Working Papers by Philip T. Hoffman

By the eighteenth century, Europeans dominated the military technology of gunpowder weapons, which had enormous advantages for fighting war at a distance and conquering other parts of the world. Their dominance, however, was surprising, because the technology had originated in China and been used with expertise in Asia and the Middle East. To account for their prowess with gunpowder weapons, historians have often invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies in the peculiar form that military competition took in Western Europe: it was a winner take all tournament, and a simple model of the tournament shows why it led European rulers to spend heavily on improving the gunpowder technology, and why political incentives and military conditions kept such a tournament from developing elsewhere in the world. As a result, rulers elsewhere in Eurasia had much less reason to advance the gunpowder technology or to catch up with the Europeans. The consequences were huge, from colonialism to the slave trade and even the Industrial Revolution.

Using evidence from a sample of over 800 leases, this paper examines the productivity of farming in the Paris Basin between 1450 and 1789. Existing evidence about productivity is unreliable, the paper argues, and the leases provide historians with a new and valuable source for the study of productivity and economic growth. Much of the paper is devoted to a defense of the method employed with the leases, which point to spurts of spectacular growth on local farms but also to stunning setbacks during times of war and increased taxation. The paper concludes with analysis of the causes of economic growth in pre-industrial agriculture.

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century France - a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations early modern historians have tended to rely upon.

This paper examines the wave of investment in agriculture in 16th and 17th century France, a movement with parallels throughout western Europe. After dismissing the explanations advanced by most historians, I argue that the investment in agriculture resulted from royal tax policy. I then consider the predilection investors showed for sharecropping and suggest that this predilection can be explained in light of modern economic theories of share contracts.