Blockchain Papers

Tommaso Brollo, Giuseppe De Luca

No abstract is available for this record.

Michael C. M. Ng

Abstract This article examines how and why renowned Republican-era Chinese firms raised debt capital to finance their businesses by accepting savings deposits from ordinary people instead of borrowing from financial institutions. The article argues that in the absence of a powerful unitary state and centralized financial institutions, Chinese firms innovated sophisticated, decentralized financial instruments capable of amassing large quantities of capital from a broad host of depositors without the involvement of financial intermediaries. Savings deposits not only provided these firms with a cheaper and more flexible source of debt capital than that on offer from banks but also they fueled the Chinese economy by creating a sizable credit supply, a phenomenon that Chinese business and financial history scholarship focusing on the role of indigenous and modern banks has hitherto largely neglected.

Luca Fantacci, Marcella Lorenzini

The application of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the financial sector has fostered the development of new services that are frequently referred to collectively as ‘decentralized finance’, or DeFi. In the wake of these recent developments many observers and practitioners regard DLT as a major technological disruption to the financial system, possibly leading to the complete disintermediation of banks and to their substitution with a network of bilateral relations between borrowers and lenders recorded in a common ledger. Recent historiography has shown that a potentially analogous system existed in Ancien Régime societies whereby finance was provided not only by specialized intermediaries, but also by an ‘informal’ credit network where debtors and creditors entered directly into relationship through notaries. In this paper, we carry out a systematic comparison between cryptolending, an extreme form of DeFi at the technological frontier, and the early system of peer-to-peer lending represented by notarized loans in the early modern period. Our aim is to assess the true novelty of current practices and to understand if, and in what sense, the technological innovation represented by DLT can effectively produce a structural change in the functioning of the financial system.

Richard Sylla

As financial crises became more frequent during recent decades, so also have books about them, as well as about crises that occurred centuries earlier. These studies tend to come in three styles: (1) narratives of one or more crises, usually by historians and journalists; (2) financial-economic-heuristic models of the typical patterns or essential stages of crises, as illustrated by historical examples, often adduced by financial economists with historical interests; and (3) large-scale data assemblies and econometric analyses covering decades or centuries of crises by economists.1Boom and Bust, written by two financial economists who observed firsthand from their posts in Belfast the devastating effects of the global financial crisis from 2007 to 2009 on Ireland, combines styles 1 and 2. The authors call their simple model “the bubble triangle.” Its three sides (with analogies to a fire) are marketability (oxygen), money and credit (fuel), and speculation (heat). Financial bubbles form when it is easy to buy and sell assets, when ample money and credit is available to finance speculative purchases, and when people are in a mood to speculate. These, however, are only necessary conditions for a bubble. They become sufficiently hot to inflate a bubble only with the right spark, which the authors contend can come from either of two sources, a captivating technological breakthrough (for example, the internet leading to the “dot com” bubble) or governmental policies that cause a rise in asset prices (for example, home-ownership policies leading to the sub-prime bubble).The authors develop narratives of several bubbles and then analyze each of them using their bubble-triangle framework. Some of the cases—the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles of 1719/20, the British railway mania of the 1840s, the Wall Street stock bubble of the late 1920s, Japan’s stock and real-estate bubble of the 1980s, and the recent “dot com” and sub-prime bubbles—are familiar to financial historians. Others such as the Australian real-estate bubble of the 1880s and the British bicycle mania of the 1890s are more obscure.The book’s discussion and analysis of two stock-market bubbles in China, in 2007 and 2015, is particularly useful because these bubbles are recent and not well known. In each instance, the Chinese authorities engineered a bubble to advance a policy goal. In 2007, the authorities wanted to privatize government-owned untraded shares in state-owned enterprises into privately owned tradable shares, and a bubble eased achievement of the goal. In 2015, after encouraging massive private-sector borrowing to alleviate the impact of the global crisis from 2007 to 2009, China’s authorities hoped that a new stock bubble would allow companies to raise equity capital on easy terms and use it to reduce their bloated debts. China’s 2015 bubble promoted debt for equity swaps to ease corporate debt burdens in the same way that John Law’s Mississippi bubble and the South Sea Company’s bubble did in 1719/20 to ease the debt burdens of the French and British governments. Financial history is cyclical, forever blowing bubbles.Quinn and Turner tout their model as predictive. A test of its predictive power seems underway (as of mid-2021), when the S&P 500 stock index hit an all-time high. All the authors’ necessary conditions for a bubble scenario appear to be in place. Competition of financial firms for assets and trades has made the marketability of stocks and other assets easier and cheaper than ever before. The Federal Reserve roughly doubled its balance sheet over the past year, vastly expanding the supply of money and credit. To fight the economic slowdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress enacted trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus, with more on the way. Signs of speculative excesses abound, with names such as Archegos, Bitcoin, Credit Suisse, GameStop, Greensill, non-fungible tokens (nfts), Nomura, Reddit, Robinhood, and special-purpose acquisition companies (spacs) attached to them. So far, none of these potential sparks has started the deflation of a bubble, if indeed there is one in mid-2021. Conventional wisdom, challenged by Quinn and Turner, holds that we can know a bubble only after it bursts. By the time this review is published, we may have some test results.

