Negotiating Community Values: The Franklin County Agricultural Society Premium Lists, 1844-1889

The creation of agricultural fairs was originally intended as a way to achieve agricultural and economic reform. Once they took shape, however, the meaning and impact of the fairs was shaped as much or more by those who attended the fairs as it was by the organizers

What Lessons for Economic Development Can We Draw from the Champagne Fairs?

The medieval Champagne fairs are widely used to draw lessons about the institutional basis for long-distance impersonal exchange. This paper re-examines the causes of the outstanding success of the Champagne fairs in mediating international trade, the timing and causes of the fairs’ decline, and the institutions for securing property rights and enforcing contracts at the fairs. It finds that contract enforcement at the fairs did not take the form of private-order or corporative mechanisms, but was provided by public institutions. More generally, the success and decline of the Champagne fairs depended crucially on the policies adopted by the public authorities.legal system, medieval Europe, trade, private-order institutions, community responsibility system

Why did modern trade fairs appear?

According to our interpretation, modern trade fairs started in Europe during the First World War and in its immediate aftermath. With the closing of trade movements during the war, many cities had to resort to the old medieval tradition of providing especial permits to traders to guarantee them personal protection during their trade meetings. During the tough post war crisis many more cities –typically industrial districts- discovered in the creation of trade fairs a powerful competitive tool to attract market transactions. We compare these developments with the remote origins of fairs, as, in both cases, trade fair development is a reaction to the closing of free markets under the pressure of political violence.Trade fairs, modern trade fairs, markets, industrial districts, international trade, First World War

Parsimonious numerical modelling of deep geothermal reservoirs

Numerical modelling has been undertaken to help improve understanding of a deep geothermal system being considered for development in the vicinity of Eastgate (Weardale, County Durham, UK). A parsimonious numerical modelling approach is used, which allows the possibility to develop a workable formal framework, rigorously testing evolving concepts against data as they become available. The approach used and results presented in this study are valuable as a contribution to a wider understanding of deep geothermal systems. This modelling approach is novel in that it utilises the mass transport code MT3DMS as a surrogate representation for heat transport in mid-enthalpy geothermal systems. A three-dimensional heat transport model was built, based on a relatively simple conceptual model. Results of simulation runs of a geothermal production scenario have positive implications for a working geothermal system at Eastgate. The Eastgate Geothermal Field has significant exploitation potential for combined heat and power purposes; it is anticipated that this site could support several tens of megawatts of heat production for direct use and many megawatts of electrical power using a binary power plant

Una fiera senza luogo. Was Bisenzone an offshore capital market in sixteenth-century Italy?

This paper discusses how Genoese bankers collected money at exchange fairs. This money was then lent to the King of Spain - through the asientos - from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Genoese bankers raised capital at the exchange fairs , which were typical short-term credit mechanism, where foreign bills of exchange were discounted over a three-month period. The Genoese funded long-term obligations by means of short term loans which meant they were able to enforce payment to the King and at the same time successfully manage the supply of finance from a large number of easily substitutable markets, located in different states. The Bisenzone fair of exchange was the forerunner to an efficient, widely integrated international capital market where Genoese pre-eminence was firmly established and which the Genoese kept firmly under their control. The success of the Bisenzone fairs of exchange directly challenges the theory which suggests that the laws against usury restrained the development of capital markets in early modern Italy.Financial markets, market integration, financial institutions

What lessons for economic development can we draw from the Champagne fairs?

