This article presents the first complete 19th-century reconstruction of the Mexican wealth distribution, from independence to the Mexican Revolution. It uses an often underutilized source in Mexican historiography: will inventories/protocols. In addition, the present article estimates the levels and trends of historical wealth inequality using five different methods, among them the application of the

From 1860 to 1913 the six colonies that became states of Australia strove to attract migrants from the UK with a variety of assisted passages. The colonies/states shared a common culture and sought migrants from a common source, the UK, but set policy independently of each other. This experience provides a unique opportunity to examine the formation of assisted immigration policies. Using a panel of

This article analyzes the print culture of the Black and multiethnic community known as L8 in the northern British city of Liverpool. Through a critique of printed materials, including newsletters, magazines, and pamphlets all written, produced and read within the locale, the author assesses the construction of a community that was at once imagined and lived. This print infrastructure facilitated a

Abstract not available

During the late 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed a series of area descriptions with color-coded maps of cities that summarized mortgage lending risk. We analyze the maps to explain the oft-noted fact that black neighborhoods overwhelmingly received the lowest rating. Our results suggest that racial bias in the construction of the HOLC maps can explain at most 4 to 20 percent

For centuries, the Catholic Church demanded that baptisms take place in the hours immediately after birth. This custom began to lose importance in the last decade of the nineteenth century, which i...

Before the mid-seventeenth century when a developing understanding of probability transformed gambling, English gaming took place in the community rather than in dedicated institutions like casinos and so represented and interacted with more general social behavior. Different communities gambled differently; they had different status under the law. This article considers gentlemen's gambling, arguing

This article surveys plans that envisioned new leisure uses for derelict landscapes in Britain from about 1966 to 1979. These plans were an attempt to transform areas of Britain in ways that cut across issues ranging from deindustrialization to planning, landscape, environmentalism, industrial heritage, and leisure. The author argues for the importance of the profession of landscape architects in setting

Campaigns on behalf of Russian political prisoners stretch from the revolutionary “nihilists” of the 1880s to the dissidents of the 1970s. While the efforts of political émigrés and their Western sympathizers – to promote awareness, raise funds, and pressure governments – met with decidedly mixed success, there were several watershed moments. This article examines how one such breakthrough, the compilation

This paper analyzes migrant self-selection from Portugal between 1885 and 1930 for both men and women. Leveraging newly digitized data on migrants’ characteristics across districts and literacy as a selection indicator, we document that self-selection was positive over the entire period but varied markedly across space and time. In some districts, migrants’ literacy was similar to the general population

Resentment of monopoly and purveyance, weariness with the burdens of a long war, and the fears and hopes attendant upon the accession of a new and foreign dynasty were all focussed by the meeting of James I's first parliament in 1604. If there was nothing entirely new in these elements, there was novelty and danger in the concurrence of so many grievances at a time when the sense of external crisis

The tendency persists to separate the artful storyteller in Collins from the less successful thesis novelist. Like Wells and, to a lesser degree, Lawrence, Collins developed too strong a sense of mission. Beginning with Man and Wife, his novels seem encumbered with social protest. Collins's “old-fashioned” opinions, especially the remark that the “primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell

As the royal government in England expanded from the twelfth century onward and touched more aspects of the economy and society, landlords tried to control the administration and to protect their interests by retaining royal officers as their private clients. Simultaneously, lords built their own administrations to manage their estates and households. As clients, administrators could move easily between

Five weeks before the armistice in November 1918 an unprecedented thing happened in Britain. The control of a modern popular newspaper passed from private ownership into the hands of the prime minister of the day. Ever since David Lloyd George assumed the premiership twenty-two months earlier there were signs aplenty that relations between Downing Street and Fleet Street had entered a new era. But

It is now more than six years since Professors D.C. Moore and R.W. Davis battled it out, toe to toe like a pair of heavyweights, over the “other face of reform” in Buckinghamshire. The controversy began, it will be recalled, when Davis in his book on Bucks electoral politics addressed himself to Moore's conclusions about a country-based reform movement. Moore suggested that it was composed of ultra-Tories

