No abstract

This paper addresses two questions. First, when and to what extent did capital markets integrate north and south of the Alps? Second, how mobile was capital? Analysing a unique new dataset on pre-modern urban annuities, we find that northern markets were consistently better integrated than Italian markets. Long-term integration was driven by initially peripheral places in the Netherlands and Upper Germany integrating with the rest of the Holy Roman Empire where the distance and volume of inter-urban investments grew primarily in the sixteenth century. The institutions of the Empire contributed to stronger market integration north of the Alps.

Structural transformation is a key indicator of economic development. We present the first time series of male labour sectoral shares for England and Wales before 1800, using a large sample of probate and apprenticeship data to produce national and county-level estimates. England experienced a rapid decline in the share of workers in agriculture between the early seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, associated with rising agricultural and especially industrial productivity; Wales saw few changes. Our results show that England experienced unusually early structural change and highlight the mid-seventeenth century as a turning point.

By analyzing a newly compiled database of exchange rates, this article finds that in Central Europe money markets integrated cyclically during the fifteenth century. The cycles were associated with monetary debasements. Long-distance financial integration progressed in connection with the rise of the territorial state, facilitated by the synergy between princes and emperor, which helped to avoid coordination failures. For Central Europe, theories of state formation and market integration should therefore take interstate actors into account.

By analyzing a newly compiled data set of interest rates on public annuities in early modern Italy, this article finds that the cost of borrowing fell in spite of growing debts and stagnating fiscal revenues. Feudalism and clerical interference increased the cost of borrowing, while parliaments, wars, and centralized fiscal institutions mattered little. The constitutional representation of creditors may have meant significant markups for republican oligarchs. These results cast doubts on the claim that the growth of absolutism was at the root of Italy's economic decline.