We provide a natural resource explanation for the divergence of the Portuguese economy relative to other European countries before the Second World War, based on a considerable body of contemporary sources. First, we demonstrate that a lack of domestic resources meant that Portugal experienced...

We examine the role of substitution from traditional to modern energy carriers and of differential rates of innovation in the use of each of these in economic growth in Sweden from 1850 to 1950. We use a simple growth model with a nested CES production function and exogenous factor-augmenting...

Power to the People examines the varied but interconnected relationships between energy consumption and economic development in Europe over the last five centuries. It describes how the traditional energy economy of medieval and early modern Europe was marked by stable or falling per capita...