Mittelweg 36 | 2/2014
Von Walden Pond nach Waikiki Beach
Quelle: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/mittelweg36/issue/2014-04-18.html
Vine-growing in Catalonia: the main agricultural change underlying the earliest industrialization in Mediterranean Europe (1720-1939)
We present a model of vine-growing specialization that explains the key agricultural change carried out before and throughout the Catalan industrialization. The results confirm the role played by a "Smithian" market-pull force exerted from the Atlantic demand, together with the "Boserupian" population-push on land-use intensification. They jointly put in motion a process of opening and closing of an inner frontier of vineyard planting, whose local impact was conditioned by the agro-ecological endowments as well as to the different levels and trends of income inequality. Vineyard planting gave rise to less inequality up to the 1820s, but it grew again afterwards.
Quelle: http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/18/2/203?rss=1
The roots of economic failure: what explains East Germany’s falling behind between 1945 and 1950?
The relative decline of the East German economy after 1945 has eluded researchers, as several large shocks appeared to have hit it at the same time. In this paper, we revisit the immediate post-war period in both parts of Germany to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the output and productivity shocks operating in both economies. Our principal finding is that the dismantling of the capital stock alone cannot explain the inferior performance of the East German economy. The collapse of output after the war and the ensuing recovery in both parts of the country were driven by total factor productivity; changes in factor endowments were of second-order significance. West Germany began to lead East Germany in industrial labor productivity well before the economic reforms of 1948 could make their mark. The major factor contributing to this early divergence were disproportions in industrial structure caused by the division of Germany.
Quelle: http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/18/2/166?rss=1
Von Thunen south of the Alps: access to markets and interwar Italian agriculture
This paper sheds new light on the agricultural side of the Italian regional divide from an economic geography perspective, following a Von Thünen approach. The central hypothesis is that the development of the nonagricultural economy in the Northern cities drove the location of agricultural output and inputs during the interwar years. A new database on Italian agriculture around 1930 fully confirms the key role of access to domestic markets in shaping agricultural activity. Thus, the causes of Southern agriculture falling behind are revealed: it is not very surprising that an agricultural divergence joined an already ongoing industrial divergence during a period in which international markets collapsed. It was the growth of Northern industry that led to the growth of Northern agriculture, and not vice versa.
Quelle: http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/18/2/107?rss=1
Why are you tall while others are short? Agricultural production and other proximate determinants of global heights
We analyze the proximate determinants of the biological standard of living from a global perspective, namely high-quality nutrition and the disease environment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Until the mid-twentieth century, the local availability of cattle, meat, and milk per capita and the local disease environment mainly determined the stature of the population – and, by implication, how long they lived and how healthy they were. During the late twentieth century, the trade of agricultural products and health-promoting technologies increased in relative importance; hence, the local availabilities became less decisive in explaining height differences.
Quelle: http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/18/2/144?rss=1
Living standards on the pre-colonial Gold Coast: a quantitative estimate of African laborers‘ welfare ratios
This paper is an attempt to estimate living standards on the pre-colonial Gold Coast (in current-day Ghana) quantitatively, looking at the welfare ratios of indigenous laborers – in particular canoemen – working for the British Royal African Company in the early eighteenth century. This is the first time such a study has been undertaken for an indigenous population in any part and period of pre-colonial Africa. The data indicate that living standards were at least on a par with those in many other parts of the world, including large parts of Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe. No large gap in material affluence between the Gold Coast of West Africa and most of the rest of the world seems to have developed by this time.
Quelle: http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/18/2/185?rss=1
“SEEING” THE PAST: TEXT AND QUESTIONS OF HISTORY IN THE RĀJATARAṄGIṆĪ
ABSTRACT
Traditional scholarly opinion has regarded Kalhaṇa's Rājataraṅgiṇī, the twelfth-century Sanskrit chronicle of Kashmiri kings, as a work of history. This essay proposes a reinvestigation of the nature of the iconic text from outside the shadow of that label. It first closely critiques the positivist “history hypothesis,” exposing its internal contradictions over questions of chronology, causality, and objectivity as attributed to the text. It then argues that more than an empiricist historical account that modern historians like to believe it is—in the process bracketing out integral rhetorical, mythic, and didactic parts of the text—the Rājataraṅgiṇī should be viewed in totality for the kāvya (epic poem) that it is, which is to say, as representing a specific language practice that sought to produce meaning and articulated the poet's vision of the land and its lineages. The essay thus urges momentarily reclaiming the text from the hegemonic but troubled understanding of it as history—only to restore it ultimately to a more cohesive notion of historicality that is consistent with its contents. Toward this end, it highlights the concrete claim to epistemic authority that is asserted both by the genre of Sanskrit kāvya generally and by the Rājataraṅgiṇī in particular, and their conception of the poetic “production” of the past that bears a striking resonance with constructivist historiography. It then traces the intensely intertextual and value-laden nature of the epistemology that frames the Rājataraṅgiṇī into a narrative discourse on power and ethical governance. It is in its narrativity and discursivity—its meaningful representation of what constitutes “true” knowledge of time and human action—that the salience of the Rājataraṅgiṇī may lie.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10705