A recurrent and indeed persistent problem in European economic history – a veritable deus ex machina -- from medieval to modern times, is Europe’s supposed ‘balance of payments’ problem in trade with the ‘East’. This supposed problem has often been couched in Mercantilist overtones:...

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major ‘institutional’ international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the ‘draperies’ or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic...

This article seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the 'nouvelles draperies' chose to use them, and why their resort to such merino wools allowed at least some of them to escape the...

Comparative analysis of the markets for land, labor, and capital in north-central Italy and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period reveals that urbanization in itself was not the crucial variable in the quality and effect of developing factor markets. More...

Research on the practices of the moneylender, a permanent yet shadowy fixture of society, has focused on England in the early modern period. This paper, however, examines the business operations of Costantino Bogdano, a Greek moneylender active in Venice (c. 1800-44). At a time of transition in...

This article, a contribution to the ‘proto-industrialisation’ debate, examines the relative advantages of urban and rural locations for cloth manufacturing in later-medieval England and the Low Countries. From the 11th to the mid-14th century, when the English cloth trade began its seemingly...

Abstract (English) In recent years there have been major advances in our historical knowledge of regional disparities in Italy; as a consequence, the debate on the causes of the North-South divide (and thus, ultimately, on strategies and possibilities to overcome it) has also revived. By mainly...

The rise of factor markets during the transition from the middle ages into the early modern was of crucial importance for long term economic growth. The transmission of property through the market however remains understudied, especially in the Southern Low Countries. In this paper we construct...

We examine spatial convergence in biological well-being in the Habsburg Monarchy circa 1890-1910 on the basis of evidence on the physical stature of 21-year-old recruits disaggregated into 15 districts. We find that the shorter was the population in 1890 the faster its height grew thereafter....