A rejoinder to a rejoinder about peasant destinies

Abstract

In his review of my book Peasant Destinies in SEHR 1978:2 Carl-lohan Gadd put forward a number of unfounded statements, which I disputed in a reply in SEHR 1979:2. As Gadd has continued the discussion here with five points, I would like to add a few comments.     

Finnish mortality in the eighteenth century: The sources and the reality

Abstract

Mr. Niels Steensgaard, in his ‘Consuls and Nations in the Levant from 1570 to 1650’¹ referred in note 4, p. 14, to my article on the beginning of Anglo-Turkish relations, and stated: ‘Apparently Horniker is not aware of the existence of the French capitulations of 1569’. There is no point in arguing whether or not I am aware of them, but later on I will give my reasons for omitting reference to them in my article. The implication of Steensgaard's statement, however, is that they were new capitulations, which, of course, they were not. They were a renewal, in the form of a grant,² by Sultan Selim II of the treaty concluded between his predecessor Suleiman I Kanuni and Francis I in 1536.³ Revised capitulations were granted to France in 158l.4 These, and the treaty of 1536, gave the French certain exclusive privileges in the Ottoman Empire. And until 1593, when Elizabeth I of England obtained capitulations which gave her subjects the same privileges as those enjoyed by the French, France was the paramount capitulatory nation in the Levant.     

Globalisation and its discontents: an Indonesian perspective

It is indeed a great honour for me to give the 2011 Heinz Arndt Memorial Lecture. The first time I met the great Professor Heinz Arndt was as a nine‐year‐old back in 1966 when our family first came to Canberra and Heinz was my father's (Panglaykim) new boss. I recall that he picked us up at the airport and within the first week we had visited his house in Deakin, where he gave me and my two brothers games such as Chinese checkers and books that his own kids had outgrown. So my first thought was: what a kind and thoughtful man. Little did I know that I would end up being what he often termed his ‘academic grandchild’. I never took a class from Heinz or was fortunate enough to be supervised by him. However, I had many interactions with him when I was a student at the Australian National University (ANU) and, upon graduation, as an aspiring young academic. He had an important influence on the course of my life. First, he encouraged me to do my PhD in the USA. After I completed my masters at the ANU under Peter Drysdale, I toyed with the idea of continuing with a PhD at the Research School of Pacific Studies. However, Heinz convinced me to go to the USA because he thought it would widen my horizons. He was right. Second, there was the importance of being disciplined and thorough in undertaking country or regional research. One of the most important initiation exercises for an academic working on Indonesia was to do a ‘Survey of Recent Developments’ for the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies. I recall being given a yellowed document that had been formulated by Heinz with precise guidelines on topics, structure, and people to see and interview. We found similar guidelines on regional surveys when we did economic surveys of all the provinces a few years later. I found that doing the research and interviews for the survey was the easy part. The hard part was the two weeks spent in Canberra writing up the survey and being subjected to peer review. The draft was presented to the ‘editorial team’ and others, including, of course, the venerable Professor Arndt. I am glad to say that I passed in terms of substance; but of course there were lots of edits to do following Heniz's traditional typed‐up comments, both general and specific! Third, despite being a formidable figure and someone with a reputation for strong opinions, Heinz was the same kind and thoughtful man I remembered as a nine‐year‐old. He always had the time of day for the young academics, especially those from Indonesia. I had many cups of tea with him as a student and later as an aspiring academic. I still recall his room in University House filled with his books and the filing cabinet near the bathroom, where he would inevitably pull out the right references and reading materials that one needed. I learned a lot about the importance of mentoring and encouraging the young—many of whom have succeeded and are in the room today. This lecture is to honour Professor Heinz Arndt. I believe Professor Arndt was a true internationalist and therefore he would tackle with gusto the rumblings of discontent on globalisation. He would be thorough in trying to understand the manifestations of globalisation and its sources of discontent. He would also be of the firm belief that the benefits of globalisation outweigh its costs and come up with strategic ideas on how to best manage globalisation to counter ‘globaphobia’. I hope I do justice to this topic in the Heinz Arndt tradition.     

