Rather than simply retell the story of British economic policymaking since World War II, this book draws upon the literatures on institutional path dependence, economic constructivism and political economy to explain this puzzle.

This book is the fifth volume of essays edited by A. J. H Latham and Heita Kawakatsu from the International Economic History Congresses looking at the development of the Asian Economy. Bringing together leading scholars from both the east and west, this book offers fascinating insights into the cotton trade, the rice, wheat and shipping industries and the development of trade and finance in East Asia.

This is the first full-scale anthropometric history of Imperial Russia (1700-1917). It mobilizes an immense volume of archival material to chart the growth, weight, and other anthropometric indicators of the male and female populations in order to chart how the standard of living in Russia changed over slightly more than two centuries. It draws on a wide range of data--statistics on agricultural production, taxation, prices and wages, nutrition, and demography--to draw conclusions on the dynamics in the standard of living over this long period of time. The economic, social, and political...

This book provides the most comprehensive history of German migration to North America for the period 1709 to 1920 than has been done before. Employing state-of-the-art methodological and statistical techniques, the book has two objectives. First he explores how the recruitment and shipping markets for immigrants were set up, determining what the voyage was like in terms of the health outcomes for the passengers, and identifying the characteristics of the immigrants in terms of family, age, and occupational compositions and educational attainments. Secondly he details how immigrant servitude...

The recent dramatic decline in the economic fortunes of the Republic of Ireland have been all the more painful, because it followed the most rapid period of economic development ever witnessed in Irish economic history, when growth rates since the early-1990s surpassed those in the rest of Western Europe. With an unusual openness to international trade and capital flows and a relatively benign corporate tax regime and closer links to the American economy (in terms of investment and trade) than other parts of Western Europe, this growth was something of an aberration in a wider European...

History teaches us that the agricultural transformation process is a necessary step towards better living conditions in all societies. A rising productivity in agriculture allows for increasing incomes within agriculture simultaneously as more resources can be devoted to other sectors. Within the field of economic history one of the overriding debates during the last decade has been whether long term economic change is primarily driven by institutional change or changes in factor endowments. This book uses a global history approach to better understand the agricultural transformation process,...

Central economic planning is often associated with failed state socialism, and modern capitalism celebrated as its antithesis. This book shows that central planning is not always, or even primarily, a state enterprise, and that the giant industrial corporations that dominated the American economy through the twentieth century were, first and foremost, unprecedented examples of successful, consensual central planning at a very large scale.

This title focuses on the development of public-sector plant-breeding in Germany from the late 19th century through its fate under national socialism. Harwood uses this historical case study in order to argue that peasant-friendly research has an important role to play in future green revolutions.