In the early 19th century coal mining in the region of Aachen (Prussian Rhine Province) developed to an industrial scale within few decades production was mechanised and new types of industrial organization emerged that allowed for concentration on production and economies of scale. The region...

This article tries to shed light on a macroeconomic issue from a microeconomic or business perspective. The problem is the Andalusian backwardness in comparison to more advantaged regions of Spain and the subsequent negative effects it had on the population’s standard of living. The...

In this text we analyze the main economic activities that were developed in the city of Alicante in the mid 19th century promoted by dynamic elite of aristocrats and middle classes. The economy was moderately diversified, the main weight falling on trade and commercial farming. Following this we...

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has...

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...

The massive land privatization that took place over the 19th century deeply transformed the Spanish economic landscape. Nevertheless, the outcome of the process was quite different, both in pace and impact, depending on the geographic area we analyze. The explanation for this regional diversity...

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has...

This study examines a facet of institutional change in 19th Century Spain. Empirical analysis of a zone in the Ebro valley confirms that the process of selling commons prior to the 1855 Ley de Desamortización (Disentailment Law) was of great significance. It evaluates the nature of the changes...

Provisioning of the Imperial capital Istanbul had been one of the major concerns of the Ottoman rulers from the classical age to the dawn of the modern era. Grain occupied a particularly important place in the provisioning policies of the Ottoman state due to the fact that the Ottoman sultans...

Owing to the high cost of transporting farm produce before the railway age, the land-intensiveness of European mixed farming caused both production and consumption of foodstuffs and intermediate farm inputs in the steady state to be highly dispersed, a spatial configuration offering weak...