Comment

Abstract

When I started the study which has been discussed in the preceding review, advertisements for an assistant were put into Le Monde and The Economist. There were about one hundred applicants, of which ten were selected for personal interview. One of them was Dr. William N. Parker who was at that time in the Ruhr, working on a study of the German steel industry. I have often said and I repeat it now, after having read his review of my book, that one of the greatest mistakes I have made was not to engage Dr. Parker as a member of my small research team. I am very gratified that he, nevertheless, has taken the trouble to penetrate so deeply into my study.     

Norway and the scandinavian economic history review

Abstract

In the first volume of SEHR, published in 1953, we can find articles from Denmark, Finland and Sweden but not from Norway. The question is whether this was accidental or symptomatic. Professor Johan Schreiner was the Norwegian representative on the editorial board from the beginning, and I assume that he also took part in the founding meeting in 1952, described by Kristof Glamann. He also published an article in the second volume (1954) entitled “Wages and Prices in England in the Later Middle Ages”. Schreiner stayed on as the Norwegian representative throughout the Sdderlund period, that is until 1961. During this period 11 main articles by Norwegians appeared in SEHR, most of which dealth with aspect of pre-industrial agrarian history, a field that had been developed by Professor Andreas Holmsen, who was the author of four of the eleven articles.     

A salary bass: a study of bassists’ earnings in the Royal Swedish Opera, 1799–1980

The number of occupations which have hardly altered at all, thus not suffering from Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’, is very restricted. However, one such profession is the contrabassist's. Classical music is still largely produced in the same way as when it was first performed. There is very little productivity change in the actual production of music from bygone times. This, too, is a phenomenon rare in society at large and in the economy in particular. In this study I test Baumol's Cost Disease with the Swedish Hovkapellet bass players as my focus. The disease occurs when salary increases in jobs that have seen no increase of labour are accepted. Have musicians such as bass players seen a stagnating salary development compared to professions in industries which have actually seen labour productivity growth? This, together with other related issues, is discussed based on longitudinal salary data for the Hovkapellet musicians and similar data from Copenhagen and Paris. All data are primary data collected from the orchestra archives. The data indeed verify the Baumol Cost Disease hypothesis. The open question discussed is whether that is an actual problem or not.     

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.     

Demographic trends in late-slavery Jamaica, 1817–32

Early nineteenth-century demographic trends on sugar estates in Jamaica, the most important British Caribbean colony, are examined through the 1817–32 public slave registers. We seek evidence regarding the background to the island's 1831–2 popular insurrection, the immediate cause of the London parliament's vote in 1833 to abolish colonial slavery. Some historians argue that the revolt occurred as ‘political’ effect from a sudden upsurge of metropolitan anti-slavery activism in 1830–1. They believe the uprising broke out despite improvement in enslaved people's material welfare, favoured by many slaveholders to secure population increase after the closure of the British transatlantic slave trade in 1808. Alternative ‘economic’ assessments judge that increasing workloads had been aggravating popular unrest before the revolt. Commercial pressures, and the imminent likelihood of emancipation, allegedly outweighed welfare concerns. The excess of slave deaths over births widened between 1817 and 1832. However, the registers show that demographic deficits resulted mainly from the ageing of the last Africa-born cohorts. Jamaica-born enslaved people became self-reproducing. There was no general pre-1831 regime deterioration. Most slaveholders sought to maintain their Jamaican assets for the long term through pro-natalist measures, and did not expect emancipation. The revolt's causes were thus more ‘political’ than ‘economic’.     

