{"title":"Overseas trade and taxation in England and Wales, c. 1680–1790","authors":"Spike Sweeting","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13370","url":null,"abstract":"Historians have made relatively little headway in quantifying the economic influence of central government taxation in the eighteenth century. This question has a bearing on both the claims of the fiscal military state thesis that taxation got more regressive after 1690 and histories of welfare, which have argued that the lot English labourers improved during this period. The following article shows how the state indirectly taxed English and Welsh consumers and what impact that had on prices. It pays special attention to revenues derived from overseas trade and compares them with excises on beer and malt. It also uses recent estimates of consumption to calculate the taxes paid by ‘respectable’ households and charts the advancing impositions made by the state. It finds that most revenues derived from overseas trade were paid by middling or elite households with incomes that could easily achieve respectability. Poorer households were, however, squeezed hard by inland duties on beer, coal, and other necessaries. In this respect, factoring in state taxes should cause historians to revise downwards the living standards of much of the population.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"22 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141814672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Red gold: Copper and the U.S. mobilization campaign, 1950–3","authors":"Glenn J. Dorn","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13371","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines U.S. planners’ persistent efforts to secure an adequate supply of a vital metal, copper, during the Korean War, and the numerous obstacles that plagued them. Their initial efforts to mobilize without imposing a disruptive, draconian control scheme quickly proved inadequate, all but forcing planners to adopt a much more regimented Controlled Materials Plan (CMP). The inability of U.S. planners to secure a strong supranational control regime through the International Materials Conference undercut efforts to coordinate international mineral allocation, exacerbated U.S. shortages, and spawned ill‐conceived compromises that eroded the effectiveness of the CMP. Finally, Truman's domestic opponents, never entirely reconciled to a rigid control regime, used the copper shortage to further weaken mobilization planning. In the end, the preparedness campaign, despite some remarkable successes, failed to achieve many of its goals due, in part, to a global copper shortage that Senator Burnet Maybank's Joint Committee on Defense Production called ‘perhaps the most serious material limiting factor on fulfillment of defense goals’.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"56 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141649808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the little divergence to the little divide: Real wages in the Kingdom of Sicily (1540‒1850)","authors":"Tancredi Buscemi","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13359","url":null,"abstract":"This paper challenges the commonly held belief that Southern Italy was a homogeneous, backwards region by reconstructing real wages in the kingdom of Sicily over three centuries. The findings suggest more than one divide in pre‐unitarian regions, with Sicilian living standards being structurally higher than the Italian average. This study has important implications for traditional debates in European and Italian economic history, such as the timing of the little divergence and the Italian economic downturn. Additionally, it raises new questions regarding the origins of the regional divide, highlighting a heterogeneous picture of regional trends and the need for broader spatial coverage in wage studies to avoid the potential bias of single‐city analysis.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"129 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141351588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Respectable standards of living: The alternative lens of maintenance costs, Britain 1270–1860","authors":"Jane Humphries","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13357","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that in all societies there is considerable agreement about what goods and services are needed to provide a decent living, and that this standard can be measured by the expense involved in maintaining people of good standing. Maintenance costs include two components of living costs that are neglected in conventional approaches. First, in contrast to the usual focus on a fixed basket of commodities, maintenance costs capture changes in the composition and quality of the goods required for a respectable lifestyle. Second, unlike conventional accounting, they include the costs of the household services required to turn the basket commodities into livings. Ignored in the conventional methodology, the inclusion of these costs represents a core innovation. More than 4600 observations, drawn mainly from primary sources, trace levels and trends in maintenance costs for Britain from 1270 to 1860. These can be compared with established cost of living indicators to offer a complementary perspective on real consumption that accommodates aspirational goods and the input of household labour. The struggle to support families at respectable standards emerges as driving industriousness and motivating prudence among a class that played a major role in economic development.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"13 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141359340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"UK fiscal policy and external balance under Bretton Woods: Twin deficits or distant relatives?","authors":"Joshua J. Banerjee","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13352","url":null,"abstract":"The United Kingdom (UK) is typically regarded as the sine qua non case of an economy experiencing chronic external imbalances under the post‐war Bretton Woods system, apparently unable to reconcile the divergent objectives of robust economic growth and current account equilibrium. This paper investigates the famed ‘twin deficits hypothesis’, which ascribed responsibility for the UK's current account woes to an excessively lax fiscal policy. Calling on two distinct approaches to identifying fiscal shocks, we find evidence decisively against the traditional twin deficits view, and uncover serious shortcomings in the way that both policymakers and academics conceptualized the transmission of fiscal policy to the current account. Our results demonstrate that factors other than fiscal policy are of considerably greater importance for understanding the UK's historical experience, and we elaborate on the need for a reappraisal of some classic policy debates concerning external adjustment under the Bretton Woods system.