American colonial incomes, 1650–1774

New data now allow conjectures on the levels of real and nominal incomes in the 13 American colonies. New England was the poorest region, and the South was the richest. Colonial per capita incomes rose only very slowly if at all, for five reasons: productivity growth was slow; population in the low‐income (but subsistence‐plus) frontier grew much faster than that in the high‐income coastal settlements; child dependency rates were high and probably even rising; the terms of trade were extremely volatile, presumably suppressing investment in export sectors; and the terms of trade rose very slowly, if at all, in the North, although faster in the South. All of this checked the growth of colony‐wide per capita income after a seventeenth‐century boom. The American colonies led Great Britain in purchasing power per capita from 1700, and possibly from 1650, until 1774, even counting slaves in the population. That is, average purchasing power in America led Britain early, when Americans were British. The common view that American per capita income did not overtake that of Britain until the start of the twentieth century appears to be off the mark by two centuries or more.     

Why the industrial revolution was British: commerce,induced invention,and the scientific revolution1

Britain had a unique wage and price structure in the eighteenth century, and that structure is a key to explaining the inventions of the industrial revolution. British wages were very high by international standards, and energy was very cheap. This configuration led British firms to invent technologies that substituted capital and energy for labour. High wages also increased the supply of technology by enabling British people to acquire education and training. Britain's wage and price structure was the result of the country's success in international trade, and that owed much to mercantilism and imperialism. When technology was first invented, it was only profitable to use it in Britain, but eventually it was improved enough that it became cost‐effective abroad. When the ‘tipping point’ occurred, foreign countries adopted the technology in its most advanced form.     

Spinning the industrial revolution

The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's ‘high wage economy’ view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such ‘high wage economy’ in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low‐productivity, low‐wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.     

Lancashire,India, and shifting competitive advantage in cotton textiles, 1700–1850: the neglected role of factor prices1

In the early eighteenth century, wages in Britain were more than four times as high as in India, the world's major exporter of cotton textiles. This induced the adoption of more capital‐intensive production methods in Britain and a faster rate of technological progress, so that competitive advantage had begun to shift in Britain's favour by the late eighteenth century. However, the completion of the process was delayed until after the Napoleonic Wars by increasing raw cotton costs, before supply adjusted to the major increase in demand for inputs.     

The high wage economy and the industrial revolution: a restatement

This article responds to Humphries's critique of Allen's assessment of the high wage economy of eighteenth‐century Britain and its importance for explaining the industrial revolution. New evidence is presented to show that women and children participated in the high wage economy. It is also shown that the high wage economy provides a good explanation of why the industrial revolution happened in the eighteenth century by showing that increases of women's wages around 1700 greatly increased the profitability of using spinning machinery. The relationship between the high wage economy of the eighteenth century and the inequality and poverty in Britain in the nineteenth century is explored.     

The empire strikes back: Hong Kong and the decline of sterling in the 1960s1

The aftermath of the sterling devaluation of 1967 is usually portrayed only in terms of the performance of the British economy, but it had more far‐reaching implications, exposing the changed financial relationship between Britain and its overseas dependencies and prompting the end of the sterling reserve system. This article explores the reasons why Britain was forced to offer its first exchange guarantee to Hong Kong in May 1968. Prolonging the colonial monetary system devised in the period from the 1930s to the late 1960s created problems for Britain that shifted the balance of power to the point where Hong Kong and other colonies were able to force a re‐negotiation of their link to sterling.     

The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution

The new meta‐narrative of the industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy and that this itself caused industrialization. Contemporary inventions, although derived from scientific discoveries shared with mainland Europe, could only be profitable in the context of Britain's factor prices. Therefore, important inventions were only developed in Britain where they enabled access to a growth path that transcended trajectories associated with more labour‐intensive production methods. The criticism presented here concerns perspective and methodology. The account of the high wage economy is misleading because it focuses on men and male wages, underestimates the relative caloric needs of women and children, and bases its view of living standards on an ahistorical and false household economy. A more accurate picture of the structure and functioning of working‐class households provides an alternative explanation of inventive and innovative activity in terms of the availability of cheap and amenable female and child labour and thereby offers a broader interpretation of the industrial revolution.     

