This article revisits and attempts to explain the failure of settlement in England between the outbreak of civil war in late 1642 and the execution of Charles I in January 1649. It argues that doubts about the process—and not just the proposed terms—of settlement worked against the possibility of an accommodation in the 1640s. An influential parliamentarian faction regarded negotiated treaties as inherently

Early modern war was a complex phenomenon that marked not only the lives of soldiers and civilians directly involved in conflicts, but also the technology, the economy and the culture of the epoch. Current intellectual approaches to war nevertheless tend to ignore that war was also experienced as a particular series of sounds, from drums to cannons and cries. In fact, aural perception constituted in

We evaluate the role of taxes on overseas trade in the development of imperial Britain’s fiscal-military state. Influential work, for example, Brewer’s Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with domestic goods, grew faster than customs revenues. We construct new historical revenue series disaggregating

This article analyses the elimination of hand-spinning in Britain during the Industrial Revolution and shows that it produced large-scale technological unemployment. First, it uses new empirical evidence and sources to estimate spinning employment before the innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. The estimates show that spinning employed 8 per cent of the population by about 1770. Next, the article systematically

This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the

The article explores the evolution of household income in India before the late nineteenth century. At a time when criticism of estimates of global real wages challenges the assumptions arising from the Great Divergence Debate, we aim to provide alternative ways of contributing to the discussion. By looking at individual and household income, as well as consumption levels in different parts of India

This article makes use of nearly 25,000 observations representing over 95,000 paid workdays across over 300 years to investigate individual work patterns, work availability, and the changes in work seasonality over time. This sample is comprised of workers in the construction industry, and includes unskilled men and women as well as skilled building craftsmen – the industry that is often used to estimate

To address growing concerns on the representativeness of real wages, we generate new estimates of GDP pc in pre-industrial England and Italy, as well as new exploratory estimates for Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Spain and Sweden, with Groth and Persson's (2016) general equilibrium model. Our results question the robustness of the current theoretical consensus

This article examines the death of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington Police Station, Hackney, in 1983, and explores the emotional politics of the campaigns that followed his death. These campaigns were focused on both determining the circumstances of Roach's death and highlighting tensions between the police and the Black community of Hackney. Using hitherto unpublished archival sources, local newspapers

This article traces the reproduction of whiteness in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the lens of domestic labor. Articulated in dialogue—and at times in tension—with Britain, what it meant to be white was forged through representations and practices of domestic service and household management, shaped by the legacies of slavery and the shifting colonial relationship

This paper analyzes monetary policy in Italy between 1894 and WWI by focusing on the main bank of issue at the time (the Banca d’Italia, BdI) and the Treasury. We show that the Treasury set multiple official rates, and the BdI determined an ”effective” rate transmitted to the market by discounting different bills to the various rates; we provide an original measure of this rate based on primary sources

For two decades, real wage comparisons have been centre stage in global socio-economic history studies of comparative development, offering a tractable – if oversimplified – gauge of living standards. But critics argue that these studies have leaned too heavily on the earnings of male, urban, unskilled, daily wage labourers, overlooking wage disparities between social groups and the mechanics of how

In September 1857, extracts from letters written in Gwalior and Agra, India, by an elite British “lady,” Wilhelmina “Minnie” Murray (1834–1912), were published as part of the “correspondence” sections of The Times's coverage of the 1857–58 Indian Rebellion. Through the letters she documented her escape from Gwalior to Agra. She described encounters with the maharajah and “fanatic” “ghazis,” and her

Edible goods are not usually considered suitable for archiving. This short article introduces an unconventional archive of images relating to design, book, costume, and performance history. Each image in this archive depicts an intricately decorated biscuit (cookie) set inspired by historical artifacts or styles. I began making these biscuits during the pandemic as a way of engaging with material culture

Studies on household income and consumption in Southern Europe have primarily focused on rural areas and factory workers. In this study, we aim to incorporate evidence of household income, considering the earnings of all household members and not just the male wage, using the population list of Zaragoza (Spain) from 1924. This population list is the first (and the last) to systematically record the

This study assesses whether British public debt featured a convenience yield during the Classical Gold Standard before World War I, as the US does in modern times. The empirical results support this thesis. Increases in the British debt-to-GDP ratio decreased the convenience yield on British public debt by between 8 and 20 basis points, qualitatively similar to the behavior of US public debt yields

