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Manufactured and Natural Gas Industry

Christopher Castaneda, California State University – Sacramento

The historical gas industry includes two chemically distinct flammable gasses. These are natural gas and several variations of manufactured coal gas. Natural gas is composed primarily of methane, a hydrocarbon composed of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms, or CH4. As a “fossil fuel,” natural gas flowing from the earth is rarely pure. It is commonly associated with petroleum and may contain other hydrocarbons including butane, ethane, and propane. In the United States, substantial commercial natural gas utilization did not begin until after the discovery of large quantities of both crude oil and natural gas in western Pennsylvania during 1859.

Manufactured Gas

Manufactured coal gas (sometimes referred to as “town gas”), and its several variants, was used for lighting throughout most of the nineteenth century. Consumers also used this gas as a fuel for heating and cooking from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in many locations where natural gas was unavailable. Generally, a rather simple process of heating coal, or other organic substance, produces a flammable gas. The resulting gas (a combination of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and other gasses depending upon the exact process) was stored in a “holder” or “gasometer” for later distribution. Coal based “gas works” produced manufactured gas from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Commercial utilization of manufactured coal gas occurred prior to that of natural gas due to the comparative ease of producing coal gas. The first manufactured coal gas light demonstration in the United States apparently took place in 1802. Benjamin Henfrey of Northumberland, Pennsylvania, used a “thermo-lamp,” reportedly based on European design, with which he produced a “beautiful and brilliant light,” Despite Henfrey’s successful demonstration in this case and others, he was unable to attract financial support to develop further his gas light endeavors.

Other experimenters followed, but the most successful were several members of the Peale family. Charles Willson Peale, the family patriarch, Revolutionary War colonel, and George Washington’s portraitist, opened a museum in Independence Hall in Philadelphia and subsequently transferred control of it to his son Rubens. Seeking ways to attract paying visitors, Rubens decided to use gaslights in the museum. With technical assistance from chemist Benjamin Kugler in 1814, Rubens installed gaslights. He operated and maintained the museum’s gas works for the next several years until his fear that a fire, or explosion, might destroy the building caused him to disassemble the equipment.

Rembrandt Peale in Baltimore

In the meantime, Rembrandt Peale, another of Charles’ sons, opened a new Peale Museum in Baltimore. The Baltimore museum was similar to his father’s Philadelphia museum in that it contained both works of art and specimens of nature. Rembrandt understood that his museum’s success depended upon its ability to attract paying visitors, and he installed gaslights in the Baltimore museum.

The first advertisement for the museum’s new gas light attraction appeared in the “American and Commercial Daily Advertiser” on June 13, 1816. The ad stated:

Gas Lights – Without Oil, Tallow, Wicks or Smoke. It is not necessary to invite attention to the gas lights by which my salon of paintings is now illuminated; those who have seen the ring beset with gems of light are sufficiently disposed to spread their reputation; the purpose of this notice is merely to say that the Museum will be illuminated every evening until the public curiosity be gratified.

Controlled by a valve attached to the wall in a side room on the second floor next to the lecture hall, Rembrandt Peale dazzled onlookers with his “magic ring” of one hundred burners. The valve allowed Rembrandt to vary the luminosity from dim to very bright. The successful demonstration of gas lighting at the museum underscored to Rembrandt the immense potential for the widespread application of gas lighting.

In his successful gas light demonstration, Rembrandt recognized an opportunity to develop a commercial gasworks for Baltimore. Rembrandt had purchased the patent for Dr. Kugler’s gas light method, and he organized a group of men to join him in a commercial gas lighting venture. These men established the Gas Light Company of Baltimore (GLCB) on June 17, 1816. On February 7, 1817, the GLCB lit its first street lamp at Market and Lemon Streets. The Belvidere Theater located directly across the street from the gas works became the first building illuminated by GLCB, and J. T. Cohen who lived on North Charles Street owned the first private home lit by gas. Rembrandt’s role at GLCB soon diminished, in large part because he lacked understanding of both business and relevant technological issues. Rembrandt was ultimately forced out of the company, and he continued his career as an artist.

The Gas Light Company of Baltimore was the first commercial gas light company in the United States. Other entrepreneurs soon thereafter formed gas light firms for their cities and towns. By 1850, about 50 urban areas in the United States had a manufactured gas works. Generally, gas lighting was available only in medium sized or larger cities, and it was used for lighting streets, commercial establishments, and some residences. Despite the rapid spread of gas lighting, it was expensive and beyond the means of most Americans. Other than gas, whale oil and tallow candles continued to be the most popular fuels for lighting.

1840s-50s: Use of Manufactured Gas Spreads Rapidly

Manufactured gas utilization for lighting and heating spread rapidly throughout the nation during the 1840s and 1850s. By the mid-nineteenth century, New York City ranked first in manufactured gas utilization by consuming approximately 600 million cubic feet (MMcf) per year, compared to Philadelphia’s consumption of approximately 300 MMcf per year.

Developments in portable gas lighting allowed for gas lamp installations in some passenger railroad cars. In the 1850s, the New Jersey Railroad’s service between New York City and Philadelphia offered gas lighting. Coal gas was stored in a wrought-iron cylinder attached to the undercarriage of the passenger cars. Each cylinder contained enough gas to light the two burners per car for fifteen hours. The New Haven Railroad also used gas lighting in the smoking cars of its night express. Each car had two burners that together consumed 7 cubic feet (cf) of gas per hour.

Challenge from Electric Lighting and Consolidation

Although kerosene and tallow candles competed with coal gas for the nineteenth century lighting market, it was electricity that forced permanent restructuring on the manufactured gas industry. In the early 1880s, Thomas Edison promoted electricity as both a safer and cleaner energy source than coal gas which had a strong odor and left soot around the burners. However, the superior quality of electric light and its rapid accessibility after 1882 forced gas light companies to begin promoting manufactured gas for cooking instead of lighting.

By the late nineteenth century, independent gas distribution firms began to merge. Competitive pressures from electric power, in particular, forced gas firms located in the same urban area to consider consolidating operations. By the early twentieth century many coal gas companies also began merging with electric power firms. These business combinations resulted in the formation of large public utility holding companies, many of which were referred to collectively as the “Power Trust.” These large utility firms controlled urban manufactured and natural gas production, transmission, and distribution as well as the same for electric power.

Manufactured gas continued to be used well into the twentieth century in many urban areas that did not have access to natural gas. Between 1930 and the mid-1950s, however, utility companies began converting their manufactured gas plants to natural gas, as the natural fuel became available through newly built long-distance gas pipelines.

Natural Gas

While the manufactured gas business expanded rapidly in the United States during the nineteenth century, natural gas was then neither widely available nor easy to utilize. During the Colonial era, it was the subject more of curiosity than utility. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson observed natural gas “springs” in present-day West Virginia. However, the first sustained commercial use of natural gas, albeit relatively minimal, occurred in Fredonia, New York in 1825.

After discovery of large quantities of both oil and natural gas at Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, natural gas found a growing market. The large iron and steel works in Pittsburgh contracted for natural gas supply as this fuel offered a stable temperature for industrial heat. Residents and commercial establishments in Pittsburgh also used natural gas for heating purposes. In 1884, the New York Times proclaimed that natural gas would help reduce Pittsburgh’s unpleasant coal smoke pollution.

1920s: Development of Southwestern Fields

The discovery of massive southwestern natural gas fields and technological advancements in long distance pipeline construction dramatically altered the twentieth century gas industry market structure. In 1918, drillers discovered huge natural gas fields in the Panhandle area of North Texas. In 1922, a crew located a large gas well in Kansas that became the first one in the Hugoton field, located in the common Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas border area (generally referred to as the mid-continent area). The combined Panhandle/Hugoton Field became the nation’s largest gas producing area comprising more than 1.6 million acres. It contained as much as 117 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas and accounted for approximately 16 percent of total U.S. reserves in the twentieth century.

As oil drillers had done earlier in Appalachia, they initially exploited the Panhandle Field for petroleum only while allowing an estimated 1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas to escape into the atmosphere. As new markets emerged for the burgeoning natural gas supply, the commercial value of southwestern natural gas attracted entrepreneurial interest and bolstered the fortunes of existing firms. These discoveries led to the establishment of many new companies including the Lone Star Gas Company, Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company, Kansas Natural Gas Company, United Gas Company, and others, some of which evolved into large firms.

Pipeline Advances

The sheer volume of the southwestern fields emphasized the need for advancements in pipeline technology to transport the natural gas to distant urban markets. In particular, new welding technologies allowed pipeline builders in the 1920s to construct longer lines. In the early years of the decade, oxy-acetylene torches were used for welding, and in 1923 electric arc welding was successfully used on thin-walled, high tensile strength, large-diameter pipelines necessary for long-distance compressed gas transmission. Improved welding techniques made pipe joints stronger than the pipe itself; seamless pipe became available for gas pipelines beginning in 1925. Along with enhancements in pipeline construction materials and techniques, gas compressor and ditching machine technology improved as well. Long-distance pipelines became a significant segment of the gas industry beginning in the 1920s.

These new technologies made possible the transportation of southwestern natural gas to distant markets. Until the late 1920s, most interstate natural gas transportation took place in the Northeast, and it was based upon Appalachian production. In 1921, natural gas produced in West Virginia accounted for approximately 65% of interstate gas transportation while only 2% of interstate gas originated in Texas. The discovery of southwestern gas fields occurred as Appalachian gas reserves and production began to diminish. The southwestern gas fields quickly overshadowed those of the historically important Appalachian area.

Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, the combination of abundant and relatively inexpensive southwestern natural gas production, improved pipeline technology, and increasing nation-wide natural gas demand stimulated the creation of a new interstate gas pipeline industry. Metropolitan manufactured gas distribution companies, typically part of large holding companies, financed most of the pipelines built during this first era of rapid pipeline construction. Long distance lines built during this era included the Northern Natural Gas Company, Panhandle Eastern Pipe Line Company, and the Natural Gas Pipeline Company.

Midwestern urban utilities that began receiving natural gas typically mixed it with existing manufactured gas production. This mixed gas had a higher Btu content than straight manufactured gas. Eventually, with access to reliable supplies of natural gas, all U.S. gas utilities converted their distribution systems to straight natural gas.

Samuel Insull

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the most well-known public utility figure was Samuel Insull, a former personal secretary of Thomas Edison. Insull’s public utility empire headquartered in Chicago did not fare well in the economic climate that followed the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash. His gas and electric power empire crumbled, and he fled the country. The collapse of the Insull empire symbolized the end of a long period of unrestrained and rapid growth in the U.S. public utility industry.

Federal Regulation

In the meantime, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a massive investigation of the nation’s public utilities, and its work culminated in New Deal legislation that imposed federal regulation on the gas and electric industries. The Public Utility Holding Company Act (1935) broke apart the multi-tiered gas and electric power companies while the Federal Power Act (1935) and the Natural Gas Act (1938), respectively authorized the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to regulate the interstate transmission and sale of electric power and natural gas.

During the Depression the gas industry also suffered its worst tragedy in the twentieth century. In 1937 at New London, Texas, an undetected natural gas leak at the Consolidated High School resulted in a tremendous explosion that virtually destroyed the Consolidated High School, 15 minutes before the end of the school day. Initial estimates of 500 dead were later revised to 294. Texas Governor Allred appointed a military court of inquiry that determined an accumulation of odorless gas in the school’s basement, possibly ignited by the spark of an electric light switch, created the explosion. This terrible tragedy was marked in irony. On top of the wreckage, a broken blackboard contained these words apparently written before the explosion:

Oil and natural gas are East Texas’ greatest mineral blessings. Without them this school would not be here, and none of us would be here learning our lessons.

Although many gas firms used odorants, the New London explosion resulted in the implementation of new natural gas odorization regulations in Texas.

The New Deal era regulatory regime did not appear to constrain gas industry growth during the post-World War II era, as entrepreneurs organized several long-distance gas pipeline firms to connect southwestern gas supply with northeastern markets. Both during and immediately after World War II, a second era of rapid gas industry growth occurred. Pipeline firms targeted northeastern markets such as Philadelphia, New York and Boston, very large urban areas previously without natural gas supply. These cities subsequently converted their distribution systems from manufactured coal gas to the more efficient natural gas.

In the 1950s, the beginnings of a national market for natural gas had emerged. During the last half of the twentieth century, natural gas consumption in the U.S. ranged from about 20-30% of total national energy utilization. However, the era of natural gas abundance ended in the late 1960s.

1960s to 1980s: Price Controls, Shortages, and Decontrol

The first overt sign of serious industry trouble emerged in the late 1960s when natural gas shortages first appeared. Economists almost uniformly blamed the shortages on gas pricing regulations instituted by the so-called Phillips Decision of 1954. This law extended the FPC’s price setting authority over the natural gas producers that sold gas to interstate pipelines for resale. The FPC’s consumerist orientation meant that it had held gas prices low and producers lost their incentive to develop new gas supply for the interstate market.

The 1973 OPEC oil embargo exacerbated the growing shortage problem as factories switched boiler fuels from petroleum to natural gas. Cold winters further strained the nation’s gas industry. The resulting energy crisis compelled consumer groups and politicians to call for changes in the regulatory system that had constricted gas production. In 1978, a new comprehensive federal gas policy dictated by the Natural Gas Policy Act (NGPA) created a new federal agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to assume regulatory authority for the interstate gas industry.

The NGPA also included a complex system of natural gas price decontrols that sought to stimulate domestic natural gas production. These measures soon resulted in the creation of a nationwide gas supply “bubble” and lower prices. The lower prices wreaked additional havoc on the gas pipeline industry since most interstate lines were purchasing gas at high prices under long-term contracts. Large gas purchasers, particularly utilities, subsequently sought to circumvent their high-priced gas contracts with pipelines and purchase natural gas on the emerging spot market.

Once again, dysfunction of the regulated market forced government to act in order to try and bring market balance to the gas industry. Beginning in the mid-1980s, a number of FERC Orders culminating in Order 636 (and amendments) transformed interstate pipelines into virtual common carriers. This industry structural change allowed gas utilities and end-users to contract directly with producers for gas purchases. FERC continued to regulate the gas pipelines’ transportation function.

The Future

Natural gas is a limited resource. While it is the most clean burning of all fossil fuels, it exists in limited supply. Estimates of natural gas availability vary widely from hundreds to thousands of years. Such estimates are dependent upon the technology that must be developed in order to drill for gas in more difficult geographical conditions, find gas where it is expected to be located, and transport it to the consumer. Methane can also be extracted from coal, peat, and oil shale, and if these sources can be successfully utilized for methane production the world’s methane supply will be extended another 500 or more years.

For the foreseeable future, natural gas will continue to be used primarily for residential and commercial heating, electric power generation, and industrial heat processes. The market for methane as a transportation fuel will undoubtedly grow, but improvements in electric vehicles may well dampen any dramatic increase in natural gas powered engines. The environmental characteristics of natural gas will certainly retain this fuel’s position at the forefront of all fossil fuels. In a broadly historical and environmental perspective, we should recognize that in a period of a few hundred years, human society will have burned as fuel for lighting, cooking and heating a very large percentage of the earth’s natural gas supply.

References:

Castaneda, Christopher J. Invisible Fuel: Manufactured and Natural Gas in America, 1800-2000. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

Herbert, John H. Clean Cheap Heat: The Development of Residential Markets for Natural Gas in the United States. New York: Praeger, 1992.

MacAvoy, Paul W. The Natural Gas Market: Sixty Years of Regulation and Deregulation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Rose, Mark H. Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Tussing, Arlon R. and Bob Tippee. The Natural Gas Industry: Evolution, Structure, and Economics, second edition. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1984.

Citation: Castaneda, Christopher. “Manufactured and Natural Gas Industry”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. September 3, 2001. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/manufactured-and-natural-gas-industry/

Fair Housing Laws

William J. Collins, Vanderbilt University

Before the Civil Rights Movement, housing market discrimination was common and blatant, especially against African Americans but also against Jews and other minority groups.1 This essay focuses on the treatment of African Americans, but readers should keep in the mind the pervasiveness of housing discrimination around 1950. By “discrimination,” I mean (as usual in economics) the differential treatment of market participants on the basis of their race or ethnicity — for example, the refusal to rent an apartment to a black family that is willing and able to pay a rental price that would be acceptable if the family were white. Proponents of fair housing laws, at the local, state, and federal levels, hoped that the laws would effectively limit housing market discrimination.

Around mid-century, many barriers inhibited African Americans’ residential mobility, including racially restrictive covenants among white property owners, biased lending practices of banks and government institutions, strong social norms against selling or renting property to blacks outside established black neighborhoods, and harassment of blacks seeking residence in otherwise white neighborhoods (Myrdal 1944, Abrams 1955, Meyer 2000). Since then, the potentially adverse effects of housing discrimination on blacks’ accumulation of wealth through housing equity and on blacks’ access to high quality schools, jobs, and public goods have been widely discussed (Kain 1968, Oliver and Shapiro 1995, Yinger 2001). A related literature has sought to understand the apparent connection between residential segregation, in part a legacy of housing market discrimination (Kain and Quigley 1975), and a variety of adverse socioeconomic outcomes (Massey and Denton 1993, Cutler and Glaeser 1997, Collins and Margo 2000).

Given these concerns, it is not surprising that dismantling housing market discrimination has been among the top priorities of civil rights groups and urban policymakers for decades. Starting in 1959, states began implementing fair housing laws to curb discriminatory practices by sellers, renters, real estate agents, builders, and lenders. In 1968, almost immediately after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., the United States Congress passed the Fair Housing Act. The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 substantially broadened federal enforcement powers (Yinger 1999).

Fair housing laws are commonly placed among the Civil Rights Movement’s central legislative achievements. Unfortunately, we still do not have convincing measures of the laws’ impact on blacks’ housing market outcomes. It is clear that the laws did not completely eliminate discriminatory practices, let alone the residential patterns that such practices had promoted. The more relevant open questions concern how much headway the laws made on discriminatory practices and segregation, and especially, whether minority families improved their housing situation because of the laws’ implementation. On the basis of the existing evidence, it would be difficult to argue that the laws made a large direct contribution to improvements in African Americans’ housing market outcomes (or those of other groups protected by the laws). One could argue, however, that fair housing was one element of a larger campaign that successfully changed discriminatory norms and policies.

Fair Housing’s Origins and Operation

The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 remains a highly visible accomplishment of the Civil Rights Movement. It is important to note, however, that the basic ideas that underpinned the federal legislation emerged long before 1968. State and local governments incrementally adopted nondiscriminatory standards for public housing starting in the late 1930s. The application of anti-discrimination policy to the private housing market, however, was among the Civil Rights Movement’s least popular initiatives among whites, and as a result, fair housing legislation lagged years behind fair-employment and public accommodations laws (Lockard 1968). On one level, this reflected whites’ concern about property values and their desire to avoid interracial social contact. On another level, it reflected the rhetorical strength of the argument that the government ought not infringe on perceived private property rights, particularly with respect to homes.

Nevertheless, as black migration to central-city neighborhoods continued through the 1950s, and as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, fair housing initiatives rose toward the top of the Movement’s legislative agenda. In this regard, especially when considering state legislation outside the South, it is important to note that the efforts of African-American groups were complemented by those of Jewish groups and labor unions (Lockard 1968, Collins 2004b). In 1957, New York City adopted the nation’s first fair housing ordinance which served as a model for several of the subsequent state laws and was itself based on existing fair-employment statutes. While granting exceptions for the rental of rooms in or attached to owner-occupied homes (the “Mrs. Murphy rule”), the ordinance (as amended in 1962) stated that:

“no owner, . . . real estate broker, . . . or other person having the right to sell, rent, lease, . . . or otherwise dispose of a housing accommodation . . . shall refuse to sell, rent, lease . . . or otherwise deny or withhold from any person or group of persons such housing accommodations, or represent that such housing accommodations are not available for inspection, when in fact they are so available, because of the race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry of such persons” (Housing and Home Finance Agency 1964, p. 287). It also barred discrimination in the terms of sale or rental, advertisements expressing discriminatory preferences, and discrimination by banks and lending institutions. Finally, it outlined a procedure for handling complaints and enforcing the policy.