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"67 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141387511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The expansion of basic education during ‘deskilling’ technological change in England and Wales, c. 1780–1830","authors":"Louis Henderson","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13354","url":null,"abstract":"The first country to industrialize – England – ostensibly did so without expanding investment in the basic education of its workforce. The empirical evidence underpinning this argument for England rests largely on signature rates at marriage. These are not a perfect indication of educational achievement, particularly as many children never learned to write. More problematically, I argue signatures are likely to have systematically underestimated human capital in industrial districts. In place of signature data, I propose age heaping, a measure widely understood as a proxy for numeracy but shown here to be closely related to both reading and writing abilities. In contrast to signatures, this measure suggests that ‘deskilling’ industrialization induced human capital accumulation. I argue that this occurred not because human capital was directly productive, but rather because schools provided a valuable signal. Sunday school attendance signalled low leisure‐preference among child workers and were popularly attended in industrial districts. Further, such schools taught children to read but not write, which they considered inappropriate for the Sabbath, accounting for the discrepancy between these two measures of human capital.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"43 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141273928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The implementation of national labour legislation in England after the Black Death, 1349–1400","authors":"Mark Bailey","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13355","url":null,"abstract":"The responses of labour markets to global pandemics are attracting renewed interest, although the English labour laws in response to the Black Death of 1348/9 – capping wages, imposing annual contracts, and restricting mobility – have a long and established scholarship. The conventional wisdom is that the legislation represented an extension of existing local practices and created common cause among all categories of employer. Yet this view is hard to reconcile with the fact that, despite subsequent revisions, the legislation soon failed. These arguments are tested through original research into how the legislation was actually enforced in a variety of legal tribunals (manorial, borough, and royal). A clear distinction is maintained between public presentments and private litigation, and a robust methodology is pursued to record their absence as well as quantifying their presence. This casts new light on the novelty of the labour laws, the reasons for their failure, and their influence on contract law. The analysis exemplifies the potential for short‐term legal responses to infectious diseases to have unintended and unanticipated long‐term consequences.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"7 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141099194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The emergence of double entry bookkeeping","authors":"Alan Sangster","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13358","url":null,"abstract":"Double entry account books of medieval Italian merchants and bankers have been extensively used as primary sources by historians of several disciplines interested in business, trade, commodities, markets, sources, prices, interest rates, exchange rates, tariffs, taxes, wages, rents, agents, networks, and many other related topics. The reason for the emergence of such a detailed bookkeeping method is unknown. This paper presents a critical analysis of entries in a ledger of Florentine moneychanger‐bankers from 1211. Comparison with later examples confirms that this ledger portrays a method of bookkeeping embracing double entries that transformed into entity‐wide double entry bookkeeping by the end of the thirteenth century. Following consideration of the socio‐political, economic, legal, and commercial environment of the period and place in which it was used in 1211, the origin of this bookkeeping method is attributed to northern Italian moneychanger‐bankers in the twelfth century. Their bookkeeping method addressed the evidential demands of multiple legal systems relating to use of credit necessitated by a lack of sufficient quality coinage in circulation to support the growing and expanding regional markets of northern Italy.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"26 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141106661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trade costs and the integration of British West Africa in the global economy, c. 1840–1940","authors":"F. Tadei, N. Aslanidis, Oscar Martinez","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13353","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the essential role of trade for African economies, in the extensive literature on the historical evolution of international trade costs, Africa is still missing. In this article, we contribute to filling this gap by (1) providing the first estimates of British West Africa's trade costs with Britain c. 1840–1940 by computing relative price gaps in a representative sample of African export and European import prices, and (2) analysing the main determinants of trade costs trends, by regressing price gaps on measures of transport costs, market efficiency, and trade barriers. The results uncover a diverging pattern in African and global trade costs trends, which was not noticed in the previous literature. British West Africa experienced a reduction in its trade costs with Britain c. 1840–70, similar to the one we observe in other world areas, thanks to improvements in shipping technology and market efficiency. From the late 1870s, however, as colonial monopsonistic trading companies consolidated their control of African export markets, trade costs continued to decline in the rest of the world, but not in British West Africa. Consequently, from the late nineteenth century, trade for West Africa became relatively more expensive than for other world regions.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"36 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141021758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"It's not about the money: New evidence on U.S. reconstruction aid in Italy, 1947–68","authors":"Marco Martinez","doi":"10.1111/ehr.13349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13349","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies the economic impact of foreign aid on Italian firms. In particular, I study the different effects of three main forms of aid: Export–Import Bank loans, Marshall Plan European Recovery Program (ERP) ‘dollars’ loans and the Marshall Plan ERP ‘lire’ loans. In all programmes, the United States sent technologically advanced machinery to allow for a modernization of the technology of Italian firms, but the conditions of such loans differed. This paper tests how crucial such different features have been for the effectiveness of firm reconstruction aid. By creating a new dataset on recipient firms and linking it to a large comprehensive firm‐level dataset (Imita.db), I compare the effects on the performance of firms. I find that the Export–Import Bank loan raised the long‐run profitability of firms, but that firms which received more flexible forms of Marshall Plan aid (‘ERP‐lire’) raised their performance much more than Export–Import Bank recipients. Recipients who only received funds provided with long delays (‘ERP‐dollars’) did not benefit from them. This evidence suggests that rather than receiving foreign aid per se, the most crucial features of reconstruction aid in Italy have been obtaining the requested goods on time and adjusting requests to receive the most needed productive goods.","PeriodicalId":505850,"journal":{"name":"The Economic History Review","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140660065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}