This article examines the institutional foundations of the financial market underpinning Venice's commercial success during the late medieval period. A public-order, reputation-based institution enabled merchants to commit (i) not to flee with investors' capital, despite the limited geographical reach of the legal system, and (ii) not to breach their contracts, despite the investors' inability to directly monitor them. Economic rents in Venice motivated merchants to submit to the city's authorities, while tight administrative trading controls provided the information required to verify a contractual breach. These institutional arrangements differed from other public-order and reputation-based institutions that have been considered in the literature.

The market for company stock in Ireland entered its formative period in the mid 1820s with the incorporation of banks and railways. Using data obtained from stockbroker lists, we estimate market capitalisation and construct weighted and unweighted monthly stock market indices for the period 1825–64. Our findings show that the market appears to have been relatively unaffected by the Famine. We suggest that an efficient-market explanation may better explain this finding than a dual-economy explanation. Our findings also show that the stock market increased significantly in value in the post-Famine period. This finding is consistent with an increase in demand for financial assets as well as the rapid commercialisation of the Irish economy.

Economic rather than political forces appear to dominate inequality trends in Spain. Inequality evolution fits a Kuznets curve. Wars increased inequality but had non-permanent effects, while progressive taxation had no impact until 1980, at odds with Atkinson, Piketty, Saez and associates' findings. A substantial fall in absolute poverty resulted from growth but also from inequality reduction in the interwar period and the late 1950s. Rising inequality and extreme poverty are not found at the roots of the Spanish Civil War. Between the mid 1950s and 1974, inequality contraction and absolute poverty eradication represented a major departure from Latin America's performance while matching the OECD's.

The American novelist Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have said once to Ernest Hemingway, ‘You know, the rich are different from you and me.’ Hemingway replied, ‘Yes. They've got more money.’ Gregory Clark is of the Fitzgerald school. Most economic historians, among them his critics, follow Hemingway instead.

In this article, we investigate the information efficiency of the Berlin stock exchange using returns of a new daily stock-market index for the years 1892–1913. We focus on the impact of the 1896 stock exchange law and of the increases of the stock-market turnover tax in 1894 and 1900 on information efficiency. We fit an ARMA(0,1)-GARCH(1,1) model to the data and search for structural breaks. This approach yields no convincing evidence that the tax increases had a negative influence on weak information efficiency. In addition, the restriction of derivative trading by the 1896 stock exchange law did not result in measurable changes in the autocorrelation of daily returns.

This article presents econometric evidence of integration in rural and urban wages in Russia's Northwest in the late tsarist era. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to co-integration and error correction modelling, we show the flexibility of the rural wage in response to the lagged rural/urban wage ratio. Applying the model developed by Boyer and Hatton (1994) and Hatton and Williamson (1991a, 1991b, 1992), we show the similarity of the wage gap in northwest Russia in the late tsarist era to that during industrialisation in the US, England and Western Europe. Although our evidence does not necessarily describe countrywide trends, it does support for an industrialising region the more positive view of the degree and nature of late tsarist economic growth. Growth was not slowing down, and there is little evidence of constraints on migration by traditional agrarian institutions.

For many years, Greg Clark was mainly known amongst economic historians for two things – his devasting book reviews are as witty as they are insightful. He also invented a signature recipe for academic articles. Start with a fresh puzzle. Chop some theory and carefully knead into puzzle. Gently squeeze some data and mix well. Garnish with a racy dressing of Cambridge-honed essay-writing skills, while stirring the pot. Then, turn up the heat and watch how the puzzle slowly mushrooms into an ever larger paradox. Wrap into some mystery and serve as is.

We revise previous estimates on average nutritional status in Britain during the industrial revolution. We find that average nutritional status declined substantially throughout the period 1740–1865, with a partial recovery only for the cohorts born in 1805–9 and 1810–14. The decline in nutritional status estimated for the second half of the eighteenth century is consistent with recent estimates of food prices and farm labour wages. We suggest that parliamentary enclosures and the decline of cottage industry could partially explain the fall in nutritional status. In addition, comparing the age at final attainment of height of a group of rural residents with a group of urban migrants we provide further evidence about the negative impact of urbanization during the early industrial revolution.

The large-scale structure of world economic history exhibits three steady states punctuated by two phase transitions. The first transition arrived with the domestication of plants and animals; the second with the invention of engines capable of converting thermal to mechanical energy for applications in mining, manufacturing, and transportation. Yet, although both transitions led to increases in the absolute size of the economy, they affected the standard of living differently. Whereas the Industrial Revolution resulted in sustained growth in real per capita income for more than two centuries, over nine millennia the Agricultural Revolution spent itself in population growth that left per capita income insignificantly higher, and possibly lower than the level prevailing under hunting and gathering. This pattern raises three fundamental questions in economic history: why did the first great technological transition produce secular stasis in living standards? Why has the second yielded both steady growth in population and rising living standards? What triggered the transition from the stationary agricultural state to the progressive industrial state?

The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, typically a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this article we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300–1861. Using an existing data set, we perform panel estimations where the development of city size and urban patterns can be explained by various geographical, institutional and other determinants of city size for the period under consideration. Although large shocks such as the plague epidemics are clearly visible in the data, our baseline estimation results show that the main determinants of Italian city growth are physical geography and the predominance of capital cities. With respect to geography, being a seaport or having access to navigable waterways increases city size whereas a city's relative location, measured by its urban potential, is not significant. Being a capital city also increases city size. The estimation results reveal strong century-specific effects on city growth and these effects differ markedly between the North and South of Italy. Additional estimations show that these time effects can be linked to the political and institutional developmental changes over time in Italy. Our findings that the capital city bonus increases and non-capital cities suffer when the political power and the institutions of the state are more centralised corroborate the idea that institutions are a key factor in explaining Italian city growth.

