Economic History Seminars

Autumn Term seminars are Thursdays, 4-5.30pm

Venue: FAW 2.04 (unless otherwise stated)

1 October

• Knick Harley, Oxford
• An evaluation of 'British Economic Growth' before 1700: Recovering the "the Malthusian Delusion"
• Abstract: British Economic Growth 1270 - 1870 by Steven Broadberry, Bruce Campblell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen has become a standard source on very long-term British economic growth. As such it is appropriate to consider the robustness of its conclusions, the most novel of which is probably that their estimate deny significant decline in per capita national income in the face of renewed population growth in the sixteenth century. Their conclusion rests primarily on their estimates of the growth of the iron, coal and woollen textile industries. This paper reexamines the evidence on the output of these industries and concludes that Broadberry et al have seriously exaggerated their sixteenth century growth. Reconstructing Broadberry et al’s national income estimate for comparison with a revised estimate reveals that agriculture, iron, coal and woollens make up almost all of the data directly relating to individual industries while the remaining estimates are based on suppositions about per capita output and/or the role of urbanization. Revised these generate rate of growth of industry and of national income in the sixteenth century significantly slower than Broadberry et al’s estimate. The process of construction consistent national income estimates also reveals lack of robustness of many of the other component series of their income estimates.
  The full paper is available here.

8 October

• Beatrice Cherrier, CNRS, CREST, Polytechnique
• A history of macroeconomics
• Abstract: This book offers a history of macroeconomics (the study of “the economy” as a whole) from its inception in the interwar period to today. Its novelty is twofold: it goes beyond a history of theories to cover a wider range of macroeconomists’ practices; it relies on a growing body of historical research, challenging misconceptions commonly disseminated in macroeconomics textbooks. This is not “yet another history of macroeconomics”. It is one that should strike scholars and students in macroeconomics as novel. Such a history is needed because macroeconomics textbooks project a particular “identity” of the field, derived from a specific historical narrative, in which the field evolved through theoretical “revolutions” and “battles” between “schools of thought” initiated by “great men”. We argue that this misrepresents the actual dynamics of macroeconomics. Our history conveys a different perspective, highlighting a more diverse set of characteristics (what macroeconomics is about) and practices (what macroeconomists do). We emphasise how macroeconomics has always relied on the combination of research agendas (theoretical, mathematical, empirical, and computational); how the interaction with other fields (notably microeconomics and econometrics) has been constant; and how the field has been shaped by a cast of researchers with diverse geographical and institutional origins (some working within academia, others in policymaking institutions and private organisations). We bring these many dimensions together through a simple chronology outlining four periods: birth (1920s-1940s), bridges (1950s-1960s), frictions (1970s-1980s), and constellations (1990s-2000s).
  The full paper is available here.

15 October

• Mark Bailey, UEA
• Labour rents, money rents, and tenures in England 1300-1500: what happened and why does it matter?
• Abstract:

22 October

• Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Campop
• The Industrial Revolution as a dramatic event: a review of the evidence.
• Abstract: This paper is a critique of what I regard as the fundamentally mistaken view that comes largely out of Nick Crafts' and Knick Harley's work, and much of which was espoused by Nick himself that there were no dramatic changes during the Industrial Revolution. There are a number of parts to the argument. First, on Nick's own figures, the British economy achieved sustained and high rates of GDP per capita growth from the second quarter of the C19th. This was unprecedented in human history and forms a key watershed in human experience. Moreover, if we look at total GDP, this took off in the third quarter of the C18th in a way which was probably unprecedented in human history. Second, after many centuries of a clear Malthusian relationship between real male wages and population, from the third quarter of the C18th real male day wages grew despite the highest population growth rates on record. Third, the Industrial Revolution saw the emergence of the first urban society in the history of the world and by 1831 London was the largest city in world history. Fourth, the deindustrialisation of most parts of the country in the eighteenth century combined with the rapid population growth of the industrial districts on the coal fields in the C18th, together with massive urbanisation, means there was a complete spatial restructuring of the economy during the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, cities went from being demographic sinks incapable of self-sustaining growth in 1750 to being capable of self sustaining growth after 1800. This was historically probably unprecedented and a necessary precondition for modern economic growth. Fifth, new occupational data show the growth in labour productivity in manufacturing was not 60% as Crafts and Broadberry have it but 160% between 1750-1850. This suggests that technological change was much more pervasive than the national accounts literature currently suggests. The complete disappearance of manufacturing imports during the Industrial Revolution also suggests much broader change. Sixth, the arguments that Crafts and Mulatu made for the modest effects of the steam engine in the Industrial Revolution are fundamentally misguided and rest on the wholly implausible assumption that water-power could have been substituted for steam-power.everywhere. Without the steam engine the enormous expansion of coal mining, that underpinned the escape from Malthusian constraints, would have been impossible. Nor would the enormous expansion of the iron industry taken place after 1780. Furthermore, Crafts use of TFP to measure technological change (supposedly modest) is deeply misleading. For TFP to measure technological change presumes that the returns to scale were constant. This is to ignore what needs to be explained, the escape from a world in which many of the returns to scale were negative. To triple population while holding average incomes stable, on Crafts' view would imply no technological change. In reality to triple population while incomes grew modestly must have required massive technological change. The introduction of iron frames to building led to the most dramatic architectural i development in millennia. Finally there is the enormous expansion of the British Empire during the Industrial Revolution. By the late C19th the British Empire was the largest empire in world history both in terms of land area and in terms of the number of people ruled directly and this is before considering informal empire in Latin America, China and elsewhere. A key reason why a small island off the north-west coast of Eurasia was able to dominate so much of the world was its historically unprecedented level of economic development.