The medieval Champagne fairs are widely used to draw lessons about the institutional basis for long-distance impersonal exchange. This paper re-examines the causes of the outstanding success of the Champagne fairs in mediating international trade, the timing and causes of the fairs' decline, and the institutions for securing property rights and enforcing contracts at the fairs. It finds that contract enforcement at the fairs did not take the form of private-order or corporative mechanisms, but was provided by public institutions. More generally, the success and decline of the Champagne fairs depended crucially on the policies adopted by the public authorities

The Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Warfare, Transaction Costs, and the 'New Institutional Economics'

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major 'institutional' international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the European economy, serving financial as well as commercial functions, from the 12th to late 16th centuries. The three distinguished models that provided the major inspiration for this paper are, in the chronological order of their publication: (1) the Van der Wee thesis (1970) on the macro-economic impact of the major shifts, first, from continental, overland- trade to maritime-based routes, and then back to continental-overland trade routes, over this same four-century era; (2) the North-Milgrom-Weingast 'institutional' model (1990) on the role of law-merchant courts and judges in reducing incentives to cheat or renege on contracts in fair-oriented trade amongst 'unacquainted' participants (i.e. in the Champagne Fairs), and thus in reducing transaction costs in international trade; and (3) the Epstein model (1994) on the various ways in which the later-medieval regional fairs further reduced transaction costs in commerce (even if his model implicitly contradicts elements of my own favoured Van der Wee model). The central theses of this paper are that: (1) the changing intensities, scope, and nature of late-medieval and early modern-warfare played the decisive role in determining the fate of international fairs: (a) in that the consequences of such warfare fatally undermined the economic viability of the earlier medieval fairs (English, French), by raising to a prohibitive level the transportation and other transaction costs involved in overland- continental trade, and more particularly in the mass-market trade in cheap, light textiles, on which these fairs had fundamentally depended; and thus conversely (b) that a restoration of relative security combined with other factors that reduced both transportation and transaction costs led (in accordance with the Van der Wee model) to a revival of continental, overland-trade, to a revival and even more dramatic growth in international trade in cheap textiles, and to a rebirth and renewed pre-eminence of international fairs in early modern European commerce; and (2) that the financial role of fairs was as important as their commercial role; and thus that another major factor in the pre-eminence of early-modern international fairs were financial innovations that led to full negotiability of both private and public forms of credit -- especially the rentes, innovations developing chiefly out of fair-based law merchant courts (thus leading us back to the North- Milgrom-Weingast model). The chief criticisms of these models, or parts of them, lie in their inadequate or wrongly formulated explanations for the decline of the Champagne and English fairs, either by adducing incorrect arguments (North-Milgrom-Weingast) and/or by neglecting the very major adverse consequences of the spreading stain of chronic, debilitating, and ever so disruptive European and Mediterranean-wide warfare from the 1290s -- and not from the Hundred Years' War era, consequences that also fatally undermined the international trade in, and thus the production of, the cheap light textiles, over the next two centuries. Such analysis is extended to criticize other favoured models to explain the decline and fall of the Champagne Fairs: the De Roover 'commercial revolution' thesis on Italian branch-plant firms with their use of bills-of-exchange; the Bautier-Verlinden model on the 'industrialization of 14th century Italy'; and the most favoured one of all -- the establishment of the Italian galley route, the direct sea-route, to NW Europe. One merely has to point out the dramatic impact of the revival of overland, continental trade routes and of so many international, fairs from the 15th century, to see why these three latter theories lack credibility in explaining a general commercial- financial phenomenon on the supposed 'decline of fairs' in the international economy.

[Review of] Jim Zwick. Inuit Entertainers in the United States

The stories documented in this book about Inuit entertainers in the United States reveals important events and circumstances pertaining to the lived experiences of Esther Eneutseak and her daughter Columbia, the only Eskimo born in the United States, during a time period (1890s-1920s) when the indigenous peoples to North America participated in world fairs and expositions as living exhibits. Were these indigenous people as cultural performers in control of their own lives? Did they possess the power and authority to make their own decisions on their own terms? In an attempt to answer these questions, the author, Jim Zwick, makes use of primary sources, newspapers, magazines, ship manifests, and census records to piece together the lives of these two Inuit women who, according to him, were more than objects of curiosity to the people that viewed them and saw their performances. Rather, he asserts that they, as well as Inuit entertainers in general, possessed various levels of control and were neither passive nor powerless despite the fact that they experienced some of the worst conditions faced by performers in ethnic villages at world\u27s fairs and expositions (pp. 4-5)