Previous work has demonstrated the potential for wheat market integration between the US and the UK before the 'first era of globalization' in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was however frequently interrupted by policy and 'exogenous' events such as war. This paper adds Canada to...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a...

This paper re-examines the late medieval market in freehold land, the extent to which it was governed by market forces as opposed to political or social constraints, and how this contributed to the commercialisation of the late medieval English economy. We employ a valuable new resource for...

In the four decades leading up to World War I, a significant proportion of British aristocrats married daughters of newly rich American business magnates. I provide a quantitative economic analysis of this phenomenon in the deeper context of British aristocratic marriages during the 18th and...

In the 19th century, the Liverpool Cotton Brokers Association (CBA) coordinated the dramatic growth of Liverpool's raw cotton market. This article shows how the CBA achieved this through the development of a private order institutional framework that improved information flows, introduced...

From 1770 to 1914, the British Government collected weekly price and quantity data for all types of grain traded in many market towns; these ‘Corn Returns’ were published in the London Gazette. We computerised the data published 1770-1864, totalling around 6 million data points. Here we...

It is widely believed that one of the main causes of productivity decline in British coal-mining in the late 19th century was a backward-bending effort supply curve: as wage rates rose, miners reduced their effort either by adjustments of output per shift, or by changes in their attendance...

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...

Historical scholarship on business-environment interactions has largely sidestepped the study of corporate innovations that had both economic and environmental benefits. This issue is examined through late-nineteenth-century initiatives sponsored by the British Society for the Encouragement of...

By documenting the legislative history of the Corn Laws from 1670 and using previously unused data to calculate annual Ad Valorem Equivalents for most years from 1814, it is possible to establish several important facts about British wheat protection. Statutory protection was only significant...