English and French mercantilist thought and the matter of colonies during the 17th century

Abstract

Monetary enrichment was among the hottest topics in mercantilist writings of France and England in the 17^th century. How might wealth best be increased in a world that, until the close of this period, was to remain largely without the concept of the market? Colonies came to be seen as a means of increasing the home nation's wealth given the right political and economic conditions. The economists of the day enquired into whether colonies could enrich the nation, and if so, how they might best contribute to this. Three views on this formed over the course of the period. The first view was that the economic development of the colonies should be promoted as a basis for trade on a more equitable, albeit exclusive, basis with the home nation. The ‘predatory’ view saw the colonies as a means of enrichment through unfair trade with no major local investment. The third view held that colonies were the road to the impoverishment of the home country rather than its enrichment. These three views underpinned discussion of the colonial question throughout the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries.     

The Danish cattle trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Abstract

Danish production and exports of oxen have been the subject of frequent investigation from various points of view. Historians have chiefly tended to stress the social lop-sidedness of the trade and the dependence of these exports on the vicissitudes of the international market. While the dominant political position of the Danish nobles enabled them to monopolize the production of oxen, their economic prosperity depended on the successful maintenance of the exports.¹ Against this interpretation, however, some historians have argued that the cattle production was not only of fundamental importance to Danish agriculture but that it also made a significant contribution to the European supply. According to Erik Arup, oxen provided Denmark in the fifteenth century with an export commodity of high quality, and Astrid Friis has stressed the fundamental importance of oxen exports to the economic development of sixteenthcentury Denmark. Both interpretations, however, maintain that the production and export of oxen provided a solid economic foundation for the aristocratic rule of Denmark.²     

The Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis and Air Pollution in Finland

Abstract

The historiography of mercantilism has been described as a series of disconnected still pictures which reflect the shifting viewpoints of economic thought.¹ However, historians have favoured different concepts of mercantilism not only in response to the shifts of economic science but also because they have held, explicitly or implicitly, different opinions on the problem of how economic ideas are formed and of the role they have played in historical development. The following reexamination of some of those ‘stills’ concentrate on such differences.²     

Relief works,the world bank and private business:

Abstract

In an extended review of the arguments advanced by Mancur Olson concerning the economic rise and decline of nations Angus Maddison drew an interesting distinction between ultimate and proximate causality which implicitly invited consideration of both the nature of the discipline of economic history and the key causal factors influencing the rate of economic growth in both the short and long run.¹ To my knowledge nobody has taken the opportunity to build upon this distinction, although sustained analyses of deeper causality are less rare than when Maddison was writing.²     

A chronology of cycles in real economic activity for Norway, 1867–1914

Abstract

Business cycles, defined as “recurrent sequences of persistent and pervasive expansions and contractions in economic activities”¹, have been a distinctive feature of the experience of capitalist countries as far back as our historical records on aggregate economic activity go. Indeed, Schumpeter maintained that “[a]nalyzing business cycles means neither more nor less than analyzing the economic process of the capitalist era … Cycles are not, like tonsils, separable things that might be treated by themselves, but are, like the beat of the heart, of the essence of the organism that displays them”.²     

Corruption and civic order — natural law and economic discourse in Sweden during the age of freedom

Abstract

Views on the history of economic thought have changed during recent decades, with regard both to content and to how it should be written. This special discipline was formerly dominated by an approach that was in principle anachronistic: modern economic theory functioned as the starting point and was projected backwards in time. The task of the history of economic thought was to depict the gradual perfecting of concepts and theories — the “box of tools” of which Schumpeter spoke.¹     

Prices and industrial transformation

Abstract

One of the contradictions of neo-classical economic theory concerns its view of relative prices. On the one hand it is relative prices that determine the market's equilibrium position and decide what transactions will take place. On the other hand, the pattern of relative prices, or expressed differently the price structure, has been regarded as more or less immutable. Variations in relative prices have been considered short-term phenomena, after which, in time, an adaptation has taken place which has restored the initial situation. The same line of thought was also held by Wesley Mitchell, who in the dispersion of relative prices found a reflection of business cycles, but he maintained that the price system is “yet stable in the essential balance of its interrelations”.¹ F.C. Mills cited Mitchell as his authority in his comprehensive work The Behavior of Prices, and although he felt compelled to raise objections to the inference that relative prices varied rhythmically with the business cycle, he still considered that there was a limit to change in relative prices, i.e. the price structure had a fundamental stability.²     

