In the middle of the twentieth century, increasingly influential political and business interest groups invoked long-entrenched traditional practices in order to pursue dynamic industrial policies. This chapter explores the formation of a state-owned enterprise (SOE) for iron ore mining in the context of coordinating complex institutional and material requirements. The Brazilian government reverted to earlier property definitions that established its sovereignty over the subsoil and mineral resources, and it used the global strategic circumstances of World War II to great advantage. As a result, the state promoted large-scale industrial development in the twentieth century by consolidating a strong entrepreneurial role for itself within the productive sectors of the economy. Much historiography addresses the early formation of the capital-goods industries. The National Steel Company (Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional, CSN) was the lynchpin of that effort. The iron ore story is less well known; but its institutional implications were as profound as the efforts to produce steel. The transformation of the British-owned Itabira Iron Ore Company into Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (Vale), an SOE, demonstrates the expansion of the concept of the public domain that was crucial to institution-building of the period.

Defining the domestic iron ore mining and steel manufacture as strategic industries hinged on the large important externalities of enhancing both national military security and rapid, broad-based industrialization.

Introduction

In 1997, Hans Bühlmann, one of the doyens of twentieth-century non-life actuarial science, gave a speech about the role of the actuarial profession. He stated that one of the oldest English life insurance companies, the Equitable Life Assurance Society, founded in 1762, ‘managed to weather all storms in good shape, and flourished, because of the scientific methods it employed’. Making the application of scientific methods the centre piece of explaining the success of the life insurance industry raises a question about non-life insurance, particularly given that Bühlmann argued that actuarial science only first gained effective influence over non-life actuarial practice in the 1960s and 1970s. The question is how did the different branches of non-life insurance manage to become successful insurance enterprises in the absence of scientific methods?

The cornerstones of the development of non-life actuarial science are known. Much less is known about the actuarial practice of the non-life insurance companies. In one of the first comprehensive textbooks on non-life actuarial practice, Max Gürtler noted in 1936 that most experts in non-life insurance had never seen a correct statistic during their career. He also stressed that most premium rates were not so much derived from any calculations as from mere intuitions and practical experiences. Keynes, for his part, famously poked fun at the seat-of the-pants methods that most insurance companies used to calculate premiums.

The nineteenth century saw new manifestations of poverty among the proletarian population in the industrialized countries of Europe. This new expression of poverty had different characteristics from those of the eighteenth-century agrarian societies, and was therefore subject to different solutions. The primary, underlying ties of solidarity which knitted communities together and provided protection for both families and individuals in a critical situation were broken by migratory movements and the process of urbanization. Poverty and destitution were to present their crudest aspect and submit the working classes to serious risks while, systems of mutual aid and, later, systems of compulsory assistance were slowly being set up by the states.

The event of industrialization had profoundly transformed society. The former farm workers, mutated into general labourers, populated the run-down neighbourhoods at the extreme of working and living conditions. Once mutual support systems had broken down and new difficulties had to be faced in order to survive, the poverty of these people became the object of interest for new studies in sociology and anthropology. Social reformers of both sexes deduced from their analyses that there existed a type of plague which was destroying the working classes and which they called ‘pauperism’. Some of these reformers (in particular, females), quickly verified that it was the women who fell into poverty more easily and more oft en than the men and, therefore, tried to find an explanation for this phenomenon.

This chapter examines the role of international organizations in influencing and shaping the development of national welfare systems. In this process, scientific expertise played a crucial role, both on the level of international organizations and for the interactions between international and national institutions. In this sense, the chapter builds a bridge between the emerging fields of transnational history and the history of knowledge. The significance of experts in international organizations is based upon an epistemic analogy, if not a relatedness, between the processes of scientification and globalization. Both are manifestations of the broad and heterogeneous tradition of a secular universalism that was particularly prominent and influential in the long nineteenth century. Universalist traditions materialized in a variety of organizations including the world exhibitions and their philanthropic sponsors, as well as the international academic congresses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the twentieth century, these organizations were amended by new international and supranational organizations, including the International Labour Office (ILO), the ILO-affiliated International Social Security Association (ISSA) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which also tried to shape the development of national welfare states in Europe and on a global level. Most of these organizations relied heavily on universalist expert knowledge to define the recommended social policy models; and most models were built after particular European welfare states – from the German and Scandinavian models in the first part of the century to the Anglo-Saxon and Swiss models since the 1970s.

