902 research outputs found
Malta and the Nineteenth Century Grain Trade:British free trade in a microcosm of Empire?
It is often assumed that Britain’s colonies followed the British doctrine of free trade in the second
half of the nineteenth century. Malta, which became a British colony in 1814, did indeed become
an early free trader. However, she failed to liberalize the grain trade, even when the mother
country famously repealed the Corn Laws. This paper documents that although institutions
changed over the years, the ad valorem equivalents of the duties on wheat did not. The reason for
this seems to be that administrators were convinced that is was not possible to fund government
spending in any other way. The duties on grain in Malta were therefore not protectionist, but
rather for revenue purposes, in contrast to the UK Corn Laws. Taxing an inelastic demand for
foreign wheat by Maltese, who were unable to grow enough food to support themselves, was
certainly an effective way of raising revenue, but probably not the fairest one, as contemporaries
were well aware.peer-reviewe
Pushing Wheat:Why Supply Mattered for the American Grain Invasion of Britain in the Nineteenth Century
The Long American Grain Invasion of Britain:Market integration and the wheat trade between North America and Britain from the Eighteenth Century
Something Rational in the State of Denmark?:The Case of an Outsider in the Cobden-Chevalier Network 1860-1875
A Malthusian Model for all Seasons:A Theoretical Approach to Labour Input and Labour Surplus in Traditional Agriculture
Malthus in Cointegration Space:A new look at living standards and population in pre-industrial England
From Preventive to Permissive Checks:The Changing Nature of the Malthusian Relationship between Nuptiality and the Price of Provisions in the Nineteenth Century
The Malthusian "preventive check" mechanism has been well documented for pre-industrial England through evidence for a negative correlation between the marriage rate and the price of wheat. Other literature, however, speculates that the correlation was in fact positive from the early nineteenth century. This paper uses the cointegrated VAR model and recursive estimation techniques to document the changing relationship between nuptiality and the price of wheat from 1541-1965. The relationship is indeed positive from the early nineteenth century to the First World War. A simple theoretical model shows that this result is not in fact inconsistent with a stylized Malthusian mechnanism, and can be understood within the context of an increasing dominance of shocks to aggregate demand rather than to aggregate supply
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