In defence of Heckscher and the idea of Mercantilism

Abstract

In his recent reappraisal of Heckscher's Mercantilism ² Dr. Coleman raised certain questions concerning Heckscher's methodological approach which transcend the immediate problem of the nature and validity of the idea of ‘mercantilism’ and have a bearing upon the broader issue of the relationships between economic conditions, ideas and policy. To the present writer, the danger that Heckscher's development of the idea of mercantilism will drive yet another wedge between the political and the economic historians as Dr. Coleman fears,³ is less serious than the danger that Heckscher's apparent reluctance to admit the influence of economic conditions upon economic ideas,⁴ and his readiness to pass directly from generalizations about economic ideas to generalizations about economic policy, will widen the existing gap between economic historians and historians of economic doctrine, two groups of scholars whose mutual services should be considerable. To the student of economic ideas who seeks to rescue his discipline from the sterile pursuit of tracing the genealogy of particular analytic propositions, of which some of his colleagues seem inordinately fond, the matter is one of crucial importance.     

Serfdom in esthonia during the period of Swedish rule

Abstract

For quite some time after World War II peasant behavior in less developed countries was ‘unproblematic’. There was a general consensus that peasants were not ‘economic men’, in the sense that they tried to maximize profits as postulated by mainstream economic theory. Instead, their acts were assumed to be governed by ‘tradition’, or ‘conservatism’, which by and large had nothing to do with the type of maximizing or minimizing behavior which acquired prominence in economic theory not least by the central role that was conferred on it in Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis.¹ Their ambitions and horizons were thought to be limited in such a way as to render standard economic theory inapplicable in the study of peasant behavior. The discussion focused on the ‘inert’, or ‘lazy’, (satisficing) peasant.²     

Wages and prices in England in the later Middle Ages

Abstract

In recent years the economic development of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been the subject of much attention in international historical research. The results of local and of national studies are now for the first time being discussed within their European framework.¹     

Ultimate and proximate growth causality: A critique of Mancur Olson on the rise and decline of nations1

Abstract

In the past three decades analysis of the “proximate” causes of economic growth has been greatly enriched by both theoretical developments and quantitative studies. Technocratic supply-side growth accounts are available in considerable sophistication and detail,² but analysis of deeper causality is still rare.     

Housekeeping ideology and equilibrium policy in eighteenth-century Sweden

Abstract

In the last issue of SEHR, Jonas Ljungberg carried out an analysis, based on his price history studies, of various methods of measuring economic/industrial transformation.¹ In the main the article opposes two methodological approaches against each other, the one referring to the works of Josefsson/Örtengren and consisting of the measuring of transformation pressure in the diffusion of relative prices over fixed demarcated periods, and the other alluding to the work of Gerschenkron and measuring transformation by means of a running coupling of variously-constructed indices of price movements. The comments on Ljungberg's methods and results which follow are intended as a criticism of his very imprecise use of the concept of the “Gerschenkron effect” and thus of the concept of transformation. They are not to be construed as an opinion on the general question of methodology, where we entirely share Ljungberg's view as to the general fruitfulness of using index calculations in an historical analysis.     

Corn-price rises and equalisation: Real wages in stockholm 1650–1719

Abstract

The period between the price revolution of the sixteenth century and the long inflation which set in around 1730 was marked over large tracts of Europe by stable or even falling prices and rising real wages.¹ The features of stagnation and defensive adaptation are often pointed out by way of contrast with the pronounced economic and demographic expansion of the preceding and succeeding periods.²     

Wealth and credit in the Finnish countryside, 1850–1910

Abstract

In Finland, the early phase of industrialisation, that period of transition when trade and industry began to assume modern form, commenced around the middle of the nineteenth century. A legislative programme of economic liberalism was implemented: steam sawmills were permitted, the customs system reformed, foreign trade freed from controls and rural trade allowed. The supply of credit to farming was eased by the mortgage credit institute. The Free Trade Act of 1879 was based on completely free entrepreneurial activity. These measures, together with exogenous economic factors, stimulated new economic and intellectual forces.¹     

Increased international integration is a prerequisite for more and better research in economic history

