Review of periodical literature for 2023: (iv) 1700–1850

The topic of industrial revolution and industrial development attracted particular attention in 2023. Using econometric analysis Kelly et al. analysed growth pattern across English counties between 1760s and 1830s using male employment patterns to compare the contrasting explanations of the industrial revolution. They focused on textiles and iron industries and found that mechanical and related skills were crucial. Overall, Kelly et al. found that industrialization occurred in areas with low wages and high mechanical skills, whereas factors such as literacy, banks, and proximity to coal had little explanatory power. The work of Otojanov et al. on the other hand supported the ‘induced innovation’ hypothesis as the driving force of the industrial revolution, as cheap energy and capital induced adoption of labour-saving technologies. However, they also found that until the 1820s labour saving was modest. Galofré-Vilà explored the role of informal networks in spurring innovative activity. The author found that counties with a large number of informal networks such as Freemasonry, friendly societies, libraries, and booksellers were more innovative and produced more patents and exhibits for the 1851 Crystal Palace World's Fair. Several articles focused on industrial development. Sugden et al. explored the role of geographical factors, especially proximity to coal, for the location of woollens industry in the West Riding. They found that the key factors that facilitated the concentration in this region were coal, low cost of living, and running water. Allen studied the coal industry and transport. He found that coal markets were highly integrated, and productivity of coal shipments grew between 1695 and 1824, while the geographical pattern of production remained practically the same. Allen found that among the main reasons for the unchanging geographical pattern was the power of the Northeast coal producers that blocked the building of midland canals that would open up the market. Raman explored the role of the spinner's skill and dexterity for determining the final quality of cotton cloth. She argued that the trajectory of the British cotton industry was shaped by the pursuit of matching the quality of Indian cotton textiles and, unable to match the skills of the Indian artisans, British entrepreneurs turned to mechanization. Research on labour and living standards was also strongly represented. Sheng explored the limitations of the method of inferring time-use from court testimony. The author used Old Bailey records to study women's working time in London in 1750–1830. Sheng found that, unlike previous research that concluded that men worked longer in paid employment, women in his sample spent only slightly more time in paid work in the 1830s than in the 1750s. Sheng further argued that another limitation of the simulated time-use recall method for generating aggregate data on times worked in paid work also lies in the fact that sectoral distribution of subjects in the dataset may be biased. Paker et al. explored hiring and employment histories of over 1000 labourers employed in the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral between 1672 and 1748. They found that over the studied period the hiring strategies shifted towards labour retention and giving priority to core labourers. In this way, the employment strategies at the Cathedral were in stark contrast to the volatility that characterized pre-industrial labour demand. They also found that day wage rates remained flat over the period, but core workers had access to higher earnings, as they were given more days to work through retention and rehiring, and access to more lucrative watchman shifts. Several articles explored living standards and poor relief. Horrell relied on expenditure patterns of ordinary households between 1260 and 1869 to construct a chained-Laspeyres price index. The author used estimates of consumption of food; articles such as fuel and candles, clothing, etc.; housing costs; and durables such as furniture to reconstruct family expenditures in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Horrell’s work shows a switch away from dairy with industrialization, the responsiveness of meat and poultry consumption to economic conditions, and the shift from beer consumption to beverages such as tea from the mid-eighteenth century. The author argued that, although the results are similar to ‘bare bones’ and the ‘respectability basket’, until the eighteenth century the chained-Laspeyres price index is superior in capturing price levels over industrialization. This is because the shift towards spending on imported groceries and manufactured goods introduced a new dynamic that the chained-Laspeyres price index better captures. Bujokova and Desportes explored Scottish poor relief. They presented two case studies of poor relief in Scotland – Lowland and Highland – between c.1720 and 1790. They showed that towards the end of the eighteenth century the system of poor relief transitioned from one based on a community approach rooted in parish and kirk structures to one based on legalism and the concept of rights based social provision. They also highlighted the role of Scottish political economists’ ideas emphasizing progress and economic growth for this shift. Melander and Miotto examined the 1834 New Poor Law reform and its relationship to criminality. They found that the cut to welfare provision imposed by the reform led to increases in criminal activity with a 17.2 per cent increase in non-violent crime as compared with pre-reform yearly levels. Building a dataset of over 250 000 individual criminal charges between 1828 and 1840, they found that welfare cuts were related to a rise in non-violent property crimes, and these crimes occurred more in times of seasonal unemployment. Broadberry et al. presented a new chronology of business cycles for the period 1700–2010. They found that eighteenth-century business cycles had a shorter duration of 3.4 years and amplitude of 3.2 per cent than those in the post-1945 period, which were on average 16 years with an amplitude of 51.9 per cent. They found that the leading cause of economic fluctuations in the eighteenth century were shocks to agricultural production. The most important of these shocks was the Great Frost of 1709–10, which reduced GDP by 20 per cent. Eighteenth-century recessions were also caused by wars and