The sixteenth‐century price rise: new evidence from Scotland, 1500–85

This article contributes to the emerging belief among early modern economic historians that sixteenth‐century inflation was primarily caused by monetary factors. The Scottish case study reveals a strong relationship between coinage debasement and rising prices, a contention strengthened by the fact that the Scottish experience of inflation was high in European terms, and, in particular, stands at a considerable distance from the English pattern. This study includes the first scholarly examination of prices during the 1540s, and reveals that substantial inflation first emerged during this hitherto neglected decade. Prices plateaued during the 1550s, and rose consistently from 1560 to 1585. Meanwhile real wages declined during the 1540s and from 1560 onwards. This article is methodologically innovative in constructing two baskets of commodities, designed to represent the elite experience, alongside a more traditional basket based on a working household. These reveal the divergent experiences of the price rise within Scotland: rising prices hit the poor harder than the rich due to the high cost of domestic agricultural goods in the subsistence basket and the deflationary impact of wages and luxury goods upon the overall elite basket.     

Estate management and institutional constraints in pre‐industrial England: the ecclesiastical estates of Durham,c. 1400–1640

This article explores how far estate management and institutional constraints help to explain the transformations of rural society in England from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The monks of Durham Cathedral Priory and the bishops of Durham faced many of the same exogenous pressures in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but they responded differently to these challenges. By the seventeenth century all of the dean and chapter's lands were consolidated holdings on 21‐year leases, whereas a confused mixture of copyhold and leasehold land had developed on the bishops' estate. This had a significant impact upon the challenges and opportunities facing their tenants. Institutional constraints were often crucial factors in the transformation of the English countryside: these two neighbouring ecclesiastical estates faced broadly the same problems and yet the composition of their estates diverged significantly across this period, having a profound effect not only on levels of rent, but also on the tenure of holdings and ultimately their relative size; three of the most important factors in the formation of agrarian capitalism. This article also argues that how rural society adapted to the fifteenth‐century recession greatly affected the ability of their sixteenth‐century counterparts to respond to inflation.     

The early modern great divergence: wages,prices and economic development in Europe and Asia, 1500–18001

Contrary to the claims of Pomeranz, Parthasarathi, and other ‘world historians’, the prosperous parts of Asia between 1500 and 1800 look similar to the stagnating southern, central, and eastern parts of Europe rather than the developing north‐western parts. In the advanced parts of India and China, grain wages were comparable to those in north‐western Europe, but silver wages, which conferred purchasing power over tradable goods and services, were substantially lower. The high silver wages of north‐western Europe were not simply a monetary phenomenon, but reflected high productivity in the tradable sector. The ‘great divergence’ between Europe and Asia was already well underway before 1800.     

Explaining contract choice: vertical coordination,sharecropping, and wine in Europe, 1850–19501

Recent literature on sharecropping has emphasized its importance in reducing problems associated with moral hazard in cultivation (in Tuscany), or providing a crucial ‘rung’ on the farm ladder (in the US south). Yet despite these and other important features, sharecropping was surprisingly absent in most regions. Using case studies associated with French wine production, this article argues that a number of factors have often been overlooked in the literature, the first of which is the need for landowners to be able to offer farms that were sufficiently large both to employ the sharecropper's family on a full‐time basis, and to allow them to produce a variety of products to minimize risk. Second, measurement problems exist with the division of the harvest, especially when quality was an important factor in determining price. Finally, the nature of vertical cooperation and integration associated with the production and marketing arrangements of individual crops suggests that landowners were not indifferent to receiving payment in cash or kind, and this affected contract choice. This article incorporates these ideas to explain not just the presence and absence of sharecropping in different geographical localities, but also the wide variety of different forms of the contract that existed in France.     

Rural Europe reshaped: the economic transformation of upland regions, 1850–20001

Agriculture is no longer the main sector in the economy of rural Europe. Based on a comparative analysis of nine upland areas from five different countries (Scotland, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Spain), this article argues that, contrary to the claims of most social science work on ‘rural restructuring’, the decline of agriculture in the rural economy should be understood from a long‐term perspective and in relation to European industrialization, rather than as a recent process linked to postmodern dynamics. In fact, widely diverging paths of rural change during industrialization similarly imply occupational change.     