The state fair housing statutes initially had varying degrees of coverage. Almost all states included a Mrs. Murphy rule. More importantly, some states also exempted activities surrounding the sale or rental of owner-occupied single-family homes. Others allowed the owner-occupiers of homes to discriminate while simultaneously prohibiting discriminatory acts by real-estate brokers, advertisers, lenders, and builders. By 1968, several states had converged to a standard that covered virtually all sales and rentals (except those by Mrs. Murphy). In general, these state laws contained stronger enforcement mechanisms than the federal legislation passed in that year.

Following procedures established to enforce the earlier fair-employment laws, the administrative agencies charged with enforcing the fair housing laws did so, for the most part, by responding to individual complaints rather than by seeking out discriminatory practices. When presented with a viable complaint (i.e., within the law’s coverage), the agency would conduct an investigation. If evidence of discrimination was found, the agency’s representatives would attempt to persuade the discriminatory party to comply with the law. If the discriminatory party refused to cooperate, a public hearing could be held, a cease and desist order and/or fine could be issued, court proceedings could be undertaken, and (if appropriate) a real estate agent’s license could be suspended. Of course, all of this would take time, and households attempting to move might not have been willing or able to wait for redress. Beyond their enforcement role, fair housing agencies often undertook broad educational campaigns and offered advice to community leaders and housing industry participants regarding residential integration.

The effectiveness of this approach in dealing with housing market discrimination or, more to the point, in improving blacks’ housing market outcomes, is unclear a priori. The anti-discrimination measures were weak in the sense that the agencies’ first step was always to seek “conciliation” rather than punishment. Thus, even if caught, there was no immediate penalty and perhaps little incentive to adjust discriminatory policies until confronted by the agency. Even so, the passage of the laws and the threat of sanctions against resistant builders, lenders, or real estate agents might have facilitated conciliation procedures once initiated, might have modified discriminatory behavior immediately (rendering complaints unnecessary), and might have provided a convenient excuse for those who wished to do business with blacks but felt constrained by community norms. Moreover, the speed with which some neighborhoods “tipped” from white to black might have amplified the effects from enforcement efforts. Finally, it is possible that the state agency’s educational campaigns contributed to changing discriminatory norms. Whether the fair housing laws actually contributed to the observed improvement in blacks’ housing market outcomes is discussed below.

In 1966 and 1967, Congress failed to enact federal fair housing legislation, and its doing so in 1968 surprised many observers (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1968). Southern opposition to the law was strong, and therefore, attaining cloture on a filibuster in the Senate (then requiring a 2/3 majority of votes) was a key step in moving the legislation forward. The Senate finally passed the bill on March 11, 1968; the House passed the bill on April 10 despite opposition mobilized by the National Association of Real Estate Boards. All of this occurred against a background of extraordinary urban civil disturbances from the mid to late 1960s, including an outburst after Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4.

The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 initially exempted privately owned, single-family housing. The policy’s coverage was extended over the next two years, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) enforcement powers remained severely circumscribed (Yinger 1999). The legislation allowed only informal, clandestine efforts at persuasion. If persuasion failed, the complainant was then free to sue for an injunction in federal court, but this was obviously cumbersome, costly, and time consuming. The federal law also specified that a state with its own fair housing law had initial jurisdiction over any complaints originating there. Thus, the original federal law was no stronger than, and in many instances weaker than, existing state legislation.

Fair Housing’s Impact and Extension

Since 1960, blacks’ average housing market outcomes have improved relative to whites’, at least according to broad and commonly referenced measures such as home ownership rates and property values. Moreover, in the 1960s middle- and upper-class black families moved to suburban neighborhoods in larger numbers than ever before, and the average level of residential segregation within cities began to decline around 1970 (Cutler, Glaeser, and Vigdor 1999). These developments are consistent with the presence of a significant fair housing policy effect, but they are far from a direct evaluation of the hypothesis that fair housing laws helped improve blacks’ housing market outcomes.

How could the fair housing laws have contributed to improvement in blacks’ housing outcomes? The laws were intended to lower barriers to blacks’ entry into predominantly white neighborhoods and new housing developments, and to curb discriminatory treatment of blacks seeking mortgages, thereby lowering the effective cost of housing and expanding minorities’ set of housing opportunities. If this mechanism worked as intended, one would expect blacks to increase their housing consumption relative to whites, all other things being equal. One might also expect to see more racial integration in neighborhoods, though in theory, this need not follow. Of course, given that the laws’ enforcement mechanisms were far from draconian and that discriminatory biases in housing markets were deeply rooted, it is possible that the laws had no detectable effect whatsoever.

Comparing similar states that happened to have different fair housing policies before federal legislation was passed, Collins (2004a) finds little statistical evidence to support the hypothesis that state-level fair housing laws made an economically significant contribution to African-Americans’ housing market outcomes in the 1960s. Others (e.g., Yinger 1998) have suggested that a substantial degree of housing market discrimination still exists, though almost certainly less than before the passage of fair housing laws. The difficult measurement problem is figuring out how much of the perceived decline in discrimination or improvement in blacks’ housing is attributable to the anti-discrimination laws and how much is attributable to more general changes in discriminatory sentiment and in the economic resources of African Americans.

Since 1968, the federal government has made several extensions to its original fair housing policy. Among the most important are Fair Housing Assistance Program (1984), the Fair Housing Initiatives Program (1986), and amendments to the Fair Housing Act (1988). Separate but relevant legislation that may have had implications for minority home ownership includes the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (1975, amended in 1989) and the Community Reinvestment Act (1977). Readers are referred to Galster (1999) and Yinger (1999) for further discussion of fair housing policy in contemporary housing markets.

References

Abrams, Charles. Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955.

Collins, William J. “The Housing Market Impact of State-Level Anti-Discrimination Laws, 1960-1970.” Journal of Urban Economics 55, no. 3 (2004a): 534-564.

Collins, William J. “The Political Economy of Fair Housing Laws, 1950-1968.” Cambridge, MA: NBER Working Paper 10610 (2004b), available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w10610.

Collins, Willam J. and Robert A. Margo. “When Did Ghettos Go Bad? Residential Segregation and Socioeconomic Outcomes.” Economics Letters 69 (2000): 239-243.

Congressional Quarterly Almanac. “Congress Enacts Open Housing Legislation.” CQ Almanac 1968. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly News Features (1968): 152-168.

Cutler, David M. and Edward L. Glaeser. “Are Ghettos Good or Bad?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (1997): 827-872.

Cutler, David M, Edward L. Glaeser, and Jacob L. Vigdor. “The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto.” Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999): 455-506.

Galster, George C. “The Evolving Challenges of Fair Housing since 1968: Open Housing, Integration, and the Reduction of Ghettoization.” Cityscape 4 (1999): 123-138.

Housing and Home Finance Agency. Fair Housing Laws: Summaries and Text of State and Municipal Laws. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964.

Kain, John F. “Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 82 (1968): 175-197.

Kain, John F. and John M. Quigley, Housing Markets and Racial Discrimination: A Microeconomic Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

Lockard, Duane. Toward Equal Opportunity: A Study of State and Local Antidiscrimination Laws. New York: Macmillan Company, 1968.

Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Meyer, Stephen G. As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, 1962 (originally 1944).

Oliver, Melvin L. and Thomas M. Shapiro. Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Yinger, John. “Housing Discrimination and Residential Segregation as Causes of Poverty.” In Understanding Poverty, edited by S.H. Danziger and R.H. Haveman, 359-391. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Yinger, John. “Sustaining the Fair Housing Act.” Cityscape 4 (1999): 93-105.

Yinger, John. “Evidence on Discrimination in Consumer Markets.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (1998): 23-40.

1This essay draws heavily on Collins 2004a and 2004b.

Citation: Collins, William. “Fair Housing Laws”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. February 10, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/fair-housing-laws/

The Dutch Economy in the Golden Age (16th – 17th Centuries)

Donald J. Harreld, Brigham Young University

In just over one hundred years, the provinces of the Northern Netherlands went from relative obscurity as the poor cousins of the industrious and heavily urbanized Southern Netherlands provinces of Flanders and Brabant to the pinnacle of European commercial success. Taking advantage of a favorable agricultural base, the Dutch achieved success in the fishing industry and the Baltic and North Sea carrying trade during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries before establishing a far-flung maritime empire in the seventeenth century.

The Economy of the Netherlands up to the Sixteenth Century

In many respects the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic inherited the economic successes of the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands. For centuries, Flanders and to a lesser extent Brabant had been at the forefront of the medieval European economy. An indigenous cloth industry was present throughout all areas of Europe in the early medieval period, but Flanders was the first to develop the industry with great intensity. A tradition of cloth manufacture in the Low Countries existed from antiquity when the Celts and then the Franks continued an active textile industry learned from the Romans.

As demand grew early textile production moved from its rural origins to the cities and had become, by the twelfth century, an essentially urban industry. Native wool could not keep up with demand, and the Flemings imported English wool in great quantities. The resulting high quality product was much in demand all over Europe, from Novgorod to the Mediterranean. Brabant also rose to an important position in textile industry, but only about a century after Flanders. By the thirteenth century the number of people engaged in some aspect of the textile industry in the Southern Netherlands had become more than the total engaged in all other crafts. It is possible that this emphasis on cloth manufacture was the reason that the Flemish towns ignored the emerging maritime shipping industry which was eventually dominated by others, first the German Hanseatic League, and later Holland and Zeeland.

By the end of the fifteenth century Antwerp in Brabant had become the commercial capital of the Low Countries as foreign merchants went to the city in great numbers in search of the high-value products offered at the city’s fairs. But the traditional cloths manufactured in Flanders had lost their allure for most European markets, particularly as the English began exporting high quality cloths rather than the raw materials the Flemish textile industry depended on. Many textile producers turned to the lighter weight and cheaper “new draperies.” Despite protectionist measures instituted in the mid-fifteenth century, English cloth found an outlet in Antwerp ‘s burgeoning markets. By the early years of the sixteenth century the Portuguese began using Antwerp as an outlet for their Asian pepper and spice imports, and the Germans continued to bring their metal products (copper and silver) there. For almost a hundred years Antwerp remained the commercial capital of northern Europe, until the religious and political events of the 1560s and 1570s intervened and the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule toppled the commercial dominance of Antwerp and the southern provinces. Within just a few years of the Fall of Antwerp (1585), scores of merchants and mostly Calvinist craftsmen fled the south for the relative security of the Northern Netherlands.

The exodus from the south certainly added to the already growing population of the north. However, much like Flanders and Brabant, the northern provinces of Holland and Zeeland were already populous and heavily urbanized. The population of these maritime provinces had been steadily growing throughout the sixteenth century, perhaps tripling between the first years of the sixteenth century to about 1650. The inland provinces grew much more slowly during the same period. Not until the eighteenth century, when the Netherlands as a whole faced declining fortunes would the inland provinces begin to match the growth of the coastal core of the country.

Dutch Agriculture

During the fifteenth century, and most of the sixteenth century, the Northern Netherlands provinces were predominantly rural compared to the urbanized southern provinces. Agriculture and fishing formed the basis for the Dutch economy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of the characteristics of Dutch agriculture during this period was its emphasis on intensive animal husbandry. Dutch cattle were exceptionally well cared for and dairy produce formed a significant segment of the agricultural sector. During the seventeenth century, as the Dutch urban population saw dramatic growth many farmers also turned to market gardening to supply the cities with vegetables.

Some of the impetus for animal production came from the trade in slaughter cattle from Denmark and Northern Germany. Holland was an ideal area for cattle feeding and fattening before eventual slaughter and export to the cities of the Southern provinces. The trade in slaughter cattle expanded from about 1500 to 1660, but protectionist measures on the part of Dutch authorities who wanted to encourage the fattening of home-bred cattle ensured a contraction of the international cattle trade between 1660 and 1750.

Although agriculture made up the largest segment of the Dutch economy, cereal production in the Netherlands could not keep up with demand particularly by the seventeenth century as migration from the southern provinces contributed to population increases. The provinces of the Low Countries traditionally had depended on imported grain from the south (France and the Walloon provinces) and when crop failures interrupted the flow of grain from the south, the Dutch began to import grain from the Baltic. Baltic grain imports experienced sustained growth from about the middle of the sixteenth century to roughly 1650 when depression and stagnation characterized the grain trade into the eighteenth century.

Indeed, the Baltic grain trade (see below), a major source of employment for the Dutch, not only in maritime transport but in handling and storage as well, was characterized as the “mother trade.” In her recent book on the Baltic grain trade, Mijla van Tielhof defined “mother trade” as the oldest and most substantial trade with respect to ships, sailors and commodities for the Northern provinces. Over the long term, the Baltic grain trade gave rise to shipping and trade on other routes as well as to manufacturing industries.

Dutch Fishing

Along with agriculture, the Dutch fishing industry formed part of the economic base of the northern Netherlands. Like the Baltic grain trade, it also contributed to the rise of Dutch the shipping industry.

The backbone of the fishing industry was the North Sea herring fishery, which was quite advanced and included a form of “factory” ship called the herring bus. The herring bus was developed in the fifteenth century in order to allow the herring catch to be processed with salt at sea. This permitted the herring ship to remain at sea longer and increased the range of the herring fishery. Herring was an important export product for the Netherlands particularly to inland areas, but also to the Baltic offsetting Baltic grain imports.

The herring fishery reached its zenith in the first half of the seventeenth century. Estimates put the size of the herring fleet at roughly 500 busses and the catch at about 20,000 to 25,000 lasts (roughly 33,000 metric tons) on average each year in the first decades of the seventeenth century. The herring catch as well as the number of busses began to decline in the second half of the seventeenth century, collapsing by about the mid-eighteenth century when the catch amounted to only about 6000 lasts. This decline was likely due to competition resulting from a reinvigoration of the Baltic fishing industry that succeeded in driving prices down, as well as competition within the North Sea by the Scottish fishing industry.

The Dutch Textile Industry

The heartland for textile manufacturing had been Flanders and Brabant until the onset of the Dutch Revolt around 1568. Years of warfare continued to devastate the already beaten down Flemish cloth industry. Even the cloth producing towns of the Northern Netherlands that had been focusing on producing the “new draperies” saw their output decline as a result of wartime interruptions. But textiles remained the most important industry for the Dutch Economy.

Despite the blow it suffered during the Dutch revolt, Leiden’s textile industry, for instance, rebounded in the early seventeenth century – thanks to the influx of textile workers from the Southern Netherlands who emigrated there in the face of religious persecution. But by the 1630s Leiden had abandoned the heavy traditional wool cloths in favor of a lighter traditional woolen (laken) as well as a variety of other textiles such as says, fustians, and camlets. Total textile production increased from 50,000 or 60,000 pieces per year in the first few years of the seventeenth century to as much as 130,000 pieces per year during the 1660s. Leiden’s wool cloth industry probably reached peak production by 1670. The city’s textile industry was successful because it found export markets for its inexpensive cloths in the Mediterranean, much to the detriment of Italian cloth producers.

Next to Lyons, Leiden may have been Europe’s largest industrial city at end of seventeenth century. Production was carried out through the “putting out” system, whereby weavers with their own looms and often with other dependent weavers working for them, obtained imported raw materials from merchants who paid the weavers by the piece for their work (the merchant retained ownership of the raw materials throughout the process). By the end of the seventeenth century foreign competition threatened the Dutch textile industry. Production in many of the new draperies (says, for example) decreased considerably throughout the eighteenth century; profits suffered as prices declined in all but the most expensive textiles. This left the production of traditional woolens to drive what was left of Leiden’s textile industry in the eighteenth century.

Although Leiden certainly led the Netherlands in the production of wool cloth, it was not the only textile producing city in the United Provinces. Amsterdam, Utrecht, Delft and Haarlem, among others, had vibrant textile industries. Haarlem, for example, was home to an important linen industry during the first half of the seventeenth century. Like Leiden’s cloth industry, Haarlem’s linen industry benefited from experienced linen weavers who migrated from the Southern Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt. Haarlem’s hold on linen production, however, was due more to its success in linen bleaching and finishing. Not only was locally produced linen finished in Haarlem, but linen merchants from other areas of Europe sent their products to Haarlem for bleaching and finishing. As linen production moved to more rural areas as producers sought to decrease costs in the second half of the seventeenth century, Haarlem’s industry went into decline.

Other Dutch Industries

Industries also developed as a result of overseas colonial trade, in particular Amsterdam’s sugar refining industry. During the sixteenth century, Antwerp had been Europe’s most important sugar refining city, a title it inherited from Venice once the Atlantic sugar islands began to surpass Mediterranean sugar production. Once Antwerp fell to Spanish troops during the Revolt, however, Amsterdam replaced it as Europe’s dominant sugar refiner. The number of sugar refineries in Amsterdam increased from about 3 around 1605 to about 50 by 1662, thanks in no small part to Portuguese investment. Dutch merchants purchased huge amounts of sugar from both the French and the English islands in the West Indies, along with a great deal of tobacco. Tobacco processing became an important Amsterdam industry in the seventeenth century employing large numbers of workers and leading to attempts to develop domestic tobacco cultivation.

With the exception of some of the “colonial” industries (sugar, for instance), Dutch industry experienced a period of stagnation after the 1660s and eventual decline beginning around the turn of the eighteenth century. It would seem that as far as industrial production is concerned, the Dutch Golden Age lasted from the 1580s until about 1670. This period was followed by roughly one hundred years of declining industrial production. De Vries and van der Woude concluded that Dutch industry experienced explosive growth after 1580s because of the migration of skilled labor and merchant capital from the southern Netherlands at roughly the time Antwerp fell to the Spanish and because of the relative advantage continued warfare in the south gave to the Northern Provinces. After the 1660s most Dutch industries experienced either steady or steep decline as many Dutch industries moved from the cities into the countryside, while some (particularly the colonial industries) remained successful well into the eighteenth century.

Dutch Shipping and Overseas Commerce

Dutch shipping began to emerge as a significant sector during the fifteenth century. Probably stemming from the inaction on the part of merchants from the Southern Netherlands to participate in seaborne transport, the towns of Zeeland and Holland began to serve the shipping needs of the commercial towns of Flanders and Brabant (particularly Antwerp ). The Dutch, who were already active in the North Sea as a result of the herring fishery, began to compete with the German Hanseatic League for Baltic markets by exporting their herring catches, salt, wine, and cloth in exchange for Baltic grain.

The Grain Trade

Baltic grain played an essential role for the rapidly expanding markets in western and southern Europe. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the urban populations had increased in the Low Countries fueling the market for imported grain. Grain and other Baltic products such as tar, hemp, flax, and wood were not only destined for the Low Countries, but also England and for Spain and Portugal via Amsterdam, the port that had succeeded in surpassing Lübeck and other Hanseatic towns as the primary transshipment point for Baltic goods. The grain trade sparked the development of a variety of industries. In addition to the shipbuilding industry, which was an obvious outgrowth of overseas trade relationships, the Dutch manufactured floor tiles, roof tiles, and bricks for export to the Baltic; the grain ships carried them as ballast on return voyages to the Baltic.

The importance of the Baltic markets to Amsterdam, and to Dutch commerce in general can be illustrated by recalling that when the Danish closed the Sound to Dutch ships in 1542, the Dutch faced financial ruin. But by the mid-sixteenth century, the Dutch had developed such a strong presence in the Baltic that they were able to exact transit rights from Denmark (Peace of Speyer, 1544) allowing them freer access to the Baltic via Danish waters. Despite the upheaval caused by the Dutch and the commercial crisis that hit Antwerp in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the Baltic grain trade remained robust until the last years of the seventeenth century. That the Dutch referred to the Baltic trade as their “mother trade” is not surprising given the importance Baltic markets continued to hold for Dutch commerce throughout the Golden Age. Unfortunately for Dutch commerce, Europe ‘s population began to decline somewhat at the close of the seventeenth century and remained depressed for several decades. Increased grain production in Western Europe and the availability of non-Baltic substitutes (American and Italian rice, for example) further decreased demand for Baltic grain resulting in a downturn in Amsterdam ‘s grain market.