financial crises. In the nineteenth century the importance of sectoral shocks, such as agricultural shocks, somewhat declined, whilst financial crises continued to be an important factor. The importance of wars declined only after the major economic shock brought by the Napoleonic wars. In the nineteenth century, increasing trade and capital liberalization saw shocks to commodity prices and international trade emerge as causes of recessions. In financial history, the focus was on the Bank of England and also on insurance. O'Brien and Palma, using recalibrated financial data, found that the Bank of England, even though it was a private institution, fulfilled a public role over the eighteenth century, well before the emergence of the Bagehot doctrine. The authors argue that, by providing financial intermediation, the Bank contributed to the development of the fiscal-naval state. Importantly, the Bank provided the state with credit, particularly at times when private credit was unavailable. Yet, the Bank had autonomy from the state and was able to deny the provision of funds when such a step undermined its financial safety. Milevsky focused on eighteenth-century debates surrounding choice architecture – how to design investment options in a retirement plan – and on default options and auto-enrolment into insurance schemes. The author studied the case of Adam Smith, who joined the annuity scheme Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund when he was elected professor at the University of Glasgow. Very strongly represented was research on slavery. Absell studied the effects of slave emancipation in the British Empire on the sugar industry in Brazil. The author found that emancipation and subsequent trade liberalization led to increased demand for Brazilian sugar. Brazil thus saw an expansion of exports and its share of the world sugar market grew. Mishler explored enslaved people's engagement with the legal system in cases of legal activism in the British Empire. Roberts used slave ship drug invoices to relate the slave trade and captivity and drugs. Schwarz studied attitudes of important members of the Royal family towards the slave trade and abolition. The author shows the high level of polarization within the national debate on the issue of abolition by emphasizing that even within the Royal family there was a distinct division of opinion, with the Duke of Clarence, later William IV, favouring the slave trade. Radburn studied firms that supplied gunpowder to the slave trade and the stimulus that the trade gave to the explosives industry in Britain. The author emphasized that, as merchants from Bristol and Liverpool supplanted London slave merchants, new powder works opened in the areas focused on satisfying the specific demands from slave trading. However, as Radburn pointed out, only about 12 per cent of the British production of gunpowder was exported to Africa, so although the African market was essential to the firms connected to slave traders in the provinces, this did not apply to the industry as a whole. These firms were highly specialized, and the quality of the product they made precluded, for example, supplying the British state, and so even after abolition the firms continued to supply African markets. Business history was represented by articles on profit, trade, trading, and merchant networks and also had strong links to slavery. O'Sullivan explored the notion and the understanding of profit in the eighteenth century. To do so, the author studied revolts of Cornish copper miners in the late eighteenth century. O'Sullivan underlined that these revolts were not driven by luddism but were instead a protest against stoppages in mining activity undertaken by the owners who sought to decrease the supply of copper in efforts to increase prices and expand their profits whilst threatening the livelihood of the miners. She concluded that profit needs to be studied in a broader framework and in association with power. Ruderman and van Waijenburg examined the Royal African Company's behaviour in its post-monopoly period using letters to slave ship captains between 1685 and 1706. They emphasized the Company's organizational flexibility epitomized in better safeguarding of ships, more efficient management of slave voyages, and better monitoring of agents in Africa whose opportunities for cheating expanded with the opening of the slave trade. Sweet focused on the economic and social history of a British trading family involved principally in the slave trade – the family of Ambrose Lace. The author argues that, unlike some other British families and corporations whose business activities implicated them in slavery, the Laces focused on slavery as their main enterprise. Sweet links Ambrose Lace with the Calabar massacre and retells the subterfuge that Lace and his firm used to dissuade suspicion and to uphold their business reputation. Buckles presented a case study of John Pinney, a Bristol merchant with a plantation in Nevis, and his social network. The author modified historical social network analysis to better accommodate change over time by incorporating a 2-year moving memory total. Buckles used the methodology to study the business network of Pinney, the experience of enslaved people connected to the network, and the role of Pinney's wife Jane in the commercial network. Research on the economic role of women and their experience in the labour market was very strongly represented. Shepard emphasized that distinction between ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ work is a concept that originated in the nineteenth century and would make little sense to early modern women, as care work was often a commercial endeavour. Phillips examined the ways London theatre companies dealt with temporary absences of actresses due to childbearing in the late eighteenth century. The author found that about 20 per cent of actresses under contract with Covent Garden gave birth in the season 1784–5. Phillips found that actresses in major theatres received 1 or 2 months of maternity leave from at least 1770 onwards, and a range of accommodations were available for pregnant actresses. Furthermore, theatre managers also adapted the day-to-day business such as premieres, rehearsals, etc., to accommodate for actresses’ absence. Wakelam argued that the increasing marriage rates and the declining rates of women incarcerated due to indebtedness over the eighteenth century imply that women's