Books in the Cambridge Studies in Modern Economic History series

This major study of Spanish agrarian history, first published in 1996, examines how traditional agriculture responded to population growth and the integration of commodity markets, and explains why growth was so slow over two centuries.

This book considers the dramatic innovation in statistics between 1900 and 1945 in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Under the Nazi regime, statistics were the basis for a radical experiment in economic planning. Tooze argues for a more wide-ranging reconsideration of the history of modern economic knowledge.

In this 1997 book, Gary Magee examines the performance prior to 1914 of a very important, but little studied, British industry. The author compares Britain's performance in paper-making with its main international rivals, addressing such central subjects as technological change, entrepreneurship and productivity.

Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy: The Attlee Years 1945-1951 analyses the economic policies of the Attlee government. It stresses the importance of the government's drive for efficiency. Tomlinson questions the claim that in building a 'welfare state' the government neglected production.

The Rise of Commercial Empires is a work of major importance for the economic history of both Europe and North America. It is an analysis of a crucial transformation in the history of trade, as London became the centre of a new kind of world economy.

Drawing on his first-hand experience, Ivan Berend distils a huge array of material on the economies of the 'Eastern Bloc' countries during a period of revolutionary change. This is a major contribution to the economic history of the twentieth century.

The Balkan Economies c. 1800-1914 compares the economic progress of Serbia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia in the century before World War I. Making extensive use of native-language primary sources, this in-depth 1997 study promises to be the definitive economic history of the Balkans.

This book explores the long-term forces shaping business attitudes in the British and American cotton industries from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Mary Rose traces social, political and developmental differences to demonstrate how firms become embedded in networks, and evolve according to business values and strategies.

In this 1999 book, Karl Gunnar Persson surveys a broad sweep of economic history, examining one of the most crucial markets - grain. His analysis allows him to draw more general lessons, for example that liberalization of markets was linked to political authoritarianism. Grain Markets in Europe traces the markets' early regulation, their poor performance and the frequent market failures. Price volatility caused by harvest shocks was of major concern for central and local government because of the unrest it caused. Regulation became obsolete when markets became more integrated and performed better through trade triggered by falling transport costs. Persson, a specialist in economic history, uses insights from development economics, explores contemporary economic thought on the advantages of free trade, and measures the extent of market integration using the latest econometric methods. Grain Markets in Europe will be of value to scholars and students in economic history, social history and agricultural and institutional economics.

An Economic History of the Silk Industry, 1830-1930, first published in 1997, is an ambitious historical analysis of the development of a major commodity. Dr Federico examines the rapid growth of the world silk industry from the early nineteenth century to the eve of the Great Depression of the 1930s.