This paper reviews the growing body of evidence on the relative economic standing of different regions of the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In general, it does not find support for Eurocentric claims regarding Western Europe’s early economic lead. The Eurocentric...

This tentative essay tries to understand today's concerns about the decay of the peasantries and the loss of food security on a massive scale within a long-term and global perspective. Guiding questions are: How to handle the local scale of the peasant with the global scale of societal...

The contributions of innovations, factor endowments and institutions to American industrialization are examined through analysing the rise of the American portland cement industry. Minerals abundance contributed in multiple ways to the spectacular rise of the industry from the 1890s. However,...

Seen in historical perspective the main economic issues of the present world (such as poverty, inequality, backwardness) appear in a somewhat different light than in many current discussions. The achievements of the modern age, and in particular of the post- World War II period, are considered...

Conventional wisdom holds that international political pressure and domestic civil unrest in the mid-1970s and 1980s brought an end to apartheid in South Africa. I show that, prior to these events, labor market pressure in the late 1960s/early 1970s caused a dramatic unraveling of apartheid in...

Resumen Los dos capítulos incluidos en el presente trabajo representan un esfuerzo de síntesis de una pequeña fracción de la vasta literatura que existe sobre la esclavización de los africanos. Por ahora, estas notas cubren esencialmente dos objetivos: i) ofrecer una breve introducción a...

Seen in historical perspective the main economic issues of the present world (such as poverty, inequality, backwardness) appear in a somewhat different light than in many current discussions. The achievements of the modern age, and in particular of the post- World War II period, are considered...

This paper analyzes the human capital training strategies adopted between the 1850s and 1930s by railroad companies in Mexico and Chile. These two countries enable one to contrast the different routes taken by the same type of firm, technology and labor force. A propos of this, we suggest that...

In the heyday of the Porfirian Age, Mexico City saw the introduction of its first commercial telephone service by an American company. This essay presents an overview of this development and of the market it served aimed at the capital city's entrepreneur class.

Since its inception in Mexico City the Mexican Telephone Company tried to deal with a budding market in an organized way. to do so it used several methods and approaches, including monopy pricing, suing potential competitors for patent violations, and controling the supply of technology. This...