We study a period of Javanese history when the consumption of opium was legal, but the supply of it was undergoing substantial institutional transformation. Through most of the nineteenth century the opium trade was organized into a system of “revenue farms,” which were privately owned local monopolies that bought raw opium from the government, refined it, and sold it to consumers. After 1893 this system was replaced by a government monopoly, the so-called opium regie, which controlled importation, refining, and retailing. Our main conclusion is that this change in policy substantially reduced opium consumption.

Construction on the first commercial telegraph line in the United States began in 1845. Over the next 15 years, states promoted and regulated the industry through a variety of statutes. This article explores the patterns of telegraph legislation over time and across states. The patterns of telegraph legislation are shown to fit general regulatory patterns of economic activity during the nineteenth century.

In order to examine the relation between exports and inequality, this article first estimates per-capita income, exports, and other indicators of economic development in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Manuscript data are analyzed to measure and interpret three kinds of inequality: of income, of total wealth, and of landholding. The results suggest that exports and foreign ownership contributed far less to inequality than is imagined in dependency theory.

The relative price of capital goods, an important component of the user cost of capital, has rarely been incorporated into comparative studies of long-run capital accumulation. This article constructs and explores a data set for capital-goods and equipment prices covering the 1870–1950 period for 11 OECD countries. We document substantial differences across countries in the relative prices of capital goods, but also find convergence in those prices over time. Finally, we show that relative capital-goods prices are strongly negatively correlated with investment rates.

Rational-choice theories of the state have been used in attempts to explain how variations in policy result from differences in constraints. But these theories give little attention to how the state comes to know what the constraints are. This article provides a dramatic example of the process of discovering economic and political constraints by examining Iran's policies toward the opium trade during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (1921–1941).

Earlier accounts of the creation of property rights in the California gold fields ignored culture and are incomplete. We argue that culture matters in solving collective-action problems. Such problems in the California gold fields were solved through reliance on cultural focal points. Focal points included individualism, equality, respect for property, and rewards commensurate to work. Cultural concepts of fairness served to create norms and institutions that miners were willing to defend, which included majority rule, election of officials, trial by jury, allocation of a first-come, first-served basis and rules for working claims.

An international sample of 349 British-owned firms is analyzed to test the effectiveness of the International Tea Agreements of 1930 and 1933. Although the agreements reduced output overall, in 1930 there were significant regional differences in the extent of compliance, with firms in Eastern India reducing output more than did firms in Ceylon. These differences can be attributed to regional differences in organizational structure. Archival evidence suggests that the breakdown of collusion in 1931 and 1932 was due to a bargaining conflict between established producers in India and Ceylon and the newer plantations of Java and Sumatra.

Producers of commodities like wheat and sugar may envy the facility with which the tea growing industry obtained a 30 percent rise in average tea prices and a 90 percent enhancement of tea share values—all within the space of a little more than six months.

The Economist, 26 August 1933

This article assembles new data and methods for studying wealth inequality trends in industrializing America. Inequality grew sharply between 1820 and 1850, leveled off, and increased steadily between 1870 and 1900. Inequality grew due to compositional changes in the population, but also grew within occupations, age groups, and the native-born population. Proposed labor-market explanations are inconsistent with the fact that wealth inequality between occupational groups was declining. Wealth accumulation patterns are also inconsistent with the hypothesis of child default on responsibilities for old-age care. We propose research on a new explanation based on luck, rents, and entrepreneurship.

As the United States became more urbanized in the nineteenth century, local-government expenditures increased as local governments expanded their services in response to their growing populations. Expenditures at all levels of government increased substantially in the nineteenth century, but local governments grew more than either the states or the federal government. Total local-government expenditures increased along with the growing urban population, but expenditures per urban resident also increased substantially. The major expansion in local-government expenditures began in the 1830s. This study examines the period of transition to local-government growth from 1820 to 1870.See Davis and Legler, “Government”; Legler, Sylla, and Wallis, “U.S. City Finances”; and Wallis, government expenditures only back to 1880, 1850, and 1840 respectively. The first two used less comprehensive data than the present note, and Wallis (“American Government Finance”) gives summary data on local expenditures without discussing how they were calculated.