Mikhail Kuter, Alan Sangster, Marina Gurskaya

This article analyses the earliest known use of reserve accounting in the late fourteenth century. It reveals the dual purpose of this reserve, the entries made, including those made when the reserve was utilized and when the remainder was written-back to be distributed to the owners in the following accounting period. The research method is archival, using logical–analytical modelling of a merchant’s accounting records from 1392 to 1400. It finds that a reserve was initially an estimate of costs that had been incurred the amount of which was unclear, and that it was then extended to act as a suspense account to balance the ledger when errors in the double entries could not be identified. In doing so, this study also reveals changes made in how the entries were made to the reserve as bookkeepers sought more efficient ways to make them.

Léonard Dudley

The seventeenth century had seen the creation of the first British Empire, but the beginning of the end for the Ottoman and Mughal Empires and the complete collapse of the Ming Empire. These events coincided with differences in the capacity of these states to realize fundamental transformations in their finances: (i) military spending (from small cavalry armies paid in kind to much larger forces armed with gunpowder weapons and paid in cash); (ii) fiscal structure (from direct taxation of production to indirect taxation of transactions) ; (iii) organizational control (from decentralized nobles’ households to centralized bureaucracies). In England, these fiscal transformations were facilitated by the increasing standardization of the written and spoken vernaculars. However, in Asia the ruling dynasties were handicapped by the high cost of decoding information written in classical literary languages . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Sebastian Pranghofer