Influence of the public sector on activity in Denmark, 1929-39

Abstract

The article presents the first quantification of Denmark's discretionary fiscal policy of the 1930s. The measuring of the discretionary budget effects is based on a revision of the changes in the aggregate public sector budget balance and a computation of the size of the automatic stabilisers. It is shown that Danish fiscal policy became steadily more contractive between 1932/33 and 1936/37, while changes in an expansive direction occurred only in 1931/32 and in the late 1930s. It is concluded that the fiscal policy pursued in Denmark had considerably more points of similarity with fiscal policy in Great Britain than with the Swedish policy of the 1930s.     

British Capital and Merchandise Exports, 1870–1913: The Bilateral Case of New Zealand

The Ford thesis argued that there was a short‐term causal relationship between British overseas investment and British merchandise exports in the late nineteenth century. However, economic historians since Ford have found little empirical evidence in support of this argument. Using data on bilateral British lending, this article finds that such a relationship did exist, with British ex ante lending preceding merchandise exports by 2 years. A case study of New Zealand, which had an extraordinarily high share of Britain in its imports, reveals that the relationship was conditional upon the lending being allocated to social overhead capital.     

Canals,rivers, and the industrial city: Manchester's industrial waterfront, 1790–18501

This article presents new data on mill location in Manchester in 1850 to show that water‐transport infrastructure played a key role in determining the intra‐urban pattern of factory development. The shift from water to steam power introduced new patterns of industrial water use, rather than the relocation of factories away from waterways. Five new public canals and 23 private canal branches activated a major expansion of Manchester's waterfront, providing the majority of the manufacturing sites that enabled the town to become the world's foremost factory centre. Without effective municipal water supplies, canals were the best available water source for steam engines.     

Fattening children or fattening farmers? School milk in Britain, 1921–19411

Fattening children or fattening farmers? School milk in Britain, 1921‐1941. The introduction of school milk in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century was a relatively slow process. This article seeks to understand state and private sector initiatives in the light of four issues: nutrition, political factors, problems in the dairy industry, and the moulding of the consumers of the future. Overall, the nutritional benefits of school milk are debatable, possibly even negative in those areas where it replaced other foods; but the dairy industry did well, creating new markets at a time of depression. After the war school milk reached the zenith of its popularity.     

Party politics,political economy,and economic development in early eighteenth‐century Britain

Economic growth and change in eighteenth‐century Britain, both the expansion of pre‐industrial commercial society and the industrial revolution itself, have been explored using a variety of approaches. This article highlights a relatively ignored aspect of the problem, arguing that the state, politics, and political economic ideology played a central role. In particular, the early eighteenth‐century political victory of a version of political economy associated with the Whig party, which centred on manufacturing and consumption, was a prerequisite for the economic developments later in the century. The article begins by describing a political economy of manufacturing and its rival, a political economy of re‐exporting associated with the Tory party. It then explains how and why a political economy of manufacturing became dominant, examining both political elites and ordinary voters and petitioners. The growth of manufacturing and consumption must be understood, therefore, as political as much as economic events.     

Australian squatters,convicts, and capitalists: dividing up a fast‐growing frontier pie, 1821–71

Compared with its competitors, Australian GDP per worker grew exceptionally quickly from the 1820s to the 1870s, at a rate about twice that of the US and three times that of Britain. Did this rapid growth produce rising inequality, following a Kuznets curve? Using a novel dataset, this article offers new evidence that provides unambiguous support for the view that, in sharp contrast with the US experience and with globalization‐inequality views concerning late nineteenth‐century frontiers, Australia underwent a revolutionary levelling in incomes up to the 1870s. This assessment is based on trends in many proxies for inequality, as well as annual estimates of functional income shares in the form of land rents, convict payments, free unskilled labour incomes, free skilled labour and white collar incomes, British imperial transfers, and a capitalist residual.     

