British Relative Economic Decline Revisited

This paper examines the role of competition in productivity performance in Britain over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically.competition; productivity; relative economic decline

Pioneers in the Victorian provinces: veterinarians, public health and the urban animal economy

From the 1850s in Britain, concerns were growing about the role of animals in transmitting disease to man, whether through the food chain or through infection. While London is often seen as providing a model for public health reform, it was the great provincial cities that initiated veterinary involvement in public health in the closing years of the century. The emergence of this new strand of public health activity is the subject of this paper

British transport history: shifting perspectives and new agendas

This chapter is a contribution to the festschrift of Derek Aldcroft, formerly Professor of Economic History at Leicester and Manchester. It offers a retrospective on his contribution to transport history and suggests new research agendas for the subject

‘The Greatest Bubble in History’: Stock Prices during the British Railway Mania

Although the British Railway Mania has been described as one of the greatest bubbles in history, it has been largely neglected by academics. This paper attempts to redress this neglect by creating a daily stock price index for the 1843-50 period and by assessing the contribution of the many newly-created railways to the bubble-like pattern in stock prices. The paper then examines whether this bubble-like pattern was due to an increase in the stochastic discount factor arising from an increase in the probability of large-scale adoption of railway technology. We find little evidence to support this hypothesis.bubbles, financial crises, Railway Mania

The History of Team Production Theory

In this short Essay, the author consider the team production theory developed by Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout1 from a historical perspective, in three senses. First, does the theory fit the historical use of the corporate form? Second, can it explain the development of corporation law doctrines? And third, can we place the development of the theory as such into the intellectual history of corporation theories at large? The author will state my bottom line up front: while the Article finds the team production theory insightful and useful for my historical research, for teaching corporation law, and for thinking about contemporary corporate problems, the author is unable to position the theory in the three above-mentioned senses: the history of the corporation, the history of corporation law, and the history of the theory itself. This Essay first considers the changing function of the corporation. It argues that the corporate form has solved different problems in different periods and different contexts. It next discusses the history of legal doctrines and argue that the history of various corporate law doctrines does not support a coherent switch to doctrines that uphold the team production theory. At the time when some doctrines became more supportive of the theory, others undermined it. Third, and finally, this Essay considers the intellectual history of corporation theories. It argues that the theoretical discourse regarding the purpose of the corporation is not uniform. One cannot identify clear timing for the decline of other theories and for the rise of the team production theory. The team production theory and the agency theory coexist. As we shall see, they are designed to solve different problems, and, therefore, can coexist in different types of corporations

"Mrs Harvey came home from Norwich ... her pocket picked at the station and all her money stolen”:using life writing to recover the experience of travel in the past

In most societies the ability to move easily from place to place is a taken-for-granted aspect of twenty-first century life, but much less is known about such mobility in the past with a tendency for accounts to focus on the exceptional rather than the routine. In this paper we use two personal diaries written in England in the mid-nineteenth century and early-twentieth centuries to explore the ways in which everyday mobility was accomplished in the past. Attention is focused on the ease with which people could move around, the variety of modes of transport used, the enjoyment that travel generated, and the difficulties that were encountered. It is concluded that frequent everyday mobility was commonplace and mostly unproblematic, and was as closely enmeshed with society and economy as is the case in the twenty-first century. Such mobility also facilitated residential migration by providing knowledge about potential locations

Fracasó el sistema ferroviario en España? Reflexiones en torno a la paradoja del ferrocarril español

En este artículo se intenta ofrecer una solución a la llamada «paradoja del ferrocarril español», es decir, al aparente conflicto existente entre el elevado ahorro social del sistema ferroviario español, por un lado, y, por otro, la escasa utilización de la red y los paupérrimos rendimientos de las compañías concesionarias (achacados tradicionalmente a un exceso de inversión en el sistema). En el artículo se analiza la información disponible referente a esos aspectos y se llega a la conclusión de que, a partir de la base empírica existente, no puede hablarse de exceso de inversión ni de fracaso económico en lo que respecta al sistema ferroviario español. Sí, en cambio, podría hablarse de fracaso en lo que respecta a la intervención estatal, aunque este tema queda pendiente de investigaciones futuras

Coal as a Freight, Coal as a Fuel: A Study of the British Coal Trade: 1850 - 1913

Coal was of great importance to the continuing dominance of Great Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century. From 1815 to 1914, the Pax Britannica was built on a steady exploitation of Britain’s coal resources. The factories that built the country’s many manufactures ran on steam turbines powered by the ‘black diamonds’ dug up from across the nation, South Wales to Scotland. The nation’s homes were heated and its electricity generated by burning great mountains of it. The ships that protected the shores and projected power across the waves ran, during this period, almost exclusively on coal, as did the ships bringing the raw materials of the planet to ‘the workshop of the world’. Yet in this last regard, the crucial role played by coaling stations set about the planet’s coastlines has never yet been truly appreciated. In order to do this, it is necessary to discuss coal more generally and its importance to the British transport economy. This must be done both domestically (in terms of London’s dominant role in the British coal market, particularly for coal from the North East) and internationally (based around the South Wales coalfield and its use as a ballast to enable Britain’s imports), not to mention the dominance of steamships in international trade before the First World War – the latter a topic riven by debate. Furthermore, given the absence of scholarly work on coaling stations themselves, once their importance is established it is vital to undertake a study of their structure and variety, the firms and alliances behind their creation and to see if these were in fact a great British success story in a period traditionally associated with British entrepreneurial failure