Author: Lecturer in Economic History Aashish Velkar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781139526265
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
An economic and social history of measurements in nineteenth-century British markets.

Author: Aashish Velkar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139536826
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Measurements are a central institutional component of markets and economic exchange. By the nineteenth century, the measurement system in Britain was desperately in need of revision: a multiplicity of measurement standards, proliferation of local or regional weights and measures, and a confusing array of measurement practices made everyday measurements unreliable. Aashish Velkar uncovers how metrology and economic logic alone failed to make 'measurements' reliable, and discusses the importance of localised practices in shaping trust in them. Markets and Measurements in Nineteenth-Century Britain steers away from the traditional explanations of measurement reliability based on the standardisation and centralisation of metrology; the focus is on changing measurement practices in local economic contexts. Detailed case studies from the industrial revolution suggest that such practices were path-dependent and 'anthropocentric'. Therefore, whilst standardised metrology may have improved precision, it was localised practices that determined the reliability and trustworthiness of measurements in economic contexts.

Author: Aashish Velkar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107023335
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
An economic and social history of measurements in nineteenth-century British markets, showing how social conventions shaped local practices and economic institutions. This book uncovers how metrology alone failed to make 'measurements' reliable, and discusses the importance of localised practices based on political and social values in shaping trust in measurements.

Author: Aashish Velkar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
This thesis is concerned with measurements used in economic activity and investigates how historical markets managed transactional problems due to unreliable measurements. Existing literature has generally associated the problems of measurements in historical markets with the lack of uniformity in weights and measures. This thesis shows that metrological standardization was not sufficient to ensure reliability of measurements. Markets developed mensuration practices that enabled markets to address specific transactional issues in micro-contexts. This involved, in addition to the use of standardized metrology, improved governance of transactions, third party monitoring and guaranteeing, and other institutional solutions. Historical institutional arrangements were altered or replaced as a result of changing or standardizing mensuration practices. The thesis also makes a conceptual contribution in terms of understanding the process of standardization. It shows how, while standards can be inflexible and rationalized (i.e. limited in number), standardized practices can incorporate a number of such standards and be flexible in terms which standard to be used in a given context. Analytically, standardized practices are institutional objects that are determined endogenously and are formed in 'packages' that create interlinks between standards, other artefacts, rules and people. These arguments are developed by studying three detailed cases of mensuration practices in the British economy during the nineteenth-century. The case of the London Coal Trade examines how altered mensuration practices gave buyers greater assurance that the amount of coal they received was actually the amount they purchased. The case of the wire industry illustrates the struggles to define a uniform set of wire sizes that could overcome the disputes arising from incompatible and multiple ways of measuring wire sizes. The case of the wheat markets illustrates the complexity involved in developing standards of measurements such that quality could be reliably measured ex-ante. Through these case studies, the thesis shows how markets developed different mensuration practices to manage measurements in a given context.

Author: Eric Brousseau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139952722
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
Different types of markets exist throughout the world but how are they created? In this book, an interdisciplinary team of authors provide an evolutionary vision of how markets are designed and shaped. Drawing on a series of case studies, they show that markets are far from perfect and natural mechanisms, and propose a new view of markets as social construct, explaining how combinations of economic, political and legal constraints influence the formation and performance of markets. Historical trajectories and interdependencies among institutional dimensions make it difficult to build costless, non-biased co-ordination mechanisms, and there are limitations to public and private attempts to improve the design of markets. The authors show that incomplete and imperfect modes of governance must be improved upon and combined in order for markets to work more efficiently. This timely book will interest practitioners and academics with backgrounds in economics, law, political science and public policy.

Author: Georg Christ
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429015445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
History and Economic Life offers students a wide-ranging introduction to both quantitative and qualitative approaches to interpreting economic history sources from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Having identified an ever-widening gap between the use of qualitative sources by cultural historians and quantitative sources by economic historians, the book aims to bridge the divide by making economic history sources more accessible to students and the wider public, and highlighting the need for a complementary rather than exclusive approach. Divided into two parts, the book begins by equipping students with a toolbox to approach economic history sources, considering the range of sources that might be of use and introducing different ways of approaching them. The second part consists of case studies that examine how economic historians use such sources, helping readers to gain a sense of context and understanding of how these sources can be used. The book thereby sheds light on important debates both within and beyond the field, and highlights the benefits gained when combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to source analysis. Introducing sources often avoided in culturally-minded history or statistically-minded economic history courses respectively, and advocating a combined quantitative and qualitative approach, it is an essential resource for students undertaking source analysis within the field.

