Select bibliography of contributions to economic and social history appearing in Scandinavian books,periodicals and year-books, 1981

Abstract

This issue of the annual bibliography of the Review is arranged according to themes. Within each of the eight sub-divisions the contributors are presented in alphabetical order. The country of publication is indicated by ‘D’ ‘F’ ‘N’ or ‘S’ for Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, respectively.     

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     

Clé Lesger,The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange – Merchants,Commercial Expansion and Change in the Spatial Economy of the Low Countries,c.1550–1630

Abstract

Between 1930 and 1935, Sverre Steen wrote four volumes of Det norske folks liv og historie [The Life and History of the Norwegian People], covering the period 1500–1814. He has now half completed the task of bringing the work further towards our own time in a comprehensive series entitled ‘Free Norway’. The first three volumes are devoted to political history in the period immediately following 1814. In this, the fourth volume, entitled ‘The Old Society’, Steen examines the social and economic history of the period 1814–1840. Both the title and the arrangement of the book indicate that Steen's intention is to provide a survey of the foundations of Norwegian society before continuing his work in further volumes, not only about ‘Free Norway’, but also about ‘New Norway’.     

Sweden's iron ore exports to Germany, 1933–1944

Abstract

Rolf Karlbom's article about Swedish iron ore exports to Germany during the Nazi era¹ is an attempt to examine a very important problem as yet unsolved—the significance of the Swedish ore deliveries to Germany. His study begins with the following two questions:² 1. ‘How much of the total consumption of this raw material by German industry did Swedish ore cover during these years?’

2. ‘How far was access to Swedish iron ore a sine qua non for the continuance of the armaments programme?’

3. These basic questions indicate the main problems. Karlbom's answers to them are not wholly convincing because of some weaknesses in his approach.

     

Birgit Karlsson,Egenintresse eller samhällsintresse,Nazityskland och svensk skogsindustri 1933–1945

Abstract

In Vol. XV (1967) of this journal, Alan S. Milward and Jorg-Jöhannes Jäger published criticisms of my article on Swedish iron are exports to Nazi Germany.¹ Turning first to Milward's contribution, this is based on the assumption that the German economy was a ‘blitzkrieg war economy’ in the period preceding the attack upon the Soviet Union. This view, which has been expressed before by B. H. Klein, undoubtedly brings a number of valuable refinements into the hitherto exaggerated estimates of the level of German armaments at the outbreak of the Second World War.² But when he goes on to say that ‘in such a war economy all considerations of potential armaments-producing capacity were rejected in favour of present armaments-producing capacity’,³ Milward palpably oversimplifies a complex problem. In fact, the demand for an armaments programme ‘in depth’, to quote General Thomas, did make itself heard long before the autumn of 1941.     

Collusion and combines in Canada, 1880–1890

ABSTRACT

It is a little-known fact that Canada adopted its own antitrust law one year before the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The Anti-Combines Act of 1889 (‘the Act’) was adopted after a decade in which ‘combines’ (the Canadian equivalent of ‘trusts’) had grown more numerous. From the combines’ numbers, Canadian historians, legal scholars, and economists have inferred that consumer welfare was hindered. However, price and output evidence has never been marshalled to provide even a first step towards assessing the veracity of this inference. This paper undertakes that task. I highlight the fact that the output from industries accused of collusion increased faster than national output in the decade before the passage of the Act and that their prices accordingly fell faster than the national price index. I argue that these findings militate for the position that the origins of Canada's Anti-Combines Act were partially rooted in rent-seeking processes similar to those that American scholars have found driving the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.     

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     

Easy prey? Firms based in small nations and international cartels, 1919–1939

Abstract

It is taken as common sense that small countries have been more pressed and exploited by transnational enterprises than large ones. Economists call this the ‘small-country-squeeze’. Our contribution tries to transfer the thesis to the micro-economic level: Did mighty international cartels exploit their cartel partners based in small countries more easily than enterprises from larger states? From a viewpoint of political logic, or everyday feeling, such a thesis looks straightforward. In the following we apply the thesis of small-country-squeeze to several cases of cartels during their peak period, 1919–1939, and find surprisingly little evidence for this ‘common sense’. The assumption rather needs to be reversed: We should take non-discrimination as the normal case and try to find contradicting cases of discrimination.     

