Philip T. Hoffman

Real Inequality in Europe since 1500

Introducing a concept of real, as opposed to nominal, inequality of income or wealth suggests some historical reinterpretations, buttressed by a closer look at consumption by the rich. The purchasing powers of different income classes depend on how relative prices move. Relative prices affected real inequality more strongly in earlier centuries than in the twentieth. Between 1500 and about 1800, staple food and fuels became dearer, while luxury goods, especially servants, became cheaper, greatly widening the inequality of lifestyles. Peace, industrialization, and globalization reversed this inegalitarian price effect in the nineteenth century, at least for England.

The Economic Theory of Sharecropping in Early Modern France

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France-a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations upon which early modern historians have tended to rely.

Why Was It Europeans Who Conquered the World

By the 1700s Europeans dominated the gunpowder technology, which was surprising, because it had originated in China and been used with expertise throughout Eurasia. To account for their dominance, historians have invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies with a simple tournament model of military competition that allows for learning by doing. Political incentives and military conditions then explain why the rest of Eurasia fell behind Europeans in developing the gunpowder technology. The consequences were huge, from colonialism to the slave trade and even the Industrial Revolution.

Private Credit Markets in Paris, 1690–1840

Relying on a large sample of private and public loan contracts taken from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the private borrowers and lenders who participated in the credit market between 1690 and 1840. It explains the important role notaries played in the market, describes the types of loans available to borrowers and lenders, stresses the importance of the life cycle in explaining the recourse to indebtedness, and ends with a discussion of the difficulties lenders had in assessing creditworthiness.

Prices, the Military Revolution, and Western Europe's Comparative Advantage in Violence

Preliminary data from England, France, and Germany show that the relative price of artillery, handguns, and gunpowder declined between the fourteenth century and the eighteenth century. Most of these prices fell relative to the cost of factors of production, and the price decline suggests that the military sector of western European economies experienced rapid and sustained technical change before the Industrial Revolution–a claim in accord with qualitative evidence from research on the late medieval and early modern military revolution. The price data shed new light on this revolution and point to a potential explanation for why western Europe developed a comparative advantage in violence over the rest of the world.

Land Rents and Agricultural Productivity: The Paris Basin, 1450-1789

Using evidence from leases and price series, this article examines the total factor productivity of farming in the Paris Basin between 1450 and 1789. Existing evidence about productivity is unreliable, the article argues, and the leases provide historians with a new and valuable source for the study of productivity and economic growth. The article defends the methods used with the leases, which point to spurts of noteworthy growth on local farms but also to setbacks during times of war and increased taxation. It concludes with an analysis of the causes of economic growth in preindustrial agriculture.

Taxes and Agrarian Life in Early Modern France: Land Sales, 1550–1730

Between 1550 and 1730, privileged investors in France--nobles, officers, and wealthy merchants--bought up enormous quantities of land from peasants. The transfer of property has attracted considerable attention from historians, but it has never been satisfactorily explained. The paper invokes the tax exemptions the privileged enjoyed to account for the transfer--an explanation that fits both the chronology of the land sales and the identity of the purchasers. The paper then examines how the tax system throttled growth in the agricultural sector.

Sharecropping and Investment in Agriculture in Early Modern France

This paper examines the wave of investment in agriculture in 16th and 17th century France, a movement with parallels throughout Western Europe. After dismissing the explanations advanced by most historians, I argue that the investment in agriculture resulted from royal tax policy. I then consider the predilection investors showed for sharecropping and suggest that this predilection can be explained in light of modern economic theories of share contracts.

Redistribution and Long-Term Private Debt in Paris, 1660–1726

Based on a large sample from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the long-term private credit market in Paris in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and analyzes how it was affected by government-caused redistribution. It estimates the level of private indebtedness from 1662 to 1789, explains the problems the credit market faced, and determines who profited and who lost when government defaults, banking reforms, and currency manipulations struck private borrowers and lenders. It concludes by accounting for the expansion of the credit market in the last half of the eighteenth century.

What Do States Do? Politics and Economic History

Although politics has a huge effect on economic outcomes, we still know too little about what public goods states furnish or what determines the laws, regulations, and policies that states adopt. Worse yet, we do not really understand how states arise in the first place and how they gain the ability to tax. There are numerous unanswered questions here that economic historians can profitably work on, and their research will be particularly valuable if they model the politics, gather data on taxation and spending by local and central governments, and pay serious attention to the historical details and to political behavior that may not involve optimization.