It is with much sadness that we bring news of the passing of Moses Abramovitz, our esteemed colleague and dear friend, who died on 1 December at the Stanford University Hospital, just a month before reaching his eighty-ninth birthday. He had been hospitalized with a gastroenterological condition for one week, during most of which time he remained alert and conversational; then succumbed to a sudden, unexpected infection.

This modest book examines the world of petty entrepreneurs in a late medieval Italian town. It is based on a rare collection of 46 account books from small tradesmen in the archives of Prato, a town better known for the extraordinarily rich archive of business and personal records left by the wealthy merchant Francesco Datini. The author was guided in his study by Richard Goldthwaite, a leading expert on late medieval account books. The ledgers provide a look at a little-studied social and economic group. They are especially revealing because they were used not only for business entries but also to record family events, including births, deaths, and marriages. As Marco Spallanzani points out in a preface to the book, most scholarship on medieval tradesmen centers on guilds and guild members. The people represented in these ledgers operated outside of economic corporations. They were not a homogeneous group but included a thirteenth-century moneylender, fourteenth-century druggists, cheese sellers, cloth sellers, a tailor, a doublet maker, a grain seller, a secondhand dealer, a broker, a cloth shearer, butchers, wallers, paper makers, and a family of innkeepers who were responsible for seventeen account books. As Marshall notes, the business atmosphere was casual, and this list is a bit deceptive because people's stated occupations were not always how they made their money. One man named as a second-hand dealer in fact used a broker to trade commodities, including 318 pounds of Sardinian cheese, bought one day and sold at a profit the next.

This volume was written in commemoration of West Germany's postwar currency reform and its product, the Deutschmark. In June 1948 the U.S. Army distributed a new currency in the Western occupation zones of Germany. These banknotes, which had been printed in the United States, carried no signatures and made no mention of an issuing authority. But they did carry the name Deutsche Mark. Seldom has a military initiative created such a successful brand name, but that is not the theme of this book. Its purpose, rather, is to burnish the Bundesbank's once-formidable reputation as an inflation fighter. As the European Central Bank is taking a decidedly different course, the magic of the Bundesbank is vanishing at an amazing speed. The Bundesbank has been downgraded to a mere member bank, has suffered severe budget cuts, and has had to lay off half its personnel. Meanwhile, those who remain regard the new system with apparent bewilderment and sometimes outright fury.

The process of industrial change energized generations of historians to explain the transformations that reformed the modern world. Over much of the twentieth century, historians of Marxist and liberal persuasions staged mighty contests to define most persuasively the effects of factory production, work discipline, class, and capital formation. The sometimes triumphalist chronicle of factory reform, capital accumulation, and trade-union growth were painted across the nineteenth century; more detailed studies of communities, corporations, and institutions had to fit in as best they could. Until the 1970s, as graduate students signed up for one or the other of these interpretative camps, few authors, liberal or Marxist, considered the experience of women. Adding women's history and gender analysis to the study of industrialization has brought about one of the most significant transformations of this chronicle. Katrina Honeyman's most recent contribution stands as an essential text for those teaching and working in this field.

This book is an English translation of the abridged edition of Professor Magnusson's grand survey of Swedish economic history. The latter has emerged as the standard introductory text on the subject within Sweden, and this book is likely finally to replace Eli Heckscher's venerable work of the same title (actually a translation of a “popular” work first published in 1957) as the Anglophone's introduction of choice to Swedish economic history. In exchange for later coverage and a more up-to-date approach, however, the reader will have to forego any discussion of the period before 1750. While Magnusson's Swedish text covers earlier centuries, this material was apparently deemed inessential for Anglo-Saxons. Unfortunately, there will also be some loss of reading pleasure. Although certainly competent and understandable, the present translation is excessively mechanical. The book's Swedish origin is apparent, without, however, preserving the smooth flow of Magnusson's prose. Nor is it up to the—admittedly very high—standard established by Goran Ohlin (with the active participation of Alexander Gerschenkron) with his translation of Heckscher.

