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Articles for inclusion in the Economic History Review
August 2005
Article 1:
Spanish merino wools and the nouvelles draperies: an industrial transformation in the late medieval Low Countries
John Munro
From the seventeenth century, the world’s finest wools have been those produced by descendants of the Spanish merino. During the middle ages, however, England produced Europe’s finest wools. Not until the fourteenth century does a distinct merino breed appear in Spain; and, before then, ‘Spanish’ wools were amongst the very worst in Europe, used in the production of only the very cheapest fabrics. By the late fourteenth century, some merino wools were being used in some Italian draperies; but, in the north, long-held historic prejudices against ‘Spanish’ wools hindered their introduction, especially into the Low Countries’ draperies, which, because of structural changes in international trade, had become re-oriented to manufacturing luxury woollens, most woven from the finest English wools. From the 1420s, however, disastrous changes in England’s fiscal policies so increased the cost of these exported wools that many of the younger Flemish draperies, the so-called nouvelles draperies, producing imitations of the finer woollens from the older established draperies, decided to switch to Spanish merino wools (often mixed with English wools). By the mid-fifteenth century, the merinos had indeed improved enough in quality to rival at least the mid-range English wools. Most of the traditional draperies, however, did not adopt merino wools until much too late, and thus, by the early sixteenth century found themselves displaced by the nouvelle draperies as the leading cloth manufacturers in the Low Countries.
Article 2:
Poor relief, labourers’ households and living standards in rural England c.1770–1834: a Bedfordshire case study
Samantha Williams
This article estimates the contribution of poor relief to the household economies of the labouring poor in the two case-study communities of Campton and Shefford, east Bedfordshire, and thereby throws further light on the standard of living of workers during industrialization in the south and east. Utilizing the technique of nominal record linkage between poor law sources and family reconstitution for the period c.1770–c.1834, the article charts the growth in social welfare and estimates the proportion of inhabitants benefiting from regular relief payments, the changing family circumstances of recipients, and the proportion of total income made up by poor relief.
Article 3:
Incentives, technology, and the shift to year-round dairying in late nineteenth-century Denmark
Ingrid Henriksen and Kevin H. O’Rourke
This article uses monthly trade data to document the decline in the seasonality in Danish butter exports that occurred from the 1880s onwards. This decline contrasted with steady or increasing seasonality elsewhere. Monthly butter prices in Britain, Denmark, and Ireland show that the incentives to shift into winter dairying were particularly high in the 1880s and 1890s; however, this cannot on its own explain the Danish shift, since our price data show that farmers elsewhere faced winter premia that were every bit as high as the Danish premia. The crucial factor in Denmark was the generation of empirical knowledge by the private and public sectors systematically analysing empirical evidence; the rapid diffusion of this knowledge in a highly educated society via lectures, exhibitions, written materials, and by institutions such as the new cooperative sector; and a willingness to absorb this knowledge by profit-maximizing farmers.
Article 4:
Managing the economy, managing the people: Britain c.1931–70
Jim Tomlinson
The rise and consolidation of national economic management is one of the key themes of British economic and political history in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This article seeks to complement the existing substantial literature focused upon elite economic policy-making processes with an analysis of how that economic management has been accompanied by persistent government attempts to develop and popularize new understandings of ‘the economy’. In this way, governments were involved in a profound shift in their relationship with the wider society, as they sought to shape the beliefs and behaviour of producers, consumers, and the public in general. The article attempts to link the elite discourse of national economic management to the attempts to shape popular understandings about the economy, and the (problematic) impact of these understandings on behaviour. The particular focus is on the 1960s, when these attempts reached some kind of culmination.
Article 5:
Capital deepening and the rise of the factory: the American experience during the nineteenth century
Jeremy Atack, Fred Bateman, and Robert A. Margo
Between 1850 and 1880, capital per worker in United States manufacturing increased on average by at least 75 per cent, even after taking account of declining capital goods prices. During this same period, production shifted from small, labour-intensive artisan shops to large capital-intensive factories. Similar changes have occurred in many other countries at the same stage of industrialization. Establishment-level data from the federal censuses of manufacturing, however, reveal that the shift in production in the United States accounts for a modest amount of the increased capital per worker. There, at least, capital deepening seems to have occurred in almost all firms everywhere.
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