This paper examines price convergence and changes in the efficiency of wheat markets, covering the period from the mid-fourteenth to the early twentieth century and most of Europe. The analysis is based on a new data set of prices from almost 600 markets. Unlike previous research, we find that convergence was a predominantly pre-modern phenomenon. It started in the late fifteenth century, advanced rapidly until the beginning of the seventeenth century when it temporarily stalled, resumed after the Thirty Years’ War, and accelerated after the Napoleonic Wars in response to trade liberalization. From the late 1840s, convergence petered out and turned into divergence after 1875 as policy decisions dominated technological change. Our results point to the ‘Little Divergence’ between North-Western Europe and the rest of the continent as starting about 1600. Long-term improvements in market efficiency began in the early sixteenth century, with advances over time being as uneven as in price convergence. We trace this to differential institutional change and the non-synchronous spread of modern media and systems of information transmission that affected the ability of merchants to react to news.

This article addresses two questions. First, when and to what extent did capital markets integrate north and south of the Alps? Second, how mobile was capital? Analysing a unique new dataset on pre-modern urban annuities, we find that northern markets were consistently better integrated than Italian markets. Long-term integration was driven by initially peripheral places in the Netherlands and Upper Germany integrating with the rest of the Holy Roman Empire where the distance and volume of inter-urban investments grew primarily in the sixteenth century. The institutions of the Empire contributed to stronger market integration north of the Alps.

By analyzing a newly compiled database of exchange rates, this article finds that in Central Europe money markets integrated cyclically during the fifteenth century. The cycles were associated with monetary debasements. Long-distance financial integration progressed in connection with the rise of the territorial state, facilitated by the synergy between princes and emperor, which helped to avoid coordination failures. For Central Europe, theories of state formation and market integration should therefore take interstate actors into account.

We analyse the Swedish general elections that took place in spring and autumn 1887. Our aim is to discover which groups of voters supported free trade and which protectionism. We find that while capital owners and wage earners consistently favoured free trade, in the spring election only the largest farmers supported protectionism. By autumn, political preferences among smallholders and middling farmers had shifted in favour of protectionism too. As these groups were not specialised in the production of import-competing goods, we assume that the political landslide in the autumn elections can be attributed to a loss of trust in the government.

We estimate a threshold autoregressive model to assess medieval financial integration. Our approach is based on the analysis of deviations between exchange rates and parity, which in a fully integrated market should not exceed bullion points. Hence, the time needed for adjustment, following a violation of the bullion points, is a measure of integration. We apply this approach to exchange between fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders, Lübeck, and Prussia, results showing that whereas it took about eight months to reduce deviations between Flanders and Lübeck by 50 percent, those between Flanders and Prussia were roughly twice as persistent.

This article presents a model of the transformation of the Central European economy between the years 1000 and 1800. On the basis of assumptions about the social environment, the actors, and the relations between them, deductions are made that are compared to actual historical developments. The model explains why competitive markets emerged in the high Middle Ages, why anti-competitive corporations and states developed in the period up to the seventeenth century, and why institutions safeguarding market exchange began to be introduced in the course of the eighteenth century.