Author: Jonas Albrecht
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350398489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
From the 1770s the Vienna bread market was rocked by a series of politico-economic and technological changes that questioned the way this everyday foodstuff was sold and produced. In this book, Jonas Albrecht explores how this reconfiguration of the bread market had wide-reaching and significant consequences for a society who relied on this foodstuff to live. Before 1860 the production and selling of bread was embedded into a moral economy with distinct regulations. But as the grain market expanded and new cereal varieties arrived from the empire's peripheries reformers sought to create a 'free' market through liberalizing reforms. The Moral and Market Economies of Bread shows that while terminating market regulation did mobilize and diversify Vienna's bread market in spatial terms, it intensified inequality among consumers. As opaque prices, non-transparent market procedures and diverging power relations between producers and consumers led to unrest, city officials and bakers struggled to meet the shortcomings of the free market from within. This book brings economic, social and urban histories together and employs a spatial approach and GIS methods to explore the relationship between market and society, and capitalism at large.

Author: Adrian Randall
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9780853237006
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This volume is concerned with markets, market culture and popular protest in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. The chapters focus upon both urban and rural communities: towns and cities, villages and corporations, colliers and tradesmen all feature in these studies since the market was ubiquitous and universal. How it was managed, however, varied from place to place and from time to time and the process of management provides us with a major insight into the social, political and economic relationships of eighteenth-century Britain. Some readers will see in these chapters evidence of the heterogeneity of these relations, but others will recognize that, for all the apparent differences, on basic issues of provisioning there was a remarkable uniformity. Following an introductory chapter, contributions focus on protest in relation to customary corn measures, opposition to turnpikes, resistance to the Cider Tax, scarcity and market management in Bristol, the moral economy of "the English middling sort", Oxford food riots and the Irish famine 1799–1801.

Author: Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152613361X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Researching urban space and the built environment is an accessible guide for historians keen to explore the spatial dimensions of the past. Written in a clear and lively style, it equips readers with the tools to effectively plan, research and write innovative spatial histories. By outlining and summarizing the theories and methodologies particularly pertinent to spatial research, and by providing hands-on advice on locating evidence and archives, the book supports researchers in the development of their own original projects. Through engagement with a rich array of primary evidence and useful historiographical case-studies, the guide opens up a huge variety of research possibilities. This book is the ideal research companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as independent researchers. It is especially tailored for students in history and related disciplines in the humanities encountering spatial themes and methodologies for the first time.

Author: John A. Kroll
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429703716
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Openness in the international economy happens when countries employ the commercial policies needed to mould free trade into an outcome that serves their national interests. With this conclusion, John Kroll challenges previous attempts to explain movements between free trade and economic closure solely in terms of domestic politics, international distributions of power, or market crises. He demonstrates that the final outcome of economic cooperation or conflict is more complex, determined both by the anarchical structure of international politics and by the policies nations employ to cope with that anarchy. Establishing a theoretical framework that links commercial policies to systemic outcomes, Kroll is able to offer a unique solution to the current debates over trade policy. He takes the major elements of that debate such as calls for aggressive reciprocity, enhanced multilateralism, and expanded trading blocs and establishes how and why each of these policies can influence the stability or instability of free trade systems. Kroll reviews how the GATT has enhanced free trade in the past by institutionalizing some of those policies and explains how GATTs failure to implement other policies will leave it ill equipped to handle future challenges. Kroll combines trade theory and recent works on anarchical cooperation, thereby responding to two recent admonitions in the international relations literature: He eschews ad hoc hypotheses in favor of ones derived from deductive models, and he moves game theory analysis beyond modelling and into the derivation of falsifiable propositions. In the latter book chapters, the author tests his proposition against a case study of British and German behavior during the collapse of free trade in the late nineteenth century.