Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts

This article examines the business strategies employed by early twentieth-century Bombay mill owners in work organization and wage differentiation. The traditionally highly segmented and fluctuating domestic textile markets in India were further complicated by colonial free trade policies, making them highly competitive. This prompted Bombay mills to adopt various strategies, including maintaining

During the French Revolution, thousands of revolutionaries and royalists fled the turmoil in French islands. Many went to nearby islands, from which they could observe events. Situated between Martinique and Guadeloupe, Dominica had a majority French population and a long history of connection with its French neighbors. This article uses the case of Dominica to explore the effects of the French Revolution

By the end of the 19th century, shifts in forest property rights and associated forest uses by rural communities in Europe had affected both rural livelihood conditions and ecological functioning o...

The paper analyzes family-level wealth inequality and social mobility in Dudelange (Luxembourg) over five generations between 1766 and 1872, a period that saw the end of feudal social relations. While the integration of Luxembourg into the French revolutionary regime produced a reduction in the Gini coefficient for the ownership of land, the social mobility analysis reveals a relative stability of

This paper examines the identity and origins of Swedish inventors prior to WWI, drawing on the universe of patent records linked to census data. We document that the rise of innovation during Sweden’s industrialization can largely be attributed to a small industrial elite belonging to the upper-tail of the economic, educational, and social status distribution. Analyzing children’s opportunities to

Prize law was a legal regime that played a crucial role in maritime trade and warfare in the European imperial world before the twentieth century, governing both the capture and disposition of enemy property seized by belligerents at sea during wartime. Prize law outlined the rules by which captures were to take place and how captured property was to be handled, adjudicated, and (if “condemned” or

Between the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean became a theatre of the global war waged by European imperial states. This article compares how three colonial powers, in French, Danish, and British colonial territories, dealt with interconnected political threats, in a region where the limits of imperial sovereignty and jurisdictions were often

Every empire in the Americas developed a law of slavery that connected the forced transoceanic migration of enslaved people with land-based economic production and social life. Competing conceptions of jurisdiction over land and sea emerged from legal processes regarding slavery in the transition from colonial Portuguese rule to early independence in Brazil. Both the Portuguese monarch and post-independence

During the wars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tens of thousands of English sailors had their wages deferred because the government could not come up with the cash to pay them. Instead, Navy sailors were discharged with undated government promissory notes, usually called ‘sailors’ tickets’, which they and their families sometimes had to wait months or years to have paid. This essay

This article analyzes the practices and politics of Caribbean prize courts at the turn of the nineteenth century, in order to better understand the dynamics of these peculiar legal institutions on the ground in one of the most volatile inter-imperial maritime spaces of the period. The focus is on the daily operation of the courts, the relationship between different regional courts (within and between

This article offers a new interpretation of mutiny, and of the ways in which this concept was defined and implemented in maritime law during the seventeenth century. It particularly focuses on British seafarers and the evidence surviving in the papers of the English High Court of Admiralty, placed in a comparative perspective with reference to other states’ legal provision. Scholars of maritime social

This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair — the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 — to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-­century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and

Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the

This essay focuses on the long history of archipelagic formations in the Bay of Bengal as sites of legal experimentation. This history is often narrated beginning with convict transportation and the permanent occupation of the Andaman Islands as a British penal settlement in 1857 and the violent erasure of indigenous cultures that followed it. This essay focuses instead on the hundred years preceding

How to organize domestic care for relatives living with a disability and elderly family members is a major challenge for individual households, as it is for all European societies. Taking up current debates on the future of family care work, this special issue offers historical perspectives on family care for people with disabilities. It investigates the relationship between disability welfare and

This paper explores the contemporaneous effects of Confederate monuments dedicated in the Post-Reconstruction South. I combine monument, election, and census data to create an election-year panel dataset of former Confederate counties between 1878–1912, then exploit the temporally staggered and geographically distributed dedication of monuments using a generalized difference-in-differences design.