Historians of premodern economies, in contrast to modern ones, have only infrequently contemplated the economic contribution of slavery. Here, I suggest that quantitative and statistical tools allow us to evaluate the place of slavery in an early economy, using Roman Pompeii as a case study. At the time of its destruction in 79 ce, Pompeii appears prosperous, having benefitted from the economic development

With the disintegration of the Russian Empire, Romania annexed Bessarabia, a region on its eastern border, in 1918. The integration of the new region was implemented through a centralized process in which the security forces played a significant role. This article examines the beginnings of the Romanian police in Bessarabia, the main security force in its urban areas, focusing on the development of

When the First Carlist War (1833–1840) broke out in Spain between the queen regent María Cristina, supported by the liberals, and the absolutist pretender Don Carlos, French legitimists portrayed it as a clash of civilizations between absolutism and liberalism. As supporters of the eldest branch of the Bourbon dynasty who had governed France from 1589 to 1792 and then again from 1814–1815 to 1830,

Baron Wolfgang Jacobus Forstner von Breitenfels was envoy to Duke Leopold I of Lorraine (1697–1729) at the court of Queen Anne of Britain and Ireland (1665–1714) between 1710 and 1713. Using Forstner's unexamined papers, this article explores Lorrain perceptions of Britain during the twilight of Anne's reign. As a monarch's political decisions were influenced by the correspondence of their representatives

Differences between models of industrialization are increasingly recognized as an important element of global economic history, and the quality of jobs is receiving new interest as a better indicator of living standards than income alone. This paper considers the implications of historical development models for job quality using the spinning section of textile manufacture in the early United States

This article studies the failure of the Spanish-German treaty signed in 1893. The examination of the process that led to its derailment in the Spanish senate contributes to the historiography in the following ways. First, the composition of the executive that promoted the agreement illustrates the fragility of the protectionist agro-industrial coalition, as shown for Germany, in late-nineteenth century

This study investigates the wages and labour contracts of Khoe workers in Graaff Reinet, a district on the Cape Colony's eastern frontier in the early nineteenth century. Using wage registers from 1801 to 1810, we offer the first individual-level analysis of wages for both male and female Khoe workers, examining payment forms, socio-economic stratification, and gendered wage dynamics. The findings

Demographic response to short-term price fluctuations can be interpreted as an indicator of living standards in pre-modern societies. In this paper, we demonstrate how childbearing and infant and child mortality responded to changes in rye prices in two nineteenth-century Hungarian sub-regions. We conducted a micro-level demographic analysis based on family reconstitution data and multivariate statistical

To delay paying wages to seamen, the late Stuart Navy issued them instead with “tickets” to be redeemed for cash after months or years of delay. Seamen often sold the tickets at deep discounts to ticket buyers, who became government creditors for unpaid wages, one of the largest items in the national debt. Ticket buyers were savagely attacked in pamphlets. This article is a preliminary exploration

This Roundtable marks the beginning of a new era for the Journal of British Studies (JBS). Volume 63, issue 4, October 2024, was the last traditional issue printed on paper. No longer will members of the North American Conference on British Studies receive a bound volume quarterly in the mail. We fully understand that for many of our readers the end of print is emotionally wrought, and it constitutes

This article examines the lived experiences of the older body—the embodiment of old age—from the perspective of older people. It uses letters written from 1680 to 1820 by twenty-two women and men aged between sixty and eighty-nine, selected from a corpus of over 391 letter writers. We begin by exploring the embodied experiences discussed by older people, as well as their understanding of the relationship

In nineteenth-century London, theater-going was a genuinely mass activity. Within a rapidly expanding entertainment industry, working-class playgoers abounded. Opened to the public in 1818, the Coburg Theatre, later renamed the Victoria and known as the Vic, developed an especially strong association with popular drama. Although much has been written on the kind of work that places like the Vic presented

As mobile financial assets, slaves have high liquidation value that makes them desirable as loan collateral. The mobility of slaves also makes them insecure collateral because borrowers could sell slaves to outside buyers or move them beyond the reach of creditors. We contend that creditors balanced the opposing forces of liquidity and security in deciding whether to extend credit against slave collateral