Introduction

In the early nineteenth century, the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt visited New Spain, then still part of the Spanish Empire but soon to become the independent nation of Mexico. His book about the economy of Mexico contains a wealth of information about the general economy of the viceroyalty, including an extensive study of silver production with detailed observations about mining operations, production figures, taxation, coinage at the mint and global silver trade. Mexico was at the time the largest silver producer in the world and the Mexican peso was an international currency. Along with the precious-metal coinages, introduced by imperial authorities, cacao or cocoa beans facilitated exchanges of lesser values, and could thus be called ‘small change’, in terms of modern economies. But this form of ‘small change’ was of considerable antiquity, because cacao beans had been used for this purpose by the Aztecs and Mayans, long before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors. Indeed Humboldt himself observed how, in the old Aztec market of Tlatelolco, cacao beans were used as money ‘like the shells in the Maldives islands’ (i.e. cowrie shells). He also indicated that 72 cacao beans were currently exchanged for the smallest silver coin (medio real) minted in Mexico.

The Imperial Monetary System

The monetary system of the Spanish Empire from the fifteenth century to the independence of the American colonies was far from being a unified set of coins under a common institutional framework. In 1497, the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, issued a decree (Ordenanza de Medina del Campo) establishing the basis of the Castilian monetary system that would last for centuries. Aragon itself was divided into three kingdoms, each with a somewhat different monetary system. Because Spain was located in the Venetian ducat area Ferdinand minted a similar gold coin in Valencia in 1481 under the name of excellent. In Catalonia a similar gold piece, the principat appeared in 1493 and in 1497 the excelente of Granada or ducat was issued for the kingdom of Castile. By 1500 these three main gold coins of the Spanish realm had the same value.

In the 1990s, the nickel refinery in Kristiansand became the largest in the world outside Russia, with a capacity equivalent to 7 per cent of global production. In addition to Falconbridge's own nickel matte, the plant refined raw material for several other producers. From 1980 to year 2000 the output of nickel doubled to 80,000 tonnes.

The path of progress was a bumpy one. Aside from the tragic problems with cancer managers also had to cope with economic difficulties. At the beginning of the 1980s Falconbridge had been struggling to survive and ten years later, a new slump hit the nickel market. The nickel industry had fragmented and previous market power was irrevocably lost. But fragmentation also yielded opportunities, not the least for toll refining. The Kristiansand staff managed to improve refining technology, reorganize production and cut costs to such an extent that the plant remained one of the most competitive in the entire business.

This chapter examines how all the external changes and local responses influenced development at the Kristiansand subsidiary, that is, outside ‘push factors’ and internal ‘pull factors’ if we use Julian Birkinshaw and Neil Hood's terminology. We will review head office–subsidiary relations as well as the efficiency drive at the refinery. As we shall see, local management still had scope for autonomous action. This was indeed one of the keys to the subsidiary's success.

India is a major South Asian participant in Gulf–North-East Asian energy and economic interactions. Not only is India a growing economy, but also a major energy user with expanding consumption.

Robert Kaplan quoted Admiral Sureesh Mehta as saying that India's economy had been expanding at 9 per cent yearly, with 10 per cent increase in industrial production, and the size of its middle class is anticipated to expand from 200 million to 500 million people by the year 2020. These figures may have implications for India's trade and energy imports from the Middle East. However, Indian economic statistics may not be the only item that underlines India's growing importance for the Middle East.

India's commercially strategic position on the map should experience enhanced importance with increases in its economic status. Energy resources en route from the Middle East to North-East Asia must pass through India or the Indian Ocean. It is, therefore, logical for India to utilize its strategic position to highlight its economic, energy and commercial significance for the Middle East. India's geopolitical concerns, its economic incentives and the stability of its territories may increasingly have a direct impact on energy delivery from the Middle East to North-East Asia. It may also determine the pricing of energy resources.

Exploring the dynamics of migratory change first of all requires examining the how and why of migration. This chapter first discusses the main explanatory frameworks that have shaped migration research over the past century, from economic disparities and complementarities, over social networks and migration information, to household and individual characteristics. It subsequently builds upon recent attempts to integrate these different approaches in a three-level explanatory framework that allows us to separate the influence of structural historical change on the evolution of migration behaviour from the part played by individual variations. A third section finally explores the implications of the proposed framework for the dynamics of migratory change to arrive at the central heuristic devices that structure this book: selectivity, resilience and the speeds of change.

