This paper studies the role played by politics in shaping the Italian railway network, and its impact on long-run growth patterns. Examining a large state-planned railway expansion that took place during the second half of the 19th century in a recently unified country, we first study how both...

This paper studies the role played by politics in shaping the Italian railway network, and its impact on long-run growth patterns. Examining a large state-planned railway expansion that took place during the second half of the 19th century in a recently unified country, we first study how both...

Is geography destiny? What is the role of first-nature geography in determining prosperity? This paper estimates the effect of randomly removing and introducing favorable first-nature geography to a specific region using a difference in difference design. In 1825 a storm created a new natural...

This article is in the first place an attempt to provide evidence of specialization on the basis of a number of Dutch maritime shipping sources. Related topics such as employment, the question of demand and supply, the characteristics of good streams or the everlasting “homeport of the ship or...

In this paper, I try to substantiate the necessity of studying early-modern maritime shipping as an integral economic activity, by which I mean that early-modern maritime shipping is defined not only by the nodes it connects nor by its own social structures exclusively, but by both elements at...

We propose that the "historically relevant" comparison of the Danish and Russian Empires from the early eighteenth century until the First World War presents a useful starting point for a promising research agenda. We motivate the comparison, noting that the two empires enjoyed striking...

This discussion paper is a follow-up to a previous bibliometric analysis of articles published in The International Journal of Maritime History and maritime-themed articles published in other economic and business history journals over the last 25 years. The paper looks more closely at articles...

El artículo estudia el discurso elaborado en los espacios de la propiedad industrial durante el siglo XIX español. Se presta especial atención a la conceptualización y representación del cambio tecnológico y la retórica empleada por aquellos agentes sociales próximos al mundo de la...