This paper tests whether the so-called ‘reach of the market’ helps to explain ‘why Europe’ and ‘why north-western Europe’. By looking at grain markets from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, this study concludes that the process of commodity market integration...

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...

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...

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...

We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the post-war shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than...

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...

Recent research on international productivity comparisons has focused on the discrepancies between benchmark comparisons and time series extrapolations from other benchmarks. For a 1907 benchmark, Stephen Broadberry and Carsten Burhop (2007) find German manufacturing to be only slightly ahead of...

In this paper, the problem of why low-purchasing power silver coins depreciated relative to high-purchasing power gold coins is examined. The standard explanation by Sargent and Velde is refuted. It is argued that the relative stability of gold was due to the demand from consumers able to detect...

This paper examines the effect of a new technology on a labour-intensive service. Comparing primal and dual TFP-growth with final-year social savings, we find that, between 1900 and 1938, motion pictures increased entertainment output (measured in spectator-hours) by at least nine percent...

This paper investigates the role of consumption in the emergence of the motion picture industry in Britain France and the US. A time-lag of at least twelve years between the invention of cinema and the film industry’s take-off suggests that the latter was not mainly technology-driven. In all...