The nature of the seventeenth-century Mughal state and its land revenue taxation system has become a matter of controversy in recent years. Irfan Habib and his followers dominated thinking on this subject from the sixties onwards. They saw the regime as highly centralized and essentially...

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...

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...

Statistical analysis of Greek sovereign debt denominated in gold and traded on the London Stock Exchange from the outbreak of the First World War until the advent of the Great Depression is employed to explore the way that historical events including political and institutional changes shaped...

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...

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...

This paper analyses the transformation of two of the staple trades of the pre-modern international economy –those in wool and dried codfish– during the transition from the late medieval to the early-modern period. The development of early modern long-distance trade was subject to three major...

This paper re-examines theories previously advanced to explain Lancashire’s slowadoption of ring spinning. New cost estimates show that although additionaltransport costs and technical complementarities between certain types of machinereduced ring adoption rates, these supply side constraints...

By the late 19th century, the export of natural ice from Norway to Britain was a major trade, fuelled by the growing British consumption of ice. Although new technology eventually allowed the production of artificial ice, natural ice retained a strong market position until World War I. This...