Contrary to popular narratives, 'The Great Divergence Reconsidered' shows that Europe's rise to its current status as an undisputed world economic leader was not the effect of the Industrial Revolution, nor can it be explained by coal or colonial exploitation. Using a wealth of new historical...

This article documents and examines the integration of grain markets in Europe across the early modern/late modern divide and across distances and regions. It relies on principal component analysis to identify market structures. The analysis finds that a European market emerged only in the...

This article documents and examines the integration of markets across the early modern/late modern divide, exploiting the largest dataset compiled to date on grain prices, spanning one hundred European cities evenly spread across land-locked and low-land areas. Using those series, it studies...

This paper tests whether the so-called ‘reach of the market’ helps to explain ‘why Europe’ and ‘why north-western Europe’. By looking at grain markets from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, this study concludes that the process of commodity market integration...

By analysing a newly compiled data base of grain prices, this article finds that prior to the nineteenth century the grain trade in India was essentially local, while more distant markets remained fragmented.  It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that market integration...