Business history as economic history

Abstract

Since economic history became established as an academic discipline in the Swedish universities in the 1950s, more than ISO doctoral dissertations have been published. Of these, about 10% can be characterized as business monographs, while roughly another 10% deal with aspects of trade and industry, relying mainly on business archives. Business history, accordingly, has become an established part of economic history in Sweden. Most of the literature dealing with the history of firms does not, however, appear in the form of doctoral theses, a wide range of books has been published, from sometimes heavy, academic works by established scholars, to glossy anniversary pamphlets lacking scholarly interest.¹     

On women's history and economic history

Abstract

Women's history at the university level can be seen as an interdisciplinary movement, with researchers working in disciplines other than history itself, such as the history of ideas, sociology, anthropology and literature, among others. My initial wish here was to give a broad overview of the state of women's history in Sweden today, but this would have involved too long a discourse.¹ But it needs to be stressed that the connections across the usual boundaries of the academic disciplines are many.²     

Agrarian history as a sub-field of Swedish economic history

Abstract

During the first half of this century a main interest in international economic history was the focus on towns and trade. This path of research derived support from both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, as well as, for example, Karl Bücher in the late 19th century and, of course, Henri Pirenne in the early 20th century.     

Social history as economic history in Sweden. Some remarks

Abstract

During the last two decades social history as a subject has developed rapidly, with regard both to the number of its practicioners as well as the general interest it attracts within the international academic community. In a book of some years ago D.C. Coleman even emphasized that its success has been so great that it has had a tendency to outcompete discourses of older and more distinguished standing; that is, political history as well as economic history. In several countries — particularly Britain — social history has acquired its own departments, and has thus created problems for the older and less buoyant disciplines which have had to compete with this vital and growing new subject for funding and students.¹     

遗址：穿越时空的魅力——访奥林匹亚、迈锡尼和庞贝

面对名山大川,云海松雾,或是海天一色,沙滩椰树;抑或千年古刹或是庙宇古塔,我们总是可以得到一个相对完整的映象。而废墟,以一种残缺不全让我们体味无法一窥全貌而留存的遗憾。也正因如此,遗址成为另外的一种吸引。走访遗址、探究历史的现实意义在于从文化和历史的积淀中领略和感受生命的原生态。     

Macroeconomic history in Sweden

Abstract

The term macrohistory can have reference to the overall history of large units, e.g. world development during the last two hundred years, or European history in the Middle Ages. Another example is the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Yet another is the macrohistorical problem posed by Jones in a recently-published book. He pursues the thesis that tendencies to economic growth have been present in most societies but that for various reasons they have been prevented from becoming more than just tendencies: “Why Europe rather than China?”¹     

An Atlas of Finnish history

Abstract

Finland has a fine tradition in cartography. The ‘Atlas of Finland’ was started as early as 1899 and appeared in several new editions long before the editing of the Atlas of Sweden, for instance, was started. It is only logical therefore that Finland should also have a historic atlas without counterpart in Scandinavia and indeed in most other countries. This atlas first appeared in 1949, edited by Eino Jutikkala, Professor of History at the University of Helsinki. The present new revised edition appeared in 1959.     

The monetary history of Rome

Abstract

The internationally-renowned Swedish historian, Professor Sture Bolin, has devoted himself, ever since his youth, to the problems of monetary history and to the study of coinage as a historical source. His doctoral thesis on the finds of Roman coins in independent Germany ¹ Fynden av romerska mynt i det fria Germanien. appeared in 1926; it was an important work which, by using numismatic source material, contributed considerably to the understanding of the relations between the Roman Empire and the Germans. After the publication of this work he continued to study the functions of money in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and this research resulted in the publication, between 1939 and 1957, of a number of important papers. During the same period he worked steadily on a major work designed to provide a synthesis of the problems relating to the state and its currency from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The first volume of this work, State and Currency in the Roman Empire to 300 A.D. ² Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1958, p. 357, 45 Sw. Kr. , has now been published. The book is the product of a lifelong study of a central theme of economic history, and it unquestionably justifies the great efforts expended on it. It is a work of genius, epoch-making in its field, throwing completely new light upon Roman monetary history, and marking a culminating point in this branch of study.     

The economic history of Thailand

The article, which is a first step in writing a general economic history of Thailand, highlights the marked discontinuities between stagnation and growth, mono–crop culture and diversification, which occurred around the 1950s. While many factors were involved, an underlying theme was the transition from ‘expensive’ to ‘cheap’ labour caused by population growth and the closing of the rice frontier.     

A contribution to Norwegian urban history

Abstract

Norwegian historians have for decades concerned themselves with the study of problems pertaining to Norwegian towns in the middle ages, what needs they fulfilled, how extensive were their socio-economic functions.     

Collider bias in economic history research

Economic historians have long been aware of many forms of bias that could lead to spurious causal inferences. However, our approach to these biases has been muddled at times by dealing with each bias separately and by confusion about the sources of bias and how to mitigate them. This paper shows how the methodology of directed acyclical graphs (DAGs) formulated by Pearl (2009) and particularly the concept of collider bias can provide economic historians with a unified approach to managing a wide range of biases that can distort causal inference. I present ten examples of collider bias drawn from economic history research, focussing mainly on examples where the authors were able to overcome or mitigate the bias. Thus, the paper addresses how to diagnose collider bias and also strategies for managing it. The paper also shows that quasi-random experimental designs are rarely able to overcome collider bias. Although all of these biases were understood by economic historians before, conceptualising them as collider bias will improve economic historians’ understanding of the limitations of particular sources and help us develop better research designs in the future.     

Danish agricultural history ofthe 1920s

The aim of the paper is to qualify the meaning of an urban–rural wage gap by taking a household approach to the issue of standard of living, using household surveys for five worker groups in urban or rural Sweden in 1914/1920. The urban–rural gap in terms of total household real earnings is estimated by including all the household income and using controls for household size and composition, deflated by separate urban and rural costs-of-living indices. To further assess the results, levels of household expenditure and the nutritional value of food are compared between the worker groups. The results indicate that the urban–rural earnings gaps were small or moderate, due to the higher cost of living in urban areas and the practice of payments in kind and home production in rural areas. Some differences between urban and rural workers in terms of patterns of consumption and the nutritional value of food consumed can be attributed to differences in earnings, but a substantial part depended on the nature of the working loads, employment terms and housing conditions. These results thus modify the picture usually given in the literature on urban–rural wage gaps and income elasticity of food items.