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The late nineteenth‐century Danish agricultural revolution saw the modernization and growth of the dairy industry. Denmark rapidly caught up with the leading economies, and Danish dairying led the world in terms of productivity. Uniquely in a world perspective, high quality micro‐level data exist documenting this episode. These allow the use of the tool of modern agricultural economists, stochastic frontier analysis, to estimate production functions for milk and thus find the determinants of these productivity and efficiency advances. This article identifies the contribution of modernization through specific new technologies and practices.

This article considers an example of the impact of a new good on producers of close substitutes: the invention of margarine and its rapid introduction into the British market from the mid‐1870s. This presented a challenge to the traditional suppliers of that market, butter producers from different European countries. We argue that the capacity to react quickly to the appearance of this cheap substitute by improving quality and establishing product differentiation was critical for the fortunes of butter producers. This is illustrated by a discussion of the different reactions to margarine and quality upgrading inIreland,Denmark, and theNetherlands. A statistical analysis using monthly data for Britain from 1881–7 confirms that margarine had a greater impact on the price of poor quality butter than that of high quality butter, presumably because it was a stronger substitute.

This article investigates the costs of transport regulation using the example of agricultural markets in theUS. Using a large database of prices by state of agricultural commodities, we find that dispersion fell for many commodities until theFirstWorldWar. We demonstrate that this reflected changes in transport costs which in turn in the long run depended on productivity growth in railroads. The year 1920 marked a change in this relationship, however, and between theFirst andSecondWorldWars we find considerable disintegration of agricultural markets, ultimately as a consequence of the 1920TransportationAct. We argue that this benefited railroad companies in the 1920s and workers in the 1930s, and we put forward an estimate of the welfare losses for the consumers of railroad services (that is, agricultural producers and final consumers).

"Diplomacy and War" published on by Oxford University Press.

Originally published in 1987, The Creation of Local Authority Sector of Higher Education is a macro-analysis of the creation and development of the local authority sector of higher education from the early 1960s to the 1980s. It is a political/administrative study of educational policy-making and decision-taking at the national level. This book surveys the influence on the policy of various groups such as the Department of Education and Science, the local authority associations, and the higher education teachers' unions. The creation of the polytechnics receives considerable attention as does the merger of teacher training with advanced further education. The records of a large University Institute of Education show clearly how the battles over the future of teacher training were fought out in the 1960s and 1970s. Original material from the main teachers' unions involved has provided additional evidence from a different perspective. This study shows the problems facing local authority higher education in the 1980s and 1990s are not new, and in many respects remain the same intractable issues which have dogged the sector since its creation.