Expansion into African, American and Asian Markets – “World Primacy”

Building on the early successes of their Baltic trade, Dutch shippers expanded their sphere of influence east into Russia and south into the Mediterranean and the Levantine markets. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants had their eyes on the American and Asian markets that were dominated by Iberian merchants. The ability of Dutch shippers to effectively compete with entrenched merchants, like the Hanseatic League in the Baltic, or the Portuguese in Asia stemmed from their cost cutting strategies (what de Vries and van der Woude call “cost advantages and institutional efficiencies,” p. 374). Not encumbered by the costs and protective restrictions of most merchant groups of the sixteenth century, the Dutch trimmed their costs enough to undercut the competition, and eventually establish what Jonathan Israel has called “world primacy.”

Before Dutch shippers could even attempt to break in to the Asian markets they needed to first expand their presence in the Atlantic. This was left mostly to the émigré merchants from Antwerp, who had relocated to Zeeland following the Revolt. These merchants set up the so-called Guinea trade with West Africa, and initiated Dutch involvement in the Western Hemisphere. Dutch merchants involved in the Guinea trade ignored the slave trade that was firmly in the hands of the Portuguese in favor of the rich trade in gold, ivory, and sugar from São Tomé. Trade with West Africa grew slowly, but competition was stiff. By 1599, the various Guinea companies had agreed to the formation of a cartel to regulate trade. Continued competition from a slew of new companies, however, insured that the cartel would be only partially effective until the organization of the Dutch West India Company in 1621 that also held monopoly rights in the West Africa trade.

The Dutch at first focused their trade with the Americas on the Caribbean. By the mid-1590s only a few Dutch ships each year were making the voyage across the Atlantic. When the Spanish instituted an embargo against the Dutch in 1598, shortages in products traditionally obtained in Iberia (like salt) became common. Dutch shippers seized the chance to find new sources for products that had been supplied by the Spanish and soon fleets of Dutch ships sailed to the Americas. The Spanish and Portuguese had a much larger presence in the Americas than the Dutch could mount, despite the large number vessels they sent to the area. Dutch strategy was to avoid Iberian strongholds while penetrating markets where the products they desired could be found. For the most part, this strategy meant focusing on Venezuela, Guyana, and Brazil. Indeed, by the turn of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had established forts on the coasts of Guyana and Brazil.

While competition between rival companies from the towns of Zeeland marked Dutch trade with the Americas in the first years of the seventeenth century, by the time the West India Company finally received its charter in 1621 troubles with Spain once again threatened to disrupt trade. Funding for the new joint-stock company came slowly, and oddly enough came mostly from inland towns like Leiden rather than coastal towns. The West India Company was hit with setbacks in the Americas from the very start. The Portuguese began to drive the Dutch out of Brazil in 1624 and by 1625 the Dutch were loosing their position in the Caribbean as well. Dutch shippers in the Americas soon found raiding (directed at the Spanish and Portuguese) to be their most profitable activity until the Company was able to establish forts in Brazil again in the 1630s and begin sugar cultivation. Sugar remained the most lucrative activity for the Dutch in Brazil, and once the revolt of Portuguese Catholic planters against the Dutch plantation owners broke out the late 1640s, the fortunes of the Dutch declined steadily.

The Dutch faced the prospect of stiff Portuguese competition in Asia as well. But, breaking into the lucrative Asian markets was not just a simple matter of undercutting less efficient Portuguese shippers. The Portuguese closely guarded the route around Africa. Not until roughly one hundred years after the first Portuguese voyage to Asia were the Dutch in a position to mount their own expedition. Thanks to the travelogue of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, which was published in 1596, the Dutch gained the information they needed to make the voyage. Linschoten had been in the service of the Bishop of Goa, and kept excellent records of the voyage and his observations in Asia.

The United East India Company (VOC)

The first few Dutch voyages to Asia were not particularly successful. These early enterprises managed to make only enough to cover the costs of the voyage, but by 1600 dozens of Dutch merchant ships made the trip. This intense competition among various Dutch merchants had a destabilizing effect on prices driving the government to insist on consolidation in order to avoid commercial ruin. The United East India Company (usually referred to by its Dutch initials, VOC) received a charter from the States General in 1602 conferring upon it monopoly trading rights in Asia. This joint stock company attracted roughly 6.5 million florins in initial capitalization from over 1,800 investors, most of whom were merchants. Management of the company was vested in 17 directors (Heren XVII) chosen from among the largest shareholders.

In practice, the VOC became virtually a “country” unto itself outside of Europe, particularly after about 1620 when the company’s governor-general in Asia, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, founded Batavia (the company factory) on Java. While Coen and later governors-general set about expanding the territorial and political reach of the VOC in Asia, the Heren XVII were most concerned about profits, which they repeatedly reinvested in the company much to the chagrin of investors. In Asia, the strategy of the VOC was to insert itself into the intra-Asian trade (much like the Portuguese had done in the sixteenth century) in order to amass enough capital to pay for the spices shipped back to the Netherlands. This often meant displacing the Portuguese by waging war in Asia, while trying to maintain peaceful relations within Europe.

Over the long term, the VOC was very profitable during the seventeenth century despite the company’s reluctance to pay cash dividends in first few decades (the company paid dividends in kind until about 1644). As the English and French began to institute mercantilist strategies (for instance, the Navigation Acts of 1551 and 1660 in England, and import restrictions and high tariffs in the case of France ) Dutch dominance in foreign trade came under attack. Rather than experience a decline like domestic industry did at the end of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Asia trade continued to ship goods at steady volumes well into the eighteenth century. Dutch dominance, however, was met with stiff competition by rival India companies as the Asia trade grew. As the eighteenth century wore on, the VOC’s share of the Asia trade declined significantly compared to its rivals, the most important of which was the English East India Company.

Dutch Finance

The last sector that we need to highlight is finance, perhaps the most important sector for the development of the early modern Dutch economy. The most visible manifestation of Dutch capitalism was the exchange bank founded in Amsterdam in 1609; only two years after the city council approved the construction of a bourse (additional exchange banks were founded in other Dutch commercial cities). The activities of the bank were limited to exchange and deposit banking. A lending bank, founded in Amsterdam in 1614, rounded out the financial services in the commercial capital of the Netherlands.

The ability to manage the wealth generated by trade and industry (accumulated capital) in new ways was one of the hallmarks of the economy during the Golden Age. As early as the fourteenth century, Italian merchants had been experimenting with ways to decrease the use of cash in long-distance trade. The resulting instrument was the bill of exchange developed as a way to for a seller to extend credit to a buyer. The bill of exchange required the debtor to pay the debt at a specified place and time. But the creditor rarely held on to the bill of exchange until maturity preferring to sell it or otherwise use it to pay off debts. These bills of exchange were not routinely used in commerce in the Low Countries until the sixteenth century when Antwerp was still the dominant commercial city in the region. In Antwerp the bill of exchange could be assigned to another, and eventually became a negotiable instrument with the practice of discounting the bill.

The idea of the flexibility of bills of exchange moved to the Northern Netherlands with the large numbers of Antwerp merchants who brought with them their commercial practices. In an effort to standardize the practices surrounding bills of exchange, the Amsterdam government restricted payment of bills of exchange to the new exchange bank. The bank was wildly popular with merchants; deposits increasing from just less than one million guilders in 1611 to over sixteen million by 1700. Amsterdam ‘s exchange bank flourished because of its ability to handle deposits and transfers, and to settle international debts.

By the second half of the seventeenth century many wealthy merchant families had turned away from foreign trade and began engaging in speculative activities on a much larger scale. They traded in commodity values (futures), shares in joint-stock companies, and dabbled in insurance and currency exchanges to name only a few of the most important ventures.

Conclusion

Building on its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century successes in agricultural productivity, and in North Sea and Baltic shipping, the Northern Netherlands inherited the economic legacy of the southern provinces as the Revolt tore the Low Countries apart. The Dutch Golden Age lasted from roughly 1580, when the Dutch proved themselves successful in their fight with the Spanish, to about 1670, when the Republic’s economy experienced a down-turn. Economic growth was very fast during until about 1620 when it slowed, but continued to grow steadily until the end of the Golden Age. The last decades of the seventeenth century were marked by declining production and loss of market dominance overseas.

Bibliography

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Citation: Harreld, Donald. “Dutch Economy in the “Golden Age” (16th-17th Centuries)”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. August 12, 2004. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-dutch-economy-in-the-golden-age-16th-17th-centuries/

An Economic History of Copyright in Europe and the United States

B. Zorina Khan, Bowdoin College

Introduction

Copyright is a form of intellectual property that provides legal protection against unauthorized copying of the producer’s original expression in products such as art, music, books, articles, and software. Economists have paid relatively little scholarly attention to copyrights, although recent debates about piracy and “the digital dilemma” (free use of digital property) have prompted closer attention to theoretical and historical issues. Like other forms of intellectual property, copyright is directed to the protection of cultural creations that are nonrivalrous and nonexclusive in nature. It is generally proposed that, in the absence of private or public forms of exclusion, prices will tend to be driven down to the low or zero marginal costs and the original producer would be unable to recover the initial investment.

Part of the debate about copyright exists because it is still not clear whether state enforcement is necessary to enable owners to gain returns, or whether the producers of copyrightable products respond significantly to financial incentives. Producers of these public goods might still be able to appropriate returns without copyright laws or in the face of widespread infringement, through such strategies as encryption, cartelization, the provision of complementary products, private monitoring and enforcement, market segmentation, network externalities, first mover effects and product differentiation. Patronage, taxation, subsidies, or public provision, might also comprise alternatives to copyright protection. In some instances “authors” (broadly defined) might be more concerned about nonfinancial rewards such as enhanced reputations or more extensive diffusion.

During the past three centuries great controversy has always been associated with the grant of property rights to authors, ranging from the notion that cultural creativity should be rewarded with perpetual rights, through the complete rejection of any intellectual property rights at all for copyrightable commodities. However, historically, the primary emphasis has been on the provision of copyright protection through the formal legal system. Europeans have generally tended to adopt the philosophical position that authorship embodies rights of personhood or moral rights that should be accorded strong protections. The American approach to copyright has been more utilitarian: policies were based on a comparison of costs and benefits, and the primary emphasis of early copyright policies was on the advancement of public welfare. However, the harmonization of international laws has created a melding of these two approaches. The tendency at present is toward stronger enforcement of copyrights, prompted by the lobbying of publishers and the globalization of culture and commerce. Technological change has always exerted an exogenous force for change in copyright laws, and modern innovations in particular provoke questions about the extent to which copyright systems can respond effectively to such challenges.

Copyright in Europe

Copyright in France

In the early years of printing, books and other written matter became part of the public domain when they were published. Like patents, the grant of book privileges originated in the Republic of Venice in the fifteenth century, a practice which was soon prevalent in a number of other European countries. Donatus Bossius, a Milan author, petitioned the duke in 1492 for an exclusive privilege for his book, and successfully argued that he would be unjustly deprived of the benefits from his efforts if others were able to freely copy his work. He was given the privilege for a term of ten years. However, authorship was not required for the grant of a privilege, and printers and publishers obtained monopolies over existing books as well as new works. Since privileges were granted on a case by case basis, they varied in geographical scope, duration, and breadth of coverage, as well as in terms of the attendant penalties for their violation. Grantors included religious orders and authorities, universities, political figures, and the representatives of the Crown.

The French privilege system was introduced in 1498 and was well-developed by the end of the sixteenth century. Privileges were granted under the auspices of the monarch, generally for a brief period of two to three years, although the term could be as much as ten years. Protection was granted to new books or translations, maps, type designs, engravings and artwork. Petitioners paid formal fees and informal gratuities to the officials concerned. Since applications could only be sealed if the King were present, petitions had to be carefully timed to take advantage of his route or his return from trips and campaigns. It became somewhat more convenient when the courts of appeal such as the Parlement de Paris began to issue grants that were privileges in all but name, although this could lead to conflicting rights if another authority had already allocated the monopoly elsewhere. The courts sometimes imposed limits on the rights conferred, in the form of stipulations about the prices that could be charged. Privileges were property that could be assigned or licensed to another party, and their infringement was punished by a fine and at times confiscation of all the output of “pirates.”

After 1566, the Edict of Moulins required that all new books had to be approved and licensed by the Crown. Favored parties were able to get renewals of their monopolies that also allowed them to lay claim to works that were already in the public domain. By the late eighteenth century an extensive administrative procedure was in place that was designed to restrict the number of presses and engage in surveillance and censorship of the publishing industry. Manuscripts first had to be read by a censor, and only after a permit was requested and granted could the book be printed, although the permit could later be revoked if complaints were lodged by sufficiently influential individuals. Decrees in 1777 established that authors who did not alienate their property were entitled to exclusive rights in perpetuity. Since few authors had the will or resources to publish and distribute books, their privileges were likely to be sold outright to professional publishers. However, the law made a distinction in the rights accorded to publishers, because if the right was sold the privilege was only accorded a limited duration of at least ten years, the exact term to be determined in accordance with the value of the work, and once the publisher’s term expired, the work passed into the public domain. The fee for a privilege was thirty six livres. Approvals to print a work, or a “permission simple” which did not entail exclusive rights could also be obtained after payment of a substantial fee. Between 1700 and 1789, a total of 2,586 petitions for exclusive privileges were filed, and about two thirds were granted. The result was a system that resulted in “odious monopolies,” higher prices and greater scarcity, large transfers to officials of the Crown and their allies, and pervasive censorship. It likewise disadvantaged smaller book producers, provincial publishers, and the academic and broader community.

The French Revolutionary decrees of 1791 and 1793 replaced the idea of privilege with that of uniform statutory claims to literary property, based on the principle that “the most sacred, the most unassailable and the most personal of possessions is the fruit of a writer’s thought.” The subject matter of copyrights covered books, dramatic productions and the output of the “beaux arts” including designs and sculpture. Authors were required to deposit two copies of their books with the Bibliothèque Nationale or risk losing their copyright. Some observers felt that copyrights in France were the least protected of all property rights, since they were enforced with a care to protecting the public domain and social welfare. Although France is associated with the author’s rights approach to copyright and proclamations of the “droit d’auteur,” these ideas evolved slowly and hesitatingly, mainly in order to meet the self-interest of the various members of the book trade. During the ancien régime, the rhetoric of authors’ rights had been promoted by French owners of book privileges as a way of deflecting criticism of monopoly grants and of protecting their profits, and by their critics as a means of attacking the same monopolies and profits. This language was retained in the statutes after the Revolution, so the changes in interpretation and enforcement may not have been universally evident.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, French jurisprudence and philosophy tended to explicate copyrights in terms of rights of personality but the idea of the moral claim of authors to property rights was not incorporated in the law until early in the twentieth century. The droit d’auteur first appeared in a law of April 1910. In 1920 visual artists were granted a “droit de suite” or a claim to a portion of the revenues from resale of their works. Subsequent evolution of French copyright laws led to the recognition of the right of disclosure, the right of retraction, the right of attribution, and the right of integrity. These moral rights are (at least in theory) perpetual, inalienable, and thus can be bequeathed to the heirs of the author or artist, regardless of whether or not the work was sold to someone else. The self-interested rhetoric of the owners of monopoly privileges now fully emerged as the keystone of the “French system of literary property” that would shape international copyright laws in the twenty first century.

Copyright in England

England similarly experienced a period during which privileges were granted, such as a seven year grant from the Chancellor of Oxford University for an 1518 work. In 1557, the Worshipful Company of Stationers, a publishers’ guild, was founded on the authority of a royal charter and controlled the book trade for next one hundred and fifty years. This company created and controlled the right of their constituent members to make copies, so in effect their “copy right” was a private property right that existed in perpetuity, independently of state or statutory rights. Enforcement and regulation were carried out by the corporation itself through its Court of Assistants. The Stationers’ Company maintained a register of books, issued licenses, and sanctioned individuals who violated their regulations. Thus, in both England and France, copyright law began as a monopoly grant to benefit and regulate the printers’ guilds, and as a form of surveillance and censorship over public opinion on behalf of the Crown.

The English system of privileges was replaced in 1710 by a copyright statute (the “Statute of Anne” or “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Such Copies, During the Times Therein Mentioned,” 1709-10, 8 Anne, ch. 19.) The statute was not directed toward the authors of books and their rights. Rather, its intent was to restrain the publishing industry and destroy its monopoly power. According to the law, the grant of copyright was available to anyone, not just to the Stationers. Instead of a perpetual right, the term was limited to fourteen years, with a right of renewal, after which the work would enter the public domain. The statute also permitted the importation of books in foreign languages.

Subsequent litigation and judicial interpretation added a new and fundamentally different dimension to copyright. In order to protect their perpetual copyright, publishers tried to promote the idea that copyright was based on the natural rights of authors or creative individuals and, as the agent of the author, those rights devolved to the publisher. If indeed copyrights derived from these inherent principles, they represented property that existed independently of statutory provisions and could be protected under common law. The booksellers engaged in a series of strategic litigation that culminated in their defeat in the landmark case, Donaldson v. Beckett [98 Eng. Rep. 257 (1774)]. The court ruled that authors had a common law right in their unpublished works, but on publication that right was extinguished by the statute, whose provisions determined the nature and scope of any copyright claims. This transition from publisher’s rights to statutory author’s rights implied that copyright had transmuted from a straightforward license to protect monopoly profits into an expanding property right whose boundaries would henceforth increase at the expense of the public domain.

Between 1735 and 1875 fourteen Acts of Parliament amended the copyright legislation. Copyrights extended to sheet music, maps, charts, books, sculptures, paintings, photographs, dramatic works and songs sung in a dramatic fashion, and lectures outside of educational institutions. Copyright owners had no remedies at law unless they complied with a number of stipulations which included registration, the payment of fees, the delivery of free copies of every edition to the British Museum (delinquents were fined), as well as complimentary copies for four libraries, including the Bodleian and Trinity College. The ubiquitous Stationers’ Company administered registration, and the registrar personally benefited from the monetary fees of 5 shillings when the book was registered and an equal amount for each assignment and each copy of an entry, along with one shilling for each entry searched. Foreigners could only obtain copyrights if they presented themselves in a part of the British Empire at the time of publication. The book had to be published in the United Kingdom, and prior publication in a foreign country – even in a British colony – was an obstacle to copyright protection.

The term of the copyright in books was for the longer of 42 years from publication or the lifetime of the author plus seven years, and after the death of the author a compulsory license could be issued to ensure that works of sufficient public benefit would be published. The “work for hire” doctrine was in force for books, reviews, newspapers, magazines and essays unless a distinct contractual clause specified that the copyright was to accrue to the author. Similarly, unauthorized use of a publication was permitted for the purposes of “fair use.” Only the copyright holder and his agents were allowed to import the protected works into Britain.

The British Commission that reported on the state of the copyright system in 1878 felt that the laws were “obscure, arbitrary and piecemeal” and were compounded by the confused state of the common law. The numerous uncoordinated laws that were simultaneously in force led to conflicts and unintended defects in the system. The report discussed but did not recommend an alternative to the grant of copyrights, in the form of a royalty system where “any person would be entitled to copy or republish the work on paying or securing to the owner a remuneration, taking the form of royalty or definite sum prescribed by law.” The main benefit would be to be public in the form of early access to cheap editions, whereas the main cost would be to the publishers whose risk and return would be negatively affected.

The Commission noted that the implications for the colonies were “anomalous and unsatisfactory.” The publishers in England practiced price discrimination, modifying the initial high prices for copyrighted material through discounts given to reading clubs, circulating libraries and the like, benefits which were not available in the colonies. In 1846 the Colonial Office acknowledged “the injurious effects produced upon our more distant colonists” and passed the Foreign Reprints Act in the following year. This allowed the colonies who adopted the terms of British copyright legislation to import cheap reprints of British copyrighted material with a tariff of 12.5 percent, the proceeds of which were to be remitted to the copyright owners. However, enforcement of the tariff seems to have been less than vigorous since, between 1866 and 1876 only £1155 was received from the 19 colonies who took advantage of the legislation (£1084 from Canada which benefited significantly from the American reprint trade). The Canadians argued that it was difficult to monitor imports, so it would be more effective to allow them to publish the reprints themselves and collect taxes for the benefit of the copyright owners. This proposal was rejected, but under the Canadian Copyright Act of 1875 British copyright owners could obtain Canadian copyrights for Canadian editions that were sold at much lower prices than in Britain or even in the United States.

