Gentlemen and shopkeepers: supplying the country house in eighteenth‐century England

The country house is well recognized as a site of elite patronage, an important vehicle of social and political ambition, and a statement of power and taste. Yet we know relatively little about the networks of supply and purchasing patterns of rural elites, or about how their practices related to broader changes in material culture. Drawing on a large sample of bills and receipts of the Leigh family of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, this article recreates the processes through which the material culture of the family home was constructed. These reveal London as the source for many high‐quality goods, although the pattern of supply was not a simple dichotomy of local–everyday and metropolitan–luxury purchases. They also show the large number of shopkeepers patronized as the Leighs spread their purchases through choice, convenience, and expediency. Relating this to wider conceptions of consumption, the Leighs emerge as engaging in layered and sometimes conflicting consumer cultures. They were concerned with fashion as novelty and a marker of rank; but they also valued traditional markers of status. Social distinction was achieved through a continued emphasis on title and lineage as much as fashion or taste—value systems that were unavailable to the middling sorts.     

Mercantilism and bureaucratic modernization in early eighteenth‐century France

French mercantilism is generally associated with absolutist policy‐making subject to capture by rent‐seeking interests. This article investigates how the Bureau du Commerce, a small state agency in charge of commerce and the supply side, handed out rents and privileges to private entrepreneurs. We coded how the Bureau investigated and decided all 267 voluntary submissions received between 1724 and 1744. It is shown that the Bureau’s formal, rule‐based decision‐making process could actually differentiate between alternate policy aims and target them consistently over time, with more or less powerful sets of rents. From this, a hierarchy of revealed policy preferences is derived. First comes technical innovation and diffusion, then local economic development; import substitution is only in the third position, followed by consumers’ welfare. Lastly, and in contrast to a long line of authors, it is shown that the production of luxury goods was not a significant or valued objective.     

From imitation to invention: creating commodities in eighteenth‐century Britain

This article presents the history of new goods in the eighteenth century as a part of the broader history of invention and industrialization. It focuses on product innovation in manufactured commodities as this engages with economic, technological and cultural theories. Recent theories of consumer demand are applied to the invention of commodities in the eighteenth century; special attention is given to the process of imitation in product innovation. The theoretical framework for imitation can be found in evolutionary theories of memetic transmission, in archaeological theories of skeuomorphous, and in eighteenth‐century theories of taste and aesthetics. Inventors, projectors, economic policy makers, and commercial and economic writers of the period dwelt upon the invention of new British products. The emulative, imitative context for their invention made British consumer goods the distinctive modern alternatives to earlier Asian and European luxuries.     

House prices in the Ottoman Empire: evidence from eighteenth‐century Edirne†

This study uses a new dataset of 2,246 notarial deeds of house sales from one of the major cities of the Ottoman Empire, Edirne, covering the period from 1720 to 1814. It estimates real hedonic house prices and urban wealth inequality for the housing market. It shows that house size, proximity to the commercial centre, access to fresh water, and family ties were important determinants of relative house prices. These findings also apply to the different quartiles of the market, indicating limited market segmentation. It demonstrates that there was an increase in housing wealth inequality during the eighteenth century as house prices became more dispersed. The hedonic house price index provides evidence that inflation‐adjusted house prices declined substantially following the Russo‐Turkish war of 1768–74. The decline is mainly explained through demographic shocks induced by plague epidemics, natural disasters, and other population movements driven by wars, army mobilization, and political upheavals.     

Women's work and structural change: occupational structure in eighteenth‐century Spain

This article uses the declarations of householders in the Cadaster of Ensenada (1750–5) to calculate labour participation rates for women and men from 22 localities in inland Spain. The article establishes the actual levels of women's market activity, which are much higher than commonly assumed. This unique source also makes it possible to analyse the region's occupational structure. Due to the labour‐intensive character of manufacturing work, the abundant supply of cheap labour, the diffusion of cottage industries, and the demand for commodities from internal and colonial markets, a large portion of the region's population worked in manufactures in the eighteenth century. This finding challenges standard interpretations of the Spanish economy at this time as mostly agricultural, which rely on sources that exclude women workers. Most workers in the manufacturing sector were women, and their market activity was concentrated in textile manufacturing. Once women are included in the analyses, the industrial share of employment follows a U‐shaped trajectory from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. The article concludes that the standard interpretation of structural change, based solely on empirical evidence for male workers, gives a misleading picture of when, where, why, and how structural change occurred.     

The selection bias in court records: settlement and trial in eighteenth‐century Ottoman Kastamonu

Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity to access information about the names, characteristics, and socio‐economic status of individuals and the laws, local customs, and legal institutions of societies. Although researchers have noted various limitations of these records, the problem of selection bias has not been systematically studied. Since litigants would probably settle disputes in which one side is likely to be a clear winner, the cases that go to trial are more likely to be the difficult and uncertain ones that comprise a non‐random subset of all disputes. This article presents a study of selection bias in Ottoman courts in the town of Kastamonu in northern Anatolia, from the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Disputes are categorized by type and the distribution of court participants is studied according to composition, gender, and socio‐religious status. A regression analysis is run to determine the factors affecting the likelihood of cases being tried in court. The results indicate that the cases that ended up in court were selected systematically. If the selection bias is ignored, research based on Ottoman court records may be seriously flawed in its ability to yield general conclusions.     

The remarkable wealth of the Dutch Cape Colony: measurements from eighteenth‐century probate inventories1

How comfortable was the life of the average settler in the Dutch Cape Colony of the eighteenth century? The generally accepted view is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress being made in the 143 years of Dutch rule (1652–1795). This article shows that new evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records contradicts earlier historical accounts. These documents bear witness to a relatively affluent settler society, comparable to some of the most prosperous regions of eighteenth‐century England and Holland. This detailed picture of the material wealth of the Colony should inspire a revision of the standard accounts. The causes and consequences of this prosperity are also considered briefly.     

