The English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) were incorporated by State charters two years apart, in 1600 and 1602 respectively. They were involved in similar business activities. They were both organized as joint stock corporations, with huge capital and hundreds...

The paper analyzes the long century of deregulation of European grain markets. Eighteen century reformers won the intellectual battle as to the merits of laissez-faire markets for grain but failed to convince the angry crowds which were alerted by temporary increases in prices. Not until falling...

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data...

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data...

This paper is based on the difference between the formal introduction of a Weberian bureaucracy and its actual implementation through state officials. This difference between the formal institutional framework and its actual implementation could lead to failed reforms. On the other side, there...

Critical scholarship views corporate accumulation – a fundamental driver of capitalism – as inherently dispossessive, involving violence and expropriation. However, dispossession also involves practices of legitimation that are related to coercive violence in complex ways. We examine the...

This paper shows how an economy of a small parish developed over a consider-able time during Sweden’s period as a great power and in the beginning of the Age of Liberty up to 1735. The actual parish (Kälvsten) was a chapel of ease and situated in the diocese of Linköping. This diocese is one...

Using novel quantitative historical data on 2,483 British privateering cruises, we show that state-licensed commerce raiding by merchants was not only a popular and potentially flourishing business, but also effective in harming enemy trade during the long eighteenth century (1688-1815). Why,...

A recurrent and indeed persistent problem in European economic history – a veritable deus ex machina -- from medieval to modern times, is Europe’s supposed ‘balance of payments’ problem in trade with the ‘East’. This supposed problem has often been couched in Mercantilist overtones:...

A recurrent and indeed persistent problem in European economic history – a veritable deus ex machina -- from medieval to modern times, is Europe’s supposed ‘balance of payments’ problem in trade with the ‘East’. This supposed problem has often been couched in Mercantilist overtones:...