In pre-industrial rural Italy, the disparities among smallholders, sharecroppers, and day laborers were starkly defined by their unequal access to land, which significantly influenced their living standards, family structures, and socioeconomic conditions. This paper uses nominative data from 1819 to 1859 to first explore how the different peasant categories adjusted their demographic behaviors according

Although real wages have long been a cornerstone of our understanding of the premodern economy, in recent years historians have become sceptical about their usefulness as a proxy for living standards. One of the main concerns is that, before industrialization, most households did not depend on wages but were self-employed. This article therefore proposes a new methodology to test the representativeness

This paper investigates the labour market for female servants in England and Wales between 1780 and 1834, using previously unexplored archival materials alongside qualitative sources. After introducing the dataset, the study provides a micro-level analysis of wage determinants and traces the sources and evolution of employer market power. The findings show that real wages fell substantially during

This article was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Baltimore in November 2023.

This study investigates the effects of economic stress on out-migration behaviors using individual-level panel data transcribed from local population registers of three villages and a neighboring town in northeastern Japan in 1708–1870. Economic stress under study includes local economic hardship, measured by rice price fluctuations, and large-scale famines. We apply multinomial logistic models to

On 11 December 1967, a large earthquake devastated the village of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, western India. Many blamed the new Koyna hydroelectric dam nearby. Prompting international inquests, Koyna became perhaps the world’s most famous case of reservoir-induced seismicity, a novel type of earthquake triggered by human activities. We use the dam’s history to explore the emergent consciousness of

During the past decade, scholars have produced a vast amount of research using linked historical individual-level data, shaping and changing our understanding of the past. This linked data revolution has been powered by methodological and computational advances, partly focused on supervised machine-learning methods that rely on training data. The importance of obtaining high-quality training data for

In this paper we propose an integrated view of both the rural and the urban sides of migration in 19th century East Belgium. We study two rural areas, Ardennes and the Pays de Herve, with diverging agrarian structures and pathways to modernization. Both areas faced the challenge of population pressure due to high fertility and falling mortality. Between them was a textile town, Verviers, which was

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in twentieth-century India. Creating a new dataset of district-level political outcomes between 1920 and 1957, we find that both the partial franchise extension of 1935 and the universal suffrage reform of 1950 led to limited increases in citizen participation as voters or candidates

This paper uses newly digitized data on the growth of the telegraph network in America during 1840–1852 to study the impacts of the electric telegraph on national elections. Exploiting the expansion of the telegraph network in a difference-in-difference approach, I find that access to telegraphed news from Washington significantly increased voter turnout in national elections. Newspapers facilitated

This article focuses on the intellectual efforts made by a South African activist named Alice Kinloch, one of the first people to openly criticize the violence perpetrated against black mineworkers in Kimberley's compound system, at the end of nineteenth century. In the first section, we focus on Alice Kinloch's early life, her involvement in early Pan-Africanism in Britain, and the beginning of her

It has long been a matter of contention what role the Nuremberg Trials accorded to the murder of the European Jews. While especially early historiography considered the Allied war crimes proceedings the beginning of «Holocaust trials», a later generation of scholars would argue that the extermination of Europe’s Jews was both under- and misrepresented in the course of the 1945–1949 trials. The present

History still looms large in the politics of East Asia. Rather than settling into a modicum of consensus, debates on how to understand and commemorate the Second World War even seem to gain in intensity and emotionality with the passage of time. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debates on landmark cases of (post-) transitional justice, particularly the Tokyo Trial of 1946–1948 and later, more

The Tokyo and Nuremberg tribunals led to the disappearance of the Axis alliance. In this process, a domestication of the past commenced in both Germany and Japan as the memory of the war became regionalised and, above all, nationalised. This has had paradoxical consequences to this day: we have been left with a history of the Second World War in which the world has been left out. This article argues

Between 1900 and 1930, the share of power in American manufacturing coming from electricity grew from 10% to 80%. Although electrification has been attributed with dramatic productivity gains, data limitations have constrained previous research to rely on aggregate data. Using a newly-collected dataset covering manufacturers in North Carolina in the early 1900s, I examine the effects of electrification