Explanatory Frameworks in Migration Research

One apparent problem of overall generalizations on the causes of migration is that those that stand the test turn out to be as trivial as they are true: that is, that people move with an eye to better opportunities than they had or expected to have where they were. These propositions in turn have the greatest difficulty in explaining why only some of those in comparable conditions move, and why those who do move go to specific places and not to others where overall prospects might be even better. To explain why people move in the numbers and directions and for the lengths of time they do, migration research generally employs one or more of three main explanatory frameworks: economic disparities, social networks and household and individual characteristics. This book will adopt a theoretical perspective which builds on recent attempts to incorporate various migration research traditions in one theoretical framework by integrating macro (structural social and economic conditions), meso (social networks and information channels) and micro (household and individual characteristics) levels of explanation. To clarify the direction and nature of the different causal mechanisms eventually integrated in the three-level approach, I will discuss each of the three levels and their associated explanatory frameworks separately, before discussing their mutual interactions.

According to Albert Camus, Sisyphus was a happy man, in spite of being condemned forever to roll uphill a huge stone that always rolled down again. I have spent more time than I care to remember on research on Falconbridge, Norwegian industrial history and the local history of Kristiansand. At times the tasks have appeared Sisyphean, but I have carried on. Even academic drudgery may sometimes lead to happiness.

This work started as a commissioned history of Falconbridge Nikkelverk A/S, Falconbridge's subsidiary in Norway. I am very grateful to all the members of the advisory committee for this book, especially the historians Ketil Gjølme Andersen from the University of Oslo and Knut Sogner from BI Norwegian School of Management. Sometime after this project was finished I received a one-year scholarship from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology to use the Falconbridge history as a basis for a dissertation. Falconbridge generously translated the original book. However, the leap from a commissioned history to a dissertation in academic English was much bigger than I envisaged and I was only halfway through when the money ran out. Afterwards, I worked on the dissertation in between my teaching at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

I am very much indebted to my supervisor Hans Otto Frøland, the prime ‘mover and shaker’ in our small group of economic historians in Trondheim. I defended my dissertation in November 2008 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

‘Money makes the world go around’ is a commonplace, admittedly trite expression, yet one that has profound importance for the evolution of the global economy, well beyond the Industrial Revolution era that marks the temporal terminus of this collection of ten essays. Understanding how market-based economies functioned from even ancient times to the present is impossible without considering the role of money. Thus the ten authors of essays in this volume do not accept the Classical School of Economics’ view that money is ‘neutral’, in terms of its impact on economic change – a view that has led some economists to ignore the role of money. Often allied with that view is a disdain for so-called ‘monetarism’. But, to cite the famous Nobel Prize-winning Italian economist Franco Modigliani (1918–2003): if ‘monetarism’ simply means that ‘money matters’, so that monetary changes are not merely passive, neutral phenomena, but have some active role of their own, then ‘we are all monetarists’. The authors of this volume all agree that ‘money matters’ and support as well the famous corresponding observation of Marc Bloch (1886–1944): that monetary phenomena may be compared to peculiar ‘seismographs that not only register earth tremors, but sometimes bring them about’. All ten chapters in this volume focus, to one degree or another, on three inter-related themes: bullion (uncoined precious metals), coinages (precious-metal commodity moneys) and their debasements, and substitutes for precious-metal moneys.

But what is meant by ‘money’ in this volume? We may begin with the catechism presented in so many introductory economics courses: on the four functions of money. The first and most important is in serving as a medium of exchange. For Aristotle, medieval scholastics and for many in the Classical School, this was and is the only true function of money. But the other three roles of money are also vitally important: as a ‘money of account’, or standard of value used in reckoning prices, costs and values; as a store of value (i.e. if the purchasing power of money remains stable); and as a standard of deferred payment (money in the form of a wide variety of credit instruments).

Introduction

This presentation will analyze and reflect on the socioeconomic status of low-income households headed by women in Mexico, particularly with regard to inequality in the workplace, salary and educational discrimination. In addition, the government's Progresa-Oportunidades Programme, designed to provide support for poor women, will be scrutinized.