The Commission made two recommendations. First, the bigger colonies with domestic publishing facilities should be allowed to reprint copyrighted material on payment of a license to be set by law. Second, the benefits to the smaller colonies of access to British literature should take precedence over lobbies to repeal the Foreign Reprints Act, which should be better enforced rather than removed entirely. Some had argued that the public interest required that Britain should allow the importation of cheap colonial reprints since the high prices of books were “altogether prohibitory to the great mass of the reading public” but the Commission felt that this should only be adopted with the consent of the copyright owner. They also devoted a great deal of attention to what was termed “The American Question” but took the “highest public ground” and recommended against retaliatory policies.

Copyright in the United States

Colonial Copyright

In the period before the Declaration of Independence individual American states recognized and promoted patenting activity, but copyright protection was not considered to be of equal importance, for a number of reasons. First, in a democracy the claims of the public and the wish to foster freedom of expression were paramount. Second, to a new colony, pragmatic concerns were likely of greater importance than the arts, and the more substantial literary works were imported. Markets were sufficiently narrow that an individual could saturate the market with a first run printing, and most local publishers produced ephemera such as newspapers, almanacs, and bills. Third, it was unclear that copyright protection was needed as an incentive for creativity, especially since a significant fraction of output was devoted to works such as medical treatises and religious tracts whose authors wished simply to maximize the number of readers, rather than the amount of income they received.

In 1783, Connecticut became the first state to approve an “Act for the encouragement of literature and genius” because “it is perfectly agreeable to the principles of natural equity and justice, that every author should be secured in receiving the profits that may arise from the sale of his works, and such security may encourage men of learning and genius to publish their writings; which may do honor to their country, and service to mankind.” Although this preamble might seem to strongly favor author’s rights, the statute also specified that books were to be offered at reasonable prices and in sufficient quantities, or else a compulsory license would issue.

Federal Copyright Grants

Despite their common source in the intellectual property clause of the U.S. Constitution, copyright policies provided a marked contrast to the patent system. According to Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. 591, 684 (1834): “It has been argued at the bar, that as the promotion of the progress of science and the useful arts is here united in the same clause in the constitution, the rights of the authors and inventors were considered as standing on the same footing; but this, I think, is a non sequitur, for when congress came to execute this power by legislation, the subjects are kept distinct, and very different provisions are made respecting them.”

The earliest federal statute to protect the product of authors was approved on May 31 1790, “for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned.” John Barry obtained the first federal copyright when he registered his spelling book in the District Court of Pennsylvania, and early grants reflected the same utilitarian character. Policy makers felt that copyright protection would serve to increase the flow of learning and information, and by encouraging publication would contribute to democratic principles of free speech. The diffusion of knowledge would also ensure broad-based access to the benefits of social and economic development. The copyright act required authors and proprietors to deposit a copy of the title of their work in the office of the district court in the area where they lived, for a nominal fee of sixty cents. Registration secured the right to print, publish and sell maps, charts and books for a term of fourteen years, with the possibility of an extension for another like term. Amendments to the original act extended protection to other works including musical compositions, plays and performances, engravings and photographs. Legislators refused to grant perpetual terms, but the length of protection was extended in the general revision of the laws in 1831, and 1909.

In the case of patents, the rights of inventors, whether domestic or foreign, were widely viewed as coincident with public welfare. In stark contrast, policymakers showed from the very beginning an acute sensitivity to trade-offs between the rights of authors (or publishers) and social welfare. The protections provided to authors under copyrights were as a result much more limited than those provided by the laws based on moral rights that were applied in many European countries. Of relevance here are stipulations regarding first sale, work for hire, and fair use. Under a moral rights-based system, an artist or his heirs can claim remedies if subsequent owners alter or distort the work in a way that allegedly injures the artist’s honor or reputation. According to the first sale doctrine, the copyright holder lost all rights after the work was sold. In the American system, if the copyright holder’s welfare were enhanced by nonmonetary concerns, these individualized concerns could be addressed and enforced through contract law, rather than through a generic federal statutory clause that would affect all property holders. Similarly, “work for hire” doctrines also repudiated the right of personality, in favor of facilitating market transactions. For example, in 1895 Thomas Donaldson filed a complaint that Carroll D. Wright’s editing of Donaldson’s report for the Census Bureau was “damaging and injurious to the plaintiff, and to his reputation” as a scholar. The court rejected his claim and ruled that as a paid employee he had no rights in the bulletin; to rule otherwise would create problems in situations where employees were hired to prepare data and statistics.

This difficult quest for balance between private and public good was most evident in the copyright doctrine of “fair use” that (unlike with patents) allowed unauthorized access to copyrighted works under certain conditions. Joseph Story ruled in [Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F. Cas. 342 (1841)]: “we must often, in deciding questions of this sort, look to the nature and objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used, and the degree in which the use may prejudice the sale, or diminish the profits, or supersede the objects, of the original work.” One of the striking features of the fair use doctrine is the extent to which property rights were defined in terms of market valuations, or the impact on sales and profits, as opposed to a clear holding of the exclusivity of property. Fair use doctrine thus illustrates the extent to which the early policy makers weighed the costs and benefits of private property rights against the rights of the public and the provisions for a democratic society. If copyrights were as strictly construed as patents, it would serve to reduce scholarship, prohibit public access for noncommercial purposes, increase transactions costs for potential users, and inhibit learning which the statutes were meant to promote.

Nevertheless, like other forms of intellectual property, the copyright system evolved to encompass improvements in technology and changes in the marketplace. Technological changes in nineteenth-century printing included the use of stereotyping which lowered the costs of reprints, improvements in paper making machinery, and the advent of steam powered printing presses. Graphic design also benefited from innovations, most notably the development of lithography and photography. The number of new products also expanded significantly, encompassing recorded music and moving pictures by the end of the nineteenth century; and commercial television, video recordings, audiotapes, and digital music in the twentieth century.

The subject matter, scope and duration of copyrights expanded over the course of the nineteenth century to include musical compositions, plays, engravings, sculpture, and photographs. By 1910 the original copyright holder was granted derivative rights such as to translations of literary works into other languages; to performances; and the rights to adapt musical works, among others. Congress also lengthened the term of copyright several times, although by 1890 the term of copyright protection in Greece and the United States were the most abbreviated in the world. New technologies stimulated change by creating new subjects for copyright protection, and by lowering the costs of infringement of copyrighted works. In Edison v. Lubin, 122 F. Cas. 240 (1903), the lower court rejected Edison’s copyright of moving pictures under the statutory category of photographs. This decision was overturned by the appellate court: “[Congress] must have recognized there would be change and advance in making photographs, just as there has been in making books, printing chromos, and other subjects of copyright protection.” Copyright enforcement was largely the concern of commercial interests, and not of the creative individual. The fraction of copyright plaintiffs who were authors (broadly defined) was initially quite low, and fell continuously during the nineteenth century. By 1900-1909, only 8.6 percent of all plaintiffs in copyright cases were the creators of the item that was the subject of the litigation. Instead, by the same period, the majority of parties bringing cases were publishers and other assignees of copyrights.

In 1909 Congress revised the copyright law and composers were given the right to make the first mechanical reproductions of their music. However, after the first recording, the statute permitted a compulsory license to issue for copyrighted musical compositions: that is to say, anyone could subsequently make their own recording of the composition on payment of a fee that was set by the statute at two cents per recording. In effect, the property right was transformed into a liability rule. The next major legislative change in 1976 similarly allowed compulsory licenses to issue for works that are broadcast on cable television. The prevalence of compulsory licenses for copyrighted material is worth noting for a number of reasons: they underline some of the statutory differences between patents and copyrights in the United States; they reflect economic reasons for such distinctions; and they are also the result of political compromises among the various interest groups that are affected.

Allied Rights

The debate about the scope of patents and copyrights often underestimates or ignores the importance of allied rights that are available through other forms of the law such as contract and unfair competition. A noticeable feature of the case law is the willingness of the judiciary in the nineteenth century to extend protection to noncopyrighted works under alternative doctrines in the common law. More than 10 percent of copyright cases dealt with issues of unfair competition, and 7.7 percent with contracts; a further 12 percent encompassed issues of right to privacy, trade secrets, and misappropriation. For instance, in Keene v. Wheatley et al., 14 F. Cas. 180 (1860), the plaintiff did not have a statutory copyright in the play that was infringed. However, she was awarded damages on the basis of her proprietary common law right in an unpublished work, and because the defendants had taken advantage of a breach of confidence by one of her former employees. Similarly, the courts offered protection against misappropriation of information, such as occurred when the defendants in Chamber of Commerce of Minneapolis v. Wells et al., 111 N.W. 157 (1907) surreptitiously obtained stock market information by peering in windows, eavesdropping, and spying.

Several other examples relate to the more traditional copyright subject of the book trade. E. P. Dutton & Company published a series of Christmas books which another publisher photographed, and offered as a series with similar appearance and style but at lower prices. Dutton claimed to have been injured by a loss of profits and a loss of reputation as a maker of fine books. The firm did not have copyrights in the series, but they essentially claimed a right in the “look and feel” of the books. The court agreed: “the decisive fact is that the defendants are unfairly and fraudulently attempting to trade upon the reputation which plaintiff has built up for its books. The right to injunctive relief in such a case is too firmly established to require the citation of authorities.” In a case that will resonate with academics, a surgery professor at the University of Pennsylvania was held to have a common law property right in the lectures he presented, and a student could not publish them without his permission. Titles could not be copyrighted, but were protected as trade marks and under unfair competition doctrines. In this way, in numerous lawsuits G. C. Merriam & Co, the original publishers of Webster’s Dictionary, restrained the actions of competitors who published the dictionary once the copyrights had expired.

International Copyrights in the United States

The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that “nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books … by any person not a citizen of the United States.” Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers “indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement.” The tendency to reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent.

The United States stood out in contrast to countries such as France, where Louis Napoleon’s Decree of 1852 prohibited counterfeiting of both foreign and domestic works. Other countries which were affected by American piracy retaliated by refusing to recognize American copyrights. Despite the lobbying of numerous authors and celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, the American copyright statutes did not allow for copyright protection of foreign works for fully one century. As a result, American publishers and producers freely pirated foreign literature, art, and drama.

Effects of Copyright Piracy

What were the effects of piracy? First, did the American industry suffer from cheaper foreign books being dumped on the domestic market? This does not seem to have been the case. After controlling for the type of work, the cost of the work, and other variables, the prices of American books were lower than prices of foreign books. American book prices may have been lower to reflect lower perceived quality or other factors that caused imperfect substitutability between foreign and local products. As might be expected, prices were not exogenously and arbitrarily fixed, but varied in accordance with a publisher’s estimation of market factors such as the degree of competition and the responsiveness of demand to determinants. The reading public appears to have gained from the lack of copyright, which increased access to the superior products of more developed markets in Europe, and in the long run this likely improved both the demand and supply of domestic science and literature.

Second, according to observers, professional authorship in the United States was discouraged because it was difficult to compete with established authors such as Scott, Dickens and Tennyson. Whether native authors were deterred by foreign competition would depend on the extent to which foreign works prevailed in the American market. Early in American history the majority of books were reprints of foreign titles. However, nonfiction titles written by foreigners were less likely to be substitutable for nonfiction written by Americans; consequently, the supply of nonfiction soon tended to be provided by native authors. From an early period grammars, readers, and juvenile texts were also written by Americans. Geology, geography, history and similar works would have to be adapted or completely rewritten to be appropriate for an American market which reduced their attractiveness as reprints. Thus, publishers of schoolbooks, medical volumes and other nonfiction did not feel that the reforms of 1891 were relevant to their undertakings. Academic and religious books are less likely to be written for monetary returns, and their authors probably benefited from the wider circulation that lack of international copyright encouraged. However, the writers of these works declined in importance relative to writers of fiction, a category which grew from 6.4 percent before 1830 to 26.4 percent by the 1870s.

On the other hand, foreign authors dominated the field of fiction for much of the century. One study estimates about fifty percent of all fiction best sellers in antebellum period were pirated from foreign works. In 1895 American authors accounted for two of the top ten best sellers but by 1910 nine of the top ten were written by Americans. This fall over time in the fraction of foreign authorship may have been due to a natural evolutionary process, as the development of the market for domestic literature over time encouraged specialization. The growth in fiction authors was associated with the increase in the number of books per author over the same period. Improvements in transportation and the increase in the academic population probably played a large role in enabling individuals who lived outside the major publishing centers to become writers despite the distance. As the market expanded, a larger fraction of writers could become professionals.

Although the lack of copyright protection may not have discouraged authors, this does not imply that intellectual property policy in this dimension had no costs. It is likely that the lack of foreign copyrights led to some misallocation of efforts or resources, such as in attempting to circumvent the rules. Authors changed their residence temporarily when books were about to be published in order to qualify for copyright. Others obtained copyrights by arranging to co-author with a foreign citizen. T. H. Huxley adopted this strategy, arranging to co-author with “a young Yankee friend … Otherwise the thing would be pillaged at once.” An American publisher suggested that Kipling should find “a hack writer, whose name would be of use simply on account of its carrying the copyright.” Harriet Beecher Stowe proposed a partnership with Elizabeth Gaskell, so they could “secure copyright mutually in our respective countries and divide the profits.”

It is widely acknowledged that copyrights in books tended to be the concern of publishers rather than of authors (although the two are naturally not independent of each other). As a result of lack of legal copyrights in foreign works, publishers raced to be first on the market with the “new” pirated books, and the industry experienced several decades of intense, if not quite “ruinous” competition. These were problems that publishers in England had faced before, in the market for books that were uncopyrighted, such as Shakespeare and Fielding. Their solution was to collude in the form of strictly regulated cartels or “printing congers.” The congers created divisible property in books that they traded, such as a one hundred and sixtieth share in Johnson’s Dictionary that was sold for £23 in 1805. Cooperation resulted in risk sharing and a greater ability to cover expenses. The unstable races in the United States similarly settled down during the 1840s to collusive standards that were termed “trade custom” or “courtesy of the trade.”

The industry achieved relative stability because the dominant firms cooperated in establishing synthetic property rights in foreign-authored books. American publishers made payments (termed “copyrights”) to foreign authors to secure early sheets, and other firms recognized their exclusive property in the “authorized reprint”. Advance payments to foreign authors not only served to ensure the coincidence of publishers’ and authors’ interests – they were also recognized by “reputable” publishers as “copyrights.” These exclusive rights were tradable, and enforced by threats of predatory pricing and retaliation. Such practices suggest that publishers were able to simulate the legal grant through private means.

However, private rights naturally did not confer property rights that could be enforced at law. The case of Sheldon v. Houghton 21 F. Cas 1239 (1865) illustrates that these rights were considered to be “very valuable, and is often made the subject of contracts, sales, and transfers, among booksellers and publishers.” The very fact that a firm would file a plea for the court to protect their claim indicates how vested a right it had become. The plaintiff argued that “such custom is a reasonable one, and tends to prevent injurious competition in business, and to the investment of capital in publishing enterprises that are of advantage to the reading public.” The courts rejected this claim, since synthetic rights differed from copyrights in the degree of security that was offered by the enforcement power of the courts. Nevertheless, these title-specific of rights exclusion decreased uncertainty, enabled publishers to recoup their fixed costs, and avoided the wasteful duplication of resources that would otherwise have occurred.

It was not until 1891 that the Chace Act granted copyright protection to selected foreign residents. Thus, after a century of lobbying by interested parties on both sides of the Atlantic, based on reasons that ranged from the economic to the moral, copyright laws only changed when the United States became more competitive in the international market for literary and artistic works. However, the act also included significant concessions to printers’ unions and printing establishments in the form of “manufacturing clauses.” First, a book had to be published in the U.S. before or at the same time as the publication date in its country of origin. Second, the work had to be printed here, or printed from type set in the United States or from plates made from type set in the United States. Copyright protection still depended on conformity with stipulations such as formal registration of the work. These clauses resulted in U.S. failure to qualify for admission to the international Berne Convention until 1988, more than one hundred years after the first Convention.

After the copyright reforms in 1891, both English and American authors were disappointed to find that the change in the law did not lead to significant gains. Foreign authors realized they may even have benefited from the lack of copyright protection in the United States. Despite the cartelization of publishing, competition for these synthetic copyrights ensured that foreign authors were able to obtain payments that American firms made to secure the right to be first on the market. It can also be argued that foreign authors were able to reap higher total returns from the expansion of the market through piracy. The lack of copyright protection may have functioned as a form of price discrimination, where the product was sold at a higher price in the developed country, and at a lower or zero price in the poorer country. Returns under such circumstances may have been higher for goods with demand externalities or network effects, such as “bestsellers” where consumer valuation of the book increased with the size of the market. For example, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and other foreign writers were able to gain considerable income from complementary lecture tours in the extensive United States market.

Harmonization of Copyright Laws

In view of the strong protection accorded to inventors under the U.S. patent system, to foreign observers its copyright policies appeared to be all the more reprehensible. The United States, the most liberal in its policies towards patentees, had led the movement for harmonization of patent laws. In marked contrast, throughout the history of the U.S. system, its copyright grants in general were more abridged than almost all other countries in the world. The term of copyright grants to American citizens was among the shortest in the world, the country applied the broadest interpretation of fair use doctrines, and the validity of the copyright depended on strict compliance with the requirements. U.S. failure to recognize the rights of foreign authors was also unique among the major industrial nations. Throughout the nineteenth century proposals to reform the law and to acknowledge foreign copyrights were repeatedly brought before Congress and rejected. Even the bill that finally recognized international copyrights almost failed, only passed at the last possible moment, and required longstanding exemptions in favor of workers and printing enterprises.

In a parallel fashion to the status of the United States in patent matters, France’s influence was evident in the subsequent evolution of international copyright laws. Other countries had long recognized the rights of foreign authors in national laws and bilateral treaties, but France stood out in its favorable treatment of domestic and foreign copyrights as “the foremost of all nations in the protection it accords to literary property.” This was especially true of its concessions to foreign authors and artists. For instance, France allowed copyrights to foreigners conditioned on manufacturing clauses in 1810, and granted foreign and domestic authors equal rights in 1852. In the following decade France entered into almost two dozen bilateral treaties, prompting a movement towards multilateral negotiations, such as the Congress on Literary and Artistic Property in 1858. The International Literary and Artistic Association, which the French novelist Victor Hugo helped to establish, conceived of and organized the Convention which first met in Berne in 1883.

The Berne Convention included a number of countries that wished to establish an “International Union for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.” The preamble declared their intent to “protect effectively, and in as uniform a manner as possible, the rights of authors over their literary and artistic works.” The actual Articles were more modest in scope, requiring national treatment of authors belonging to the Union and minimum protection for translation and public performance rights. The Convention authorized the establishment of a physical office in Switzerland, whose official language would be French. The rules were revised in 1908 to extend the duration of copyright and to include modern technologies. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the convention was not its specific provisions, but the underlying property rights philosophy which was decidedly from the natural rights school. Berne abolished compliance with formalities as a prerequisite for copyright protection since the creative act itself was regarded as the source of the property right. This measure had far-reaching consequences, because it implied that copyright was now the default, whereas additions to the public domain would have to be achieved through affirmative actions and by means of specific limited exemptions. In 1928 the Berne Convention followed the French precedent and acknowledged the moral rights of authors and artists.

Unlike its leadership in patent conventions, the United States declined an invitation to the pivotal copyright conference in Berne in 1883; it attended but refused to sign the 1886 agreement of the Berne Convention. Instead, the United States pursued international copyright policies in the context of the weaker Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), which was adopted in 1952 and formalized in 1955 as a complementary agreement to the Berne Convention. The UCC membership included many developing countries that did not wish to comply with the Berne Convention because they viewed its provisions as overly favorable to the developed world. The United States was among the last wave of entrants into the Berne Convention when it finally joined in 1988. In order to do so it complied by removing prerequisites for copyright protection such as registration, and also lengthened the term of copyrights. However, it still has not introduced federal legislation in accordance with Article 6bis, which declares the moral rights of authors “independently of the author’s economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights.” Similarly, individual countries continue to differ in the extent to which multilateral provisions governed domestic legislation and practices.

