Towards debate and open conversation

The beginning of the 64th year of the Scandinavian Economic History Review marks some changes in our editorial team. For 13 years Sverre Knutsen (BI Oslo) has been one of the co-editors of the journal; after a long tenure he is stepping down. We are grateful for his enduring engagement with the journal and initiatives he has started. One of the major decisions during his editorship concerned starting our fruitful collaboration with Taylor & Francis and professionalising the journal. In his first editorial Knutsen (2003) stated that his major aim was to focus on quality in improving the journal and we certainly will keep quality as a priority in the future as well. Our editorial secretary Janette Rawlings is likewise retiring. Since 2011 she has been key to modernising the journal by introducing an electronic submission platform which helped reduce manuscript turnover time by 50%; another important achievement was improving author communication, and many authors have profited from her meticulous editing work. We are grateful for all Janette Rawlings has done for the journal.

While some people leave, others come to join us – and it is well known that change is important. We are more than happy that Camilla Brautaset (University of Bergen) is to join the editorial team as the new co-editor from Norway. She will add to the scope of the journal with her research expertise in the history of trade and shipping, and in business history. And she will bring new female energy to the editorial team. The secretariat of the journal will in the future be managed by Tiina Hemminki and Pasi Nevalainen (University of Jyväskylä). They both completed their doctorates in History in 2014: Hemminki (2014) analysed early nineteenth-century peasants’ lending and credit practices in Sweden and in Finland. Nevalainen (2014) concentrated on the privatisation process of the Finnish governmental Post and Telecommunications Department. Both will help with managing the journal, and they will contribute their research expertise and specific fields of interest.

We have also changed the style of the journal. Starting with this issue in-text citations (APA) will be used. Further information and our guidelines can be found in the document ‘Instructions to authors’ on our website. Moreover, together with other Taylor & Francis journals we will follow the publisher's suggestion for a new layout that reflects changes in readers’ demands and publishing. We hope that this new design will make the journal even more attractive to our readers.

This first issue of Scandinavian Economic History Review 2016 features three articles, some book reviews, and a debate article by Deirdre McCloskey. We feel honoured that Deirdre McCloskey considered this journal as the place to publish her important contribution identifying liberty, dignity, and ideas as key factors in understanding the ‘Great Enrichment’ that has changed the world since the late eighteenth century. She challenges contributions by scholars such as Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, by Joel Mokyr, or by Robert Allen and many existing assumptions on the causes of economic growth and making the modern world, including the role played by labour, capital, technology and (formal) institutions.

The editors do not necessarily agree with all articles published in the journal, but we aim to publish more contributions like that by McCloskey, opening up space for engaged conversations. Today, economic, social, and business history journals all over the world seem to shy away from debate and controversy. Such debates about equality and inequality, equal access, or about the origins of economic development do indeed exist in our disciplines, but they have been confined to coffee tables at conferences and some panel discussions. We want to air these in our journals as well.

Staffan Albinsson offers in his article ‘A salary bass: a study of bassists’ earnings in the Royal Swedish Opera, 1799–1980’ an interesting perspective on the long-term development of earnings. Using the salary data of the contrabassists of the Royal Swedish Opera he contributes to the discussion on what is known as Baumol's cost disease. Bass players are an interesting group to study as the profession has not changed significantly over the last two centuries and also because of the absence of productivity growth – at least compared to most employment sectors that have continuously faced creative destruction.

In ‘The National Wealth of Sweden, 1810–2014’, Daniel Waldenström presents a new database on the long-term changes in Swedish National Wealth over the period 1810–2014. This new database will help change the overall picture of Swedish economic development; for example it will enable us to more accurately analyse the role played by private and public capital (assets and liabilities) in the Swedish industrialisation.

Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson, in ‘The landlord lag. Productivity on peasant farms and landlord demesnes during the agricultural revolution in Sweden 1700–1860’ focus on agricultural productivity in Sweden during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They contribute to the general debate about the role played by large manors and peasants in the agricultural transformation during this era. They show that in the middle of the eighteenth century landlords gained an advantage, while feeling that they lagged behind the peasantry in terms of productivity in the early-nineteenth century.

Publication report 2015

The aim of the Scandinavian Economic History Review is to publish ‘articles and reviews in the fields of economic, business and social history with a particular, but not exclusive interest in Scandinavia’. During the year 2015 we published altogether 13 articles, of which roughly half were dealing with the Nordic countries and the other half more general economic history topics or countries outside Scandinavia. Thus, our focus is internationally ranging articles from the Anglo-American productivity gap (Woltjer, 2015) to Nordic demographic development (Voutilainen, 2015). The articles published during the last year also reflect our aim to include ‘a broad variety of aspects and approaches to economic and social history, ranging from macroeconomic history to business history, from quantitative to qualitative studies’. Moreover, the articles published viewed economic history in a real long-term perspective from the neolithic era (Svizzero, 2015) to contemporary times (Ahnland, 2015).

