This paper studies the characteristics of investment in slave trade and associated trades in France during the eighteenth century. The study of the accounts of an investor from Nantes, Bertrand de Cœuvre, shows that his investment compared favourably with domestic alternatives. It was more...

For nearly two decades, the share of trade in inputs, also called vertical trade, has dramatically increased. This paper suggests a new measure of international trade: “value-added trade”. Like many existing estimates, “value-added trade” is net of double-counted vertical trade. It also...

This paper studies the role of the French intercontinental trading maritime frontier in domestic capital accumulation at the end of the Ancien Régime. It uses O'Brien's method to measure the amount of annual profits generated in this sector. The net gain is then computed by computing how much...

This paper shows that reduced heterogeneity of exporter-specific goods can provide a direct explanation of the distance puzzle. Using COMTRADE 4-digit bilateral trade data we find that the elasticity of trade to distance has increased by 8% from 1962 to 2009. Theoretical foundations of the...

This paper makes the point that quantitative methods should be part of the toolkit of all economic historians. In the first part I will show that quantitative methods have been obviously important in the rise of economic history as a field up the 1980s. In a second part, I will illustrate...

Most European intercontinental trade passed through the Atlantic during the Early Modern period, with the exception of Mediterranean trade and caravan trade through the Eurasian landmass, both in relative decline. Both the rise to primacy of the European economy and the increase of Atlantic...