Craig Muldrew has written an imaginatively conceived and richly researched study of the meaning and practice of “credit” in early modern England. “Credit” today is understood almost exclusively in value-neutral terms, and applies principally to functional economic activities. Directed towards individuals, it refers primarily to their financial assets and their capacities to assume interest-bearing debt. This meaning was only entering into use in the later sixteenth century; it became common only in the later seventeenth. “Credit” in the medieval and early modern era referred paradigmatically to a person's moral worth, as this book abundantly demonstrates.

Divergence, rather than convergence, has been the name of the game in worldwide “modern economic growth,” at least up to the 1980s. This empirical observation no longer puzzles economists, as it did thirty years ago. In the last two decades, we have taken a more sophisticated approach to the issue of the long-run relative performance of pioneers and latecomers, of core and periphery, of rich and poor countries. If we are currently able to talk of “conditional convergence,” “convergence clubs,” and the like, this is the result of a tremendous cross-fertilization between the so-called “new growth theory,” the pioneering work of Moses Abramovitz and a few others, and new approaches in global economic history. Amongst the latter, the monumental research program of Jeffrey Williamson stands in a class of its own. Thanks to his intellectual inputs and coordination efforts we have rediscovered the so-called “first globalization” and the backlash against it, and are thus better equipped to understand the causes and effects of the current globalization wave, and thus produce plausible scenarios for its future course.

How long is a century? In British history, the answer is rarely a hundred years. The last two decades of historiography have extended the eighteenth century deep into the nineteenth. In his new book, Richard Price both develops and modifies this tendency by suggesting that the two centuries from 1680 to 1880 constitute a single phase in the broad sweep of British history.

Michael Sanderson, author of several influential books on British education and industry, is the general editor of the series in which this volume appears. It admirably fulfills the aim of the series—to survey the current state of scholarship for students and their teachers—by reviewing an extensive literature on British schooling and its relation to the economy in seven tightly organized, substantive chapters. If a succinct overview of this work is what you need, this is the book to get.

This is a strong contribution to a cultural interpretation of the dynamics of industrialization. Critical of quantitative debates and their limited insights into the processes of change, critical too of polarized views about the primacy of supply (production) or demand (consumption), Smail's study is directed at the ways in which merchants and merchant manufacturers fought to reconcile the shape of supply with that of markets, and thus brought about fundamental changes in the processes of production and the source and scale of profitability. Smail's central thesis concerns the shift, as he sees it, from a Smithian to a Schumpeterian economy: from activity based upon the extension of operations and growing sophistication in the division of labor, to an economy founded upon continuous product and design innovation and intensive technological as well as organizational change. His concern is with the cultural and economic conditions under which producers and merchants shifted from maximizing profits by manipulating the marketing system (through niche products and niche markets) to maximizing profits by changing the mode of production. He dates this shift, in the case of the woolens sector, from the middle third of the eighteenth century. Focusing upon the interplay between production and marketing systems, he carefully documents change in the four major regions of manufacture in England: East Anglia, Devon, the West Country, and West Yorkshire. He places particular emphasis upon Yorkshire, which quickly emerged as the most responsive region and which dominated the trade in the second half of the century.

This is an important book, with implications far beyond the Swedish case. The author has painstakingly constructed a unique aggregate series of transport expenditures covering two centuries (the book contains 260 pages of appendices). He uses this information in a series of models that analyze the crucial role of transport improvements in Swedish economic development, with a special focus on industrialization.