This paper explores the dynamics underlying integration of the international grain markets of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that ‘deep’ integration implied changes to market structures, firm strategies and the commodity being marketed. Coordination within grain markets occurred at...

What effect did the dramatic expansion in long distance trade in the early modern period have on healthcare in England? This paper presents new evidence on the scale, origins and content of English imports of medical drugs between 1567 and 1774. It shows that the volume of medical drugs imported...

This paper discusses the problem, implied by Arrow’s fundamental paradox of information, of how to make money from news. To earn money from important news, news traders need to tell the potential buyer what it is, yet once they have revealed it, the buyer no longer needs to pay. This paper...

The 19th century was a period of great transformations for Italy. Political unification was achieved in 1861 while economic unification was still far off. Ever since, Italian industrialization has been unbalanced, as the pre-existing gap between Northern and Southern economic development has...

By the late 19th century, the export of natural ice from Norway to Britain was a major trade, fuelled by the growing British consumption of ice. Although new technology eventually allowed the production of artificial ice, natural ice retained a strong market position until World War I. This...

Measurement standards are like institutional facts – they enable the travel of information across different domains: geographical, social, institutional or contextual. Uncovering the reasons underlying how and why measurement standards are adopted can provide insights into how ‘well’ such...

One of the many miracles of Victorian Britain’s market economy was that it worked most efficiently when it was left to regulate itself – or at least, this is what the great majority of Victorians believed. The prevailing economic orthodoxy throughout the nineteenth century assumed, following...