The paper explores the link between international economic integration and technological capability in colonial India. The example of iron industry shows that many new ideas and skills flowed into India from Europe, but not all met with commercial success. The essay suggests that in those fields...

This paper develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth and compare them with leading cities in Europe, Japan and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the...

This paper identifies the absence of both sub-continentally oriented histories which knit together the land and sea trades, and convincing explanations of the persistence of the Indo-Central Asian trade (for example) despite the growing Indo-European trade from the seventeenth-century. The...

The Great War of 1914-18 constituted a major rupture for the economies of Europe in several respects. It marked the end of almost a century of uninterrupted economic growth. It ended a long period of near-universal currency stability, and set in motion a painful process of de-globalisation. It...

This study uses two samples of linked adult males to examine wealth accumulation by region and occupation between 1850 and 1870. Consistent with past research, the findings here show that wealth accumulation was substantial in the South in the 1850s and stagnant in the 1860s. The findings also...

Today efficient states can be represented as sovereign authorities governing successful economies that provide high, stable and rising standards of welfare for their citizens. Such states emerged slowly and painfully over centuries of geopolitical rivalry and conflict among aristocracies for...

This paper presents new regional GDP estimates for the Habsburg Monarchy and constructs measures of market potential for its 22 major regions. The paper argues that regional income differentials were significantly larger, that intra-empire catching-up of poor with rich regions was far more...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in social capital and in the difficulties related to its measurement. In this paper, we propose to measure social capital by means of principal components analysis. Then, we present the first available international social capital estimates for the...

From 1945 to 1975, fifteen Western European countries passed school-leaving age laws that raised the number of years of compulsory schooling for the first time after the Second World War. In order to understand the driving forces behind the increase in compulsory schooling and to explain the...

This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where growing conflict between various ethnic and national groups within an empire might have contributed to the emergence of internal borders and even its eventual dissolution. To this end we adopt an...