“I wilnot give my dogge that bred that some prestes doth minister at the Alter when thei be not in clene lyff.” (statement attributed to Elisabeth Sampson, 1509)How subversively anticlerical was late medieval Catholic reform in England? Were Elisabeth Sampson or perhaps John Wyclif the reformer or malcontent at hand, one might expect scholars rapidly to identify reform with subversion. But if John

Much has been written about the fall of Robert Harley in 1708, little about the fall of the Godolphin ministry in 1710. Yet a comparison of the two events casts a flood of light upon the nature of politics in the reign of Queen Anne. This is especially true if the historian asks the question: why did Robert Harley succeed in 1710 where he failed in 1708? For succeed he assuredly did in 1710 and fail

“What was wrong with the historical reaction at the end of Victoria's reign, was not the positive stress it laid on the need for scientific method in weighing evidence, but its negative repudiation of the literary art, which was declared to have nothing whatever to do with the historian's task.” Writing in 1945, G.M. Trevelyan was overly pessimistic in assuming that this “negative repudiation” had

The origin and original nature of medieval English palatinates has been a hardy theme of medieval English constitutional history at least since the seventeenth century. Earlier work on the topic by this author was essentially negative, dealing with what palatinates were not rather than with what they were; it is now time to offer the thoughts which follow. This article presents no conclusions based

William Pitt had no desire for a war with France in 1793. While the French had lurched from bankruptcy to revolution to war, he had kept England at peace for a decade and successfully repaired the damage done to government finance by the American War. Such had been Pitt's intention from the start, according to his Cabinet colleague, Lord Grenville, who later wrote that “his views and measures…were

In her biographical note on John Ponet, C. H. Garrett observed that although there was “little good” to be said of him as a man, as a political pamphleteer Ponet had attracted less attention than was his due. Although W. S. Hudson and W. Gordon Zeeveld have remedied this deficiency to a considerable extent, the precise connections between Ponet's Short Treatise of Politic Power and the contemporary

Between the accession of Charles I in 1625 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660 Calvinism lost its hold over English religious life. The effect of Arminianism on this decline has yet to be fully understood. The impact of the early English Arminians, the circle of Archbishop Laud, is, to be sure, well known. Less appreciated is the emergence of an Arminian critique of Calvinism from within the

Primarily because of the Reformation, political obedience became an increasingly significant issue in Tudor England. The success of Henry VIII's break with Rome resulted partly because the state could use the established church to inculcate in the populace the notion of loyalty to the civil government as a Christian duty. Despite the vacillations of Henrician ecclesiastical policy and the more radical

Between the abolition of slavery, 1834, and World War I, more than a half-million laborers were introduced to the British West Indies under terms of indenture. Indenture implies unfreedom, the exploitation of people forced into exile by misfortune or misadventure. It is an alien concept in modern Western society, and the transoceanic transport of thousands of African and Indian workers during the nineteenth

An intractable domestic conflict between forces on the right and the left roiled the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939). We claim that international trade shocks exacerbated political instability. Leveraging an exposure design and disaggregated trade and employment data, we study the effects of import and export exposure on vote shares of parties and coalitions in the Republic's three elections, 1931

I study a sample of 482 English inland bills of exchange (where all parties to the bill were in England) during the period 1762-1850. Inland bills were used as a medium of exchange during the Industrial Revolution in the north of England. During this period, they circulated via indorsements, committing each indorser's personal wealth to back the bill. The number of endorsements is a measure of the

Napoléon Bonaparte revolutionized the practice of war with his reliance on a mass national army and large-scale conscription. This system faced one major obstacle: draft evasion. This article discusses Napoléon’s response to widespread draft evasion. First, we show that draft dodging rates across France varied with geographic characteristics. Second, we provide evidence that the regime adopted a strategy

How were unskilled workers selected and hired in preindustrial labor markets? We exploit records from the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral, London (1672–1748), to analyze the hiring and employment histories of over 1,000 general building laborers, the benchmark category of “unskilled” workers in long-run wage series. Despite volatile demand, St Paul’s created a stable workforce by rewarding the tenure

This paper investigates the evolution of gender equality in Sweden during a phase characterized by industrialization, urbanization, and demographic transition. To this end, we build a database with quantitative indicators to construct a spatial Historical Gender Gap Index. We find that after a period of stagnation, Sweden made significant progress in closing the gender gap from the 1940s onward to

