Books in the Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series series

This 2005 book is a comparative history of the economic organisation of energy, telecommunications and transport in Europe. It examines the role played by private and public enterprise in their construction and operation from the arrival of the railways in the 1830s to the eve of privatisation in the 1980s.

Until the widespread harnessing of machine energy, food was the energy which fuelled the economy. In this groundbreaking 2011 study of agricultural labourers' diet and material standard of living, Craig Muldrew uses empirical research to present a much fuller account of the interrelationship between consumption, living standards and work in the early modern English economy than has previously existed. The book integrates labourers into a study of the wider economy and engages with the history of food as an energy source and its importance to working life, the social complexity of family earnings, and the concept of the 'industrious revolution'. It argues that 'industriousness' was as much the result of ideology and labour markets as labourers' household consumption. Linking this with ideas about the social order of early modern England, the author demonstrates that bread, beer and meat were the petrol of this world, and a springboard for economic change.

Focusing on the relationship between privilege and liberty, this is a major reinterpretation of economic development in early modern France. It sheds new light on early industrialization, the achievements of Louis XIV, the economics of the Enlightenment, the origins of the French Revolution and comparative economic development.

An economic and social history of measurements in nineteenth-century British markets, showing how social conventions shaped local practices and economic institutions. This book uncovers how metrology alone failed to make 'measurements' reliable, and discusses the importance of localised practices based on political and social values in shaping trust in measurements.

The Geniza merchants of the eleventh-century Mediterranean - sometimes called the 'Maghribi traders' - are central to controversies about the origins of long-term economic growth and the institutional bases of trade. In this book, Jessica Goldberg reconstructs the business world of the Geniza merchants, maps the shifting geographic relationships of the medieval Islamic economy and sheds new light on debates about the institutional framework for later European dominance. Commercial letters, business accounts and courtroom testimony bring to life how these medieval traders used personal gossip and legal mechanisms to manage far-flung agents, switched business strategies to manage political risks and asserted different parts of their fluid identities to gain advantage in the multicultural medieval trading world. This book paints a vivid picture of the everyday life of Jewish merchants in Islamic societies and adds new depth to debates about medieval trading institutions with unique quantitative analyses and innovative approaches.

A magisterial new history of commercial institutions, this book shows how the study of merchant guilds can help us understand which types of institution made trade grow, why institutions exist, and how corporate privileges affect economic efficiency and human well-being.

Russian rural history has long been based on a 'Peasant Myth', originating with nineteenth-century Romantics and still accepted by many historians today. This book looks beyond the myth to show how a vivid and colourful Russian society really looked from below before the 1861 abolition of serfdom.

Corporate capitalism was invented in nineteenth-century Britain; most of the market institutions that we take for granted today - limited companies, shares, stock markets, accountants, financial newspapers - were Victorian creations. So were the moral codes, the behavioural assumptions, the rules of thumb and the unspoken agreements that made this market structure work. This innovative study provides the first integrated analysis of the origin of these formative capitalist institutions, and reveals why they were conceived and how they were constructed. It explores the moral, economic and legal assumptions that supported this formal institutional structure, and which continue to shape the corporate economy of today. Tracing the institutional growth of the corporate economy in Victorian Britain and demonstrating that many of the perceived problems of modern capitalism - financial fraud, reckless speculation, excessive remuneration - have clear historical precedents, this is a major contribution to the economic history of modern Britain.

Challenging conventional narratives of abolitionist Britain, this book, provides a comprehensive analysis of the extent and importance of absentee slave-ownership and its impact on British society by drawing on the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, who were responsible for distributing compensation to slave-owners when slavery was abolished.

This study was the first to compare the emergence and economic development of the film industry in Britain, France and the United States between 1890 and 1940. Gerben Bakker investigates the commercialisation and industrialisation of live entertainment in the nineteenth century and analyses the subsequent arrival of motion pictures.

The Agrarian Origins of the Spanish Civil War. History - cross discipline, Economic history, 20C European history

A major study of the role of women in the labour market of Industrial Revolution Britain. Joyce Burnette demonstrates that gender differences in occupations and wages were largely driven by market forces and resulted from actual differences in productivity. She shows that rather than harming women competition actually helped them.

This innovative study investigates why inventors rose to heroic stature and popular acclaim in Victorian Britain. Christine MacLeod argues that inventors became figureheads of various nineteenth-century factions who deployed their heroic reputation, not least to challenge the aristocracy's hold on power and the militaristic national identity that bolstered it.

A major reassessment of Britain's comparative productivity performance over the last 150 years. Stephen Broadberry provides a qualitative account of developments within individual sectors, including shipping, railways, road and air transport, telecommunications, wholesale and retail distribution, banking, and finance.

A study of the formation of the British Atlantic World from the perspective of Yorkshire aristocratic families who invested in the West Indies from the mid-seventeenth century to the 1830s. S. D. Smith offers a case study of the plantation-owning Lascelles and the networks they created with their associates.

This book examines the establishment of the institutions, such as the Bank of England, on which London's financial system was built during this crucial period in English financial history, and, for the first time, reveals the choices and actions of the investors who enthusiastically embraced the new investment opportunities.

This 2010 book uses the autobiographies of working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to shed new light on child labour, family life, careers and schooling during the British industrial revolution. It provides a unique account of working-class childhood in times and places untouched by conventional sources.

How to maintain fair market relations, a major contemporary concern, is addressed in this study of the regulation of bread prices. The humble loaf serves as a prism through which to explore major developments in early modern European society and how public market regulation affected private economic life.

Can the lessons of the past help us to prevent another banking collapse in the future? This is the first full account of the rise and fall of British banking stability over two hundred years, shedding new light on why banking systems crash and on the factors underpinning banking stability.

For many, Germany's post-war economic power was based on liberal market reforms and the Marshall Plan. This book disputes this old myth. Quantitative evidence shows instead how the re-emergence of Germany as a leading industrial power was founded in the Second World War itself and the conditions it left behind.