The article discusses the advancement of timber traders and former middlemen in Riga's timber trade during the second half of the 19 th and early 20 th century. Using methods from spatial history, statistical data on the Riga timber trade and archival documents from the timber trade files in the...

This special issue focuses on the financial behaviour of different participants in European medieval and early modern financial markets. It extends our knowledge of the financial strategies employed by households, merchants, charities, city governments and corporations by asking what investment...

While several studies have shed light on the emergence of consumer society in Western Europe and the Atlantic world, our knowledge on the spread of new consumption patterns in regions beyond the core areas of European economic development is still limited. To gain insights into patterns of...

Not all major Italian cities of the late Middle Ages could rely on an established and organised system of public debt like Florence, Venice, Genoa, and others. The study of one such city, Bologna, reveals that whenever the city found itself in serious financial straits, outside of ad hoc...

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...

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 justify the comparison by noting that the two empires enjoyed striking...

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 introduction sketches out what relevance wood and wood products have had in Europe's industrial societies. It also summarizes some peculiarities of the wood-based businesses caused by both the materiality of wood and the ecologies of forests. Most importantly, the introduction...

This paper provides an overview of the various financial resources that existed in medieval Tirol to meet financial needs, using notary registers and court records from the 14 th century as sources. These provide ample evidence of an active capital and land market in rural areas, which offered...

Can state-owned banks spur development? Gerschenkron (1962) identified the State Bank of the Rus- sian Empire as the main institutional driver of the country's catch-up industrialization. In this paper, we test this assertion by evaluating the outcome of a policy experiment (1892-1903) under the...