Articles for inclusion in the Economic History Review

August 2004 

Article 1:

Progress, decline, growth: product and productivity in Italian agriculture, 1000-2000

Giovanni Federico and Paolo Malanima

This article estimates agricultural production and output per worker in Italy, from about the year 1000 to the present.  The millennium can be neatly divided into three periods.  Output per worker increased until the fourteenth century, declined, with some fluctuations until the end of the nineteenth century, and then recovered, booming in the past 50 years.

Article 2:

Baking for the common good: a reassessment of the assize of bread in medieval England

James Davis

This article reassesses the structure of the assize of bread and its relevance for bakers and consumers in medieval England.  It has long been thought that the laws governing the manufacture and sale of bread, although adhering to a logical relationship between weight and price, were nevertheless, ill-considered in formulation, calculation and enactment and did not, in reality, provide the stable allowance recommended for bakers.  By examining the economic and moral ideology underlying the assize of bread it is possible to demonstrate that legislators were actually employing a rationale that best fitted contemporary circumstances and retail practices.  There nevertheless remained one fundamental flaw in its construction, which was to have implications for its enforcement.

Article 3:

The jump-start of the Holland economy during the late-medieval crisis, c.1350-1500

Bas van Bavel and Jan Luiten van Zanden

By c.1500, the Holland economy had already acquired modern traits, as witnessed by the occupational structure and the urbanization rate.  This article tries to explain the remarkable development of the Holland economy between 1350 and 1500, linking it to the specific occupation history of the region in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.  The combination of high wages in this frontier economy with increasing difficulties in arable agriculture as results of the subsidence of peat soils, and the absence of feudal restrictions in production and marketing, resulted in the rise of capital-intensive industries, benefiting from converging wages and increasing market integration.

Article 4:

‘Crooks, thieves and receivers’: transaction costs in nineteenth-century Birmingham

Francesca Carnevali

The existence of cooperation and trust between competing economic agents is taken for granted by much of the literature of industrial districts.  This article explores the structure of the Birmingham jewellery-making district and the problems created by the opportunistic behaviour of many of its members.  Archival sources show that the district was plagued by endemic dishonesty and that proximity did not generate trust and cooperation.  The absence of barriers to entry into the trade and of the low cost of exit, due to the inefficiency of public ordering, created a district where social sanctions could not be used to reduce moral hazard.  All these factors threatened to destroy the district during the crisis of the 1880s.  The article shows how firms joined together to create an institution, the Birmingham Jewellers Association, to establish and enforce ‘rules of the game’, with the aim of reducing transaction costs.

The empire strikes back: Hong Kong and the decline of sterling in the 1960s

Catherine R. Schenk

The aftermath of the sterling devaluation of 1967 is usually portrayed only in terms of the performance of the British economy, but it had more far-reaching implications, exposing the changed financial relationship between Britain and its overseas dependencies and prompting the end of the sterling reserve system.  This article explores the reasons why Britain was forced to offer its first exchange guarantee to Hong Kong in May 1968.  Prolonging the colonial monetary system devised in the 1930s through to the late 1960s created problems for Britain that shifted the balance of power to the point where Hong Kong and the other colonies were able to force a re-negotiation of their link to sterling.