieval England: a sample from Westminster Abbey

Abstract: A comparison between secular hospitals and monastic infirmaries introduces a discussion of the duration and seasonality of the illnesses of the monks of Westminster in two periods: 1297/8 to 1354/5 and 1381/2 to 1416/17. A change in the duration of illnesses is related to change in the conventions of treatment after the Black Death of 1348/9. The resemblance between the seasonal pattern of morbidity in this sample and that of mortality among male adults in the early modern period is discussed. It is suggested that the latter pattern may extend into the late middle ages.

‘Riches beyond the dreams of avarice?’: commerical returns on British warship construction, 1889-1914

Abstract: The contracts for naval warships placed in private shipyards in the nineteenth century provide an early example of state procurement policy. It has been widely argued that these contracts allowed the firms concerned to earn unusually high profits, although the evidence provided has been very limited. This article analyses the effects of naval warship contracts on the profitability of the dominant suppliers during the ‘naval arms race' of 1889-1914 in order to provide new and more systematic evidence on the workings of an early form of regulation and on a tangible aspect of the relationship between firms and the British government.

List of Publications on the Economic and Social History of Great Britain and Ireland Published in 2000

Abstract: 1. Original documents Anselment, R.A., ed., The remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671-1714 (Camden Soc., 5th ser., 18). Barker, H. and Vincent, D., eds., Language, print and electoral politics, 1790-1832: Newcastle-under-Lyme broadsides. Woodbridge: Boydell. Barlow, J., ed., A calendar of the registers of apprentices of the city of Gloucester, 1595-1700 (Gloucs. Rec. Ser., 14). Bartlett, P., ‘Documents and sources: legal madness in the nineteenth century’, Soc. Hist. Medic., 14, pp. 107-31. Berg, T. and Berg, P., eds., R.R. Angerstein’s illustrated travel diary, 1753-5: industry in England and Wales from a Swedish perspective. Science Mus. Bird, Y., ed., A Quaker family in India and Zanzibar, 1863-5: letters from Elizabeth and Henry Jacob: ‘Peacock tails with diamonds’. York: Sessions (2000). Blair, J., ‘Estate memoranda of c.1070 from the see of Dorchester-on-Thames’, Eng. Hist. Rev., CXVI, pp. 114-23. Bracken, D., ‘Irish migrants in Paris hospitals, 1702-30: extracts from the registers of Bicêtre, La Charitéé, La Pitié and La Salpetrère’, Archivium Hibernicum, LV, pp. 7-47. Carr, D.R., ed., The first general entry book of the city of Salisbury, 1387-1452 (Wilts. Rec. Soc., 54). Cooper, T., ed., The journal of William Downing: iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War. Woodbridge: Boydell. Cox, A.D.M. and Darwall-Smith, R.H., eds., Account rolls of University College, Oxford, II:1471/2-1596/7 (Oxford Hist. Soc., 90). Delaney, E., ed., ‘Irish migration to Britain, 1939-45’, Ir. Econ. & Soc. Hist., XXVIII, pp. 47-71. Denton, J. and Taylor, B., ‘The 1291 valuation of the ecclesiastical benefices of Llandaff diocese’, Arch. Cambs., 147 (1998), pp. 133-58. Durkan, J., ‘Early letters of John Brown, Minim and Report to Propaganda, 1623, by Scots Minims’, Innes Rev., 52, pp. 63-79. Farrant, J.H. et al., Sussex depicted: views and descriptions, 1600-1800 (Sussex Rec. Soc., 85). Fennessey, I., ‘Two letters from Boetius (Augustine) MacEgan, O.F.M., on the death of Archbishop Florence Conry, O.F.M., 1629’, Collectanea Hibernica, 43, pp. 7-12. Fenning, H., ‘Troy to Bray: letters from Dublin to Thurles, 1792-1817’, Archivium Hibernicum, LV, pp. 48-125. Frantz, P.B., ed., Jane’s letters from Ireland, 1884-6: as seen in the journal of Jane C. Mahon from March 1884 to October 1886. Edinburgh: Pentland (1999). Fyfe, C., ed., Anna Maria Falconbridge, ‘Narrative of two voyages to the River Sierra Leone during the years 1791-1792-1793’, and the journal of Isaac Dubois, with Alexander Falconbridge, ‘An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa’. Liverpool: Liverpool U.P. (2000). Gray, T., ed., Travels in Georgian Devon: the illustrated journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789-1800, 4. Tiverton: Devon Books (2000). Haines, R.M., ‘Three Christchurch (Twynham) indulgences for the repair of bridges and Bishop William of Wykeham’s admonition to the earl of Shrewsbury on account of abuse of his patronage over the priory’, Archives, XXVI, pp. 30-5. Haines, R.M., ‘Looking back in anger: a politically inspired appeal against John XXII’s translation of Bishop Adam Orleton to Winchester (1334)’, Eng. Hist. Rev., CXVI, pp. 389-404.