29 October

• Mar Rubio-Varas, Universidad Publica de Navarra and Cambridge
• Monopolizing the Flow: water control as the foundation of business power in the Spanish electricity sector
• Abstract: Electricity market theory and historical scholarship have largely overlooked how private utilities establish monopolistic control over natural resources, particularly water, as a mechanism of market power. While conventional analyses emphasize downstream competition, and Spanish historiography focuses on regional markets or local hydropower, neither addresses the upstream reality: the comprehensive monopolization of water resources as the bedrock of market dominance. This paper provides the first national analysis of resource monopolization in Spain's electricity sector, utilizing a novel database of over 600 power plants and their water concessions. Focusing on a strategic snapshot of 1986, the eve of European integration and the final year in which every kilowatt generated in Spain required water as an essential input, we quantify resource monopolization across river basins using standard industrial organization metrics. Our findings reveal that every basin exhibited either monopolistic or highly concentrated structures, regardless of the nominal number of firms present, and that this concentration was deeply correlated with regional water endowments. Ultimately, we demonstrate that territorial water monopolization structurally underpinned the electricity sector in Spain. This analysis exposes a critical blind spot in electricity market scholarship and advances our understanding of how private firms leverage essential natural resources to sustain market power

12 November

• Bruno Caprettini, St Gallen University
• xxx
• Abstract:

19 November

• Francesco Sergi, Paris Est (Créteil)
• Crises as they unfold: Data Resource Inc's analysis of the US stagflation
• Abstract: This article documents the analysis of the 1970s US stagflation produced by Data Resources Inc. (DRI), a private economic forecast company, led by Otto Eckstein, a Harvard professor of economics. In the 1970s, DRI was arguably the largest and most important economic forecast firm in the US, and its ‘Monthly Review’ was a highly popular reading for academics, business people, and government officials. DRI was thus one influential voice within the economic debate about the causes of the simultaneous rise of inflation and unemployment—but a voice ignored, so far, in the literature in the history of economics. The distinctive format of DRI’s monthly publication give us the opportunity to build a fine-grained (month-by-month) understanding of how DRI economists engaged with the ongoing events. The article documents that, all along the 1970s, DRI’s analysis of inflation relied on a distinctive combination of several mechanisms, although built around a “core” explanation related to wage-price spirals.

26 November

• Mary O'Sullivan, Geneva
• Thinking in Chains: Revisiting the Emergence of Global Cotton Capitalism, 1764–1833
• Abstract: When Eric Hobsbawm pronounced his much-quoted formulation that “[w]hoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton”, he was drawing on a literature that seems hardly recognisable today. Revisionist accounts have clarified and qualified our understanding of cotton machines’ contributions to the expansion of manufacturing in Britain, and a wave of global histories have brought greater attention to the cultivation of cotton by enslaved people and the foreign markets in which British cotton goods were sold. Certainly, the history of cotton capitalism is more interesting today than ever before, but major puzzles remain about where and how economic value was generated in the cotton chain from raw materials to final goods.
  Resolving these puzzles, this paper suggests, requires some rethinking of the conceptual frameworks and empirical methods that dominate in economic and global history. Drawing on the commodity chains of Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins and Irving Fisher’s chain of consequences, the paper offers a simple framework that integrates spatial interactions between cotton materials, manufactures, and markets and historical shifts in these spatial relationships. Based on this framework, it proposes a revisionist account of the emergence of global cotton capitalism in three distinct phases between 1779 and 1833.
  Each phase begins with expansion based on a specific configuration of spatial interactions between cotton cultivation, cotton manufacturing and cotton consumption and concludes with the buildup of a crisis in each configuration. By focussing on the sequences of causal interactions that lead to expansion and crisis in each phase, it identifies the factors that played a formative or causal role in the distinct phases through which cotton capitalism emerged. Across all three phases, a common finding is the importance of shifting markets for cotton goods in constituting cotton capitalism. Only in the final phase, the paper claims, do the cultivation of cheap cotton in the United States, the mechanisation of manufacturing in Britain, and the global consumption of high-quality cotton thread and low-quality cotton cloth come together to constitute a self-expanding system of capitalist accumulation.

3 December

• Chenzi Xu, Berkeley
• xxx
• Abstract:

10 December

• Kara Dimitruk, Hamilton College
• xxx
• Abstract: