This paper studies the influence of the service sector (joint-stock commercial banks and railways) on the economic development of agricultural regions within the Russian empire in the second half of the 19th century, using the case of the Central Black Earth region. The study compares yield data...

This paper shows that railroad building in Russia, as in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, improved the value of land, a classic benefit of transportation investment in largely agrarian countries. From a database constructed for this paper, we use cross-sectional data for the fifty...

This paper examines the effect of the early adoption of technology on the evolution of human capital and on industrialization, in the context of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. It shows that wrights, a group of highly skilled mechanical craftsmen, who specialized in water-powered machinery in...

The English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) were incorporated by State charters two years apart, in 1600 and 1602 respectively. They were involved in similar business activities. They were both organized as joint stock corporations, with huge capital and hundreds...

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data...

Critical scholarship views corporate accumulation – a fundamental driver of capitalism – as inherently dispossessive, involving violence and expropriation. However, dispossession also involves practices of legitimation that are related to coercive violence in complex ways. We examine the...

Using novel quantitative historical data on 2,483 British privateering cruises, we show that state-licensed commerce raiding by merchants was not only a popular and potentially flourishing business, but also effective in harming enemy trade during the long eighteenth century (1688-1815). Why,...

The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469 began the process of the eventual unification of Spain. Over the ensuing decades, Spain finally conquered the Muslims at Granada in 1492 and completed the Reconquista. Spain then began a period of imperial expansion with...

Cherso (Cres in Croatian) is the largest island in the Adriatic. Placed in the northern part of this sea, namely in the Kvarner Gulf and lying off the east coast of the Istrian peninsula, Cherso today belongs to the Republic of Croatia, but for centuries this island had been a faithful and...

The paper reconsiders the boom of the mid 1890s in which a large number of firms in the bicycle, vehicle and pneumatic tyre industries were floated. It investigates why so many of these issues featured aristocratic directors listed in their prospectuses and finds that they exemplified City...