European Review of Economic History, 15, 277–311. C European Historical Economics Society 2011 doi:10.1017/S1361491611000116 First published online 12 April 2011 Foreign wars, domestic markets: England, 1793–1815 DAVID S. JACKS Simon Fraser University and NBER, Department of Economics, 8888 University Drive, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6,
[email protected] This article explores the means by which warfare influences domestic commodity markets. It is argued that England during the French Wars provides an ideal testing ground. Four categories of explanatory variables are taken as likely sources of documented changes in English commodity price disintegration during this period: weather, trade, policy and wartime events. Empirically, increases in price dispersion are related to all of the above categories. However, the primary means identified by which warfare influenced domestic commodity market integration was through inter- national trade linkages and the arrival of news regarding wartime events. I. Introduction An emerging consensus in the economic history literature has identified the period encompassing the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as one of the key turning points in the process of global market integration. Federico and Persson (2007), Jacks (2005, 2006), Rönnbäck (2009) and Studer (2009) all very clearly indict the so-called French Wars in disrupting the slow, but gradual process of intra- and intercontinental market integration that had unfolded over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The effects of this commodity market disintegration are most clearly seen in the work of O’Rourke (2006, 2007). The shared findings of his papers are that the relative price effects of the French Wars were larger than generally appreciated, global in scale, and brought large changes to consumer welfare in their wake.