From privatized to government‐administered tax collection: tax farming in eighteenth‐century France1

The establishment of a government bureaucracy to collect taxes is regarded as one of the essential features of a modern economy. While Britain is considered a pioneer, France has been treated as a laggard because of continued reliance on tax farming. Focusing on the largest tax farm, France's late transition from private to government tax collection is explained in a principal‐agent context by the difficulties of monitoring employees and borrowing at low cost in the capital market. Tax farmers continued to earn high returns, absorbing the risk of fluctuating collections, leaving the Crown with lower revenue.     

Modelling regional imbalances in English plebeian migration to late eighteenth‐century London†

Using a substantial set of vagrancy removal records for Middlesex (1777–86) giving details of the place of origin of some 11,500 individuals, and analysing these records using a five‐variable gravity model of migration, this article addresses a simple question: from which parts of England did London draw its lower‐class migrants in the late eighteenth century? It concludes, first, that industrializing areas of the north emerged as a competitor for potential migrants—contributing relatively fewer migrants than predicted by the model. Rising wage rates in these areas appear to explain this phenomenon. Second, it argues that migration from urban centres in the west midlands and parts of the West Country, including Bristol, Birmingham, and Worcester, was substantially higher than predicted, and that this is largely explained by falling wage rates and the evolution of an increasingly efficient travel network. Third, for the counties within about 130 kilometres of the capital, this article suggests that migration followed the pattern described in the current literature, with London drawing large numbers of local women in particular. It also argues that these short‐distance migrants came from a uniquely wide number of parishes, suggesting a direct rural‐to‐urban path.     

Baltic iron and the British iron industry in the eighteenth century

Before the revolution in coal technology that swept the British iron industry in the last years of the eighteenth century, native ironmasters were unable to meet the burgeoning demand for malleable bar iron. The shortfall was made good by imports of bar iron from the Baltic, first from Sweden, then from Russia. This article presents new empirical evidence on the role played by Baltic iron in the Georgian economy. It also considers the impact of Swedish and Russian iron on domestic ironmasters as they sought organizational, as well as technological, ways to overcome the energy constraints facing the industry.     

Urban inoculation and the decline of smallpox mortality in eighteenth‐century cities—a reply to Razzell

Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth‐century Britain but was reduced to a minor cause of death by the mid‐nineteenth century due to vaccination programmes post‐1798. While the success of vaccination is unquestionable, it remains disputed to what extent the prophylactic precursor of vaccination, inoculation, reduced smallpox mortality in the eighteenth century. Smallpox was most lethal in urban populations, but most researchers have judged inoculation to have been unpopular in large towns. Recently, however, Razzell argued that inoculation significantly reduced smallpox mortality of adults and older children in London in the last third of the eighteenth century. This article uses demographic evidence from London and Manchester to confirm previous findings of a sudden fall in adult smallpox mortality and a rise in the importance of smallpox in early childhood c. 1770. The nature of these changes is consistent with an increase in smallpox transmission in London and Manchester after 1770 and indicates that smallpox inoculation was insufficient to reduce smallpox mortality in large towns. It remains unclear whether inoculation could have operated to enhance smallpox transmission or whether changes in the properties of the smallpox virus drove the intensification of smallpox mortality among young children post‐1770.     

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.     

Turnpike trusts and property income: new evidence on the effects of transport improvements and legislation in eighteenth‐century England1

Numerous Acts of Parliament changed the financing of transport infrastructure in eighteenth‐century England. This paper examines the economic effects of turnpike acts, which greatly improved road infrastructure by introducing tolls. It shows that turnpike trusts increased property income in local areas by at least 20 per cent. The findings shed light on why local property owners promoted and managed turnpikes. They also show that turnpike trusts accounted for at least 20 per cent of the total growth in real land rents between 1690 and 1815, and added at least 1.65 per cent to national income in 1815.     

Some aspects of technology choice in the iron foundry industry

This article examines technological choice for developing countries in the iron founding industry. Three key sub-processes are investigated and the effect of wage rates, discount rates, scale and quality standards are examined. In general, low wage rates, low scale and high discount rates favour the selection of techniques that are high or intermediate in their labour-intensity. The effect of increasing quality standards is to favour the more capital-intensive (and less labour-intensive) techniques.     

Scottish,Irish, and imperial connections: Parliament,the three kingdoms,and the mechanization of cotton spinning in eighteenth‐century Britain1

This paper offers a new perspective on the emergence of machinery in the cotton spinning trade during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It does so by examining the interplay between economic, political, and national interests within the early Hanoverian state. Changes in trading relationships between textile producers across the three kingdoms of England/Wales, Ireland, and Scotland created escalating supply‐side problems, which, by the 1760s, would precipitate a quest for solutions based on new technologies.     

Cottage industry,migration, and marriage in nineteenth‐century England

There has been considerable debate concerning the impact of the industrial employment of women upon their demographic behaviour in nineteenth‐century England. This article assesses the impact of employment in the cottage industry of straw plait and hat making in the county of Hertfordshire, comparing and contrasting districts where the industry was prominent with those where it was not. It is discovered that in 1851 the availability of straw industry employment encouraged earlier marriage, most notably in those parishes where the industry was particularly heavily concentrated, although overall levels of nuptiality and proportions ultimately marrying were similar in straw and non‐straw areas alike. By 1871, however, the skewed sex ratio that such employment produced among young adults served to offset this positive effect. As the industry waned in the later nineteenth century, the experience of different regions of the county converged, while throughout the period the data suggest that urban/rural contrasts and the suburbanization of London produced more stark contrasts in female marriage patterns than did the availability of cottage industry employment.