In his final televised address to the American people in 1961, US President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the danger that the posed to freedom, peace, and democracy. Although Eisenhower's rhetoric proved controversial, the idea that nexus of legislators, national security agencies, the armed forces, and weapons manufacturers wielded undue influence over the direction of US foreign and domestic policy complements scholarly investigations into the consequences of war on political, economic, and social developments in different kinds of states and societies across time and space. Recent research on the military-industrial complex referred directly to Eisenhower's assessment with the aim to uncover the post-war relationship between arms industries, the US army and government. (2) Understood as confluence of profit and policy that undermines the public's overall welfare, the idea of military-industrial complex was mainly adopted by critics of public spending in the interest of the military establishment and big corporations in the US during the Cold War era. (3) Whether or not this concept is used to argue against the generally detrimental effect to the public good of combined corporate and establishment interests, it draws attention to the mutual dependency of government, military, and business interests. Although the idea of military-industrial complex was shaped by US defence and social politics after World War II and rooted in the socio-economic realities of highly industrialized democratic society, it resonates with previous developments in the complex relationship between economy, military, the state, and society. The notion of military-industrial complex also raises questions about the long-term connections between the public sector, the military, and private business; the organization and administration of public spending and contracting; as well as corruption and the potentially dysfunctional nature of public-private partnerships. I. MILITARY ENTERPRISE, BUREAUCRACY, AND STATE FORMATION For the early modern period, the ongoing debate about the military revolution, (4) discussions about the fiscal-military state, (5) and research on military entrepreneurship and the role of the state are pointing in similar direction. (6) They all take the interconnectedness of warfare and the military, the state, and other economic and social actors for granted, but focus on different aspects of the connections. While the military revolution debate is underpinned by tactical and strategic concerns and emphasizes the importance of technological and administrative innovation in the military, discussions about the role of the fiscal-military state focus on models for collecting revenue and state spending, which were behind the expansion of armies and navies. They assume that both military innovation and the creation of new fiscal tools to finance warfare were crucial in the process of state formation and the expansion of the bureaucratic state into ever more areas of social and economic life during the eighteenth century. (7) Scholarship on the business of war has different focus. It is more interested in how resources were mobilized for early modern warfare, how armies were managed and their supply organized. (8) This research shows that while the early modern state could act in entrepreneurial ways, private finance and suppliers remained crucial to war efforts. With regard to the Netherlands, Pepijn Brandon recently challenged the assumption that the growing demands of early modern military technology, tactics, and organization only allowed centralized states to carry out warfare at large scale. He admits that the rather decentralized government of the Dutch Republic relied on the methods of the fiscal-military and the contractor state in financing and supplying its armies. However, this was only possible in system where state and private interests went hand in hand, which lets Brandon characterize the Dutch Republic as a brokerage state in its continuous involvement of economic elites in the execution of its warring tasks. …

Adam Diamond

The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910 By Gordon M. Winder Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. xii + 225pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and Index. $124.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 9781409424611.What role does the manufacturing of farm machinery play in the rise of corporate capitalism? How did networks, legal protections, and technology condition how the American reaper was produced? How did the harvesting machinery industry prefigure contemporary economic geographies of globalized networks of industrial capital and localized networks of agglomeration economies with urban metropoles? These are some of the questions Gordon M. Winder seeks to answer in his fascinating volume Ihe American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910.Winder demonstrates quite clearly that the development of the reaper industry prefigures later patterns of vertical disintegration, flexible specialization, and agglomeration economies that were identified by economic geographers as exemplary of the new face of industrial capitalism starting in the latter third of the twentieth century. In Winder's retelling of this important chapter in United States economic history, it is not simply a case of individual firms and an industrial sector implementing mass production techniques in response to rising demand for farm machinery. Rather, the development of complex production networks and the eventual rise of corporate-led vertical integration was the outgrowth of the interplay between the technological limitations of Victorian era craft production, a strong patent protection system that facilitated technology transfer and decentralized production networks, and struggles over control of the labor process.From the 1830s to the 1880s, harvesting machinery manufacturing in North America and globally was dominated by a decentralized craft production paradigm due to locational, technological, labor process, seasonal, and institutional factors. First, it made sense to distribute production to minimize transportation costs of the finished product. Second, prior to the production of steel, harvesting machines used wood, then iron as the primary materials; these materials were not amenable to mass production techniques, which required both skilled labor and significant modification of finished parts before final assembly of harvesting machines. Third, the International Molders Union struggled with reaper manufacturers over the shop floor, and the key role of skilled foundry workers in producing iron implements served to limit economies of scale and hold down productivity advances. Fourth, most production prior to 1870 was seasonal for two reasons: One, this was the general pattern in manufacturing because laborers would work on the farm or forest for part of the year, and in factories another part of the year. Two, the sale of harvesting machinery was seasonal, with sales having to take place before the harvest season. Seasonality of production discouraged large investments in plants because of low capital utilization, and encouraged dispersal of production to reduce capital requirements. Fifth, a strong patent system and requirements by many foreign governments to license manufacture for sale to domestic markets, along with import limitations, encouraged the creation of decentralized production networks and technology transfer as a business expansion strategy in the United States and abroad. Reaper manufacturers licensed out production of entire machines, as well as components used in their own plants. Patent holding companies, such as McCormick or Deering, would license other companies to manufacture and sell machines within a particular region or country, with royalties paid per machine sold to the patent holder. This type of business organization demanded high levels of trust among the members of a business network of largely autonomous actors.Winder provides an extensive case study of one highly decentralized harvest implement manufacturer based in New York - D. …