Engaging with homelessness in the City of Tshwane: Ethical and practical considerations

ABSTRACT

Policies and practices aimed at developing more engaged universities that are responsive to the needs of society have become key features of the higher education landscape of most countries. Visions of universities ‘engaged’ in matters of local importance increasingly require academics to reframe their scholarship as some form of ‘engagement’. This requirement has been addressed in many different disciplines and has been met with ambivalence. Academics who see engagement as a new form of ‘public good’ find it enhancing of their teaching and research activities, while others view engaged work as unnecessary and problematic ‘third mission’ activities that impede on ‘normal’ academic work. This article aims to contribute to these debates by interrogating the paradoxes of action and inaction. Drawing on recent experiences in reviewing a policy on homelessness for a municipality in South Africa, the article seeks to bring the ambiguities and challenges of engagement into greater visibility.     

Resistance to coal inequalities and the possibilities of a just transition in South Africa*

ABSTRACT

Coal mining and burning are among the most destructive activities on the planet, and a major driver of environmental inequality in South Africa. This article suggests that, despite heavy constraints, initiatives involving resistance to coal are building a ‘counter-power’ which challenges inequality, generates solidarity, and is potentially infused by imaginative visions of another world beyond coal. Following the ‘social power’ approach this vision could, with deeper connections between three sites of resistance to coal – organised labour, mining affected communities and environmental justice organisations – cohere into a vision of a ‘just transition’. This could embed the anti-coal struggle in a social movement for an alternative development path to challenge deepening poverty and inequality.     

Nuclear power: The family in decolonial perspective and ‘pro-family’ politics in Africa

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the normative construction of ‘family’ in heteronormative ‘nuclear’ terms is infused with power relations, and therefore must not be taken for granted as an analytical category or concept. Not only a site where racialised and patriarchal western notions of sexed and gendered hierarchies have been naturalised and institutionalised, the ‘nuclear family’ model was positioned as a signifier of modernity, civilisation and progress within eurocentric knowledge construction that served colonial interests. This discussion reviews decolonial thinking on the nuclear family, as well as anti-imperialist literature on the colonial history of the nuclear family ideal. These perspectives are brought into conversation with current developments in which the nuclear family model is being reinvigorated by the conservative US-based ‘pro-family’ movement. The ‘family’, it is concluded, is entangled in multiple relations of geo-political power that should be taken into account in research and the production of knowledge around kinship in African contexts.     

Women's opportunities in Swedish society

Abstract

Research in economic history has been accompanied by rapidly developing research in social history. Demographic history, the family and social change, together with popular movements, have been taken up as objects of study. The three Swedish studies discussed here arise from projects in these fields. The studies of Sten Carlsson and Kerstin Moberg form part of projects in the Department of History at the University of Uppsala on ‘the family in demographic and social change in Sweden after 1800’ and on ‘functions of the class society: popular movements’. Gunhild Kyle's study is part of a project in the Department of History at the University of Gothenburg on ‘women in industrial society’.     

A 1735 Danish tract on economic policy

Abstract

About 1720 nearly all Western European countries experienced a monetary expansion which manifested itself most strongly in John Law's banking in France and the English ‘South Sea Bubble’. The same trend was in evidence in the Danish Monarchy; during the last years of the Northern War bank notes (‘kurantsedler’) equivalent to about one million rix-dollars were issued to meet the substantial military expenses.     

Short-distance migration,circles and flows: Movement to and from Ullensaker according to the population census lists of 1865

Abstract

This article arose from the ‘Ullensaker research project’ of the Institute of History of the University of Oslo (supported by the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities), which has as one of its objectives the application of micro-historical methods and electronic data processing techniques to social history. The article examines how far it is possible to reconstruct the migration patterns of a local population by detailed study of place-of-birth data in a nominative population census, and discusses some aspects of short-distance migration as a historical, sociological and socio-psychological phenomenon.     