In 2015 the most loaded articles from the Scandinavian Economic History Review webpages are listed in the Table 1.

Table 1. Top 10 articles downloaded in 2015.

Vol (issues)	Author	Title	Downloads
62 (3)	Jan Kunnas, Eoin McLaughlin, Nick Hanley, David Greasley, Les Oxley, Paul Warde	Counting carbon: historic emissions from fossil fuels, long-run measures of sustainable development and carbon debt	918
62 (2)	Mikael Stenkula, Dan Johansson, Gunnar Du Rietz	Marginal taxation on labour income in Sweden from 1862 to 2010	669
47 (1)	Mark Casson	The economics of the family firm	399
63 (2)	Dan Johansson, Mikael Stenkula, Gunnar Du Rietz	Capital income taxation of Swedish households, 1862–2010	329
61 (2)	Paul Caruana-Galizia, Jordi Martí-Henneberg	European regional railways and real income, 1870–1910: a preliminary report	305
62 (2)	Gregory Clark, Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke, Alan M. Taylor	The growing dependence of Britain on trade during the Industrial Revolution	214
61 (1)	Joel Mokyr	Cultural entrepreneurs and the origins of modern economic growth	192
45 (3)	Lennart Schön	Internal and external factors in Swedish industrialization	172
62 (2)	Svenja Gärtner	German stagnation versus Swedish progression: gender wage gaps in comparison, 1960–2006	167
63 (2)	Johan Söderberg	Oceanic thirst? Food consumption in mediaeval Sweden	164

List of reviewers 2015

The journal is indebted to all contributors and especially to the reviewers listed below, who provided the authors and editors of this journal with insightful, critical and supportive review reports on submissions processed in 2015:

Kim Abildgren

Staffan Albinsson

Sari Autio-Sarasmo

Jörg Baten

Tommy Bengtsson

Erik Bengtsson

Jan Bohlin

Francesco Cinnirella

John Devereux

Benjamin Dodds

Rodney Edvinsson

Jari Eloranta

Kerstin Enflo

Peter Englund

Susanna Fellman

Anders Giertz

Eric Golson

Ola Grytten

Sakari Heikkinen

Mary Hilson

Sanna-Mari Hynninen

Niklas Jensen-Eriksen

Lars Jonung

Niels Kærgaard

Petri Karonen

Sari Katajala-Peltomaa

Karlo Kauko

Arto Kokkinen

Juha-Antti Lamberg

Mark Lutter

Esa Mangeloja

Markku Mattila

Eric Monnet

Mats Morell

Jan Ottosson

Thomas Owen

Jaakko Pehkonen

Svante Prado

Leandro Prados de la Escosura

Alexandra Sapoznik

Harm Schröter

Moritz Schularick

Paul Sharp

Hanna Snellman

Maria Stanfors

Johan Söderberg

Daniel Waldenström

Evelien Walhout

Heli Valtonen

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

Niko Wolf

Nordic societies for economic and social history

The Scandinavian Economic History Review has been published since 1953 by the Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social History. Thus, this society and the economic history associations in the Nordic countries are the key stakeholders for the journal. Below we present the lists of the board members of the respective societies (situation in January 2016).

Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social history, members of the board:

Lars Magnusson (Chair), Sweden

Sverre Knutsen (vice-chair), Norway

Lars Fredrik Øksendal (treasurer and secretary)

Representatives of National Societies:

Ilkka Nummela, Finland

Alfred Reckendrees and Paul Sharp, Denmark

Danish Society for Economic and Social History, management committee:

Paul Sharp, Chairman, University of Southern Denmark

Battista Severgnini, Secretary, Copenhagen Business School

Peter Sandholt Jensen, Treasurer, University of Southern Denmark

Ingrid Henriksen, University of Southern Denmark

Inge Mønster-Kjær, University of Southern Denmark

Finnish Economic History Association, members of the board:

Ilkka Nummela, Chairman, University of Jyväskylä

Niklas Jensen-Eriksen, vice-chair, University of Helsinki

Jari Ojala,University of Jyväskylä

Sakari Heikkinen, University of Helsinki

Matti Hannikainen, University of Tampere

Elina Kuorelahti, University of Helsinki

Maiju Wuokko, executive manager, University of Helsinki

The Norwegian Economic History Association, members of the board:

Espen Ekberg, Chairman, Oslo BI

Andreas Nybø, Secretary, Trondheim

Lars Fredrik Moe Øksendal, Treasurer, NHH, Bergen

Tine Petersen, Oslo BI

Berit Eide Johnsen, Agder

Christoffer Kleivset, University of Oslo

Swedish Economic History Association

Matts Morell, Chairman, Stockholm University,

Yvonne Svanström, Treasurer, Stockholm University

Jan Ottosson Uppsala University is also a member of the board.

Christer Lund, Gothenburg University and Mats Olsson, Lund University are reserve members