This paper proposes a novel approach to assessing the efficiency and distributional consequences of occupational licensing statutes during the Gilded and Progressive eras, based on the practice of judicial review. At the time, state judges ruling on the constitutionality of police powers regulation operated under powerful legal norms that militated against redistribution and class legislation. Evidence

Cross sections of coal prices in England for 1695, 1795, and 1842 are used to infer transportation rates by sea, river, canal, and road. The effectiveness of monopolies, the degree of market integration, and the patterns of regional supply of each mining district are then established. The growth rates of productivity in sea, river, and road transport from 1695–1842 are computed and combined with a

This article explores the influence of worker resistance to Taylorism on industrial relations in Sweden. By analysing archival material from workers at the Separator Corporate Group, the Metal Workers’ Union, and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, this article highlights the interplay between shop floor activism, discussions within trade unions, and central labour market relations. It demonstrates

We study the effect of railroads, the single largest public investment in colonial India, on human capital. Using district-level data on literacy and two different identification strategies, we find railroads had positive effects on literacy, in particular on male and English literacy. We show that railroads increased literacy by raising secondary and elite primary schooling, rather than vernacular

This essay takes up the project of engendering capitalism by turning to the household. It situates a gendered analysis of capitalism within recent histories of capitalism, feminist analyses of social reproduction, histories of family and industrialism, histories of sexuality, and histories of women's labor. It argues that to analyze capitalism from a household perspective clarifies three core elements

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article

The long-standing view in US economic history is that the shift in manufacturing in the nineteenth century from the hand labor artisan shop to the machine labor of the mechanized factory led to “labor de-skilling” – the substitution of less skilled workers, such as operatives, for skilled craft workers. Investigating the Department of Labor's 1899 Hand and Machine Labor Study, we show the adoption

The growth of public transport networks in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had profound effects on commuting in the industrialized world, yet the consequences for labor markets during this important period of historical development remains largely unstudied. This paper draws on a unique dataset combining individual commuting and wage information for working-class residents of London

The end of the First World War was a crucial time for nationalist leaders and minority communities across the European continent and beyond. The impact of the post-war spread of self-determination on the redrawing of Eastern European borders and on the claims of colonial independence movements has been extensively researched. By contrast, the international historiography has paid little attention to

This article evaluates the high-profile claim that enslaved African-Americans produced over 50 percent of US national product in the pre-Civil War period. The accounting exercise shows the fraction was closer to (and indeed likely slightly below) the share of the population, that is, about 12.6 percent in 1860. The enslaved population had higher rates of labor force participation, but they were also

This article describes the construction and content of the Morts pour la France database. This database contains individual-level data on the universe of the 1.3 million French fatalities of the Great War who were officially recognized as war victims. It provides information on each soldier’s first and last names, dates of birth and death, circumstances of death, recruitment status, military rank and

Economists have used historical heights as markers of health, living standards, and long-run development. Although possible selection bias has been debated, height measurement error is less studied. I analyze novel administrative data of male Indian indentured laborers with repeated measurements of adult height to answer an important underlying question of precision. Laborers were measured by British

This paper analyzes the policies that the Castile of the seventeenth century followed toward creating and selling short-term and long-term debt paid off from the Crown's New World revenues. We use microdata to reconstruct comprehensive fiscal accounts for Spanish America during the seventeenth century. Our new time series evidence shows that the Spanish Empire maintained differential debt policies

Abstract The lack of long-term assessment of the administrative divisions of Galicia, a former part of the Austrian monarchy, has so far been a serious obstacle in the mapping and spatial analyses of archival census data. To fill this gap, we reconstructed the boundaries of 5944 cadastral communes, court districts, and political districts into circles (https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PXDP41)

Why did British politicians on both sides of the Atlantic propose a confederal rather than incorporating union in 1754? This question has been difficult to answer because most scholars have focused on the Albany Plan of Union outside of its imperial context, seeing in the plan either evidence of nascent American nationalism, a point of divergence between American and British conceptions of empire,

This paper shows that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 broadened access to Parliament for families needing rights to sell land in so-called estate bills. Bills were on average 14–27 percentage points more likely to be for gentry families and not aristocratic families in legislative sessions after the Revolution compared to sessions before. Regression and archival evidence suggest that parliamentary

