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In his book War Finance and Logistics in Late Imperial China, Ulrich Theobald shows how the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911) overcame the tyranny of logistics and successfully enlarged the territory of its empire. A detailed analysis of the long and expensive second Jinchuan war (1771 - 1776) in Eastern Tibet demonstrates that the Chinese state ordered its civilian officials as well as the common people, merchant associations, and different ethnic groups to fulfil and to foot the bill for the common cause . With increasing military success the state gradually withdrew from its responsibilities, believing that a War Supply and Expenditure Code (Junxu zeli) might offset the decreasing skill in and readiness to imperial leadership.

With use of innovative proxies and new annual data, I demonstrate that relatively high legal capacity and regulatory activity of the early-modern Polish parliament, the Seym, was positively associated with deeper domestic commodity market integration. Conversely, the lack of effective law-making, caused by the right of a single delegate to discontinue the Seym’s sessions, fostered market fragmentation. This indicates that early parliamentary regimes required legal capacity to harmonize domestic institutions and reduce the transaction costs. The Polish case suggests a hypothesis that the pre-1800 “Little Divergence” between European parliamentary regimes could be explained by differences in their governments’ capacities.

By the 1700s Europeans dominated the gunpowder technology, which was surprising, because it had originated in China and been used with expertise throughout Eurasia. To account for their dominance, historians have invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies with a simple tournament model of military competition that allows for learning by doing. Political incentives and military conditions then explain why the rest of Eurasia fell behind Europeans in developing the gunpowder technology. The consequences were huge, from colonialism to the slave trade and even the Industrial Revolution.

The Bureau du Commerce allocated rights and rents to private entrepreneurs via a mix of hierarchical division of labor and peer-based collegial deliberation. This set-up reflected an attempt to maximize information and expertise, but also allowed for the recognition of private rights and social interests. The final decisions of the Bureau (for or against each demand), and the qualitative arguments brought forward during the procedure, are robust predictors of eventual decisions. We see this result as an indication that impersonal, rational and informed decision-making could be obtained even within a patrimonialist, rent-seeking State.

By combining new archival and existing data, this article provides estimates of the economic impact of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the largest natural catastrophe ever recorded in Europe. The direct cost of the earthquake is estimated to be between 32 and 48 percent of the Portuguese GDP. In spite of strict controls, prices and wages remained volatile in the years after the tragedy. The recovery from the earthquake also led to a rise in the wage premium of construction workers. More significantly, the earthquake became an opportunity to reform the economy and to reduce the economic semi-dependency vis-à-vis Britain. “ Sometimes miracles are necessary, natural phenomena, or great disasters in order to shake, to awaken, and to open the eyes of misled nations about their interests, [nations] oppressed by others that simulate friendship, and reciprocal interest. Portugal needed the earthquake to open her eyes, and to little by little escape from slavery and total ruin.”1

Using a novel data set on 2,483 British privateering cruises, we show that state-licensed raiding of commercial vessels was a popular and flourishing business among merchants that took a serious toll on enemy trade from 1689 to 1815. Why, then, did privateering merchants gradually turn away from these profitable endeavors? We show that the expansion of overseas trade increased the opportunity costs for merchants and resulted in the decline of privateering. Our findings document that the decline of privateering had as much to do with an expanding maritime economy as with the rising naval power of the British state.

This article argues that market integration should be measured as σ-convergence over the largest possible sample of markets. Its focus is the European market for wheat, rye and candles from the middle of the eighteenth century to the eve of the first globalization. Price dispersion for cereals remained constant until the outbreak of the French Wars, then it increased abruptly. It began to decline after the end of the wars, and the process continued steadily until an all-time low was reached in the 1860s. Domestic and international integration contributed in roughly the same proportions to integration in the long run, but the latter was much more important in accounting for medium-term changes. These results suggest that the level of integration was determined for most of the period by war and political events, with a substantial contribution from a fall in transport costs in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. By contrast, there is very little evidence of integration in the market for candles.

Why is it that some countries adopted growth enhancing institutions earlier than others during the early modern period? We address this question through a comparative study of the evolution of French and Ottoman fiscal institutions. During the sixteenth century, both countries made extensive use of tax farming to collect revenue, however, uncertain property rights caused by fiscal pressure led to different paths of institutional change in each state. In France, tax collectors successfully overcame the collective action costs of imposing constraint on the king. In the Ottoman Empire, tax collectors faced prohibitive transaction costs to organizing in a similar manner.

In the 1730s and 1750s the English government proposed to refinance the redeemable debt by “lowering the interest rate.” In the ensuing coordination game among creditors, large investors like the Bank of England could block the policy change by demanding cash. Using 4 percent and 3 percent annuities prices to analyze market expectations, this article studies two refinancing episodes with very different fates. Lord Barnard failed in 1737 because his terms were too strict and financial agents induced a temporary market crash. Lord Pelham succeeded in 1750 because his better terms fit market prices, and interest rates had fallen much faster than expected.

There is a lively ongoing debate, led by Stephen Epstein and Sheilagh Ogilvie, about the economic effects of institutions (particularly guilds) on the pre-industrial economies. The focus of the controversy is an article published by Ogilvie in which she points out that there is a new trend, as Epstein puts it, a ‘modern consensus’, aimed at the ‘rehabilitation of guilds’. Based on her study of the Württemberg worsted industry and supplemented with a variety of examples from all over Europe, she develops a theoretical framework outlining the reasons for the economic inefficiency of the guilds. She challenges the view that guilds had a tangible effect on market failures with regard to (1) product quality, (2) innovation and (3) training. She also examines (4) the link between guilds and social capital. This article suggests that the first two issues are the most relevant for an analysis of the economic effects of the activities of the Silesian merchant guilds on regional growth in the eighteenth century. The focal point of this argument is the difference between craft guilds and merchant guilds and thus refers back to the earliest studies by Ogilvie on corporative institutions.