New data on individual worker’s outputs show that New England ring spinners exhibited substantial on the job learning c. 1905. Despite this, variable capital-labour ratios meant high labour turnover reduced aggregate labour productivity only fractionally. The combination of variable...

This paper revises the traditional view of Spain as a predatory colonial state that extracted revenue from natural resources and populations in the Americas while offering little in return. Using 18th century Spanish American treasury accounts we show that local elites not only exerted important...

In the past few decades, so-called model organisms have become a cornerstone of research in the biomedical sciences. For the scientists, the model organism is both a practice ground for developing laboratory techniques, and a source of insights into common or even universal biological...

When taking into account time, services can experience similar productivity gains as manufacturing. Motion pictures constituted the first technology that industrialized a labour-intensive service. Measuring output in time spent consuming them doubles output growth from 4.2 to as much as 9...

Social capital has been used to describe the links between guildsmen in pre-industrial times. However, contemporary historical research has shown that both English society and the guilds displayed more openness to newcomers than had been previously thought. This new perspective however does not...

The nineteenth century saw the advent of news agencies that became well-coordinated global organisations with large networks of correspondents, such as Reuters, Havas, Wolff-Continental and Associated Press. Essential features of these agencies were substantial fixed and sunk set-up costs, high...

The question of how Italian Renaissance architecture was taken up in other European countries has been the subject of numerous studies. One interesting example is the building activity in south Germany at the beginning of the 17th century. Major cities like Stuttgart and Augsburg implemented...

The paper discusses the rise of the East India Company in the contested political world of eighteenth century India, with reference to the manner in which economic power was deployed to enhance military power. It is shown that there was only one model of successful ‘military-fiscalism’ in...

Traditional theories of the origins of the welfare state have emphasized the financial weakness of Britain’s largest provider of mutual insurance in the late 19th century, the friendly societies. These theories share common implications with contemporary theories of institutional change...