The quest for harmonization of intellectual property laws resulted in a “race to the top,” directed by the efforts and self interest of the countries which had the strongest property rights. The movement to harmonize patents was driven by American efforts to ensure that its extraordinary patenting activity was remunerated beyond as well as within its borders. At the same time, the United States ignored international conventions to unify copyright legislation. Nevertheless, the harmonization of copyright laws proceeded, promoted by France and other civil law regimes which urged stronger protection for authors based on their “natural rights” although at the same time they infringed on the rights of foreign inventors. The net result was that international pressure was applied to developing countries in the twentieth century to establish strong patents and strong copyrights, although no individual developed country had adhered to both concepts simultaneously during their own early growth phase. This occurred even though theoretical models did not offer persuasive support for intellectual property harmonization, and indeed suggested that uniform policies might be detrimental even to some developed countries and to overall global welfare.

Conclusion

The past three centuries stand out in terms of the diversity across nations in intellectual property institutions, but the nineteenth century saw the origins of the movement towards the “harmonization” of laws that at present dominates global debates. Among the now-developed countries, the United States stood out for its conviction that broad access to intellectual property rules and standards was key to achieving economic development. Europeans were less concerned about enhancing mass literacy and public education, and viewed copyright owners as inherently meritorious and deserving of strong protection. European copyright regimes thus evolved in the direction of author’s rights, while the United States lagged behind the rest of the world in terms of both domestic and foreign copyright protection.

By design, American statutes differentiated between patents and copyrights in ways that seemed warranted if the objective was to increase social welfare. The patent system early on discriminated between nonresident and domestic inventors, but within a few decades changed to protect the right of any inventor who filed for an American patent regardless of nationality. The copyright statutes, in contrast, openly encouraged piracy of foreign goods on an astonishing scale for one hundred years, in defiance of the recriminations and pressures exerted by other countries. The American patent system required an initial search and examination that ensured the patentee was the “first and true” creator of the invention in the world, whereas copyrights were granted through mere registration. Patents were based on the assumption of novelty and held invalid if this assumption was violated, whereas essentially similar but independent creation was copyrightable. Copyright holders were granted the right to derivative works, whereas the patent holder was not. Unauthorized use of patented inventions was prohibited, whereas “fair use” of copyrighted material was permissible if certain conditions were met. Patented inventions involved greater initial investments, effort, and novelty than copyrighted products and tended to be more responsive to material incentives; whereas in many cases cultural goods would still be produced or only slightly reduced in the absence of such incentives. Fair use was not allowed in the case of patents because the disincentive effect was likely to be higher, while the costs of negotiation between the patentee and the more narrow market of potential users would generally be lower. If copyrights were as strongly enforced as patents it would benefit publishers and a small literary elite at the cost of social investments in learning and education.

The United States created a utilitarian market-based model of intellectual property grants which created incentives for invention, but always with the primary objective of increasing social welfare and protecting the public domain. The checks and balances of interest group lobbies, the legislature and the judiciary worked effectively as long as each institution was relatively well-matched in terms of size and influence. However, a number of legal and economic scholars are increasingly concerned that the political influence of corporate interests, the vast number of uncoordinated users over whom the social costs are spread, and international harmonization of laws have upset these counterchecks, leading to over-enforcement at both the private and public levels.

International harmonization with European doctrines introduced significant distortions in the fundamental principles of American copyright and its democratic provisions. One of the most significant of these changes was also one of the least debated: compliance with the precepts of the Berne Convention accorded automatic copyright protection to all creations on their fixation in tangible form. This rule reversed the relationship between copyright and the public domain that the U.S. Constitution stipulated. According to original U.S. copyright doctrines, the public domain was the default, and copyright merely comprised a limited exemption to the public domain; after the alignment with Berne, copyright became the default, and the rights of the public and of the public domain now merely comprise a limited exception to the primacy of copyright. The pervasive uncertainty that characterizes the intellectual property arena today leads risk-averse individuals and educational institutions to err on the side of abandoning their right to free access rather than invite potential challenges and costly litigation. A number of commentators are equally concerned about other dimensions of the globalization of intellectual property rights, such as the movement to emulate European grants of property rights in databases, which has the potential to inhibit diffusion and learning.

Copyright law and policy has always altered and been altered by social, economic and technological changes, in the United States and elsewhere. However, the one constant feature across the centuries is that copyright protection involves crucial political questions to a far greater extent than its economic implications.

Additional Readings

Economic History

B. Zorina Khan. The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Law and Economics

Besen, Stanley, and L. Raskind. “An Introduction to the Law and Economics of Intellectual Property.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (1991): 3-27.

Breyer, Stephen. “The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies and Computer Programs.” Harvard Law Review 84 (1970): 281-351.

Gallini, Nancy and S. Scotchmer. “Intellectual Property: When Is It the Best Incentive System?” Innovation Policy and the Economy 2 (2002): 51-78.

Gordon, Wendy, and R. Watt, editors. The Economics of Copyright: Developments in Research and Analysis. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2002.

Hurt, Robert M., and Robert M. Shuchman. “The Economic Rationale of Copyright.” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 56 (1966): 421-32.

Johnson, William R. “The Economics of Copying.” Journal of Political Economy 93 (1985): 1581-74.

Landes, William M., and Richard A. Posner. “An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law.” Journal of Legal Studies 18 (1989): 325-63.

Landes, William M., and Richard A. Posner. The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Liebowitz, S. J. “Copying and Indirect Appropriability: Photocopying of Journals.” Journal of Political Economy 93 (1985): 945-57.

Merges, Robert P. “Contracting into Liability Rules: Intellectual Property Rights and Collective Rights Organizations.” California Law Review 84, no. 5 (1996): 1293-1393.

Meurer, Michael J. “Copyright Law and Price Discrimination.” Cardozo Law Review 23 (2001): 55-148.

Novos, Ian E., and Michael Waldman. “The Effects of Increased Copyright Protection: An Analytic Approach.” Journal of Political Economy 92 (1984): 236-46.

Plant, Arnold. “The Economic Aspects of Copyright in Books.” Economica 1 (1934): 167-95.

Takeyama, L. “The Welfare Implications of Unauthorized Reproduction of Intellectual Property in the Presence of Demand Network Externalities.” Journal of Industrial Economics 42 (1994): 155–66.

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Varian, Hal. “Buying, Sharing and Renting Information Goods.” Journal of Industrial Economics 48, no. 4 (2000): 473–88.

Varian, Hal. “Copying and Copyright.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 2 (2005): 121-38.

Watt, Richard. Copyright and Economic Theory: Friends or Foes? Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2000.

History of Economic Thought

Hadfield, Gilliam K. “The Economics of Copyright: A Historical Perspective.” Copyright Law Symposium (ASCAP) 38 (1992): 1-46.

History

Armstrong, Elizabeth. Before Copyright: The French Book-Privilege System, 1498-1526. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Birn, Raymond. “The Profits of Ideas: Privileges en librairie in Eighteenth-century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4, no. 2 (1970-71): 131-68.

Bugbee, Bruce. The Genesis of American Patent and Copyright Law. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1967.

Dawson, Robert L. The French Booktrade and the “Permission Simple” of 1777: Copyright and the Public Domain. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992.

Hackett, Alice P., and James Henry Burke. Eighty Years of Best Sellers, 1895-1975. New York: Bowker, 1977.

Nowell-Smith, Simon. International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

Patterson, Lyman. Copyright in Historical Perspective. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.

Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Saunders, David. Authorship and Copyright. London: Routledge, 1992.

Citation: Khan, B. “An Economic History of Copyright in Europe and the United States”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 16, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-copyright-in-europe-and-the-united-states/

The Economic Impact of the Black Death

David Routt, University of Richmond

The Black Death was the largest demographic disaster in European history. From its arrival in Italy in late 1347 through its clockwise movement across the continent to its petering out in the Russian hinterlands in 1353, the magna pestilencia (great pestilence) killed between seventeen and twenty—eight million people. Its gruesome symptoms and deadliness have fixed the Black Death in popular imagination; moreover, uncovering the disease’s cultural, social, and economic impact has engaged generations of scholars. Despite growing understanding of the Black Death’s effects, definitive assessment of its role as historical watershed remains a work in progress.

A Controversy: What Was the Black Death?

In spite of enduring fascination with the Black Death, even the identity of the disease behind the epidemic remains a point of controversy. Aware that fourteenth—century eyewitnesses described a disease more contagious and deadlier than bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis), the bacillus traditionally associated with the Black Death, dissident scholars in the 1970s and 1980s proposed typhus or anthrax or mixes of typhus, anthrax, or bubonic plague as the culprit. The new millennium brought other challenges to the Black Death—bubonic plague link, such as an unknown and probably unidentifiable bacillus, an Ebola—like haemorrhagic fever or, at the pseudoscientific fringes of academia, a disease of interstellar origin.

Proponents of Black Death as bubonic plague have minimized differences between modern bubonic and the fourteenth—century plague through painstaking analysis of the Black Death’s movement and behavior and by hypothesizing that the fourteenth—century plague was a hypervirulent strain of bubonic plague, yet bubonic plague nonetheless. DNA analysis of human remains from known Black Death cemeteries was intended to eliminate doubt but inability to replicate initially positive results has left uncertainty. New analytical tools used and new evidence marshaled in this lively controversy have enriched understanding of the Black Death while underscoring the elusiveness of certitude regarding phenomena many centuries past.

The Rate and Structure of mortality

The Black Death’s socioeconomic impact stemmed, however, from sudden mortality on a staggering scale, regardless of what bacillus caused it. Assessment of the plague’s economic significance begins with determining the rate of mortality for the initial onslaught in 1347—53 and its frequent recurrences for the balance of the Middle Ages, then unraveling how the plague chose victims according to age, sex, affluence, and place.

Imperfect evidence unfortunately hampers knowing precisely who and how many perished. Many of the Black Death’s contemporary observers, living in an epoch of famine and political, military, and spiritual turmoil, described the plague apocalyptically. A chronicler famously closed his narrative with empty membranes should anyone survive to continue it. Others believed as few as one in ten survived. One writer claimed that only fourteen people were spared in London. Although sober eyewitnesses offered more plausible figures, in light of the medieval preference for narrative dramatic force over numerical veracity, chroniclers’ estimates are considered evidence of the Black Death’s battering of the medieval psyche, not an accurate barometer of its demographic toll.

Even non—narrative and presumably dispassionate, systematic evidence — legal and governmental documents, ecclesiastical records, commercial archives — presents challenges. No medieval scribe dragged his quill across parchment for the demographer’s pleasure and convenience. With a paucity of censuses, estimates of population and tracing of demographic trends have often relied on indirect indicators of demographic change (e.g., activity in the land market, levels of rents and wages, size of peasant holdings) or evidence treating only a segment of the population (e.g., assignment of new priests to vacant churches, payments by peasants to take over holdings of the deceased). Even the rare census—like record, like England’s Domesday Book (1086) or the Poll Tax Return (1377), either enumerates only heads of households or excludes slices of the populace or ignores regions or some combination of all these. To compensate for these imperfections, the demographer relies on potentially debatable assumptions about the size of the medieval household, the representativeness of a discrete group of people, the density of settlement in an undocumented region, the level of tax evasion, and so forth.

A bewildering array of estimates for mortality from the plague of 1347—53 is the result. The first outbreak of the Black Death indisputably was the deadliest but the death rate varied widely according to place and social stratum. National estimates of mortality for England, where the evidence is fullest, range from five percent, to 23.6 percent among aristocrats holding land from the king, to forty to forty—five percent of the kingdom’s clergy, to over sixty percent in a recent estimate. The picture for the continent likewise is varied. Regional mortality in Languedoc (France) was forty to fifty percent while sixty to eighty percent of Tuscans (Italy) perished. Urban death rates were mostly higher but no less disparate, e.g., half in Orvieto (Italy), Siena (Italy), and Volterra (Italy), fifty to sixty—six percent in Hamburg (Germany), fifty—eight to sixty—eight percent in Perpignan (France), sixty percent for Barcelona’s (Spain) clerical population, and seventy percent in Bremen (Germany). The Black Death was often highly arbitrary in how it killed in a narrow locale, which no doubt broadened the spectrum of mortality rates. Two of Durham Cathedral Priory’s manors, for instance, had respective death rates of twenty—one and seventy—eighty percent (Shrewsbury, 1970; Russell, 1948; Waugh, 1991; Ziegler, 1969; Benedictow, 2004; Le Roy Ladurie, 1976; Bowsky, 1964; Pounds, 1974; Emery, 1967; Gyug, 1983; Aberth, 1995; Lomas, 1989).

Credible death rates between one quarter and three quarters complicate reaching a Europe—wide figure. Neither a casual and unscientific averaging of available estimates to arrive at a probably misleading composite death rate nor a timid placing of mortality somewhere between one and two thirds is especially illuminating. Scholars confronting the problem’s complexity before venturing estimates once favored one third as a reasonable aggregate death rate. Since the early 1970s demographers have found higher levels of mortality plausible and European mortality of one half is considered defensible, a figure not too distant from less fanciful contemporary observations.

While the Black Death of 1347—53 inflicted demographic carnage, had it been an isolated event European population might have recovered to its former level in a generation or two and its economic impact would have been moderate. The disease’s long—term demographic and socioeconomic legacy arose from it recurrence. When both national and local epidemics are taken into account, England endured thirty plague years between 1351 and 1485, a pattern mirrored on the continent, where Perugia was struck nineteen times and Hamburg, Cologne, and Nuremburg at least ten times each in the fifteenth century. Deadliness of outbreaks declined — perhaps ten to twenty percent in the second plague (pestis secunda) of 1361—2, ten to fifteen percent in the third plague (pestis tertia) of 1369, and as low as five and rarely above ten percent thereafter — and became more localized; however, the Black Death’s persistence ensured that demographic recovery would be slow and socioeconomic consequences deeper. Europe’s population in 1430 may have been fifty to seventy—five percent lower than in 1290 (Cipolla, 1994; Gottfried, 1983).

Enumeration of corpses does not adequately reflect the Black Death’s demographic impact. Who perished was equally significant as how many; in other words, the structure of mortality influenced the time and rate of demographic recovery. The plague’s preference for urbanite over peasant, man over woman, poor over affluent, and, perhaps most significantly, young over mature shaped its demographic toll. Eyewitnesses so universally reported disproportionate death among the young in the plague’s initial recurrence (1361—2) that it became known as the Childen’s Plague (pestis puerorum, mortalité des enfants). If this preference for youth reflected natural resistance to the disease among plague survivors, the Black Death may have ultimately resembled a lower—mortality childhood disease, a reality that magnified both its demographic and psychological impact.

The Black Death pushed Europe into a long—term demographic trough. Notwithstanding anecdotal reports of nearly universal pregnancy of women in the wake of the magna pestilencia, demographic stagnancy characterized the rest of the Middle Ages. Population growth recommenced at different times in different places but rarely earlier than the second half of the fifteenth century and in many places not until c. 1550.

The European Economy on the Cusp of the Black Death

Like the plague’s death toll, its socioeconomic impact resists categorical measurement. The Black Death’s timing made a facile labeling of it as a watershed in European economic history nearly inevitable. It arrived near the close of an ebullient high Middle Ages (c. 1000 to c. 1300) in which urban life reemerged, long—distance commerce revived, business and manufacturing innovated, manorial agriculture matured, and population burgeoned, doubling or tripling. The Black Death simultaneously portended an economically stagnant, depressed late Middle Ages (c. 1300 to c. 1500). However, even if this simplistic and somewhat misleading portrait of the medieval economy is accepted, isolating the Black Death’s economic impact from manifold factors at play is a daunting challenge.

Cognizant of a qualitative difference between the high and late Middle Ages, students of medieval economy have offered varied explanations, some mutually exclusive, others not, some favoring the less dramatic, less visible, yet inexorable factor as an agent of change rather than a catastrophic demographic shift. For some, a cooling climate undercut agricultural productivity, a downturn that rippled throughout the predominantly agrarian economy. For others, exploitative political, social, and economic institutions enriched an idle elite and deprived working society of wherewithal and incentive to be innovative and productive. Yet others associate monetary factors with the fourteenth— and fifteenth—century economic doldrums.

The particular concerns of the twentieth century unsurprisingly induced some scholars to view the medieval economy through a Malthusian lens. In this reconstruction of the Middle Ages, population growth pressed against the society’s ability to feed itself by the mid—thirteenth century. Rising impoverishment and contracting holdings compelled the peasant to cultivate inferior, low—fertility land and to convert pasture to arable production and thereby inevitably reduce numbers of livestock and make manure for fertilizer scarcer. Boosting gross productivity in the immediate term yet driving yields of grain downward in the longer term exacerbated the imbalance between population and food supply; redressing the imbalance became inevitable. This idea’s adherents see signs of demographic correction from the mid—thirteenth century onward, possibly arising in part from marriage practices that reduced fertility. A more potent correction came with subsistence crises. Miserable weather in 1315 destroyed crops and the ensuing Great Famine (1315—22) reduced northern Europe’s population by perhaps ten to fifteen percent. Poor harvests, moreover, bedeviled England and Italy to the eve of the Black Death.

These factors — climate, imperfect institutions, monetary imbalances, overpopulation — diminish the Black Death’s role as a transformative socioeconomic event. In other words, socioeconomic changes already driven by other causes would have occurred anyway, merely more slowly, had the plague never struck Europe. This conviction fosters receptiveness to lower estimates of the Black Death’s deadliness. Recent scrutiny of the Malthusian analysis, especially studies of agriculture in source—rich eastern England, has, however, rehabilitated the Black Death as an agent of socioeconomic change. Growing awareness of the use of “progressive” agricultural techniques and of alternative, non—grain economies less susceptible to a Malthusian population—versus—resources dynamic has undercut the notion of an absolutely overpopulated Europe and has encouraged acceptance of higher rates of mortality from the plague (Campbell, 1983; Bailey, 1989).

The Black Death and the Agrarian Economy

The lion’s share of the Black Death’s effect was felt in the economy’s agricultural sector, unsurprising in a society in which, except in the most urbanized regions, nine of ten people eked out a living from the soil.

A village struck by the plague underwent a profound though brief disordering of the rhythm of daily life. Strong administrative and social structures, the power of custom, and innate human resiliency restored the village’s routine by the following year in most cases: fields were plowed, crops were sown, tended, and harvested, labor services were performed by the peasantry, the village’s lord collected dues from tenants. Behind this seeming normalcy, however, lord and peasant were adjusting to the Black Death’s principal economic consequence: a much smaller agricultural labor pool. Before the plague, rising population had kept wages low and rents and prices high, an economic reality advantageous to the lord in dealing with the peasant and inclining many a peasant to cleave to demeaning yet secure dependent tenure.

As the Black Death swung the balance in the peasant’s favor, the literate elite bemoaned a disintegrating social and economic order. William of Dene, John Langland, John Gower, and others polemically evoked nostalgia for the peasant who knew his place, worked hard, demanded little, and squelched pride while they condemned their present in which land lay unplowed and only an immediate pang of hunger goaded a lazy, disrespectful, grasping peasant to do a moment’s desultory work (Hatcher, 1994).

Moralizing exaggeration aside, the rural worker indeed demanded and received higher payments in cash (nominal wages) in the plague’s aftermath. Wages in England rose from twelve to twenty—eight percent from the 1340s to the 1350s and twenty to forty percent from the 1340s to the 1360s. Immediate hikes were sometimes more drastic. During the plague year (1348—49) at Fornham All Saints (Suffolk), the lord paid the pre—plague rate of 3d. per acre for more half of the hired reaping but the rest cost 5d., an increase of 67 percent. The reaper, moreover, enjoyed more and larger tips in cash and perquisites in kind to supplement the wage. At Cuxham (Oxfordshire), a plowman making 2s. weekly before the plague demanded 3s. in 1349 and 10s. in 1350 (Farmer, 1988; Farmer, 1991; West Suffolk Record Office 3/15.7/2.4; Harvey, 1965).