The issue of how elites as a social group form, maintain their position, and influence the society they control is central to the debate on inequality. This paper studies one of the most extremely unequal societies ever recorded — the sugar-based economies in the West Indies — by focusing on the island of St. Croix in the Danish West Indies and examines the emergence and persistence of its economic

The Malthusian trap is a well recognized source of stagnation in per capita income prior to industrialization. However, previous studies have found mixed evidence about its exact strength. This article contributes to this ongoing debate by estimating the speed of convergence for a panel of 9 preindustrial European economies over a long period of time (14th–18th century). The analysis relies on a calibrated

This paper highlights the importance of endogenous changes in the foundations of legitimacy for political regimes. It focuses on the central role of legitimacy changes in the rise of constitutional monarchy in England. It first defines legitimacy and briefly elaborates a theoretical framework enabling a historical study of this unobservable variable. It proceeds to substantiate that the low-legitimacy

I study native-born white men’s internal migration in the United States over all possible 10- and 20-year periods between 1850 and 1940. Inter-county migration rates—after implementing a new method to correct for errors in linkage—were stable over time. Migrant selection on the basis of occupational status was neutral or slightly negative and also largely stable. But the orientation of internal migration

I reconstruct the historical performance of individual portfolios owned by Parisian investors during the French Belle-Epoque, which was characterized by a massive concentration of wealth. Using the value of inherited bequests as a proxy for ex ante wealth, I show that wealthier investors not only exhibited greater betas and thus benefited from the bull market, but also captured positive alphas, which

How do external threats to state sovereignty benefit local development? In this paper, we look at Thailand’s railroad projects in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as an example of a state’s strategic response to colonial encroachment. By transporting government officials and establishing a permanent administrative presence, the railways served to ensure Thailand’s sovereignty over

Within the turmoil of the Norman Conquest, did religious institutions affect the economic outcomes of their land? Exploiting historical data about the changes in holdings’ lordship that occurred after the Conquest, we compare the economic performance of estates controlled by different types of lords. Holdings controlled by Benedictine monasteries (vis-à-vis secular lords) experienced a better performance

New data covering 23 countries reveal that banking crises of the Great Depression coincided with a sharp international increase in deposits at savings institutions and life insurance. Deposits fled from commercial banks to alternative forms of savings. This fueled a credit crunch since other institutions did not replace bank lending. While asset prices fell, savings held in savings institutions and

This paper examines the international role of sterling during the Bretton Woods era and argues that it was not a competitor to the U.S. dollar. I construct a novel dataset to measure the reserve role of sterling in Europe and sterling area countries. The postwar reserve role of sterling was limited to the sterling area and was artificial as this area was built as a captive market. I document how British

To analyze large, digitized corpora, we introduce the new approach of “structural reading”, which combines the abstraction of distant reading with the nuance of close reading. We do so by developin...

The average white male born in 1900 earned 2.6 times more labor income over their lifetime than the average Black male. This gap is nearly twice as large as the more commonly studied cross-sectional Black–white earnings gap because 48% of Black males born in 1900 died before the age of 30 as compared to just 26% of white males. We calibrate a model of optimal consumption in a world with mortality risk

While piece rates were a common form of payment in manufacturing, historians have rarely tried to understand the cross-sectional structure of piece-rate prices. This paper examines piece rates paid to weavers at a US cotton factory and demonstrates that in most cases expected daily earnings were constant across different piece rates. While some rates did result in higher daily earnings, there is no

During the Spanish Civil War, War Routes with tourist itineraries were organized in the area controlled by General Francisco Franco. They began to operate on 1 July 1938 and ran throughout the whole of the following year. The objective was, on the one hand, to create a new tourism product essentially aimed at the European market in order to attract tourists and obtain foreign currency. On the other

In this article we argue that the reports of conductresses accompanying female migrants shed new light on the nature of interwar labour migration. As they mitigated the anxiety and insecurity that women faced during the process of migration, they fulfilled a crucial role in the highly restrictive post-1918 international migration regime. The Polish government introduced conductresses in 1925 to respond