Joanshelley Rubin

The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine's key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book's pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book's appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published.Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine's study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twenty-five years about cultural hierarchy in America? What perspectives might be useful for the future? I want to consider those questions by bringing to bear both the insights of other scholars who have written since 1988 and the results of my own research.The first third of Highbrow/Lowbrow directly concerns students of reception because it is about the changing position of Shakespeare in American culture. Levine begins by documenting not only the frequent performance of Shakespeare on the nineteenth-century American stage but also the travesties, soliloquies, afterpieces, and other theatrical presentations that often juxtaposed adaptations of Shakespearean drama and poetry to “magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics.”1 Because “people cannot parody what is not familiar,” Levine concludes, Shakespeare was an integral part of popular culture during the early years of American history (4). For Levine, “popular” referred to “those creations of expressive culture that actually had a large audience” (31) rather than to the traditions produced by ordinary people, as historians such as Peter Burke and David Vincent have used the word.Filled with exuberant spectators unconstrained by genteel decorum, the theater itself was thoroughly democratic, housing under one roof, as Levine puts it, “a microcosm of American society” (25). But the situation was in flux. As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, separate theaters had emerged to serve more refined audiences as part of a growing “bifurcation” of “serious” and “popular” culture (68, 81). Eventually, Shakespearean drama as a popular possession was a casualty of this process, which Levine labels the “sacralization” of culture; Shakespeare became an “elite” author separated from ordinary people by an “unbridgeable gulf,” and his work receded to the rarefied realm of high art (79).The middle section of Highbrow/Lowbrow traces other forms of this process of sacralization under way at roughly the same time. Champions of symphonic music such as John Sullivan Dwight and Henry Lee Higginson articulated a vision of the classical concert as a vehicle for the transmission of art, as distinct from lighter fare, which was often segregated in separate “pops” performances. The opera house and the art museum furnish further examples wherein audiences learned, in Levine's words, to “approach the masters and their works with proper respect and proper seriousness, for aesthetic and spiritual elevation rather than mere entertainment” (146).In the last third of Highbrow/Lowbrow, Levine attempts to explain those developments, situating what he calls the fragmentation of culture into “high” and “low” in the context of the massive societal changes of the late nineteenth century, as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization proceeded apace. In a phrase that I have always found particularly resonant, he ascribes to figures such as Henry James and other white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants the perception that America had become a “new universe of strangers.” Their way of navigating this “unstable,” threatening environment was to insist on the value of discipline, self-control, and order (177). In consequence, Levine notes with dismay, the opportunity for democratically composed audiences to act “naturally” and to participate actively in cultural experiences gave way to passivity and stultifying propriety (179). Works of art and the institutions that supported them acquired the function of taming democracy, of diffusing “culture” to foster “civilization” (204). But more Americans, Levine observes, sought not to “proselytize among the people” but, rather, to make culture “an oasis of refuge from and a barrier against them” (207). Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as “the best that has been thought and known [or thought and said] in the world” became a widespread ideal, and along with it came hierarchies (best, worst, higher, lower, elite, popular) that Arnold's formulation buttressed (224). Although Levine is careful to state that the sacralization of culture was not “primarily a mechanism for social control,” he does not hesitate to single out “an elite group with a vested interest” in maintaining its authority as the party responsible for an increasingly hierarchical, fragmented culture (206, 227). From the late nineteenth century forward, theater and concert audiences had no choice but to encounter art on the terms that those elite individuals prescribed.In an epilogue, Levine indicates the extent to which recent developments had eradicated some of the distance between highbrow and lowbrow, citing, among