This paper analyses the rise of Swedish trade and shipping in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century. It focuses on three factors that shaped Sweden’s role in the area: foreign policy interest, foreign trade policy (mercantilism), and commodity demand and supply. The foreign policy interest is represented by attempts to build an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against Russia. An outcome…
This paper, basing its analysis on England’s national customs accounts between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, briefly examines England’s ports as commercial nodes (of which London was the busiest, with Hull, Southampton and Bristol becoming the main regional hubs by the fifteenth century), its shipping (which provided both liner and tramping services and sailed all year round), and…
A new edition of Kaplan's landmark study on eighteenth-century French political economy, reissued with a new Foreword by Sophus A. Reinert. Based on research in all the Parisian depots and more than fifty departmental archives and specialized and municipal libraries, Kaplan's classic work constitutes a major contribution to the study of the subsistence problem before the French Revolution and t…
This chapter seeks to explore local and regional variation in levels of inequality in different types of rural localities and regions within the late medieval County of Flanders. Our research indicates that fiscal sources for the County of Flanders can produce reliable data on the distribution of income during the late medieval period. The analysis of these data shows that important local and r…
In Europe, in the Middle Ages, ostrich feathers were used for the decoration of military headgear, as a representation of the high lineage of the possessor and his military virtues. They were imported from the coasts of West Africa, from Egypt and Syria into Italian and Spanish ports and from there exported to England and continental Europe. Venice, at the end of the fourteenth century, began t…
Gunnar Myrdal published his magnum opus, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, in 1968. He was deeply pessimistic about development prospects in Asia. The fifty years since then have witnessed a remarkable social and economic transformation in Asia – even if it has been uneven across countries and unequal between people – that would have been difficult to imagine, let alone p…
This open access book is the first to provide an analysis of the Dutch paper industry over a period encompassing six centuries. Responding to a trend of renewed scholarly interest in paper industries and production, the book seeks to illuminate the factors behind this relatively small national industry’s centuries-long survival. Previous historical research has shown that sets of colonial,…
This Open Access book examines the long economic boom experienced in Ireland between the late 1980s and 2007, analysing why this boom occurred. The book situates Ireland as a relative latecomer to economic development, with specific challenges and advantages inherent to this position. It discusses the risks involved in remaining reliant on foreign companies, exploring how in Ireland’s cas…
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This text offers a comprehensive and nuanced view of the economic development of Spain since 1850. It provides a new set of historical GDP estimates for Spain from the demand and supply sides, and presents a reconstruction of production and expenditure series for the century prior to the introduction of modern national accounts. The author …
This open access book presents the evolution of the Spanish economy over the past seven centuries since the end of the Reconquest and examines how much economic progress has Spain achieved, as well as its impact on living standards and income distribution over the very long run. It shows that preindustrial Spain was far from stagnant, although levels of output per head in the early nineteenth c…