Work in progress

Abstract

Work on the nineteenth century America may indeed be called work in progress —if that notoriously unfashionable word can be given any meaning at all in our fashionably disillusioned century. In any case, though ‘work in progress’ may logically imply progress in work, these notes are offered as a simple tribute to a fine scholar, not as an advance claim to accomplishment. No occasion would be more inappropriate to such a claim. Preferable indeed would be the kind of finely wrought, finished product that on such an occasion Söderlund himself would have produced. But even under his critical scrutiny—‘as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye'—a short sketch of some of the current effort in the United States may pass muster. It is sometimes wise, indeed, to look at the rose while the dew lies still upon it, before its flaws and frailties are opened out to pitiless light.     

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.     

The creation of big business in the Swedish brewing industry during the aftermath of the Second World War

Abstract

Before the First World War, the Swedish brewing industry was organised into cartels that fixed prices and established distribution areas. During the inter-war years, the major combines in the three biggest cities strengthened their position, since they controlled the market in the most populated areas. Because of the agreements within the brewing cartel Bryggeriidkareförbundet, there was hardly any competition among the breweries and the only way to expand the business was to buy cartel-associated smaller breweries in the fixed ‘natural distribution area’. When the cartel ceased to exist in the mid 1950s, the agreements among AB Stockholms Bryggerier in Stockholm (StB), AB Pripp & Lyckholm in Göteborg (P&L) and AB Malmö Förenade Bryggerier in Malmö (MfB) were informally maintained. They managed to expand in their old distribution areas and beyond, but there was no interference in each other's home market.

This article examines why and how these agreements finally came to an end and the effects of the increased competition. The so-called ‘beer war’ between StB and P&L during the early sixties paved the way for negotiations, which in the end led to a merger of the breweries and a new big combine – Pripps – was created. We take up questions related to the formation of the company, its market expansion, the diversification and other organisational strategies. Pripps's monopolistic position on the Swedish market and the institutional pressure that followed started a process leading in the end to a reorganisation and a holding company, PRIBO, was formed in the early 1970s. A few years later the majority of PRIBO's brewing division (Pripps) was bought by the Swedish state and the rest of PRIBO was sold to one of the upcoming holding companies in Sweden during that time – Beijer Invest.     

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     

Den egna vägen: Sverige och den europeiska integrationen 1961–1971

Abstract

The use of armaments, diplomacy and economic pressure to intervene in the functioning of an enemy economy has been one of the most disputed concepts of warfare in the twentieth century. In the war against Germany after 1939 so called ‘economic warfare’ proved on the whole a poor investment of Allied resources with the notable exception of the bombing raids on synthetic oil factories. By contrast it was eminently successful in the campaigns against Japan. One obvious reason for the difference is that Japan was an island power against which the traditional techniques of naval blockade were effective whereas Germany by her territorial conquests on the continent was able greatly to extend her control over economic resources despite the blockade. But there were other reasons for the relative failure of ‘economic warfare’ against Germany and these, like the results of conquest, are central to these two works. One was that the complexity of the German economy in its international setting, combined with the difficulty of obtaining accurate economic information about an enemy economy during a war, meant that there was in reality no method of selecting with an accuracy sufficient to justify the deployment of large resources a link in the chain of production so weak that it could be destroyed. Secondly, a lurking suspicion that this might be so caused rapid changes in strategy, so that when weak links were identified the targets were seldom attacked for long enough for the strategy to succeed. Thirdly, the weapons and techniques of intervention in an enemy economy were seldom perfect enough to achieve their ambitious purpose. And finally German foreign trade even in strategic commodities survived because it was also in the interests of neutrals, and even in those of the Allies where their own economic relationship with the neutrals was concerned, that it should.     

The reliability of the registration of births and deaths in Finland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Some examples

Abstract

Finland has an abundance of source materials for the study of historical demography. The best-known records are the two sets of tables: the census and mortality tables which were maintained by the parish clergy from 1749 onwards. These recorded the size of the population, to some extent its distribution, and the vital statistics of births, marriages and deaths. The various parish registers formed the basic material for these tables, and information about births and deaths was taken from the registers of births and deaths which exist for Finnish parishes in significant numbers after the Great Northern War (i.e. after 1721). Indeed, for some parishes such registers have survived from as early as the second half of the seventeenth century. Finland therefore has rich documentation available for research into fertility and mortality. However demographic research has previously concentrated upon the more accessible census data, while the registers of births and deaths have been relatively neglected.     