Currently, several poverty-remediation programmes involving conditional cash transfers are in operation in Mexico. An example of these programmes is the Food, Health and Education Programme (Progresa-Oportunidades) launched at the end of the 1990s. This Programme is centred on the concept of maternalism, a vision of the traditional, social and biological roles of women, and it offers poor women cash in exchange for good motherhood. In order to ensure success, women are incorporated into the design of the Programme in a way that deepens gender division. Progresa-Oportunidades ultimately also reinforces social division, with the resulting replication of gender asymmetries, even though the management of the support resources to some extent empowers women within the household. Underprivileged mothers often participate in the Programme in the hope that their daughters will gain access to opportunities to improve their lives. In other words, the programme is used as a female survival strategy.

Poor Households Headed by Women

Over the past thirty years, economic transformation, characterized by unstable employment and a broad process of increasingly precarious labour circumstances, has taken a heavy toll on women in terms of living and working conditions.

Introduction

Born 1902, Fritz Machlup's lifelong interest in monetary economics and methodology were shaped by the Europe of his university days (1920–3), as well as by his specifically Austrian roots. In his 1980 career retrospective, ‘My Early Work on International Monetary Problems’, Machlup paints a picture of pre- and post-World War I Europe. The Europe of 1914 had ten currencies, all with fixed gold parities and fixed exchange rates. The Europe of 1920 had twenty-seven paper currencies, none with a gold parity, none with fixed exchange rates and several of them in various stages of inflation or hyperinflation. Monetary experts were raising questions about the best techniques for stabilization and perhaps a return to the gold standard.

This chapter focuses on Fritz Machlup's body of work in monetary economics from 1923 to 1962, particularly his early writings on the gold standard; the theory of foreign exchanges, trade and devaluation; opportunity costs; frameworks for organizing and assessing change in payments balance and exchange rate policies, including his distinctive writing on issues of payments adjustment, liquidity and confidence; through to his 1962 Plans for Reform of the International Monetary System. Because Machlup, much like William Fellner, pursued so many areas of economics – from patents to the production of knowledge to the theory of the firm – and published prolifically in these areas, the chapter also gives some focus to these areas.

Writing in May 1819 to George Caskaden, a former Richmond retail merchant who had relocated to Fort St Stevens, Alabama, Benjamin Brand informed him, ‘You have been lucky in removing from this place’. Caskaden's good fortune was to avoid the devastating impact of the Panic of 1819 on merchants in the Commonwealth's capital. Describing business conditions, Brand wrote, ‘We have gloomy times here – many protests [failures] have taken place since I last saw you, and many more soon expected … Many have backed out of business.’ The financial crisis meant that ‘at this time there is very little credit business done. Confidence in each others ability to pay is very slight. (On Saturday it is said there were 12 notes laid over for protest.)’ The decline in business activity left ‘many store houses … shut up and written on “For Rent”’ and took the bottom out of what had been a speculative boom in property. According to Brand, ‘It is thought house rent next year will be about half the present price. Lots out of the business part of the city may be purchased for about ⅓ to 1⁄10 of what they sold for when you resided here.’ For the business community the effect was to create an atmosphere of gloom. As Brand observed, ‘Nearly all the trading part of the citizens, both debtors &creditors, have long dejected faces &I suspect many sleepless nights, particularly amongst those who lived in great splendour &extravagance.’ Summing up, Brand wrote, ‘Times much changed – economy seems all the fashion. – Fine furniture may be purchased at vendue at one half and sometimes one third of the original costs.’ John Marshall, putting it more concisely in a letter to Bushrod Washington two months earlier, said, ‘We are in great distress here for money. Many of our merchants stop – a thing which was long unknown and was totally unexpected in Richmond’.

Introduction

In 1789 Mary Chilcott from Aff Piddle in the county of Dorset, a widow with four children, the eldest of whom was nineteen, was spending six shillings and six pence a week on bread and flour. This represented 89 per cent of all her expenditure on food and 69 per cent of all her expenditure. Apart from bread and flour the only other food purchases were 4 pence on bacon, 6 pence on tea, sugar, butter and cream and I penny on yeast.

Just over a century later in York, another household consisting of a widow aged sixty-three and a daughter aged twenty spent 22 per cent of their income on meat and 16 per cent on bread. For these two women we also know what they ate at every meal in the first week of March in 1901. For example, on Monday 5 March 1901, their breakfast consisted of bread, butter and coffee, dinner (taken in the middle of the day) of meat, potatoes, bread and tea and a tea (evening meal) of bread, butter and tea. Indeed, breakfast was always limited to bread and butter and either tea or coffee, except on Saturday. Nor did tea vary greatly, involving usually just bread, butter and tea. Dripping was added on Wednesday and Thursday and on Friday the bread was toasted.