Consumption, Social Capital, and the “Industrious Revolution” in Early Modern Germany - 2010 - Journal Article (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0943, 2009
This paper uses evidence from German-speaking central Europe to address open questions about the Consumer and Industrious Revolutions. Did they happen outside the early-developing, North Atlantic economies? Were they shaped by the “social capital” of traditional institutions? How were they affected by social constraints on women? It finds that people in central Europe did desire to increase market work and consumption. But elites used the “social capital” of traditional institutions to oppose new work and consumption practices, especially by women, migrants, and the poor. Although they seldom blocked new practices wholly, they delayed them, limited them socially, and increased their costs.
Social Capital, Social Networks, and History - 2000 - Working Paper
2000
The concepts of “social capital” and “social network” have enjoyed increasing vogue now for more than a decade. History has been mobilized to support these concepts in various ways. Past societies are often portrayed as having had more and better social capital than modern ones. History is mined for examples of the closely-knit and multi-stranded social networks thought to generate particularly rich stocks of social capital.
This paper will analyze the mercantile, social and economic relations between individuals in a historical rural society character-ized by considerably marked faults due to weak legal institutions. The paper shows that neither classic institutional nor recently commercialization models offers sufficient explanations of historical evidence. Secondly, it is argued that by not using available the spatial and social networks analysis deviations will remain social deviations. From relational data, extracted partly from three account books, kept by the Danish merchant Sillio Frich, from 1755 to 1772, and partly from a parish register from 1733 to 1744, the paper shows how this particular merchant, by turning his social network into an economic network and did reduce the substantial high transaction-specific-investments. And secondly, how Sillio, through his social network, and especially his so called weak ties, created a relative reliable competitive strategy. By taking the frequency, reel values of each transaction and the spatial distances as relational values, the paper analyses the density of the greater network, isolate dense subgroups and locate the most centralized individuals in the competitive strategy. In a broader perspective the paper proposes considerations how to understand, analyze support today’s developing markets from a socioeconomic network perspective.
2004
Guilds are social scientists' favoured historical example of institutions generating a 'social capital' of trust that benefited entire economies. This article considers this view in the light of empirical findings for early modern Europe. It draws the distinction between a 'particularized' trust in persons of known attributes and a 'generalized' trust that applies even to strangers. This is paralleled by the distinction between a 'differential' trust in institutions that enforce the rights of certain groups and a 'uniform' trust in impartial institutions that enforce the rights of all. Guilds had the potential to generate the particularized and differential trust to solve market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation, although the empirical findings suggest that they often failed to fulfil this potential. Guilds also had the potential to abuse their trust, and the empirical findings show that they indeed manipulated their social capital of shared norms, common information, mutual sanctions, and collective political action to benefit their members at others' expense, blocking the spread of generalized and uniform trust. Counter to the assumptions of social capital theory, the example of preindustrial guilds suggests that the particularized and differential trust fostered by associative institutions do not favour but hinder the generalized and uniform trust fostered by impartial institutions.
Long-Lasting Social Capital and its Impact on Economic Development: The Legacy of the Commons
SSRN Electronic Journal
This paper analyzes the historical determinants and long-term persistence of social capital, as well as its effect on economic development, by looking at the legacy of the commons in a Spanish region. In medieval times, common goods were granted to townships and were managed collectively by local citizens. This enabled the establishment of institutions for collective action and self-government. Common goods persisted until the second half of the nineteenth century. We argue that the experience of cooperation among villagers, repeated over the centuries, increased the social capital in each local community. In 1845, a law forced small villages to merge with others, a fact which generated exogenous variation in the number of mergers (i.e., cooperative networks) that each modern municipality was required to have. We exploit this change in an IV and RD setting and find that current municipalities formed by a greater number of old townships have a denser network of associations. We also find that higher social capital is associated with more economic development.