We offer new evidence on the spatial economic impact of Italian unification. Adopting municipal population as a proxy for local economic activity, we construct a new geocoded dataset spanning the pre- and post-unification periods and discover robust evidence of an acceleration in growth near the former borders. A disproportionate improvement in market access boosted growth in these locations when barriers

Religious communities are important providers of social insurance. We show that risk associated with oil dependence facilitated the proliferation of religious communities throughout the U.S. South during the twentieth century. Known oil abundance predicts higher rates of church membership, which are not driven by selective migration or local economic development. Consistent with a social insurance

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Dutch bankers channeled investors’ funds to sugar and coffee plantations in the Caribbean, Surinam in particular. Agency problems between plantation owners, bankers, and investors led to an arrangement called negotiaties. Bankers oversaw plantations’ cash flows and placed mortgage debt with investors. We demonstrate how this securitization arrangement worked

Economists have reported results based on populations for every country in the world for the past two thousand years. The source, McEvedy and Jones’ Atlas of World Population History, includes many estimates that are little more than guesses and that do not reflect research since 1978. McEvedy and Jones often infer population sizes from their view of a particular economy, making their estimates poor

This article examines the long-term response of the Indian Muslim salariat to the lifting of usury laws in British India in 1855. The salariat were a group of urban professionals and landed gentry in north India who emerged after the uprising of 1857. They espoused a self-conscious brand of Islamic modernism, a central feature of which was a reinterpretation of Islamic traditions pertaining to ‘rent

We might expect chiromancy in the modern period to be analysed best within the well-known late nineteenth-century occult revival. The specific practice of palmistry, as it happens, is minimally examined in that historiographical context. Yet the purpose here is not to reinstate palmistry into our already extensive understanding of an Anglo-American modern occult, but to show how other readers of hands

This paper explores the politics of eminent domain, using a specific historical episode: the enactment of the new California constitution in 1879. It presents evidence that the failure of a constitutional provision that would have codified eminent domain powers for water development resulted from a complex interchange of economic interests among farmers, miners, and urban residents. This evidence was

“Direct action” emerged as a central concept in labour-movement politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article traces and explains that process of invention. In doing so, it seeks to settle three currently unresolved historical problems: the problem of the meaning of direct action; the problem of its relative novelty; and the problem of its relationship to nation. The article

Extensive research has been conducted on the concept of jobless recoveries and their potential causes, primarily focused on the United States from the 1990s. This paper finds that the prolonged employment downturn following the brief 1980–1981 recession in Britain qualifies as a jobless recovery and then investigates possible contributing factors: labor reallocation across industries, regional employment

The year 2021 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a book that set the agenda for decades of scholarship on the history of popular religion and supernatural beliefs. The book brought to life a lost world of early modern English magic, its success ultimately confirming popular beliefs and practices as respectable objects of historical study. This

Abstract This paper describes the creation of the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-Database (LIFE-M), a new data resource linking vital records and decennial censuses for millions of individuals and families living in the late 19th and 20th centuries in the United States. This combination of records provides a life-course and intergenerational perspective on the evolution of

This paper analyses the impact that Spanish road construction had on local population growth between 1787 and 1857. We find that the increase in market potential associated to road accessibility had a significant effect on local population growth. The impact was substantially higher on the municipalities that had a more diversified occupational structure. By contrast, the effect of the new network

Did the G.I. bill discriminate against Black World War II veterans? Using a variety of historical sources, I estimate the average amounts of G.I. benefits received by Black and white World War II veterans, as well as their cash-equivalents. These estimates suggest that Black veterans received more in benefits than white veterans, but that their cash-equivalents were lower. However, these estimates

We study the impact of the 1918 Spanish Flu on U.S. stock prices. Using a new weekly hand collected sample of 131 firms that traded on the NYSE, we examine the impact of the four waves of the flu on stock returns using panel regressions. We find that the second and fourth wave of the pandemic significantly lowered stock returns by 65.5 and 21.6 percent relative to the sample mean return, respectively

In this article, I defend the view that the Northern Ireland Troubles can usefully be described as an ethnic conflict. I critically examine two manifestos on this subject, those by Richard Bourke and Simon Prince respectively, which rest on misrepresentations of the scholarship on Northern Ireland. The issues raised by these historians are relevant to the historiography of nationalism and the study