Some reflections on ‘redistribution with growth’

Two aspects of this book (Redistribution with Growth) are considered: first, the method used in Chapter II to adjust growth rates of GNP for changes in income distribution; and second, the analysis in Chapter I that purports to provide further support for the Kuznets ‘hypothesis’, namely the tendency for inequality of income distribution to increase in the first stages of economic development and then to decline slightly after reaching a peak. As regards the first issue, the method used in the book is criticized on the grounds that (i) no clear interpretation can be given to the weights attributed to the income growth of individual income groups and (ii) no precise meaning can be attached to the adjusted growth rates obtained. In place of this method an alternative method is used, based on the Atkinson measure of inequality, and adjusted growth rates are shown for a number of countries on the basis of alternative valuations of ‘inequality aversion’, the interpretation of which — in terms of a trade-off between equality and total income — is claimed to be clearer and more precise. As regards the Kuznets hypothesis, the results of the book are challenged on two main counts. First, it is shown that correlations confined to the low-income countries yield statistically less significant results. Secondly, it is argued that there are various statistical biases in the data, one of which is the failure to take account of changes in relative prices faced by different groups in the course of economic development at an early stage.     

Are children poor men's riches?

Abstract

Extract

Fertility declined fairly simultaneously in most western countries nearly a century ago. The question of which social groups were early in starting the decline is thought to have been answered: the common assertion is that the highest social groups started to control their fertility and, as time passed, that their new reproductive behaviour percolated down through the social layers. The current project on the secular decline in fertility in Norway has revealed that the families at the very top of the social hierarchy were the national pioneers in family limitation. The hypothesis in this article is, however, that family limitation in Norway also had an independent point of departure in the rural lower classes. In this article, I will therefore challenge the ‘general truth’ that there is always an inverse relationship between fertility and social status in the initial phase of the secular decline in fertility.     

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     

Engineer training in Sweden during the postwar period in the context of technical and structural change

Abstract

A predilection for far-reaching social planning has been the norm in Sweden for most of the postwar period. During the Second World War, for example, planning ideas were developed by Swedish economists and officials (most of them associated with Social Democratic circles) serving on the Myrdal Commission, as it was called.1 Many of these ideas turned up subsequently in the labour movement's postwar programme and were implemented to some extent during the 1950s and 1960s. In this way a kind of supply economy came into operation. Many prominent Swedish economists became heavily involved in the work of forecasting and planning, in which oneimportant planning aim was the avoidance of structural problems. The end in view, in other words, was to plan in such a way that mutually complementary combinations of productive resources were to hand at every given point in time. Manpower forecasts and socio-economic ‘long-term planning commissions’ were some of the instruments that came to.be employed.     

Scandinavia and the advance of the Hanseatics

Abstract

In chapter IV of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. II (1952), Professor M. M. Postan has devoted an unusual amount of space and attention to Scandinavian-Baltic trade. Its varying phases are expertly described, its characteristics clearly distinguished, and the Scandinavians are shown to have played a great and important role in the early Middle Ages. Postan is the first historian to have made use of the research of the last few decades into the Viking Age and to have described the Scandinavians, in a general presentation, as something more than mere pirates hostile to culture; he saw them rather as pioneers and active merchants who during the 9th and 10th centuries extended the existing commercial relations of the West with the Baltic, by way of the rivers of Russia, to the civilizations of the East beyond the Black and Caspian Seas, and who in this way ‘left, if anything, deeper trace than the Frisians in the preceding period’ (p. 178). The activities and achievements of their Cerman-Hanseatic successors are described with no less insight and understanding (pp. 184 ff.): by an ‘almost revolutionary’ transformation of commercial life they advanced from the Rhineland and founded a professional merchant class and a rich urban culture.     

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.