W. Arthur Lewis argued that a new international economic order emerged between 1870 and 1913, and that global terms of trade forces produced rising primary product specialization and de-industrialization in the poor periphery. More recently, modern economists argue that volatility reduces growth in the poor periphery. This article assesses these de-industrialization and volatility forces between 1782 and 1913 during the Great Divergence. First, it argues that the new economic order had been firmly established by 1870, and that the transition took place in the century before, not after. Second, evidence from 1870–1939 confirms that while terms of trade improvements raised long-run growth in the rich core, they did not do so in the poor periphery. Given that the secular terms of trade boom, and thus de-industrialization, was much bigger in the poor periphery before 1870 than after, one might plausibly infer that it might help explain the Great Divergence. Third, growth-reducing terms of trade volatility also contributed to the Great Divergence. Terms of trade volatility was much greater in the poor periphery than the core before 1870. It was still very big after 1870, certainly far bigger than in the core. Based on evidence drawn from 1870–2000, we know that such volatility lowers long-run growth in the poor periphery, and that the negative impact is big. Since terms of trade volatility in the poor periphery was even bigger before 1870, one might plausibly infer that it also helps explain the Great Divergence before 1870.

This article considers the sources of long-term economic growth for Turkey over the period 1880–2005. The period in question covers the decline and eventual dissolution of the former Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the new Turkish Republic in 1923. Hence, the article provides a unique look at the growth experience of these two different political and economic regimes. The article examines in detail the evolution of factors that led to growth in output across broad periods, including the post-World War II period and the era of globalization beginning in the 1980s. It also considers output growth in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors separately and allows for the effects of sectoral re-allocation. The lessons from this exercise have important implications for Turkey's future economic performance, for its ability to converge to per capita income levels of developed countries, and for the viability of its current bid for European Union membership.

Greg Clark is a master of the art of using one-liners in telling stories and Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World is no exception. It offers the Malthusian hypothesis of population growth leading to misery as an all-purpose vehicle for all human history, except for the last 200 years. However, his Malthusianism is at times more evangelical than empirical and analytical. He dismisses Angus Maddison's painstaking efforts (e.g. Maddison 2001, 2003) at providing an empirical basis for long-run income estimates (p. 19) as inconsistent with the logic of the Malthusian economy. When the historical record contradicts Greg Clark it is not allowed to stand in the way of his noble aim and declared intention of writing big history. At least in one respect he has succeeded: this book is the widescreen version of the Postan Thesis, although M. M. Postan (1966, 1972) is remarkably missing in the credits. The book is also big in rhetorical gestures, starting with the title, and a reader must be forgiven for occasionally asking whether the author should be interpreted literally, or whether statements should simply be deflated by common sense. I have decided to go nominal on Clark.

The four reviews make the following major criticisms of the book:

1. (1) A Farewell to Alms assumes one important revolution in economic history, the Industrial Revolution. In reality there were two, with the Neolithic Revolution of equal importance (George Grantham).

2. (2) World income levels did rise between the Stone Age and 1800 (Gunnar Persson, Hans-Joachim Voth).

3. (3) The Malthusian model has been shown to be inapplicable to pre-industrial Europe (Grantham, Persson).

4. (4) The claim of ‘survival of the richest’ is just the revival of discredited and dangerous social Darwinism? (Deirdre McCloskey).

5. (5) There was no Darwinian selection for ‘bourgeois characteristics’ in the pre-industrial world of settled, institutionally stable agrarian societies (McCloskey).

6. (6) The recent growth of India and China, and the experience of immigrants to the USA, easily refute the view that survival of the richest had any impact (McCloskey).

7. (7) The ideas of A Farewell to Alms are not new, merely uncredited borrowings from others (McCloskey, Persson, Voth).

Germany's historical national accounts are controversially discussed in a series of recent papers by Fremdling and Stäglin (2004, 2005), Ritschl (2004) and Burhop and Wolff (2005). The growth of the German economy during the nineteenth century, the level of economic development reached in 1913 and the depth of the interwar slump are the major points of concern. This short article contributes to this debate by providing a benchmark estimate of labour productivity in mining, crafts and industry in 1913 using official input–output data. We confirm earlier results by Burhop and Wolff (2005) that the level of labour productivity in 1913 was much higher than the classical work by Hoffmann (1965) suggests.

This article briefly reviews the core literature on the Golden Age of economic growth and tests the explanatory power of alternative theories against one another, with particular emphasis on the reconstruction thesis as developed by Jánossy. While previous empirical work on the subject relied on cross-sectional analysis, I employ panel-data techniques, which produce more robust estimates. I demonstrate that, for the core western industrialised nations, the rapidity and variety of economic growth during the 1950s and 1960s can mostly be explained by post-war reconstruction, the completion of which marked the end of the Golden Age. Labour-force expansion also made a very strong positive contribution. In the more peripheral countries of the OECD, however, rapid catching-up from the late 1950s was largely brought about by structural modernisation. Finally, human-capital accumulation has had a determining impact on long-run growth potentials, modelled here as time-constant country-fixed effects.