While it is commonly believed that derivative instruments are a recent invention, we document the existence of forward contracts for the sale of wool in medieval England around 700 years ago. The contracts were generally entered into by English monasteries, who frequently sold their wool for up...

There is a widespread view that cost finding developed into cost accounting towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the further step towards what we today call management accounting occurring in the twentieth century. This bold assessment is based on an embarrassingly small amount of...

This paper examines annual commodity price data from England and Holland over a span of seven centuries. Our data set incorporates transactions prices on 8 commodities: barley, butter, cheese, eggs, oats, peas, silver and wheat as well as pound/shilling nominal exchange rates going back, in some...

We examine the importance of geographical proximity to coal as a factor underpinning comparative European economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Our analysis exploits geographical variation in city and coalfield locations, alongside temporal variation in the availability of...

Still in recent research a low productive peasant economy and traditional peasant society are often made responsible for Southeast Europe's economic backwardness prior to 1945. However, the radical change of paradigm after 1960 in the view of peasants as agents of economic growth and of their...

In the Middle Ages women in the Italian Alps had substantially more rights on collective properties than in the Modern Age. The documental evidence shows a progressive erosion of women’s rights and a convergence toward gender-biased inheritance systems. We tracked the evolution of inheritance...

From an extensive dataset of wheat yields at municipal level in mid eighteenth-century Spain, a detailed statistical analysis indicates that the differences in wheat yields were mainly a consequence of different natural conditions, and that demand did not have a significant influence....

This paper reconstructs an annual volume series of GDP and GDP per capita for Sweden within present borders 1620–1800, extending the annual series that exist from 1800 onwards. Annual fluctuations of GDP are estimated from the annual fluctuations of harvests, which in the nineteenth century...

This article deals with agricultural specialization in regions and farms of the state of São Paulo in the early nineteenth century, after several decades of changes caused by the coffee boom. I use data from more than forty thousand farms to examine the agrarian structure and specialization in...