New research on historical national accounting has provided a more comprehensive picture of European economic performance from the medieval period through industrialization and the transition to modern economic growth. These data confirm anecdotal arguments that pre-industrial economies were not...

Eyam is an epicentre of Europe’s plague heritage. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the Derbyshire village, drawn by stories of its catastrophic plague and the heroic response it elicited. The story they are told - of a self-imposed quarantine preventing disease spreading to the...

This article provides an historical overview on the development of Chinese money and monetary regimes between about 1800 and 1950. It develops a simple conceptual framework based on the relative costs of assessing the inherent value of the currencies of different denomination. Based on this...

The prominent role of monetary policy in the U.S. interwar depression has been conventional wisdom since Friedman and Schwartz (1963). This paper presents evidence on both the surprise and the systematic components of monetary policy between 1929 and 1933. Doubts surrounding GDP estimates for...

We find little support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of a positive relationship between market power and innovation in 1950’s Britain even though many economists and policymakers accepted it at the time. Pricefixing agreements were very widespread prior to the 1956 Restrictive Practices Act...

This paper analyses the transformation of two of the staple trades of the pre-modern international economy –those in wool and dried codfish– during the transition from the late medieval to the early-modern period. The development of early modern long-distance trade was subject to three major...

This paper examines patterns of structural change and labour productivity growth in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. Using shift-share analysis and a set of basic measures to account for the contribution of physical and human capital growth, it seeks to address three questions:...