other examples, the crossover repertoire of the Kronos Quartet and the efforts of Joseph Papp to bring Shakespeare to a large public. But, writing twenty-five years ago, he still finds the “sense that culture is something created by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy” remains both powerful and pervasive (252).There is much that is right about the picture Levine painted. It is undeniable that spectators grew quieter over the course of the nineteenth century, and that less raucousness was accompanied by less diversity, as when “wealthy elites banded together to build their own opera houses.”2 Whether or not the religious overtones of the term are helpful, it is likewise undeniable that a kind of sacralization took place, whereby the entr'acte jugglers, parodists, and minstrels became dissociated from an ostensibly pure Shakespeare, the opera grew isolated from other musical events, and classical European “masterpieces” came to occupy a status higher than the works of popular composers. It is equally true that the agents of sacralization—the founders of museums, orchestras, and concert halls—were members of the privileged classes, with the resources and social connections to launch such institutions.It is hard not to be captivated by Levine's democratic sympathies and even by the sense of loss that, he acknowledged, suffuses his book. Americans have a penchant for narratives of declension, after all, and Levine's depiction of unity giving way to fragmentation, of egalitarianism undermined, is squarely in that tradition. But can we set aside our attraction to Levine's politics and sensibility and dispassionately interrogate his premises?Let us start with the beginning of his story: the assumption that a shared public culture characterized American life in the early republic. If widespread familiarity with Shakespeare is the proof of this shared culture, it is worth noting, as Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan point out in Shakespeare in America, that the Shakespearean texts Americans read “often differed markedly” from the scripts that actors used in theaters, even when the actors were not engaged in performing excerpts or parodies.3 Moreover, printed texts adhered closely to British versions up to the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, to speak of Shakespeare as a popular possession ignores that not everyone owned the same thing, nor was that possession necessarily distinctively American.As for the theater audience as a microcosm of American society, the persistence of religious objections to theatrical performances meant that, at various times and places, a significant segment of the population did not participate in watching Shakespeare. An older work of local history records, for example, that Rochester, New York, was known as a poor theater town well into the 1840s as a result of the antipathy to the stage generated by adherents of the revivalist Charles Finney.4 Furthermore, although Levine was surely right that the theater gathered heterogeneous groups under a single roof (as in New York's Bowery Theater in the Jacksonian period), this was not a case of a diverse population bonded by common responses or shared values. As Richard Butsch has revealed, the rowdy Bowery b'hoys who occupied the pit and the gallery provoked antagonism from wealthier individuals seated in the boxes. In Butsch's words, “Audiences were neither homogeneous nor unanimous, but often divided along class lines…. The middle and upper classes demanded more restraint, and young workers seemed intent on refusing to cooperate.”5More generally, the premise that a unified American culture gave way to fragmentation does not hold up if we turn to the lessons furnished by scholars working in book history. The title of the second volume of A History of the Book in America, An Extensive Republic, signals the argument that Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, the volume's editors, have posited throughout. In contrast to the idea that the years between 1790 and 1840 marked the rise of a national print culture, they emphasize that in that period the United States was “a decentralized polity,” a and and in no single and a of and the one print culture was and to the of British on the other it was in the case of the the Gross a century of of the and of were in “the and of took at the United Although print had the to audiences social it also to and party and no of and as the to from no single of a because of the of people in Extensive also us to the of cultural hierarchy the by the of a elite to “the of as David the of learned culture sought to foster a of for the of this democratic with the that on the of a group of to the of what was as “the higher likewise to which as as the century and the century. the key is Richard The of America. which was a shared to of such as and became integral to the of a middle For to the exuberant that Levine were of this recent the idea of a democratic, unified 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Thomas Blair Crawshaw