Abstract

In the article “Is Swedish Research in Economic History Internationally Integrated?” ¹ Daniel Waldenström, Is Swedish Research in Economic History Internationally Integrated?, Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. LIII, 2005:2, 50–77 , I present new facts on the past international publications and conference participation activity of Swedish economic historians. In contrast to claims made in a recent large public investigation, my data show that Swedish economic historians have not published extensively in international journals, or books, in recent years. This can in part be explained by the custom to write predominantly monographs, to write mostly in Swedish, and to use hardly any quantitative methods or theory-based economic analysis. Naturally, I am well aware that there may also be some other factors at work, and that empirical investigations of this kind are always open to objections. Problems regarding sample selection, variable definitions and so forth cannot be avoided, and to focus mainly on journal article publications in a field where books and anthologies play an important role raises some concern. ² See, e.g., the discussion in my article on these issues relating to the works by Diana Hicks and others. However, my article does not advocate any methodological dogmatism and acknowledges that economic history research can be conducted and presented in many different ways, using several different methodologies. The important thing is to recognise that there is great potential in combining such an open-minded methodological attitude with an active interest and participation in the research that appears in the many international peer-reviewed journals. This would not be to import some foreign (American) methods or views of the field so much as trying to revive the true Swedish economic history in the spirit of Eli F. Heckscher. In my view, this is the most consistent strategy to ensure both more and better future Swedish research in economic history.     

Pre-Industrial economic growth

Abstract

Karl Gunnar Persson has written a small book on a large subject — pre-industrial societies and technological progress.¹ For a book on economic history it is unusual, mainly because of the high level of abstraction on which it moves, but also because of some of the conclusions it reaches.     

Technical change and the ‘technology’ myth

Abstract

In recent years, historians and other English-speaking commentators on technical change and technical functions have often chosen to discuss these matters under the heading ‘technology’. Thus, there have been discussions about such matters as ‘echnological innovation’, ‘technological invention’, and even ‘the imperatives of technology’, ‘the technostructure’ and ‘technological drivenness’.¹ One economist with a special interest in historical matters, Kuznets, has virtually defined a separable condition of ‘modernity’ as the era of ‘technology’ — ‘The epochal innovation that distinguishes the modern economic epoch is the extended application of science to problems of economic production’ alternatively, it is ‘the utilization of a potential provided by modern technology’. An economic historian (Musson) has it that ‘applied science is … the major force behind modern economic growth’. And a prominent historian of the so-called ‘technology’, Forbes, has argued that in ‘our modern world both technology and engineering are branches of applied science’.²     

The China model view is factually false

ABSTRACT

Using a cross-regional analysis of China, this article shows that the China model view is factually false and the universal model view is factually true. It is the marketization and development of non-state sectors, rather than the strong power of government and the state sector, that have driven the Chinese economy to grow fast and to be increasingly innovative. If China wants to sustain its economic performance, it must stay on the way to continuing marketization. Otherwise, China will fall into stagnation.     

The political economy of post-war Finland, 1945–19521

Abstract

The paper is primarily concerned with the Finnish government's management of the Finnish economic situation after the Second World War. Overall, post-war policies were dominated by three main goals, first, how to deal with the war reparation payments required under the harsh political terms of the 1944 Armistice Treaty; secondly, to ensure the settlement of the Karelian refugees and demobilised veterans; and thirdly, the raising of production and the standard of living, including the easing of the rationing system. The focus is especially in analysing how this was financed externally and by the state economy without hyperinflation and considerable indebtedness of the state. From the point of view of the government finances, the financing of the war was transformed to the financing of the war reparations, the compensations due to the war and the settlement of the homeless people. The paper has drawn on the findings of the Studies of the Economic Growth of Finland and other sources and can be seen as a sequel to a previous article on the Finnish war economy between 1939-1945.²     

Book Review

Abstract

The importance of Swedish iron ore to the re-armament and wartime economy of Nazi Germany has been touched upon in a number of writings about the international politics of the period here under review. Erik Lonnroth has demonstrated how the question of continued ore deliveries constituted the flashpoint of Swedish-German relations during the 1930s.¹ Gunnar Häggläf describes the Swedish Foreign Office's balancing act between English and German desires in regard to the ore trade, and their role in the regulating of trade with the two belligerents in the autumn of 1939.² Magne Skodvin has explored the strategic and economic aspects of the attack on Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940.³