In some instances, the initial hikes in nominal or cash wages subsided in the years further out from the plague and any benefit they conferred on the wage laborer was for a time undercut by another economic change fostered by the plague. Grave mortality ensured that the European supply of currency in gold and silver increased on a per—capita basis, which in turned unleashed substantial inflation in prices that did not subside in England until the mid—1370s and even later in many places on the continent. The inflation reduced the purchasing power (real wage) of the wage laborer so significantly that, even with higher cash wages, his earnings either bought him no more or often substantially less than before the magna pestilencia (Munro, 2003; Aberth, 2001).

The lord, however, was confronted not only by the roving wage laborer on whom he relied for occasional and labor—intensive seasonal tasks but also by the peasant bound to the soil who exchanged customary labor services, rent, and dues for holding land from the lord. A pool of labor services greatly reduced by the Black Death enabled the servile peasant to bargain for less onerous responsibilities and better conditions. At Tivetshall (Norfolk), vacant holdings deprived its lord of sixty percent of his week—work and all his winnowing services by 1350—51. A fifth of winter and summer week—work and a third of reaping services vanished at Redgrave (Suffolk) in 1349—50 due to the magna pestilencia. If a lord did not make concessions, a peasant often gravitated toward any better circumstance beckoning elsewhere. At Redgrave, for instance, the loss of services in 1349—50 directly due to the plague was followed in 1350—51 by an equally damaging wave of holdings abandoned by surviving tenants. For the medieval peasant, never so tightly bound to the manor as once imagined, the Black Death nonetheless fostered far greater rural mobility. Beyond loss of labor services, the deceased or absentee peasant paid no rent or dues and rendered no fees for use of manorial monopolies such as mills and ovens and the lord’s revenues shrank. The income of English lords contracted by twenty percent from 1347 to 1353 (Norfolk Record Office WAL 1247/288×1; University of Chicago Bacon 335—6; Gottfried, 1983).

Faced with these disorienting circumstances, the lord often ultimately had to decide how or even whether the pre—plague status quo could be reestablished on his estate. Not capitalistic in the sense of maximizing productivity for reinvestment of profits to enjoy yet more lucrative future returns, the medieval lord nonetheless valued stable income sufficient for aristocratic ostentation and consumption. A recalcitrant peasantry, diminished dues and services, and climbing wages undermined the material foundation of the noble lifestyle, jostled the aristocratic sense of proper social hierarchy, and invited a response.

In exceptional circumstances, a lord sometimes kept the peasant bound to the land. Because the nobility in Spanish Catalonia had already tightened control of the peasantry before the Black Death, because underdeveloped commercial agriculture provided the peasantry narrow options, and because the labor—intensive demesne agriculture common elsewhere was largely absent, the Catalan lord through a mix of coercion (physical intimidation, exorbitant fees to purchase freedom) and concession (reduced rents, conversion of servile dues to less humiliating fixed cash payments) kept the Catalan peasant in place. In England and elsewhere on the continent, where labor services were needed to till the demesne, such a conservative approach was less feasible. This, however, did not deter some lords from trying. The lord of Halesowen (Worcestershire) not only commanded the servile tenant to perform the full range of services but also resuscitated labor obligations in abeyance long before the Black Death, tantamount to an unwillingness to acknowledge anything had changed (Freedman, 1991; Razi, 1981).

Europe’s political elite also looked to legal coercion not only to contain rising wages and to limit the peasant’s mobility but also to allay a sense of disquietude and disorientation arising from the Black Death’s buffeting of pre—plague social realities. England’s Ordinance of Laborers (1349) and Statute of Laborers (1351) called for a return to the wages and terms of employment of 1346. Labor legislation was likewise promulgated by the Córtes of Aragon and Castile, the French crown, and cities such as Siena, Orvieto, Pisa, Florence, and Ragusa. The futility of capping wages by legislative fiat is evident in the French crown’s 1351 revision of its 1349 enactment to permit a wage increase of one third. Perhaps only in England, where effective government permitted robust enforcement, did the law slow wage increases for a time (Aberth, 2001; Gottfried, 1983; Hunt and Murray, 1999; Cohn, 2007).

Once knee—jerk conservatism and legislative palliatives failed to revivify pre—plague socioeconomic arrangements, the lord cast about for a modus vivendi in a new world of abundant land and scarce labor. A sober triage of the available sources of labor, whether it was casual wage labor or a manor’s permanent stipendiary staff (famuli) or the dependent peasant, led to revision of managerial policy. The abbot of Saint Edmund’s, for example, focused on reconstitution of the permanent staff (famuli) on his manors. Despite mortality and flight, the abbot by and large achieved his goal by the mid—1350s. While labor legislation may have facilitated this, the abbot’s provision of more frequent and lucrative seasonal rewards, coupled with the payment of grain stipends in more valuable and marketable cereals such as wheat, no doubt helped secure the loyalty of famuli while circumventing statutory limits on higher wages. With this core of labor solidified, the focus turned to preserving the most essential labor services, especially those associated with the labor—intensive harvesting season. Less vital labor services were commuted for cash payments and ad hoc wage labor then hired to fill gaps. The cultivation of the demesne continued, though not on the pre—plague scale.

For a time in fact circumstances helped the lord continue direct management of the demesne. The general inflation of the quarter—century following the plague as well as poor harvests in the 1350s and 1360s boosted grain prices and partially compensated for more expensive labor. This so—called “Indian summer” of demesne agriculture ended quickly in the mid—1370s in England and subsequently on the continent when the post—plague inflation gave way to deflation and abundant harvests drove prices for commodities downward, where they remained, aside from brief intervals of inflation, for the rest of the Middle Ages. Recurrences of the plague, moreover, placed further stress on new managerial policies. For the lord who successfully persuaded new tenants to take over vacant holdings, such as happened at Chevington (Suffolk) by the late 1350s, the pestis secunda of 1361—62 often inflicted a decisive blow: a second recovery at Chevington never materialized (West Suffolk Records Office 3/15.3/2.9—2.23).

Under unremitting pressure, the traditional cultivation of the demesne ceased to be viable for lord after lord: a centuries—old manorial system gradually unraveled and the nature of agriculture was transformed. The lord’s earliest concession to this new reality was curtailment of cultivated acreage, a trend that accelerated with time. The 590.5 acres sown on average at Great Saxham (Suffolk) in the late 1330s was more than halved (288.67 acres) in the 1360s, for instance (West Suffolk Record Office, 3/15.14/1.1, 1.7, 1.8).

Beyond reducing the demesne to a size commensurate with available labor, the lord could explore types of husbandry less labor—intensive than traditional grain agriculture. Greater domestic manufacture of woolen cloth and growing demand for meat enabled many English lords to reduce arable production in favor of sheep—raising, which required far less labor. Livestock husbandry likewise became more significant on the continent. Suitable climate, soil, and markets made grapes, olives, apples, pears, vegetables, hops, hemp, flax, silk, and dye—stuffs attractive alternatives to grain. In hope of selling these cash crops, rural agriculture became more attuned to urban demand and urban businessmen and investors more intimately involved in what and how much of it was grown in the countryside (Gottfried, 1983; Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The lord also looked to reduce losses from demesne acreage no longer under the plow and from the vacant holdings of onetime tenants. Measures adopted to achieve this end initiated a process that gained momentum with each passing year until the face of the countryside was transformed and manorialism was dead. The English landlord, hopeful for a return to the pre—plague regime, initially granted brief terminal leases of four to six years at fixed rates for bits of demesne and for vacant dependent holdings. Leases over time lengthened to ten, twenty, thirty years, or even a lifetime. In France and Italy, the lord often resorted to métayage or mezzadria leasing, a type of sharecropping in which the lord contributed capital (land, seed, tools, plow teams) to the lessee, who did the work and surrendered a fraction of the harvest to the lord.

Disillusioned by growing obstacles to profitable cultivation of the demesne, the lord, especially in the late fourteenth century and the early fifteenth, adopted a more sweeping type of leasing, the placing of the demesne or even the entire manor “at farm” (ad firmam). A “farmer” (firmarius) paid the lord a fixed annual “farm” (firma) for the right to exploit the lord’s property and take whatever profit he could. The distant or unprofitable manor was usually “farmed” first and other manors followed until a lord’s personal management of his property often ceased entirely. The rising popularity of this expedient made direct management of demesne by lord rare by c. 1425. The lord often became a rentier bound to a fixed income. The tenurial transformation was completed when the lord sold to the peasant his right of lordship, a surrender to the peasant of outright possession of his holding for a fixed cash rent and freedom from dues and services. Manorialism, in effect, collapsed and was gone from western and central Europe by 1500.

The landlord’s discomfort ultimately benefited the peasantry. Lower prices for foodstuffs and greater purchasing power from the last quarter of the fourteenth century onward, progressive disintegration of demesnes, and waning customary land tenure enabled the enterprising, ambitious peasant to lease or purchase property and become a substantial landed proprietor. The average size of the peasant holding grew in the late Middle Ages. Due to the peasant’s generally improved standard of living, the century and a half following the magna pestilencia has been labeled a “golden age” in which the most successful peasant became a “yeoman” or “kulak” within the village community. Freed from labor service, holding a fixed copyhold lease, and enjoying greater disposable income, the peasant exploited his land exclusively for his personal benefit and often pursued leisure and some of the finer things in life. Consumption of meat by England’s humbler social strata rose substantially after the Black Death, a shift in consumer tastes that reduced demand for grain and helped make viable the shift toward pastoralism in the countryside. Late medieval sumptuary legislation, intended to keep the humble from dressing above his station and retain the distinction between low— and highborn, attests both to the peasant’s greater income and the desire of the elite to limit disorienting social change (Dyer, 1989; Gottfried, 1983; Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The Black Death, moreover, profoundly altered the contours of settlement in the countryside. Catastrophic loss of population led to abandonment of less attractive fields, contraction of existing settlements, and even wholesale desertion of villages. More than 1300 English villages vanished between 1350 and 1500. French and Dutch villagers abandoned isolated farmsteads and huddled in smaller villages while their Italian counterparts vacated remote settlements and shunned less desirable fields. The German countryside was mottled with abandoned settlements. Two thirds of named villages disappeared in Thuringia, Anhalt, and the eastern Harz mountains, one fifth in southwestern Germany, and one third in the Rhenish palatinate, abandonment far exceeding loss of population and possibly arising from migration from smaller to larger villages (Gottfried, 1983; Pounds, 1974).

The Black Death and the Commercial Economy

As with agriculture, assessment of the Black Death’s impact on the economy’s commercial sector is a complex problem. The vibrancy of the high medieval economy is generally conceded. As the first millennium gave way to the second, urban life revived, trade and manufacturing flourished, merchant and craft gilds emerged, commercial and financial innovations proliferated (e.g., partnerships, maritime insurance, double—entry bookkeeping, fair letters, letters of credit, bills of exchange, loan contracts, merchant banking, etc.). The integration of the high medieval economy reached its zenith c. 1250 to c. 1325 with the rise of large companies with international interests, such as the Bonsignori of Siena and the Buonaccorsi of Florence and the emergence of so—called “super companies” such as the Florentine Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli (Hunt and Murray, 1999).

How to characterize the late medieval economy has been more fraught with controversy, however. Historians a century past, uncomprehending of how their modern world could be rooted in a retrograde economy, imagined an entrepreneurially creative and expansive late medieval economy. Succeeding generations of historians darkened this optimistic portrait and fashioned a late Middle Ages of unmitigated decline, an “age of adversity” in which the economy was placed under the rubric “depression of the late Middle Ages.” The historiographical pendulum now swings away from this interpretation and a more nuanced picture has emerged that gives the Black Death’s impact on commerce its full due but emphasizes the variety of the plague’s impact from merchant to merchant, industry to industry, and city to city. Success or failure was equally possible after the Black Death and the game favored adaptability, creativity, nimbleness, opportunism, and foresight.

Once the magna pestilencia had passed, the city had to cope with a labor supply even more greatly decimated than in the countryside due to a generally higher urban death rate. The city, however, could reverse some of this damage by attracting, as it had for centuries, new workers from the countryside, a phenomenon that deepened the crisis for the manorial lord and contributed to changes in rural settlement. A resurgence of the slave trade occurred in the Mediterranean, especially in Italy, where the female slave from Asia or Africa entered domestic service in the city and the male slave toiled in the countryside. Finding more labor was not, however, a panacea. A peasant or slave performed an unskilled task adequately but could not necessarily replace a skilled laborer. The gross loss of talent due to the plague caused a decline in per capita productivity by skilled labor remediable only by time and training (Hunt and Murray, 1999; Miskimin, 1975).

Another immediate consequence of the Black Death was dislocation of the demand for goods. A suddenly and sharply smaller population ensured a glut of manufactured and trade goods, whose prices plummeted for a time. The businessman who successfully weathered this short—term imbalance in supply and demand then had to reshape his business’ output to fit a declining or at best stagnant pool of potential customers.

The Black Death transformed the structure of demand as well. While the standard of living of the peasant improved, chronically low prices for grain and other agricultural products from the late fourteenth century may have deprived the peasant of the additional income to purchase enough manufactured or trade items to fill the hole in commercial demand. In the city, however, the plague concentrated wealth, often substantial family fortunes, in fewer and often younger hands, a circumstance that, when coupled with lower prices for grain, left greater per capita disposable income. The plague’s psychological impact, moreover, it is believed, influenced how this windfall was used. Pessimism and the specter of death spurred an individualistic pursuit of pleasure, a hedonism that manifested itself in the purchase of luxuries, especially in Italy. Even with a reduced population, the gross volume of luxury goods manufactured and sold rose, a pattern of consumption that endured even after the extra income had been spent within a generation or so after the magna pestilencia.

Like the manorial lord, the affluent urban bourgeois sometimes employed structural impediments to block the ambitious parvenu from joining his ranks and becoming a competitor. A tendency toward limiting the status of gild master to the son or son—in—law of a sitting master, evident in the first half of the fourteenth century, gained further impetus after the Black Death. The need for more journeymen after the plague was conceded in the shortening of terms of apprenticeship, but the newly minted journeyman often discovered that his chance of breaking through the glass ceiling and becoming a master was virtually nil without an entrée through kinship. Women also were banished from gilds as unwanted competition. The urban wage laborer, by and large controlled by the gilds, was denied membership and had no access to urban structures of power, a potent source of frustration. While these measures may have permitted the bourgeois to hold his ground for a time, the winds of change were blowing in the city as well as the countryside and gild monopolies and gild restrictions were fraying by the close of the Middle Ages.

In the new climate created by the Black Death, the individual businessman did retain an advantage: the business judgment and techniques honed during the high Middle Ages. This was crucial in a contracting economy in which gross productivity never attained its high medieval peak and in which the prevailing pattern was boom and bust on a roughly generational basis. A fluctuating economy demanded adaptability and the most successful post—plague businessman not merely weathered bad times but located opportunities within adversity and exploited them. The post—plague entrepreneur’s preference for short—term rather than long—term ventures, once believed a product of a gloomy despondency caused by the plague and exacerbated by endemic violence, decay of traditional institutions, and nearly continuous warfare, is now viewed as a judicious desire to leave open entrepreneurial options, to manage risk effectively, and to take advantage of whatever better opportunity arose. The successful post—plague businessman observed markets closely and responded to them while exercising strict control over his concern, looking for greater efficiency, and trimming costs (Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The fortunes of the textile industry, a trade singularly susceptible to contracting markets and rising wages, best underscores the importance of flexibility. Competition among textile manufacturers, already great even before the Black Death due to excess productive capacity, was magnified when England entered the market for low— and medium—quality woolen cloth after the magna pestilencia and was exporting forty—thousand pieces annually by 1400. The English took advantage of proximity to raw material, wool England itself produced, a pattern increasingly common in late medieval business. When English producers were undeterred by a Flemish embargo on English cloth, the Flemish and Italians, the textile trade’s other principal players, were compelled to adapt in order to compete. Flemish producers that emphasized higher—grade, luxury textiles or that purchased, improved, and resold cheaper English cloth prospered while those that stubbornly competed head—to—head with the English in lower—quality woolens suffered. The Italians not only produced luxury woolens, improved their domestically—produced wool, found sources for wool outside England (Spain), and increased production of linen but also produced silks and cottons, once only imported into Europe from the East (Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The new mentality of the successful post—plague businessman is exemplified by the Florentines Gregorio Dati and Buonaccorso Pitti and especially the celebrated merchant of Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini. The large companies and super companies, some of which failed even before the Black Death, were not well suited to the post—plague commercial economy. Datini’s family business, with its limited geographical ambitions, better exercised control, was more nimble and flexible as opportunities vanished or materialized, and more effectively managed risk, all keys to success. Datini through voluminous correspondence with his business associates, subordinates, and agents and his conspicuously careful and regular accounting grasped the reins of his concern tightly. He insulated himself from undue risk by never committing too heavily to any individual venture, by dividing cargoes among ships or by insuring them, by never lending money to notoriously uncreditworthy princes, and by remaining as apolitical as he could. His energy and drive to complete every business venture likewise served him well and made him an exemplar for commercial success in a challenging era (Origo, 1957; Hunt and Murray, 1999).

The Black Death and Popular Rebellion

The late medieval popular uprising, a phenomenon with undeniable economic ramifications, is often linked with the demographic, cultural, social, and economic reshuffling caused by the Black Death; however, the connection between pestilence and revolt is neither exclusive nor linear. Any single uprising is rarely susceptible to a single—cause analysis and just as rarely was a single socioeconomic interest group the fomenter of disorder. The outbreak of rebellion in the first half of the fourteenth century (e.g., in urban [1302] and maritime [1325—28] Flanders and in English monastic towns [1326—27]) indicates the existence of socioeconomic and political disgruntlement well before the Black Death.

Some explanations for popular uprising, such as the placing of immediate stresses on the populace and the cumulative effect of centuries of oppression by manorial lords, are now largely dismissed. At times of greatest stress —— the Great Famine and the Black Death —— disorder but no large—scale, organized uprising materialized. Manorial oppression likewise is difficult to defend when the peasant in the plague’s aftermath was often enjoying better pay, reduced dues and services, broader opportunities, and a higher standard of living. Detailed study of the participants in the revolts most often labeled “peasant” uprisings has revealed the central involvement and apparent common cause of urban and rural tradesmen and craftsmen, not only manorial serfs.

The Black Death may indeed have made its greatest contribution to popular rebellion by expanding the peasant’s horizons and fueling a sense of grievance at the pace of change, not at its absence. The plague may also have undercut adherence to the notion of a divinely—sanctioned, static social order and buffeted a belief that preservation of manorial socioeconomic arrangements was essential to the survival of all, which in turn may have raised receptiveness to the apocalyptic socially revolutionary message of preachers like England’s John Ball. After the Black Death, change was inevitable and apparent to all.

The reasons for any individual rebellion were complex. Measures in the environs of Paris to check wage hikes caused by the plague doubtless fanned discontent and contributed to the outbreak of the Jacquerie of 1358 but high taxation to finance the Hundred Years’ War, depredation by marauding mercenary bands in the French countryside, and the peasantry’s conviction that the nobility had failed them in war roiled popular discontent. In the related urban revolt led by étienne Marcel (1355—58), tensions arose from the Parisian bourgeoisie’s discontent with the war’s progress, the crown’s imposition of regressive sales and head taxes, and devaluation of currency rather than change attributable to the Black Death.

In the English Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381, continued enforcement of the Statute of Laborers no doubt rankled and perhaps made the peasantry more open to provocative sermonizing but labor legislation had not halted higher wages or improvement in the standard of living for peasant. It seems likely that discontent may have arisen from an unsatisfying pace of improvement of the peasant’s lot. The regressive Poll Taxes of 1380 and 1381 also contributed to the discontent. It is furthermore noteworthy that the rebellion began in relatively affluent eastern England, not in the poorer west or north.

In the Ciompi revolt in Florence (1378—83), restrictive gild regulations and denial of political voice to workers due to the Black Death raised tensions; however, Florence’s war with the papacy and an economic slump in the 1370s resulting in devaluation of the penny in which the worker was paid were equally if not more important in fomenting unrest. Once the value of the penny was restored to its former level in 1383 the rebellion in fact subsided.