The purpose of this dissertation is to accurately identify, categorize, and describe a large and previously unexplored portion of the Long Parliament's military spending during the period before the creation of the New Model Army. Specifically, it focuses on the money and the administrative machinery that was used to construct and support the central government's first regular army, a force that was placed under the immediate command of the third earl of Essex.
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\nA collection of important works have shown us how the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century were, in many ways, a decentralized series of phenomena in which local communities armed and waged war against both themselves and outsiders. However, from the outset the revolutionary central government at Westminster played a crucial role by legitimizing and facilitating a concerted, nationwide struggle against the king and his friends. It accomplished this by issuing parliamentary ordinances concerning taxation and strategy, and by providing a centralized hub for money and other military resources. This dissertation integrates a new financial and administrative history of Essex's army into this broader picture by developing and deploying a new organizational taxonomy of civil war armies. Furthermore, it shows how this taxonomy can be used to help shed new light on the messy evolution of what Michael Braddick and others have termed the 'fiscal-military state' in the British context.

Marie‐Laure Legay

International audience

Marc Schneiberg

What are the social, political and institutional conditions for organizational heterogeneity and the production of new organizational forms? I address this question using historical methods and time series analyses of 3145 mutual fire insurers — important cooperative alternatives to markets and hierarchies. Developing politically oriented neo-institutional arguments, I show that mutuals were vehicles by which property owners and agrarian interests resisted corporate consolidation and secured conditions for autonomous economic development. Mutuals embodied a vision of a decentralized, “cooperative commonwealth” of farmers, merchants and independent producers. And they rested on a socio-industrial order characterized by political struggles against corporations; anti-monopoly social movements; immigrants and other cultural carriers of mutual organizing templates; and an institutional infrastructure of protestant churches and local movements.

Natacha Coquery

With recourse to two main sources, trading almanacs and ledgers, this article is intended to establish the crucial role played by eighteenth-century Parisian shopkeepers in accelerating new modes of consuming. The uniqueness of Paris as a market rested on the strong influence of the court. Craftsmen and shopkeepers knowingly exploited the rule of distinction borne by their clients and invented novelties and launched fashions capable of enticing them. Their advertising thus focused on a multi-faceted notion of quality: quality as it related to the shopkeeper, to the consumer, to the shop and to the products. Always on the lookout for novelty, aristocrats were the great suppliers of quality goods. Invariably short of cash, they used such goods as a means of payment to tradesmen, who stood at the centre of a triple market, made up of new and second-hand goods and those sold on credit. High quality and imitation, new and old: shopkeepers used a wide qualitative vocabulary to attract customers. This is how the semi-luxury market developed also among the less affluent. Thus, apparently archaic practices such as barter were in fact used to promote a new market, a semi-luxury market, and are essential to understanding the eighteenth-century consumer explosion.

J. Lawrence Broz

This article explains (1) the origins of central banking and (2) variations in the spread and durability of central banks across nations. Early central banks helped bind governments to honor their debts and thereby furthered governments' capacities to efficiently finance military expenditures. The origins of central banking are problematic because government credit-worthiness and efficient wartime fiscal policy are public goods, subject to the free-rider problem. Applying a variant of the joint-products model, I argue that governments offered private benefits (monopoly privileges) to select creditors to induce participation in central banks. To explain cross-national differences, I argue that the level of domestic political decentralization negatively affected the incidence and durability of central banking. Countries with decentralized political systems faced regulatory competition from strong local authorities as licensers of banking monopolies, making it difficult to adopt or sustain central banking. Qualitative and statistical evidence from Europe and the United States to about 1850 support the arguments.

Robert D. Mitchell, Warren R. Hofstra

No abstract is available for this record.

Carolyn P. Boyd, Helen Nader

Throughout early modern Europe, one of the most extraordinary royal fund-raising schemes was the seizure and sale of church property to finance foreign wars. The monarchs of Habsburg Spain extended these seizures to municipal property and used the revenue to maintain their empire. They sold charters of autonomy to hundreds of villages, thus converting them into towns, and sold towns to private buyers, thus increasing the number of seigniorial lords. In Hapsburg Spain, therefore, absolutism did not mean centralization. Rather, the kings invoked their absolute power to decentralize authority and allow their subjects a surprising degree of autonomy.

