Cambridge Studies in Economic History – serie

A classic study of the development and changing fortunes of commerce in seventeenth-century England. Barry Supple explores the causes and consequences of the economic crises in the forty years prior to the Civil War through the lenses of economic thought and policy as well as monetary, industrial and commercial questions. He examines England's place in the international economy and the inter-relationship between internal instability and long-term economic development. He argues that England's relationships with economies of other lands had a crucial role to play in her own internal prosperity. By looking to external factors - political and economic events abroad, currency instabilities, harvest fluctuations - the author explains the more important dislocations in England's economic structure. The book significantly enhances our understanding of the structure and stability of the economy by focusing on, and comparing, periods of economic crisis, and reveals the role of commerce in the daily well-being of an economy highly vulnerable to dislocation.

England's relationship with the Baltic trading area has remained a generally neglected aspect of English commercial development in the seventeenth century. The spectacular colonial ventures have traditionally attracted more historical attention, although the Baltic trade in this period was more fundamental to the English economy: it supplied precisely those naval commodities, such as flax, hemp, timber, pitch and tar, which facilitated the creation of fleets for the colonial trades. Medieval English trade had been conditioned by a search for markets, and the predominantly agricultural economy of the Polish Commonwealth proved to be an ideal target for cloth exports. By the early seventeenth century, however, this traditional relationship was changing. The growing English fleets demanded steady supplies of naval stores which Poland was increasingly unable to supply, while the Polish economy, weakened by wars and entering a period of decline, could no longer afford the luxury of cloth imports from England.

An account of the activities of British merchants in China in the crucial years before the Treaty of Nanking (1842), which transformed the relations between the Celestial Empire and the Western 'barbarians' and placed them upon a footing that was to last for 100 years. Mr Greenberg shows how this change was brought about by the pressures of the expanding British economy of the early nineteenth century. Much of the material is based on the papers of Jardine Matheson and Co., the only firm of pre-treaty days to survive, and the largest of the British firms then established in Canton.

The operation of the land market is a topic of crucial importance to the student of economic and social history in the Middle Ages. In this book, Dr King uses a wide range of source material to examine the character of the land market on the estates of Peterborough Abbey in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He suggests that some common pattern emerges in the behaviour of those concerned, and offers an original interpretation of certain familiar types of medieval record.

In this detailed study of population change in Norway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dr Drake has assembled a great deal of literary and statistical material. He pays particular attention to the interplay between marriage, economic conditions, social custom and fertility. The book also introduces English readers to the writings of Eilert Sundt, a very productive pioneer sociologist whose important work of the 1850s and 1860s is little known outside Scandinavia. Malthus's work, by comparison, is shown to be much less reliable. As Dr Drake demonstrates, remarkably reliable and comprehensive demographic statistics are available in Norway in the century before industrialization. This case study is therefore a valuable contribution to the debate amongst historians on the demographic characteristics of the pre-industrial west and the links between population change and industrialization. His conclusions are also clearly relevant to the current international discussion on the relationship between population change and economic and social conditions in under developed countries.

Uninterrupted economic relations between England and Scandinavia were of vital importance to the maintenance and extension of the British Empire in the eighteenth century. Scandinavia supplied Britain with the timber to build her ships, with iron for ship-fittings, armaments and industry, and with smuggled tea at low prices to keep her people content. Scandinavia also furnished merchant fleets as neutral carriers for British goods during the Seven Years War, thus fundamentally assisting Britain's war effort. In addition she represented a small but lucrative market for Britain who was herself the largest single market for Sweden and Norway, and for the tea obtained from China by the Scandinavian East India Companies. In this study, Dr Kent examines the organization and extent of the legitimate and the smuggling trades, the effect of war and neutrality upon them, and the legal and diplomatic considerations which influenced economic enterprise and policies.

The new farming methods that so radically changed English agriculture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not adopted immediately by all farmers. The rate of improvement was uneven, not only between one farmer and another, but between different farming regions. This book suggests an approach to the problem of regional agricultural change and the factors which determined the different rates of change. Dr Grigg begins by describing the differences between the agricultural regions of South Lincolnshire - that is the two parts of Kesteven and Holland, an area fairly typical of eastern England - at the end of the eighteenth century. These were differences not only of land use and soil type but of landownership and farm size, productivity and location. The diffusion and adoption of new methods in each region is considered against the general economic background of the late eighteenth century and the boom conditions of the period of the Napoleonic Wars. The later part of the book traces the rate of farming improvement in the less favourable price conditions after 1815, and finds a marked contrast between this period and the preceding forty years. The way in which the agricultural geography of the area was changed by the new methods is discussed, and in addition Dr Grigg shows how the conditions of each agricultural region affected farmers' response to the new methods.