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作者：University of Cambridge
摘要：The less-developed interior of early modern Europe, especially the rural economy, is often regarded as financially comatose. This article investigates this view using a rich data set of marriage and death inventories for seventeenth-century Germany. It first analyzes the characteristics of debts, examining borrowing purposes, familial links, communal ties, and documentary instruments. It then explores how borrowing varied with gender, age, marital status, occupation, date, and asset portfolio....
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作者：University of Bath; Umea University
摘要：Mutual and stock insurers have coexisted and competed against each other in insurance markets for centuries. In this article, we examine the risk management strategies and underwriting profitability of the different organizational forms in Sweden's property fire insurance market between 1903 and 1939. We demonstrate that stock insurers acted as intermediaries between policyholders and reinsurers to operate effectively in the potentially high-risk segments of the fire insurance market. In contr...
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作者：California Institute of Technology
摘要：By the 1700s Europeans dominated the gunpowder technology, which was surprising, because it had originated in China and been used with expertise throughout Eurasia. To account for their dominance, historians have invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies with a simple tournament model of military competition that allows for learning by doing. Political incentives and military conditions then explain why the rest of Eura...
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作者：Dincecco, Mark
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作者：Leibniz Association; Leibniz Institut fur Agrarentwicklung in Transformationsokonomien (IAMO); Humboldt University of Berlin
摘要：This article explores the pattern of land rents and agricultural productivity across nineteenth-century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the Little Divergence between European regions. We argue that agriculture reacted to urban and industrial development rather than shaping it. In the spirit of Johann von Thunen and Ernst Engel, we develop a theoretical model to test how access to urban demand affected agricultural development. We show that the effect of urban demand is causal and...
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作者：Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
摘要：The Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 is regarded as central turning point in nineteenth-century trade policy, inaugurating a free trade era in Western Europe. We reexamine this story and put it into global perspective with a new database covering more than 7,500 data points for 11 categories of manufactures in 41 countries and colonies around the world between 1846 and 1880. It reveals that bilateralism after 1860 reinforced a process already underway before. Nevertheless, we highlight that tra...
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作者：Williams College
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作者：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
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作者：University of Rochester
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作者：University of Southampton