Incentives,technology and the shift to year‐round dairying in late nineteenth‐century Denmark1

This article uses monthly trade data to document the decline in the seasonality in Danish butter exports that occurred from the 1880s onwards. This decline contrasted with steady or increasing seasonality elsewhere. Monthly butter prices in Britain, Denmark, and Ireland show that the incentives to shift into winter dairying were particularly high in the 1880s and 1890s; however, this cannot on its own explain the Danish shift, since our price data show that farmers elsewhere faced winter premia that were every bit as high as the Danish premia. The crucial factor in Denmark was the generation of empirical knowledge by the private and public sectors systematically analysing empirical evidence; the rapid diffusion of this knowledge in a highly educated society via lectures, exhibitions, written materials, and by institutions such as the new cooperative sector; and a willingness to absorb this knowledge by profit‐maximizing farmers.     

An efficient market? Going public in London, 1891–1911

There have been claims that British capital was not well deployed in Victorian Britain. There was, allegedly, a lack of support for new and dynamic companies in comparison to the situation in Germany and the US. We find no evidence to support these claims. The London Stock Exchange welcomed young, old, domestic, and foreign firms. It provided funds to firms in old, existing industries as well as patenting firms in ‘new‐tech’ industries at similar costs of capital. If investors did show a preference for older and foreign firms, it was because those firms offered investors better long‐run performance. In addition, we show some evidence that investors who worked in the same industry and lived close to the firm going public were allotted more shares in high‐quality initial public offerings.     

Ergodic chaos for non‐expansive economic models**

Ergodic chaos is one of the most important concepts in the theory of nonlinear economics. Due to the lack of appropriate sufficient conditions, its reach has not been fully understood. In this paper a sufficient condition for ergodic chaos that covers non‐expansive dynamical systems is examined. By analyzing an endogenous growth model as an example, we discuss the breadth of models in which ergodic chaos can emerge.     

Mechanization and the spatial distribution of industries in the German Empire, 1875 to 1907

The adoption of water, steam, and electric power transformed manufacturing in the nineteenth century. This article studies the relationship between this technological change and the spatial distribution of manufacturing industries in the German Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The adoption of steam powered machinery created incentives for manufacturers to form industry clusters near coal mining regions. Specifically, this article shows that a one standard deviation increase in the average size of steam power operations was associated with a rise in geographic concentration of one‐quarter of a standard deviation. In contrast, a one standard deviation increase in the size of water power operations was associated with a drop in geographic concentration of one‐sixth of a standard deviation. This is consistent with the constraint that water powered plants had to be located on a stream with a sufficient gradient and away from other water powered plants to avoid disruption from neighbouring gates and dams. Together the findings indicate that the transition from water to steam powered machinery contributed to the geographic concentration of manufacturing in the nineteenth century.     

低浓度煤矿瓦斯梯级发电系统模型

为了系统性地研究煤矿低浓度瓦斯发电及其余热回收利用技术的热力学性能,提高能源回收效率,通过对"煤矿抽采瓦斯梯级发电系统"进行研究,采用理论分析的方法,分别建立了瓦斯内燃机、余热锅炉、背压式汽轮机、ORC发电机组等主要设备及其他附属设备的热力学模型,并将其进行整合,联立方程组,通过顺序计算及迭代计算,给出"煤矿抽采瓦斯梯级发电系统"的最终计算结果.结果表明,瓦斯气所含化学能中,有22.3％ 直接由瓦斯内燃机转化为电能,余热利用系统可回收2.42％ 的电能,总发电热效率达到24.72％,增加10.85％,但瓦斯发电系统总体热效率仍然较低,有待进一步提高.本文所建立的理论计算模型可以清晰地表明现有瓦斯内燃发电系统的能量利用效率水平,以及所采用的余热利用系统对能量回收程度,该模型是对瓦斯发电及其余热利用系统所建立的完整的指标评价模型,对瓦斯发电及余热回收系统的优化和完善具有较强的指导意义.     

The rise and decline of European parliaments, 1188–17891

This article quantifies the activities of medieval and early modern parliaments. It traces the long‐term evolution of this European institution, and offers a first pass at analysing its impact on long‐term economic development. Starting in Spain in the twelfth century, parliaments gradually spread over the Latin west between 1200 and 1500. In the early modern period, parliaments declined in influence in southern and central Europe and further gained in importance in the Netherlands and Britain, resulting in an institutional ‘Little Divergence’ between 1500 and 1800. We discuss the background of this phenomenon in detail. Moreover, by analysing the effects of parliamentary activity on city growth we find that these differences in institutional development help to explain the economic divergence between north‐western and southern and central Europe.