This paper delves into infrastructure projects initiated during the dictatorship in Spain, particularly the construction of reservoirs and dams. These projects were instrumental in bolstering support for right-wing factions advocating for Franco’s regime over the years. However, our research reveals a notable trend: areas where dams were erected by the regime demonstrate diminished political backing

Elites were pivotal for Latin America’s modernization, yet granular evidence of their industrial entrepreneurship is limited. I study Antioquia, an early center of industrialization, from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Analyzing elite interactions via newfound archival data and exploiting unexpected deaths as exogenous shocks, I find global connectivity—not local—drove industrial

In this article, we discuss the sources employed and the methodological choices that entailed assembling a novel, individual-level, large panel dataset containing an incredible wealth of data for a...

This article examines the contrast between the interwar British state's emphasis on motherhood and the justification for the institutional care of a relatively small group of blind babies. After the First World War, concerns about the state of the nation were addressed in part by legislation and an increase in the number of organisations which purported to help mothers to bring up healthy babies. The

Large and persistent racial disparities in land-based wealth were an important legacy of the Reconstruction era. To assess how these disparities were transmitted intergenerationally, we build a dataset to observe Black households’ landholdings in 1880 alongside a sample of White households. We then link sons from all households to the 1900 census records to observe their economic and human capital

We provide decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the Russian Empire from the 1690s to the 1880s, making it possible for the first time to compare the economic performance of one of the world’s largest economies with other countries. Significant Russian economic growth before the 1760s resulted in catching-up on northwest Europe, but this was followed by a period of negative growth between the 1760s

Who is responsible for health care? Neoliberal policies since the 1970s seem to place this responsibility increasingly on the individual, in a process that is called responsibilization. The recent literature on neoliberalism, however, has questioned the preference of free-market liberalism for individual responsibility and shows how neoliberals often made common cause with communitarian conservatives

The Industrial Revolution traditionally has been seen in Disability Studies as marking a decisive shift in the lives of disabled people. It is argued that the rise of mechanisation, time discipline and standardisation made the industrial workplace a hostile environment for people with non-standard bodies. According to this view, increasing demands to work outside the home also meant that families were

This paper uses a new linked sample constructed from full-count census data of 1851–1911 to revise estimates of intergenerational occupational mobility in England. I find that conventional estimates of intergenerational elasticities are attenuated by classical measurement error and severely underestimate the extent of father-son association in socioeconomic status. Instrumenting one measure of the

I investigate the effects of trade on labor coercion under the dual-coercive institutions of slavery and state coercion. Employing novel data from Egypt, I document that the cotton boom in 1861–1865 increased both imported slaveholdings of the rural middle class and state coercion of local workers by the elite. As state coercion reduced wage employment, it reinforced the demand for slaves among the

During World War II, tens of thousands of Latvians served in German-led military formations, primarily in the Waffen-SS Latvian Legion. After the war, around 25,000 former Legionnaires transitioned from prisoner of war camps run by the Western Allies to civilian life in a variety of Western countries. They created veterans’ organisations — such as Daugavas Vanagi (‘Hawks of the Daugava’) — which also

Parents and their disabled children in both German states faced discrimination and severe challenges in the organisation of family life. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), from the 1960s onwards, parents achieved more far-reaching influence over the schooling and overall treatment of their children. The reasons for and avenues of parental empowerment

This paper explores the prevalence of in-kind wages in medieval labour markets and the underlying reasons for their use. Using a new dataset of agricultural labourers in medieval England, we demonstrate that, until the late fourteenth century, wages were recorded anonymously and most remuneration was done through in-kind payment. From the 1370s, however, labour remuneration shifted increasingly to

This paper analyzes and documents a new long-term income inequality series for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela based on dynamic social tables with four occupational groups. This enables the calculation of comparable Overall (four groups) and Labor Ginis (three groups) with their between- and within-group components. The main findings are the absence of a unique inequality