In sum, the Black Death played some role in each uprising but, as with many medieval phenomena, it is difficult to gauge its importance relative to other causes. Perhaps the plague’s greatest contribution to unrest lay in its fostering of a shrinking economy that for a time was less able to absorb socioeconomic tensions than had the growing high medieval economy. The rebellions in any event achieved little. Promises made to the rebels were invariably broken and brutal reprisals often followed. The lot of the lower socioeconomic strata was improved incrementally by the larger economic changes already at work. Viewed from this perspective, the Black Death may have had more influence in resolving the worker’s grievances than in spurring revolt.

Conclusion

The European economy at the close of the Middle Ages (c. 1500) differed fundamentally from the pre—plague economy. In the countryside, a freer peasant derived greater material benefit from his toil. Fixed rents if not outright ownership of land had largely displaced customary dues and services and, despite low grain prices, the peasant more readily fed himself and his family from his own land and produced a surplus for the market. Yields improved as reduced population permitted a greater focus on fertile lands and more frequent fallowing, a beneficial phenomenon for the peasant. More pronounced socioeconomic gradations developed among peasants as some, especially more prosperous ones, exploited the changed circumstances, especially the availability of land. The peasant’s gain was the lord’s loss. As the Middle Ages waned, the lord was commonly a pure rentier whose income was subject to the depredations of inflation.

In trade and manufacturing, the relative ease of success during the high Middle Ages gave way to greater competition, which rewarded better business practices and leaner, meaner, and more efficient concerns. Greater sensitivity to the market and the cutting of costs ultimately rewarded the European consumer with a wider range of good at better prices.

In the long term, the demographic restructuring caused by the Black Death perhaps fostered the possibility of new economic growth. The pestilence returned Europe’s population roughly its level c. 1100. As one scholar notes, the Black Death, unlike other catastrophes, destroyed people but not property and the attenuated population was left with the whole of Europe’s resources to exploit, resources far more substantial by 1347 than they had been two and a half centuries earlier, when they had been created from the ground up. In this environment, survivors also benefited from the technological and commercial skills developed during the course of the high Middle Ages. Viewed from another perspective, the Black Death was a cataclysmic event and retrenchment was inevitable, but it ultimately diminished economic impediments and opened new opportunity.

References and Further Reading:

Aberth, John. “The Black Death in the Diocese of Ely: The Evidence of the Bishop’s Register.” Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995): 275—87.

Aberth, John. From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348—1350, a Brief History with Documents . Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005.

Aston, T. H. and C. H. E. Philpin, eds. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre—Industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Bailey, Mark D. “Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England: Some Thoughts on Recent Research.” Economic History Review 49 (1996): 1—19.

Bailey, Mark D. A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Benedictow, Ole J. The Black Death, 1346—1353: The Complete History. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004.

Bleukx, Koenraad. “Was the Black Death (1348—49) a Real Plague Epidemic? England as a Case Study.” In Serta Devota in Memoriam Guillelmi Lourdaux. Pars Posterior: Cultura Medievalis, edited by W. Verbeke, M. Haverals, R. de Keyser, and J. Goossens, 64—113. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995.

Blockmans, Willem P. “The Social and Economic Effects of Plague in the Low Countries, 1349—1500.” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 58 (1980): 833—63.

Bolton, Jim L. “‘The World Upside Down’: Plague as an Agent of Economic and Social Change.” In The Black Death in England, edited by M. Ormrod and P. Lindley. Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1996.

Bowsky, William M. “The Impact of the Black Death upon Sienese Government and Society.” Speculum 38 (1964): 1—34.

Campbell, Bruce M. S. “Agricultural Progress in Medieval England: Some Evidence from Eastern Norfolk.” Economic History Review 36 (1983): 26—46.

Campbell, Bruce M. S., ed. Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.

Cipolla, Carlo M. Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000—1700, Third edition. New York: Norton, 1994.

Cohn, Samuel K. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. London: Edward Arnold, 2002.

Cohn, Sameul K. “After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes toward Labour in Late—Medieval Western Europe.” Economic History Review 60 (2007): 457—85.

Davis, David E. “The Scarcity of Rats and the Black Death.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (1986): 455—70.

Davis, R. A. “The Effect of the Black Death on the Parish Priests of the Medieval Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield.” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 62 (1989): 85—90.

Drancourt, Michel, Gerard Aboudharam, Michel Signoli, Olivier Detour, and Didier Raoult. “Detection of 400—Year—Old Yersinia Pestis DNA in Human Dental Pulp: An Approach to the Diagnosis of Ancient Septicemia.” Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States 95 (1998): 12637—40.

Dyer, Christopher. Standards of Living in the Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200—1520. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Emery, Richard W. “The Black Death of 1348 in Perpignan.” Speculum 42 (1967): 611—23.

Farmer, David L. “Prices and Wages.” In The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. II, edited H. E. Hallam, 715—817. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Farmer, D. L. “Prices and Wages, 1350—1500.” In The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. III, edited E. Miller, 431—94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Flinn, Michael W. “Plague in Europe and the Mediterranean Countries.” Journal of European Economic History 8 (1979): 131—48.

Freedman, Paul. The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Gottfried, Robert. The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe. New York: Free Press, 1983.

Gyug, Richard. “The Effects and Extent of the Black Death of 1348: New Evidence for Clerical Mortality in Barcelona.” Mediæval Studies 45 (1983): 385—98.

Harvey, Barbara F. “The Population Trend in England between 1300 and 1348.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4th ser. 16 (1966): 23—42.

Harvey, P. D. A. A Medieval Oxfordshire Village: Cuxham, 1240—1400. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Hatcher, John. “England in the Aftermath of the Black Death.” Past and Present 144 (1994): 3—35.

Hatcher, John and Mark Bailey. Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hatcher, John. Plague, Population, and the English Economy 1348—1530. London and Basingstoke: MacMillan Press Ltd., 1977.

Herlihy, David. The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, edited by S. K. Cohn. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Horrox, Rosemary, transl. and ed. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Hunt, Edwin S.and James M. Murray. A History of Business in Medieval Europe, 1200—1550. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Jordan, William C. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Lehfeldt, Elizabeth, ed. The Black Death. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 2005.

Lerner, Robert E. The Age of Adversity: The Fourteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Peasants of Languedoc, transl. J. Day. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976.

Lomas, Richard A. “The Black Death in County Durham.” Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989): 127—40.

McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1976.

Miskimin, Harry A. The Economy of the Early Renaissance, 1300—1460. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Morris, Christopher “The Plague in Britain.” Historical Journal 14 (1971): 205—15.

Munro, John H. “The Symbiosis of Towns and Textiles: Urban Institutions and the Changing Fortunes of Cloth Manufacturing in the Low Countries and England, 1270—1570.” Journal of Early Modern History 3 (1999): 1—74.

Munro, John H. “Wage—Stickiness, Monetary Changes, and the Real Incomes in Late—Medieval England and the Low Countries, 1300—1500: Did Money Matter?” Research in Economic History 21 (2003): 185—297.

Origo. Iris The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335—1410. Boston: David R. Godine, 1957, 1986.

Platt, Colin. King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late—Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

Poos, Lawrence R. A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350—1575. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Postan, Michael M. The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages. Harmondswworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975.

Pounds, Norman J. D. An Economic History of Europe. London: Longman, 1974.

Raoult, Didier, Gerard Aboudharam, Eric Crubézy, Georges Larrouy, Bertrand Ludes, and Michel Drancourt. “Molecular Identification by ‘Suicide PCR’ of Yersinia Pestis as the Agent of Medieval Black Death.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97 (7 Nov. 2000): 12800—3.

Razi, Zvi “Family, Land, and the Village Community in Later Medieval England.” Past and Present 93 (1981): 3—36.

Russell, Josiah C. British Medieval Population. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948.

Scott, Susan and Christopher J. Duncan. Return of the Black Death: The World’s Deadliest Serial Killer. Chicester, West Sussex and Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004.

Shrewsbury, John F. D. A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Twigg, Graham The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal. London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1984.

Waugh, Scott L. England in the Reign of Edward III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. London: Penguin, 1969, 1987.

Citation: Routt, David. “The Economic Impact of the Black Death”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. July 20, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-black-death/

History and Financial Crises: Lessons from the 20th Century

Reviewer(s):Moen, Jon

Published by EH.Net (August 2013)

Christopher Kobrak and Mira Wilkins, editors, History and Financial Crises: Lessons from the 20th Century.? New York: Routledge, 2013. x + 138 pp. $140 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-415-62297-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Jon Moen, Department of Economics, University of Mississippi.

This book is a collection of six papers that were originally published as a special issue of Business History (Volume 53, Issue 2, April 2011).? It includes a new summary chapter on the use of history in understanding modern financial crises.? Two themes tied the original collection together: the roles of globalization and regulation in financial crises.? Because of the five papers chosen, the collection focuses on the 1920s and 30s.? The papers cover the experiences of the German, Swedish, British, Canadian, and U.S. financial and banking sectors just before and during the Great Depression.? Individually, the five papers draw useful lessons from historical episodes of financial crises, and I enjoyed reading them.? Because they were subject to careful peer-review, I will not review them individually.? Instead, I will review the effectiveness of the collection as a whole.

The original introductory essay and the new concluding essay distract from the five papers; they do not clearly make a case for why I should read them as a collection.? The introductory essay by Christopher Kobrak and Mira Wilkins starts with an extended discussion on the definition of a financial crisis.? It acknowledges Charles Kindleberger?s (2011) self-confessed inability to define a crisis and notes attempts to define a crisis on the basis of sudden movements in interest rates or the money supply.? Yet it ends quite unsatisfyingly with ?no absolute definition of either financial or economic crisis? (p. 5).? Later the essay apologizes for ultimately choosing a set of papers that are limited to the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the Great Depression (p. 10).? That is not bad, but the apology diminishes what the five essays do offer, as noted carefully in the next few pages.? One important point that the essay points out, however, is that not all crises covered in the special issue resulted in a collapse in demand and prices (p. 15).? Why crises do not inevitably lead to recessions or worse could be examined more.

The new, concluding essay by Christopher Kobrak is problematic.? As a stand-alone essay, I found it to be a potentially compelling survey of the relationship between financial and banking panics and the perils of making casual historical comparisons.? In particular, highlighting the relevance of the banking crises of the early 1930s rather than the spectacular stock market crash of 1929 helps in making historical comparisons with the crisis that started in 2008.? But then the essay veers off into topics that are again distracting, like musing on the loss of governmental discipline from the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement (p. 119).? This is odd, as the introductory essay indicates that the paper by Mark Billings and Forrest Capie emphasizes the benefits of flexible exchange rates.? The author then regrets not having an essay or more discussion of the Bank Panic of 1907, stating that it gets ?little press in financial histories? (p. 120) and then proceeds to write several pages on the Panic.? I have found quite a bit about 1907 in financial histories by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (1963), Gary Gorton (2010), Richard Timberlake (1993), and Elmus Wicker (2000), just to name a few.? I may have contributed something myself.? The section on regulation (p. 123) starts out well, noting how historically regulation has always been trying to play catch-up to financial innovation.? But the subsequent discussion of the breakdown in Bretton Woods again doesn?t seem closely related to the papers of the special issue.? The discussion of ?Good Financial Crises? argues that crises that were successfully averted rarely get examined.? Wicker clearly points out that the New York Clearing House successfully dealt with the Panic of 1873, and he refers to the reactions to the Panics of 1884 and 1890 as success stories from the point of view of the Clearing House.? I mention this because there is a lot of historical analysis of specific panics out there that could have been tied into this essay.

The conclusion to the essay left me a bit puzzled.? Certainly financial markets are much more complicated today than, say, in 1907.? But is this the result of an increasing lack of social responsibility on the part of financiers today?? We are asked to compare today?s leaders with those of 1907, who ?stepped in to save a system from problems they themselves had created? (p. 131).? Whatever those problems were, I have a hard time imagining that saving his own skin was not first and foremost in J.P. Morgan?s mind, an incentive that just happened to be compatible with that of New York?s financial market in general.? Nevertheless, read the special issue or the book for the all of the essays.? Just do not expect to find a lot of lessons.

References:

Friedman, Milton, and Anna J. Schwartz. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1963.

Gorton, Gary.? Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007.? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Kindleberger, Charles.? Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 6th edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Timberlake, Richard.? Monetary Policy in the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Wicker, Elmus.? Banking Panics of the Gilded Age.? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
?

Jon Moen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Mississippi.? He has studied retirement in the United States in addition to his research on the Panic of 1907.? He is currently working on a project with Ellis Tallman of Oberlin College and the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank on the effectiveness of the New York Clearing House in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.??
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Copyright (c) 2013 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (August 2013). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview

Subject(s):Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Geographic Area(s):Europe
North America
Time Period(s):20th Century: Pre WWII

In the Shadow of Adam Smith: Founders of Scottish Economics, 1700-1900

Author(s):Rutherford, Donald
Reviewer(s):Paganelli, Maria Pia

Published by EH.Net (July 2013)
?
Donald Rutherford, In the Shadow of Adam Smith: Founders of Scottish Economics, 1700-1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. vii + 344 pp. $40 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-230-25210-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Maria Pia Paganelli, Department of Economics, Trinity University.

Donald Rutherford?s In the Shadow of Adam Smith presents the intellectual wealth of Scotland which generated a large number of economic thinkers who have often been undeservingly overlooked, because of the towering presence of Adam Smith.? The book is an important contribution to the literature on Smith, on the history of economic thought, on Scotland?s intellectual history, as well as, indirectly, on the evolution of ideas more generally.

Smith is generally such an immense figure that we may be tempted to think of him as the only voice of eighteenth century Scotland as far as economics is concerned. Attempts to moderate Smith?s grandeur remind us that he may have just systematized previous knowledge. Rutherford offers us the context in which Smith?s presence grew and his legacy developed. He offers us insight into the wide economic knowledge that Smith used (or did not use), added to (or not), and of which he is (just a) part.

The scholarship present in the book is remarkable, even more so because the book is organized by topic, rather than by time or by authors. The topics covered are trade (international trade, exchange economy, value); money (functions of money, paper credit, banking); public finance (functions of government, taxation, national debt); condition of the people (population, property rights and rent, profits and wages, poverty); condition of the economy (economic growth, economic development); and economic ideology (natural liberty, socialism). And to this, Rutherford adds an appendix with biographical sketches of the major Scottish writers.

Most of the topics chosen bring to light both the strengths and the weaknesses of vision of Smith, given what was written before, during and after his life. Rutherford brings to life the complexity of the debate in Smith?s time and links the complexity of those debates to today?s debates in the literature. I will give an example of both: the debate on population and the debate on poverty.

Smith?s stature seems to shrink a bit when inserted into the complexity of population growth debates. According to Rutherford, Smith, like Richard Cantillon, thought that changes in population were linked to changes in labor demand: higher labor demand would lead to a growth in population. But Smith?s ideas, like those of the writers before him, were based on not much more than speculation, at least for Scotland. The first Census was legislated in 1800. Yet, Alexander Webster (1707-84) started to count the population of parishes and offered an estimate of the population of Scotland in 1750 (1.265 million). Webster was a friend of Robert Wallace (1697-1771), ?the great precursor of Malthus? (p. 151). Hodges (1703), Hutchinson (1755), Ferguson (1767), Kames (1778), Anderson (1782), and Dunbar (1789) seemed preoccupied with a declining population, such as in (the North of) Scotland because they believed that the strength of a country consists in its people, and that population decline is a symptom of unhappiness caused by problems with both subsistence provision and political arrangements.? The opposite fear, of overpopulation, given the slow growth of means of subsistence, was addressed by Lindsay (1736) and Murray (1758). Wallace and Hume debated whether population had increased (Hume) or decreased (Wallace) since ancient times, focusing on moral reasons (government, wars, debauchery, luxury). William Hazlitt (1807) claimed that Wallace was the main source for Malthus (Malthus adds Smith and Hume to Wallace as his sources). James Steuart added his voice to this debate (1767), which included also William Ogilvie (1781), Alexander Campbell (1796-1870), Dugald Stewart (1840), Chalmers (1832), Craig (1814), Grahame (1816), Samuel Read (1829), Ramsay (1836), Alison (1840), and Burton (1849). The general picture that Rutherford offers is that from Scotland we have sophisticated theories of population which rely less on subsistence and more on social and psychological forces, theories which should be seen under their own light outside Smith?s shadow.

Rutherford also offers some short yet pungent engagements of old debates with current debates on Smith. For example, Rutherford tiptoes around the idea that Smith is not as much in favor of the poor as some may describe him today. Smith?s analysis is claimed to be more psychological and his remedies less explicit than some of his fellow Scots. Rutherford mentions Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (c.1653-1715) who proposed an ?adopt a poor? plan for the rich which provided the ?adopted? poor with a form of slavery cum legal protection. Francis Hutcheson, Smith?s ?never to be forgotten? teacher, suggested that the state should compel the poor to work and to educate their children.? The problem of the idleness of the poor was addressed by David Black (1705), Lindsay (1736), Sinclair (1790), and Craig (1814): public relief encourages idleness; therefore the poor should be given jobs, even useless jobs, in the government sector or in the private sector and paid by government subsidies. The poor could also be given cheap food (Steuart 1769), some land (Ogilvie 1781, Archibald Alison 1840), a one-way ticket to a foreign place, such as North America (Earl of Selkirk 1805, Archibald Alison 1840, Burton 1841), incentives to save in a saving bank (Henry Duncan 1816), charity (Chalmers 1821), or some English-style-like Poor Laws. Samuel Read (1829) proposed a realistic national scheme and is presented as the real champion of the poor. In this context, Smith?s suggestion of labor mobility to solve the problem of poverty and his contemptuous descriptions of the poor seem, Rutherford appears to imply, to somehow weaken Rothschild?s (1992) claim that Smith was a friend of the poor.

With the exception of a section on the invisible hand Adam Smith remains in the background. The section on the invisible hand, on the other hand, feels underdeveloped mostly because it is only about Adam Smith. The rest of the analysis of Smith?s idea remains mounted among other Scottish thinkers.

My only regret about this book is that Scotland is not put into context. Granted, this may require a completely different project. Yet, at least a hint of where Scotland stood compared to the rest of the world of economics, even if only in terms of the number of economic publications compared to other countries, would have completed the picture. This remark should not take away anything from the strengths of the book. As it provides us with detailed economic debates over these two centuries, this volume is a useful and stimulating tool for eighteenth and nineteenth century scholars and scholars of ideas and of their evolution.

Maria Pia Paganelli is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (2013).

Copyright (c) 2013 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (July 2013). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview

Subject(s):History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Geographic Area(s):Europe
Time Period(s):18th Century
19th Century

Anticipating The Wealth of Nations: The Selected Works of Anders Chydenius (1729-1803)

Author(s):Jonasson, Maren
Hyttinen, Pertti
Reviewer(s):Eloranta, Jari

Published by EH.Net (November 2012)

Maren Jonasson and Pertti Hyttinen, editors, Anticipating The Wealth of Nations: The Selected Works of Anders Chydenius (1729-1803). Translated from the original by Peter C. Hogg. London: Routledge, 2012. xxv + 382 pp. $130 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-55133-5.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Jari Eloranta, Department of History, Appalachian State University.

?Freedom never exists without causing us to desire it once we know of it: our desires guide us in all our actions? (Anders Chydenius, 1763, p. 101 in this volume)

Anticipating The Wealth of Nations
is a collection of the most important writings of Anders Chydenius, eleven texts in total, while a full five-volume set of his complete works (about 85 texts in total) will be published in the coming years in Finnish and Swedish (and later online). Who was Anders Chydenius? He was an eighteenth-century Finnish-Swedish clergyman, writer, and political philosopher, whose ideas are often compared to those of Adam Smith. The texts are aligned with some of his key interests, such as Swedish politics of the time, freedom of information, occupation, and religion, as well as broader economic issues of the time. Moreover, the book features an excellent introduction by one of the best known Nordic economic historians, Lars Magnusson. Each of the original texts is followed by a brief commentary by him as well.

As Magnusson points out in the introduction, Chydenius is often, unfairly so, solely compared to Adam Smith and his monumental achievement, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), especially since Chydenius? writings preceded Smith?s. In fact, both were influenced by eighteenth-century economic and political thought, for example the French Physiocrats, with Chydenius more so than Smith. There are many similar themes in their writings, ranging from ideas about freedom of thought and liberty to more practical economic issues and policies. However, as a whole, Chydenius? writings are less theoretical by nature and perhaps also a bit more practical as policy statements.?

