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In The Changing Body (Cambridge University Press and NBER, 2011), we presented a series of estimates showing the number of calories available for human consumption in England and Wales at various points in time between 1700 and 1909/1913. We now seek to correct an error in our original figures and to compare the corrected figures with those published by a range of other authors. We also include new estimates showing the calorific value of meat and grains imported from Ireland. Disagreements with other authors reflect differences over a number of issues, including the amount of land under cultivation, the extraction and wastage rates for cereals and pulses and the number of animals supplying meat and dairy products. We consider recent attempts to achieve a compromise between these estimates and challenge claims that there was a dramatic reduction in either food availability or the average height of birth cohorts in the late-eighteenth century.

Did the expansion of democratic institutions play a role in determining central government spending behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries? The link between democracy and increased central government spending is well established for the post-Second World War period, but has never been explored during the first “wave of democracy” and its subsequent reversal, that is 1870–1938. The main contribution of this paper is the compilation of a dataset covering 24 countries over this period to begin to address this question. Utilizing various descriptive techniques, including panel data regressions, we explore correlations between central government spending and the institutional characteristics of regimes. We find that the data are consistent with the hypothesis that democracies have a broader need for legitimization than autocracies as various measures of democracy are associated with higher central government spending. Our results indicate that the extension of franchise had a slight positive impact on central government spending levels, as did a few of the other democracy variables. We also find that early liberal democracies spent less and monarchies more than other regimes; debt increases spending; and participation in the Gold Standard reduced government spending substantially.

The paper constructs an annual price series for English net agricultural output in the years 1209–1914 using 26 component series: wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, beans, potatoes, hops, straw, mustard seed, saffron, hay, beef, mutton, pork, bacon, tallow, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, wool, firewood, timber, cider, and honey. I also construct sub-series for arable, pasture and wood products. The main innovation is in using a consistent method to form series from existing published sources. But fresh archival data is also incorporated. The implications of the movements of these series for agrarian history are explored.

During early childhood, Indians and non-Indians learn a definition of “Indianness” (Merskin, 1998, p. 159). Around 18 months of age, human beings begin to recognize themselves as distinct and separate from their mothers and others (Lacan, 1977). By age 6, most attributes of personality formation are already established (Biber, 1984). The content of the information that consciously and unconsciously reaches children is critical for the formation of a healthy, grounded sense of self and respect for others. Today, in the absence of personal interaction with an indigenous person, non-Indian perceptions inevitably come from other sources. These mental images, the “pictures in our heads” as Lippmann (1922/1961, p. 33) calls them, come from parents, teachers, textbooks, movies, television programs, cartoons, songs, commercials, art, and product logos. American Indian images, music, and names have, since the beginning of the 20th century, been incorporated into many American advertising campaigns and marketing efforts, demarcating and consuming Indian as exotic “Other” in the popular imagination (Merskin, 1998). Whereas a century ago sheet music covers and patent medicine bottles featured “coppery, feather-topped visage of the Indian” (Larson, 1937, p. 338), today's Land O’ Lake's butter boxes display a doe-eyed, buckskin-clad Indian “princess.” The fact that there never were Indian “princesses” (a European concept), and most Indians do not have the kind of European features and social “availability” that trade characters do, goes largely unquestioned. These stereotypes are pervasive, but not necessarily consistent, varying over time and place from the “artificially idealistic” (noble savage) to images of “mystical environmentalists or uneducated, alcoholic bingo-players confined to reservations” (Mihesuah, 1996, p. 9). Today, a trip down the grocery store aisle still reveals ice cream bars, beef jerky, corn meal, baking powder, malt liquor, butter, honey, sugar, sour cream, chewing tobacco packages, and a plethora of other products emblazoned with images of American Indians. To discern how labels on products and brand names reinforce long-held stereotypical beliefs, we must consider embedded ideological beliefs that perpetuate and reinforce this process.

Purpose – This study compares the historical evolution of two particular models of dairy policy: supply management in Canada and deregulated cooperative monopolisation in New Zealand.

Design/methodology/approach – Both cases draw on historical sources and other secondary data.

Findings – Despite national adherence to neoliberalism and global trade reform, both Canada and New Zealand have arguably developed dairy sectors that are operating according to unique local dynamics and with vastly different outcomes. The result is a model in Canada which is potentially more resilient to future shocks than the New Zealand model.

Originality/value – By identifying the contradictory outcomes of local dairy policy development within a neoliberalist context, the chapter is able to explore the potential resilience of each sector in a way that hasn't been achieved before.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s creation of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) in 1999 inspired great hopes. As we explain, however, the noble initiatives of the UNGC are undermined by the arms industry. Arms are expensive. The expenditure on arms diverts a nation’s “resources from ‘productive’ to ‘unproductive’ ends.” The arms industry is a major employer in most arms manufacturing nations. It generates much needed revenue for those countries. Therefore, attempts at thwarting the supply of arms are doomed to failure. Instead of halting the supply of arms, we argue as to the advantages of restraining the demand for arms. Michael Walzer is the only moral philosopher who has considered the ethics of appeasement. We explore Walzer’s arguments for appeasement and consider how a United Nations Secretary-General could appease those nations demanding arms. In doing so, the UN Secretary-General would make it possible for the UNGC to achieve what was initially envisaged for the UNGC.

The essay is a short response to Charles Post’s reflections on my critique of his work on the theory of the labour aristocracy, challenging Post’s denial of the existence of imperialism and its transformation of the global class structure over time and insisting upon the correctness of the idea that workers in the global North constitute a labour aristocracy and a bulwark of global capitalist rule.