Institutions, wages, and inequality: The case of Europe and its periphery (1500–1899)

This paper explores the long-run relationship between institutions and wage outcomes in Europe and its periphery. I find that cities that exercised stronger institutional protection of private property experienced: (i) higher levels of both skilled and unskilled real wages, as well as (ii) lower levels of inequality as measured by the skilled–unskilled wage ratio. While the first result corroborates existing work on the positive growth effects of better institutions, the second finding is more novel to the literature. Some explanations are proposed for how stronger institutions can cause an increase in the relative supply of skilled workers, thus lowering wage inequality.     

Silver production and the money supply in England and Wales, 1086–c.1500

The contribution of English and Welsh lead mines to the silver supplies of mints between Domesday Book and the end of the fifteenth century is assessed in this article, comparing evidence for the size of silver production with mint output data. It is shown that the proposal that northern Pennine mines were the principal source of the silver in the late twelfth‐century English currency is untenable. Welsh mines supplied limited amounts of silver to local mints around 1200. Devon silver made a significant but not predominant contribution to mint output at times of bullion scarcity in the 1290s and the mid‐fifteenth century. Imported silver was usually a greater source of the metal in the English currency than locally mined silver, and gold coins constituted most of England's money supply from the mid‐fourteenth century onwards.     

Economic freedom in the long run: evidence from OECD countries (1850–2007)

This article presents historical indices for the main dimensions of economic freedom and an aggregate index for the developed countries of today, specifically pre‐1994 OECD members. Economic liberty expanded over the last century‐and‐a‐half, reaching more than two‐thirds of its possible maximum. However, its evolution has been far from linear. After a substantial improvement from the mid‐nineteenth century, the First World War brought a major setback. The postwar recovery up to 1929 was followed by a dramatic decline in the 1930s. Significant progress took place during the 1950s but fell short of the pre‐First World War peak. After a period of stagnation, steady expansion since the early 1980s has resulted in the highest levels of economic liberty of the last two centuries. Each of the main dimensions of economic freedom exhibited a distinctive trend and its contribution to the aggregate index varied over time. Overall, improved property rights provided the main contribution to the long‐run advancement of economic liberty.     

Small‐scale technologies and European coal mine safety, 1850–1900

This article considers new technologies and fatal accident rates in European coal mining from 1850 to 1900. Its contributions are twofold: to recover and emphasize improvements in small‐scale mine technologies such as safety lamps and ventilation, and, second, to deny any role at this time for later macroinventions such as electrification and mechanization. We discuss the influence of these safety‐improving technologies as well as government regulations on different kinds of fatal accident rates. It is proposed that an important and overlooked source of the reduction in fatalities from certain kinds of accidents was the introduction and diffusion of a variety of safety‐related technologies, none of particularly large scale.     

Child day‐labourers in agriculture: evidence from farm accounts, 1740–18501

While child labour has always been an important part of the industrial revolution story, there is little quantitative evidence about the number of child workers in the 1740–1850 period. This article estimates trends in the percentage of the agricultural day‐labouring workforce that were children. By using the wage level to identify child workers, it is possible to estimate child labour for a large sample of English farms. It is found that girls were rarely employed as day‐labourers, while boys were employed about as frequently as women. The percentage of boys in the day‐labour workforce increased until the 1820s and then declined.     

The jump‐start of the Holland economy during the late‐medieval crisis,c.1350–c.15001

By c.1500 the Holland economy had already acquired modern traits, as witnessed by the occupational structure and the urbanization rate. This article tries to explain the remarkable development of the Holland economy between 1350 and 1500, linking it to the specific occupation history of the region in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The combination of high wages in this frontier economy with increasing difficulties in arable agriculture as a result of the subsidence of peat soils, and the absence of feudal restrictions in production and marketing, resulted in the rise of capital‐intensive industries, benefiting from converging wages and increasing market integration.     

Information asymmetries and craft guilds in pre‐modern markets: evidence from Italian proto‐industry

This article analyses the relationship between guilds and information asymmetries using a large database of quality disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that a high‐quality urban textile industry was able to solve externalities using a range of ex ante and ex post monitoring mechanisms based on private market relationships and fair sanctions which effectively reduced adverse selection and information asymmetries. Instead, when guilds did use their quality regulations, the effect of the guild on information asymmetries and the industry as a whole was generally negative, by providing mechanisms that could be manipulated by entrenched interest groups for rent‐seeking purposes.