This review can only scratch the surface of these works, presenting some examples of the economic ideas in the writings (especially the text called The National Gain). For a fuller picture, I urge all scholars of the history of economic thought to peruse the book on their own. Moreover, I will not go into great detail about the life and personal history of Chydenius, beyond a brief biography, since that is also not the main contribution of this volume.

Anders Chydenius was born in 1729 in Sotkamo, Finland, to a middle-class family, as his father was the rector of a large parish in Northern Finland. Anders also became very accustomed to a rural lifestyle; something that profoundly influenced his worldview in later life. Finland at the time was a part of Sweden, a state of affairs that had lasted for over 500 years. This was also the heyday of mercantilism, an ideology aimed at maximizing exports over imports and emphasizing the state?s control over economic affairs in the realm. In this case that meant that all foreign trade had to go through the so-called staple towns, and Finland only had a few of those in the south and Northern Finland had none until 1765. This was often perceived to be an unjust system in the more peripheral parts of the nation, and certainly influenced Chydenius? thinking on economic policy, up until his death in 1803.

Politics became a natural outlet for Chydenius after his university studies. Eighteenth century Sweden was a fertile ground for ideological debates, given the expansion of the universities and the more flexible ideas about democracy, not to mention the intense competition between the two main political parties (the so-called Hats and Caps). University life exposed him to new and radical ideas, and he concentrated on the study of philosophy and religion. Ultimately this led to his selection of profession and employment as a preacher, initially under his father?s supervision, and later his own appointment as a chaplain and finally the rector of a parish.

Anders became fluent in both Finnish and his native Swedish when growing up, which helped him during his political and religious career, and exposed him to a wider circle of influences. His political awakening seems to have culminated in the early years of the 1760s, when he had secured an occupation for himself in the clergy. For example, he participated in essay writing contests that brought him some attention. When he participated in the Diet (the Swedish Parliament) in 1765-66, he garnered even more attention as a keen writer and supporter of economic and political freedoms. This also got him in trouble with some powerful political players (particularly due to his views on monetary policy) and he was expelled from the Diet. Chydenius? political career remained tumultuous up until the late 1770s. However, during the later years of his life he remained politically active and occasionally was a member of the Diet as well.

Why was Chydenius controversial? Some of his writings certainly hit a nerve as far as the ruling parties were concerned, for example on the issue of censorship. Chydenius was himself a target for censorship on several occasions, which made him an even more ardent supporter of free speech. As he wrote in 1765, ?the liberty of a nation is preserved not only by the laws but by public information and knowledge as to how they are being administered? (p. 221). He wanted to make sure that no single individual would be given the singular power to censor political discourse. His fairly practical solution to this was to expand the number of individuals engaged in censorship by forming a larger body, scientific or literary, to make the decisions. This is the issue that also got him in trouble with some of his peers and political opponents.

While he expressed his views on economic issues in several essays (for example, in the essay on why Swedes were emigrating from the country, see the quote in the beginning of the review ? he also warned societies of not focusing too much on armed enemies rather than enemies within, see p. 124), The National Gain is the most important of his writings in regards to his economic philosophy. The National Gain was presented to the Estates in 1765, and it contained many themes similar to Smith?s 1776 masterpiece. There were, however, important differences as well. First, Chydenius? ideas were less clearly articulated as a cohesive theory; in contrast, he presented an interesting mix of rather abstract principles and certain clear policy recommendations. Second, Chydenius was much more influenced by the French Physiocrats, and his opposition to the staple towns was tied to the idea of giving rural communities a more equal footing in the economic system.??

?That every individual nation pursues profit as the chief aim of its economic and political regulations is incontrovertible, but if we consider the means that each has adopted to achieve that, we observe an incredible variety? (p. 142). Is this the famous ?invisible hand,? in its preliminary form? Not quite, at least explicitly. Chydenius did articulate some ideas that would feature prominently in the writings of Smith and David Ricardo. For example, he discussed the idea of an absolute advantage in similar terms, highlighting that ?each individual will of his own accord gravitate towards the locality and the enterprise where he will most effectively increase the national profit, provided that the laws do not prevent him from doing so? (p. 145). He frequently discussed ?free enterprise? and ?industriousness? as useful forces in shaping an economy, although he did not advocate completely free markets rather than ?order;? i.e. less invasive, yet firm governmental oversight of the economy (p. 156). For him, allowing the freedom of occupation and enterprise would lead to beneficial outcomes, as for example merchants would know best how to conduct their business ? if they were to try to extract exorbitant rents, their competitors would drive them out of business (p. 158).

Chydenius argued that freeing up trade and occupations would increase ?national profit? as well, going directly against the existing mercantilist orthodoxy. Freedom for all occupations would, in his view, guarantee the largest ?national profit,? since profit-seeking in all occupations would lead to the greatest efficiency; even though he did not use the word ?efficiency? directly (p. 162). While Chydenius? thinking emanated from a fairly practical place, namely the aim to improve the rural economic communities and existence (similar to Physiocrats, who were against luxury consumption and profit, the latter being one of the favorite themes of Chydenius as a beneficial force), he formed an abstract synthesis that was in many ways similar to Smith. Both were influenced by eighteenth-century thought and writings, which makes this less surprising. However, it is quite interesting that Chydenius articulated many themes and concepts similar to Smith prior to 1776. While that is important, we should not confine Chydenius to some sort of a footnote of history, a ?pre-Adam Smith.? His writings addressed many societal and economic themes, often going beyond the moral philosophy of Smith. On the other hand, he did not present a coherent philosophical construct like Smith, which explains why his influence was much more limited (and language certainly played a role as well).

On the whole, Chydenius was an important eighteenth-century contributor who offers us a window into Nordic economic and political thought and helps us understand why and when The Wealth of Nations was created, giving us a more nuanced view of the time period. I would recommend this volume to all those interested in eighteenth-century economic thought and theory. This book is well organized and thought out, and the commentaries by an expert will help non-Nordic readers by providing more context to the texts. The future publications of the full volumes will certainly give us an even better view of Chydenius and the time period. Hopefully many of those texts will be made available in English as well, so a broader audience will be exposed to these writings.

Jari Eloranta is an Associate Professor of Comparative Economic and Business History at Appalachian State University. His publications include several articles and edited volumes on military and government spending, trade and conflicts among smaller nations, and Nordic economic and business history. He is currently working on several projects related to these research areas. elorantaj@appstate.edu

Copyright (c) 2012 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (November 2012). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

Subject(s):History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Geographic Area(s):Europe
Time Period(s):18th Century

Economists in the Americas

Author(s):Montecinos, Verónica
Markoff, John
Reviewer(s):Boianovsky, Mauro

Published by EH.Net (January 2012)

Ver?nica Montecinos and John Markoff, editors, Economists in the Americas. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009. xx + 341 pp. $155 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84542-043-7.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Mauro Boianovsky, Department of Economics, Universidade de Bras?lia.

Largely thanks to Bob Coats?s (1924-2007) pioneering studies about the sociology and professionalization of economics, research about the emergence of economics as a discipline and the development of the contexts and institutions in which economists act have become an important area in the history of economic thought. One should expect that the subject would attract also the attention of social scientists such as sociologists and political scientists. Economists in the Americas, edited by sociologists Ver?nica Montecinos and John Markoff (from Pennsylvania State University and University of Pittsburgh, respectively), offers a detailed investigation of the history of the economics profession in the Americas in the form of case studies of a representative set of Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay) plus one chapter about the United States.? Coats focused on North American and British economic thought; a couple of Latin American case studies (particularly about Brazil, by Paulo R. Haddad and Maria R. Loureiro, whose essay is partly reproduced in the volume under review) can be found in the 1981 and 1997 collections edited by him for the History of Political Economy (HOPE) about economists in the government and the internationalization of economics after 1945. Economists in the Americas, as acknowledged by the editors, adds to Coats?s path-breaking research and follows his lead and inspiration.

Although the essays assembled in the book offer much valuable information about the historical evolution and consolidation of economic epistemic communities in the Americas throughout the twentieth century, their main goal is rather to understand the factors behind the paradigm shift that took place in Latin American economic theory and policy between the 1970s and 1990s. It was a doctrinal change expressed as a clear move from ?developmentalism? or ?structuralism? towards what was named (mostly by its critics) ?neo-liberalism.? Instead of state-led import-substituting industrialization, economists shifted to a ?more market, less state? view, and promoted free-market reforms in order to implement it. As the editors explain, the book had a long gestation period; early versions of the chapters were presented at the 2001 meetings of the Latin American Studies Association held in the U.S. This probably explains why editors and contributors do not take into account another volume that addresses the same issue about doctrinal change (FitzGerald and Thorp 2005).? There is a significant overlap between those two books, although the volume edited by FitzGerald and Thorp, based on a conference held in Oxford in 2000, is not dominated by case studies (there are just two, on Colombia and Mexico), featuring contributions by economists, historians and a political scientist. Only one of the contributors to Economists in the Americas is an economist, two are political scientists and the other six are sociologists. Moreover, regarding nationality, four are Latin Americans ? one of them (Montecinos) affiliated to a North American university ? and the others are North Americans. The first discussion of the paradigm shift in Latin American economics came out, however, in an article by Albert Fishlow (then in UC? Berkeley?s Economics Department) as far back as 1985. And it is still attracting the attention of the literature on Latin American economics (see Ocampo and Ros 2011).

As documented by the case studies, the origins of economics as a separate profession in Latin America ? despite the fact that there was already some economic literature and teaching at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, when a broad liberal outlook prevailed ? can be traced to the 1930s and 1940s. The early generations of economists in the region were generally associated with nationalism and protectionism, a tendency that would be much reinforced after CEPAL (the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America) was established in Santiago in the late 1940s. This started to change in the mid 1970s, especially in Chile, where a cooperation agreement had been signed in 1955 between the University of Chicago and the Catholic University of Santiago. The so-called ?Chicago Boys? (Chilean economists with Chicago Ph.D. training) came to dominate economic thought and policy in Chile. Initially associated with Pinochet?s authoritarian regime, Chile?s market reforms and their effects on the economy became even more visible after the return of democracy in the 1990s. From that perspective, the economic neo-liberal movement started in Chile even before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher made it a key element of their respective government agendas in the U.S. and the UK. However, as far as Latin America as a whole is concerned, the collection makes clear that the main fact determining the paradigm shift was the Mexican default of 1982 and the ensuing debt crisis that affected most countries in the region for the rest of the decade. That was the turning point for economic policy and thought in Latin America, when the indigenous approach represented by structuralism was largely abandoned and replaced by the international prevailing economic doctrines. One of the main contributions of the comparative essays collected in this volume is to show the increasing role of Latin American economists as members of national political elites on one side and of the international economic community dominated by North American economics on the other, which has provided much of the source of their domestic power.

Paradoxically, as argued by Marion Fourcade in her chapter about the United States, although economics has played an essential role in North American economy and society, the political influence of economists in that country has been much lower than for their Latin American colleagues in their own nations. This is due, in her view, to the fact that U.S. economics has acquired its status through its association with science and its attempted separation from politics. That chapter offers a brief discussion of changes in North American economics after the end of the Keynesian consensus in the early 1970s, but the reader must look elsewhere in order to understand the complex rise of free market economics and the dramatic change in the economists? perception of the role of the state between the 1970s and 1990s (see Backhouse 2005), which have had a strong influence in Latin America and other regions. True enough, neo-liberalism has not gone unchallenged in countries such as Brazil, where there has been a polarization between orthodox Americanized economic institutions and heterodox ones, as documented in the chapter about Brazil. However, as made clear throughout the book, this has not threatened the broad consensus view on ?sound economic fundamentals? such as trade openness, fiscal discipline, and transparent and steady monetary policy shared by most economists in the region and originally laid out by John Williamson in the early 1990s as part of what he famously called the ?Washington Consensus.?

Finally, according to the lengthy editorial introduction, Latin American economists have contributed relatively little to economics worldwide, as judged by names listed in the Who?s Who in Economics. The editors (see p. 7 of the book) tried to extend the exercise to the field of history of economic thought, by assessing articles published by Latin American scholars (or about Latin American economics) in HOPE and the Journal of the History of Economic Theory (JHET) between 1985 and 2005, with the conclusion that hardly any articles belonging to those categories appeared in those journals. They reached that result by studying a sample of years for HOPE (1985, 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005) and JHET (1990, 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2005). This is a very doubtful methodology, which makes it hard to interpret their results. Whereas it is probably true that articles by Latin American authors or about Latin American history of thought are relatively few, the set is certainly higher than measured by that kind of exercise. But this is just a quibble in this fine collection about the recent dynamics of the economics profession in the Americas, which is hoped to increase the conversation between social scientists and historians of economic thought.

References:

Backhouse, R. (2005), ?The Rise of Free Market Economics: Economists and the Role of the State since 1970,? in The Role of Government in the History of Economic Thought, ed. by S. Medema and P. Boettke. Supplement to Vol. 37 of History of Political Economy.

Coats, A.W., editor (1981), Economists in the Government: An International Comparative Study, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Coats, A.W., editor (1997), The Post-1945 Internationalization of Economics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Supplement to vol. 28 of History of Political Economy.

Fishlow, A. (1985), ?The State of Economics in Latin America,? Economic and Social Progress in Latin America, pp. 131-59. Inter-American Development Bank.

FitzGerald, V. and R. Thorp, editors (2005), Economic Doctrines in Latin America: Origins, Embedding and Evolution, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ocampo, A.J. and J. Ros (2011), ?Shifting Paradigms in Latin America?s Economic Development,? in Handbook of Latin American Economics, ed. by Ocampo and Ros. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mauro Boianovsky is Professor of Economics at Universidade de Bras?lia. His research focuses upon the history of macroeconomics, monetary theory and development economics. He is the co-author, along with Roger Backhouse, of Transforming Modern Macroeconomics: The Search for Disequilibrium Microfoundations, 1956-2003, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming (2012).

Copyright (c) 2012 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (January 2012). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

Subject(s):History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Geographic Area(s):Latin America, incl. Mexico and the Caribbean
Time Period(s):20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

The Decline of Jute: Managing Industrial Decline

Author(s):Tomlinson, Jim
Morelli, Carlo
Wright, Valerie
Reviewer(s):Stewart, Gordon

Published by EH.Net (January 2012)

Jim Tomlinson, Carlo Morelli and Valerie Wright, The Decline of Jute: Managing Industrial Decline.? London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.? xiii + 219 pp. $99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84893-124-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Gordon Stewart, Department of History, Michigan State University.

This superb book deserves to be considered for a prize. It is a close-grained account of the jute industry in Dundee from the 1940s to the 1980s but it is much more than that. In the course of their study of the decline of one industry the authors lay bare some of the fundamental economic, social, and political forces that shaped post-war Britain, and illuminate the complex impact of globalization on the manufacturing sector of the British economy. Many books on such topics end up by focusing on one aspect of the story ? whether it be the role of capital, government policies, strategies of employers, or the responses and actions of workers. The three authors deftly bring together every dimension. The narrative and analysis move easily from women workers, who dominated the jute labor force until the late 1950s, to the policy deliberations of civil service mandarins at the Board of Trade, while fully acknowledging the ultimately inescapable pressures exerted by the international macroeconomic environment. Valerie Wright?s sure exposition of the complex gender issues at play among the workers sits informatively alongside the economic and policy analyses of Jim Tomlinson and Carlo Morelli. It is a remarkable achievement for three authors to produce such a coherent narrative, and a ringing tribute to the benefits of collaborative scholarship.

At first sight the jute industry seems an unpromising candidate for addressing significant issues in modern British history because it was entirely localized in Dundee and surrounding district. But the authors argue that ?jute?s extreme localization makes it ideal for a case study? (p. 2).? What happened in Dundee?s jute industry is a fascinating local story but it also speaks volumes about what happened to the manufacturing economy in much of Western Europe and North America in the decades after World War II. The relentless erosion of manufacturing has been particularly visible in the case of the United Kingdom as the great staple industries which had underpinned Britain?s economic prowess in the heyday of its empire struggled to survive in the post-war decades. In the capable hands of these authors the themes examined in this study resonate with changes taking place in the world economy today and help us better understand what happened in hundreds of urban settings in Western Europe and North America in the past fifty years.

The authors challenge the widely-held view that a distinctive cultural pathology explains Britain?s post-war industrial decline. This cultural approach, they insist, ?leads to moralistic and often unhistorical judgments? (p. 4). Instead of using the tempting magic key of an anti-industry ethos in English culture the authors embark on an ambitious analysis that ranges from assessments of Britain?s place in the international? economy, to the decision-making of individual firms, from workers? strategies for survival and improvement, and to the ideological and policy debates in the corridors of Whitehall. All these elements are satisfyingly brought together as the authors assess the story from the perspective workers, employers, and governments.

The surprising conclusion to their research is that decline was ?successfully? managed in the case of jute. The success depended on the interaction of three factors. First, the jute industry was sheltered from cheap imports by the state. This was not achieved through the imposition of new tariff barriers or by actual quotas, both of which would have been prohibited by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to which Britain was a party after 1947, but by the continuation of the Jute Control system that had been set up during the war. As Lord Swinton tried to explain to a befuddled Winston Churchill (a former M.P. for Dundee) in 1952, Jute Control operated a ?cumbrous control system under which the Ministry of Materials imports jute goods and sells them at an artificial price related to the cost of manufacture in Dundee? (pp. 122-23). This state protection, initiated by the 1945 Labour Government, was continued by its successors down to the 1970s.? Second, in return for this degree of state aid the jute firms agreed to company consolidation to make themselves more efficient, to increase labor productivity, and to cooperate in developing new fibers and goods. Third, unions and management put behind them the bitter relationship that had characterized the industry for much of its history and had come to a head in the dismal decade of unemployment in the 1930s.? In this new collaborative atmosphere ?employers, unions and the city spoke with one voice? (p. 160). As a result of these strategies, and the brief presence in the city of multinational corporations like NCR and Timex, decline was staved off. There was relative ?full employment? in the city down to the 1970s.

All this came to an end in the 1980s. The American multinationals began looking for cheaper and more subservient labor in Asia, and the Thatcher government launched its assault on the elaborate post-1945 apparatus of state support for British industry. In this new environment of ?free markets? and unfettered globalization Dundee finally lost out to the jute industries in Bangladesh, India, South America and other cheaper-labor regions of the world. By the 1990s jute had disappeared from Dundee. That disappearance raises the obvious question of why the authors can claim successful management of decline. The answer gets at the nature of history itself. If one looks at the final outcome by the 1990s then there was no success but being content to describe the past in that easy way gives an inaccurate picture of what Dundee was like from the 1940s to the 1970s. The authors believe that they have provided a truer picture of that era in Dundee?s jute industry. By extension they ask for a comprehensive re-thinking of how the industrial decline of Britain has been treated by historians.

The authors even go so far as to claim that Dundee enjoyed a ?Golden Age … in the 1950s and 1960s? (p. 162). That phrase evokes the work of another great historian of contemporary Europe. Shortly before his death Tony Judt wrote in evocative terms about the Britain he knew in his youth. It was a time and place where government policies to manage the economy helped achieve a fairer distribution of wealth than we now have, and where social and educational policies were deployed to enable those not lucky enough to be born into the ruling classes to make their way up the economic ladder. This is the world we have lost according to Judt. Since the 1980s ?free market? ideologies and individualist attitudes have worked their malign influence on the poor, uneducated and marginalized, as the top tranche of society has flourished. It is easy to fall in love with Judt?s idyllic picture of post-war Britain but this book reminds us of the labyrinthine policies that were needed to sustain the comforting sense of community.
That such big questions about modern British history, and, indeed, history in general, can be raised when reading this book testifies to the power of this first-rate study of the city of jute.

Gordon Stewart is the author of Jute and Empire: The Calcutta Jute Wallahs and the Landscapes of Empire (Manchester University Press, 1998).

Copyright (c) 2012 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (January 2012). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

Subject(s):Economic Planning and Policy
Industry: Manufacturing and Construction
Geographic Area(s):Europe
Time Period(s):20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII