The Industrial Revolution continues to be analysed by economic historians deploying the conceptual vocabularies of modern social science, particularly economics. Their approach which gives priority to the elaboration of causes and processes of evolution is far too often and superficially...

Much of the literature on economic change in the post-1945 world is permeated by two ideas: the temporal convergence of per capita incomes across economies and the spatial advance of free trade. For many economists and historians the two are linked: the reduction of trade barriers in the...

On 5 December 1925, the ‘Portuguese Bank Note Bubble’ burst. The Lisbon daily newspaper, O Século (The Century), revealed the swindle in the headline ‘O Pais em Crise’ (The Country in Crisis). The article describes how twenty-eight year old white-collar worker, Artur Virgilio Alves...

This paper estimates and compares the benefits cinema technology generated to society in Britain, France and the US between 1900 and 1938. It is shown how cinema industrialised live entertainment, by standardisation, automation and making it tradable. The economic impact is measured in three...

This article examines the hypothesis that in the “Third Reich”, bureaucratic agencies engaged in economic policies competed with each other. First, a model of competition is constructed whose predictions are then compared with actual political processes in Nazi Germany. This shows that the...

Most economic historians would surely endorse Paul Romer's view expressed above that technological progress lies at the heart of long run economic growth. Long ago Kuznets identified the epoch of 'modern economic growth' as one where growth came to be driven by scientific and technological...

During the two decades after the Second World War, international tradeexpanded at its most rapid pace of the twentieth century. Between 1948 and1968, the total volume of merchandise exports from non-communist countriesgrew by a remarkable 290 percent. 2 And the growth of world trade during...

The impact that the francoist autarkic economic policy had on the Spanish economy is assessed using the Domestic Resource Cost (DRC) as an indicator. This indicator compares the real opportunity cost of the primary factors used in the production of a certain good with its aggregated value at...

Despite the kind of scholarly attention that has been attracted in the field ofChinese economic history in the past half a century or so, basic quantities ofsome basic factors have remained disagreed. Chinese population is one of them.For example, for the post-1350 period, the gap between...

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest among growth economists in General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). A GPT can be defined as "a technology that initially has much scope for improvement and evntually comes to be widely used, to have many uses, and to have many Hicksian and...