(In)equality and the South African Constitution

ABSTRACT

Does the South African Constitution constrain or empower government, courts and citizens in addressing systemic social and economic inequalities? This article argues that the Constitution is explicitly ‘transformative’, but is an enabling document, providing ‘scaffolding’ for political and legal activities. It is government, strong institutions and civil society that are ultimately responsible for securing its equality aspirations. Here the Constitution admits of different understandings of equality and different economic and social policy choices. This article identifies these contested meanings of equality and suggests that a liberal egalitarian/social democratic version is dominant in policy choices and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. It illustrates this with reference to the Court’s jurisprudence on equality, and suggests that more radical and transformative interpretations remain possible. However, it concludes that we cannot escape politics, the need for good policy choices and effective implementation and enforcement.     

Environmental efficiency and its distribution dynamics in Chinese cities

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates environmental efficiency and its distribution dynamics in Chinese cities. The analyses are applied the meta-frontier data envelopment analysis and the continuous dynamic distribution approach together with panel data of 286 Chinese cities at the prefecture and above-prefecture levels. The results show that during the period of 2002–2011, the average environmental efficiency in Chinese cities is well below the production frontier. The coastal cities show better performance than the central and western cities; large and extra-large cities are more efficient than small and medium cities; and the environmental efficiency for the ‘key’ cities is slightly better than that for the ‘non-key’ cities. The spatial dynamic distribution analyses indicate that the environmental efficiency of Chinese cities tends to converge. To improve environmental efficiency in the future, the government should pay more attention to the central cities, medium and large size cities in western China, and the non-key cities.

Abbreviations: CPI- Consumer price index; DEA- Date envelopment analysis; DMU- Decision making unit; GDP- Gross domestic product; GMI -Group- frontier managerial inefficiency; IPCC- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; MTR- Meta- technology gap ratio; NTP- Net transition probability; PAA- Prefecture and above-prefecture levels; PIM Perpetual inventory method; SFA Stochastic frontier analysis; TGI Technology gap inefficiency     

Food,fare and nutrition some reflections on the historical development of food consumption

Abstract

Cajsa Warg's old maxim ‘One eats what there is’ — apparently self-explanatory in its simplicity — has a different significance for the understanding of the historical development of food consumption and diet from what might be expected at first glance. The absolute food surplus which industrial and post-industrial society has generated during the last century has helped to conceal certain essential links between food consumption and more general economic and social development in fare-industrial society which was not characterised by self-generating and constantly increasing growth. The assumption of food scarcity in former times, allied to a paucity of research in this field, has among other things conjured up an image of a continual improvement and increase in food consumption coupled with the massive rise in productive capacity during the most recent centuries.     

Swedish imperialism under the microscope

Abstract

Interest in Sweden's Age of Greatness was keen among historians in Sweden and Finland from 1870 until as late as 1970. Apart from the extensive studies written by C.T. Odhner and F.F. Carlson, a whole succession of Swedish scholars defended dissertations on such minor issues as Sweden's relations with ‘such and such a country’ during ‘such and such years’ in order to qualify for positions as lecturers. At the same time, literature with a more geopolitical leaning was appearing, such as the works by Harald Hjärne and Eirik Hornborg on Sweden-Finland's eastern problem.¹     

Electrification and industrialisation: An assessment of the industrial breakthrough in Norway

Abstract

The article relates the ‘industrial breakthrough’ in Norway to the introduction of electricity in manufacturing production. Viewing electricity as a General Purpose Technology (GPT), the new device fostered advances across a broad spectrum of sectors. Several other key technologies (e.g., within chemical industries) also played their part. However, in Norway, electricity took an extraordinarily strong position. By presenting quantitative evidence of the electrification process, and relating it to annual estimates of employment, productivity and value added between 1896 and 1920, it is shown that the manufacturing sector was too small to form a ‘breakthrough’ before the turn of the century. It was not until the widespread introduction of electricity and electric motors gained some momentum in the first decades of the twentieth century that the economy become really industrialised.