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...

This article presents new data on grain production, storage and prices in Saxony between 1789 and 1830. We contribute to three interrelated debates. First, we discuss whether monthly price increases were sufficient to cover storage costs, and how they relate to storage levels at the end of the...

The characteristics of regional paths of industrialization had a deep impact on agricultural development during early industrialization in Germany. From 1840 rising incomes in the course of a “high wage-low energy cost” industrialization based on coal and steel and a rapid urbanization...

Southeast Europe’s countries are often denominated as the ‘first developing nations’. Since the end of the 19th century the question of industrialization dominated public economic debates in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and later on Yugoslavia. However, despite all soaring rhetoric no...

This article explores the pattern of land rents and agricultural productivity across nineteenth-century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the “Little Divergence” between European regions. We argue that agriculture reacted to urban and industrial development rather than shaping...

This paper deals with agricultural dynamics in late-Imperial Russia. Based upon a comprehensive micro-level data set on annual yields between 1883 and 1913, we provide insight into regional differences of agricultural growth and the development prospects of Russian agriculture before WWI. Making...

Our purpose here is to challenge the big-bang approach to economic history in which some alleged institutional imposition - a deus machine - is claimed to launch a series of new economic behaviors. This so-called prime mover is then carried forward by the inexorable forces of path dependency to...

With the break-down of the socialist regime in East Germany in 1989/90 the collective farms had to be transformed or to be dissolved. At that time, it had been anticipated by (mostly West German) politicians and agricultural economists alike that collective farms would soon wither away and be...

The food industry is one of the most important sectors in the Latvian economy. However, due to its close links to agriculture, the structural crisis in the processing sector is the main obstacle to increasing output, productivity and profitability in the entire agricultural sector. Based on the...

Most questions about the sources of agricultural growth during the ‘first agricultural revolution’ are still debated. For the Prussian province of Westphalia, we estimated a translog production function to determine the contribution of intensification and technical change from 1830 to 1880....