Suchergebnisse

Defence date: 20 January 2015 ; Examining Board: Jorge Flores, EUI (Supervisor); Michael J. Braddick, University of Sheffield (External supervisor); Regina Grafe, EUI; Catia Antunes, Leiden University. ; The levying of royal fiscal 'impositions' on overseas trade in 1558 eclipsed varied yet relatively light customs taxation that had existed since at least the thirteenth century. The records of governors that concern this new, relatively lucrative trade taxation are dominated by reports of fraud and evasion. The methods by which merchants and particularly customs officers were said to have embezzled and concealed the taxation, imply organised networks that undertook the fraudulent schemes. This is a curious dominant fixation of Elizabethan ministers, and of those who laboured the issue to them. Such allegations amount to rich seam of source material, and were undoubtedly part of a greater, now perished body of similar records, and they communicate a great deal about Tudor customs taxation - still a mysterious subject. When it came to governing the new customs regime, the principal aim was to standardise and regulate data entered into customs accounts now known as port books. Mistrust of that information became a locus for dramatic allegations and legal activity. Both as practices, but also in a kind of discourse, misbehaviour was coming to be described as the 'corruption' of an essentially public resource. Whether the statements of endemic abuse are true or not, they highlight the structural changes that generated widespread fear of abuse. Historians have ignored such information, arguing that Elizabethan government of customs taxation was too effective to allow for such misbehaviour on any significant scale. However, I show that governance in this sphere was inchoate. The structural changes to English taxation and administration at around this time are outlined using architectural plans, early regional maps and other surviving images. This collection demonstrates the ambition and methods used by governors to augment royal trade taxation from 1558. This was to be achieved by control over strategic locations, along rivers and in English towns, and most strikingly by the control of the information to be submitted and collected at such places by merchants and customs men. We will look at examples of new standardised accounting books from 1565, which for the first time featured voluminous or "big" data. These books were designed in reality to ensure accuracy of customers 'entries', not as statistical devices of a state. There was an epistemological problem to the extension of governance over customs houses, which had previously been virtually free of central oversight. The way the Tudor monarchy came to know its customs taxation in theory would allow specifically for more precise auditing of customs declarations. I demonstrate that fraud and corruption were not side issues, but rather intimate with the very birth of this new 'modern' taxation and administration.

AbstractEvidence from more than 40 000 voyages shows that labour productivity growth for sailing ships in the London coal trade was rapid but quite irregular between 1700 and 1860. These granular data permit us to examine various dimensions of change, showing that ships made more voyages per year, had smaller crews, carried more coal per ship ton and had longer working lives. Some changes resulted from what happened on land rather than on the sea, notably a marked reduction in the seasonality of trade as wagonways were built in the northeast in the early eighteenth century and a pronounced dip in voyages per year due to congestion in the port of London during the 1830s and 1840s, partly caused by the operation of the coal cartel. These results for the coal trade suggest that shipping, being neither spectacularly modern nor doggedly traditional, made a respectable contribution to British economic growth.

AbstractThere is a debate about whether coastal shipping experienced substantial productivity growth prior to the advent of steam power. To study changes over the long eighteenth century, this article uses thousands of coastal journey times culled from Board of Trade crew lists between 1835 and 1844 and coastal port books for the mid‐to‐late 1600s, along with a newly digitized coastal network. Comparisons between matched samples show that journey speeds, defined as miles sailed per day, were significantly higher in the crew lists compared to the port books, and that voyage cycle times, defined as days between starting two identical voyages, were substantially lower. The study also shows that voyage times in the east coast coal trade were substantially lower around 1840 than around 1700, but the difference was much smaller when peace years are compared. These new data imply that total factor productivity growth in the east coast coal trade was significant, especially if one accounts for gains from peace after 1815. The findings contribute to the larger literature studying the rate and sources of productivity growth during the industrial revolution.