economic independence declined. This finding is in contrast to the scholarship that emphasized the continued economic agency of women after marriage. Brock studied the ways in which women shaped private trade of the East India Company. The author reviewed over 1300 petitions addressed to the Company by women between 1600 and 1757 focusing on the various relationships and roles women had. Brock found that about 15 per cent of the petitions sent by women related to private trade in which women were involved and emphasized that women in merchant families had a degree of autonomy and that a woman's credit and trust was often separate from her husband's. Whitehead explored the role letter writing performed in establishing the political authority of elite women and the ways in which letters were used to negotiate patronage. Bolissian used popular health texts to challenge the masculinization hypothesis and claims that women bodies after menopause were perceived by early modern medicine as becoming increasingly masculine. Several papers explored institutions from varied perspectives. Grajzl and Murrell studied caselaw development around land, inheritance, and families, and its impact on economic development. They found that developments in caselaw related to families and inheritance shaped real-income growth. The authors argue that changes in caselaw allowed for new ways of distributing family property and thus enabled new commercial activities to take place. Dimitruk argued that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 expanded access to estate bills to gentry families. Most of the estate bills focused on removing entails and restrictions on the sale of land. The author argued that these acts facilitated Smithian growth in land and credit markets. However, Dimitruk emphasized that passing individual acts was second best to a wholesale reform of the inheritance institutions, as it created opportunities for rent-seeking on the part of members of parliament (MPs) and brokers who prepared the bills for gentry families. Taylor studied tolls on grain – payments made by merchants to market owners for the privilege to sell the grain on their market. The author found that over the eighteenth century tolls became increasingly criticized for obstructing trade, and some markets started to abolish the practice. Skjönsberg used the writings of a Quaker merchant Richard Champion to explore the role of ‘ordinary men’ in shaping eighteenth-century politics. Halliday emphasized English law's capacity for mutation. Lidwell-Durnin explored the role of scientific authority in dispelling public fear in the case of the 1782 London caterpillar outbreak – an invasion of brown-tail moth caterpillars, which prompted fears of famine and plague. Camoglu explored the experience of plague in 1722 London as depicted by Daniel Defoe in a novel A Journal of the Plague Year. The author emphasized the collectively shared experience of the disease against the physical experience of isolation that was an outcome of disease prevention protocols. Maritime history was represented by articles on risk and on institutional frameworks governing shipping. A series of papers on risk and uncertainty in the early modern world were published in the International Journal of Maritime History. Wade et al. argued for the need to reassess the ways that actors in the maritime economy dealt with risk and challenges brought by the natural environment as well as by political and social challenges. They show how this provides new insights into globalization and economic development in the early modern world. Reid explored risk mitigation strategies of British merchant ships and points towards small alterations in the construction of merchant ships that followed the specific demands of the shipyards’ clients connected to cargo capacity, structural integrity, and salaries of sailors. Reid thus empathized that sailing ship technologies remained static as previous research has argued but developed alongside the needs of its clients and with a view of natural hazards and commercial risks that sailing entailed. Dyble and Iodice introduced the AveTransRisk database that captures routes, cargo, weather conditions, ships, seafarers, and transaction costs of maritime trade. Jopling studied English privateering and challenged the perception that privateers believed in the notion of egalitarianism and had an anti-authority view. Instead, the author argued that, even though some elements of democracy were present, fragmentation between the notions of seventeenth-century buccaneers and privateers and eighteenth-century pirates existed, and this undermines the view that there was a universally shared ‘discipline’ observed by all. Tucker examined productivity of British shipping in the Atlantic using records of 25250 records of vessels entering and clearing Chesapeake Bay. The author found that over the eighteenth century port times decreased by about half and attributed this to increased attention to productivity, which was met by improved labour supply for ships. This labour supply was achieved through longer or more coercive contracts and thus decreased freedom for mariners. Articles on the history of economic thought focused on the Scottish Enlightenment and the political economy of population. Pye explored the writing of history in eighteenth-century Scotland and emphasized that, by rejecting the whiggish explanations of social progress and liberation brought by the Glorious Revolution, the Scottish Enlightenment brought focus on new explanations. The Scottish Enlightenment put a special stress on the role of commercial civilization and commerce as a force of modernization and a shift from the feudal past. Smith explored Hobbes’ concepts of the political economy of population. The author emphasized that, although predemographic theorists such as Hobbes had an in state and had them as a system made of based on a division of labour and Hobbes than in Smith points that, even though were not strongly in Hobbes’ he the view in the period that the to strongly – its and quality – to the into a and the social thus also studied eighteenth-century British and association with the expansion of and the Empire and pointed towards the particular of at how English writing depicted the and between the English and based on and The author points towards the English of the as and this freedom as based on and – which with suspicion and as that led to the rise and of the