Ken Driggs, K. Driggs

The prosecution of George Reynolds in the mid-1870s and the United States Supreme Court's 1879 affirmation of that conviction are usually viewed as the key legal events leading to mass prosecution of Mormon polygamists in the late 1880s.While Reynolds v. the United States (1879) seemed to dispose of the crucial first amendment defense relied upon by the Mormons, it did not lead to the prosecutions.Rather, they were triggered by the passage of thé Edmunds Act in 1882 as well as a major Supreme Court decision in 1885 over the cohabitation prosecution of Salt Lake Stake President Angus M. Cannon.When Reynolds was first prosecuted in 1875 there was no crime of cohabitation on the federal statute books.Only polygamy was a crime and could not be prosecuted without proof of a marriage ceremony, evidence almost impossible for prosecutors to secure.Enforcement of the anti-polygamy laws in Utah was a "dead letter."At least until 1885 and the Angus Cannon prosecution.When Brigham Young and Orson Pratt delivered the first public sermons on polygamy in August 1852 (Arlington 1985, 226; Van Wagoner 1986, 84), they were making public a principle revealed to Joseph Smith, Jr., in 1843 (D&C 132) but practiced with the greatest secrecy (Van Wagoner 1986, 1-69;Foster 1974).The sermons set in motion events that resulted in forty years of confrontation with the federal government and would threaten the Church's very existence.In spite of later national outrage, it was apparently not a crime in the early Utah Territory for a man to marry more than one woman at a time.

Mary Jane Hogan

The administrative system of England after the Norman Conquest has been described as “the adaptation of the ancient customary institutions of a decentralized system to the uses of [the Norman and Angevin kings‘] highly centralized administration”. 1 It was complex, adaptable, efficient to a high degree, and constantly changing. It had only a few of the features of a modern bureaucracy, as “government” to the medieval man did not imply anything resembling the modern state and its workings. It meant the practical expression of the rights owed to the king by his subjects and the duties of the king to his people. Its chief functions were the raising of finance and the administration of justice.

F. M. L. Thompson

T | HE 'Chandos clause' in the i832 Reform Act, which contemporaries believed delivered up the counties to Tory electoral domination, still has its place in the history books. Its author, Richard Plantagenet TempleNugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, has virtually none. This is a pity, not because his political career is especially significant, although the activities of the Farmers' Friend particularly in influencing and organizing other Members of Parliament might repay investigation; but because his financial affairs are of exceptional interest. In his own time he earned wide notoriety through spectacular financial ruin and utter collapse, culminating in the sale of most of his landed property and personal effects in the course of I 848. It is something of this renown which deserves to be recaptured. Aristocratic indebtedness has attracted considerable attention from historians of many periods in late years, both because of its importance to the proper understanding of the economy of landownership, and because of its possible effects on aristocratic political and economic policy.' If serious debt was sufficiently widespread to be characteristic of the landed aristocracy as a class, or of a considerable section of it, we would rightly expect to see its influence reflected in the political and economic life of the country. In the nineteenth century, the preservation and enhancement of the value of the land which had to carry these debts would then rank as one of the principal interests at stake in the Corn Law controversy. We would expect to find a social and political revolution caused by extensive land transfers made under the pressure of debt, and failing to detect this would justifiably assume that a successful effort to stave off ruin by increasing incomes from land ought to take its place in any general interpretation of the process of economic growth, as part of the great landowners' contribution to that expansion. Eagerness to reach these realms of general speculation has tended to obscure the difficulties of making the first assumption. An array of impressive figures of debts has been taken as sufficient proof. Debts, however, require careful handling as evidence: they may as easily indicate increasing prosperity as increasing adversity, intelligent use of available resources as wayward misappropriation. It would be as unwise to conclude that all aristocrats were in a precarious situation because all had some debts as to say that all governments or all manufacturers were on the verge of bankruptcy because they had large national debts or operated largely on credit. It is common ground that there were several different sources of debt among the landed families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not all of which were of equal importance in causing serious financial embarrassment. Until