Economic History Review最新文献

This paper investigates the impact of the disruption of the Ottoman Empire on the integration of regional and colonial commodity markets in the Near East. Exploiting a novel dataset on commodity prices in Syria, Egypt, Turkey, France, and the United Kingdom covering the 1787–1939 period, it assesses the extent of price dispersion across markets before and after the end of the Ottoman Empire and investigates the causes behind the change in market integration. The results indicate that, while regional markets disintegrated during 1923–39, reflecting the anti-global environment of the interwar era, colonial market linkages strengthened. The empirical findings also highlight that border effects, rather the rise of protection per se, were the main drivers behind the increase of regional price dispersion.

We investigate the financing and performance of international entrepreneurship in an environment that was characterized by severe information problems and very weak investor protection. Despite these problems, new ventures could raise large amounts of equity and debt on the Belgian capital market between 1890 and 1914. Many of these firms were international new ventures (INVs) with their main operations abroad, often far away from Belgium. We find that INVs raised much more capital but were less likely to pay a dividend than domestic new ventures (DNVs). They were less likely to issue a bond and had a higher cost of debt when operating further away from Belgium. Performance after listing was generally bad for new ventures throughout the period, but it was much worse for INVs than for DNVs. Our findings confirm contemporary arguments that unprotected, financially illiterate investors were expropriated by INV founders.

Since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so-called New World in 1492, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards settled in Central and South America. This paper assesses the skill selectivity of Spanish migrants who went to Hispanic America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries for the first time. The age-heaping method is employed to estimate numeracy levels as a proxy for human capital. With a database of 33 929 individual observations, the findings show that Spaniards who left the country to settle in the Spanish territories were positively self-selected. Additionally, differences are observed in the human capital of those who chose to settle in Mexico, who had a higher level of numeracy, than those who chose Peru. These differences might be due to the viceroyalty structure and educational institutions that encouraged the emigration of people with greater human capital to Mexico. Finally, when the level of numeracy of Spaniards in Hispanic America is compared with the numeracy of the total population, emigrants still had higher levels of human capital.

This paper explores the origins of German banks’ risk-taking in the years preceding the 1931 crisis. The 1920s were marked by a large and prolonged increase in capital flows into Germany, chiefly from the United States and the United Kingdom. This coincided, at the individual bank level, with a rise in leverage and a fall in liquidity. We examine possible connections between the two phenomena. Our analysis is based on a combination of historiographical work and statistical modelling based on a newly hand-collected bimonthly dataset on German reporting banks from 1925 to 1935. Bank by bank we examine the effects of foreign inflows on decisions related to leverage, lending, and liquidity. The Dawes Plan of 1924 and the relative absence of a too-big-to-fail (TBTF) environment allow us to mitigate endogeneity concerns. We suggest that while capital inflows did not seem to impact banks’ liquidity decisions, their impact on leverage was non-negligeable.

This article uses the full sample of the 1851 census enumerators’ books (CEBs) to revisit and reanalyse the well-known phenomenon of female kin servants in the British census. We find that the recording of female kin servants points to three distinct possibilities – day servants, domestic work at relatives’ homes, and work at relatives’ homes as part of the family business unit. Accordingly, we argue that female kin servants offer a rare opportunity to look into the interaction between gendered work, household economy, and market economy, and they should be considered as much in the labour force as classic servants. We further offer tentative methods to revise the number of female domestic servants. Our revision suggests that domestic service probably employed more women than manufacturing activities of all sorts put together. It highlights the limited impacts of industrialization on most women's work experiences as well as traditional sector's importance for women's employment, even as late as the mid-nineteenth century.

This paper examines the evolution of consumption practices in Venice in the long eighteenth century through the combined use of post-mortem inventories and household budgets. Although Italy experienced a period of relative decline between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, our findings suggest that Venetian households enjoyed a rich and vibrant material culture that was fully comparable with those of the most advanced European urban economies. However, although new products, practices, and fashions were adopted by Venetian society, the architecture of consumption did not undergo sudden and extreme changes; rather, consumption was gradually refined, following the path that it had begun during the Renaissance. We therefore argue that the Venetian economy did not experience a consumer revolution but, instead, consumer evolution. Moreover, this study shows that sophisticated consumption practices were not exclusive to the more dynamic economies of the continent but were widespread even in those regions that were victims of the Little Divergence. We thus suggest that the relationship between consumption development and economic development was not necessarily causal and that the diffusion of new consumption practices throughout society was a necessary, but insufficient, prerequisite for economic take-off.

Height and infant mortality are both considered health indicators of a population, yet they tend to be much more strongly correlated in high-income, low-mortality populations. This article shows that infant deaths are not representative of the health of survivors as it relates to height because breastfeeding practices shield them from part of the disease environment. Instead, child mortality rates, especially from food and waterborne diseases, capture the disease load that is associated with lower heights better. The period of this study is 1850–1940, with a focus on 1875–1900, as the Netherlands underwent major health and wealth transitions. Individual conscription heights from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands as well as municipal conscription statistics are used. The article takes a diachronic approach to examine how various health indicators have developed over time. The start of the upward trend in heights and the improvement of child mortality rates coincided in four Dutch regions, whereas infant mortality rates followed a different trajectory. Bivariate maps are used to identify municipalities in which infant and child mortality did not correlate. This study adds to both the understanding of heights as a health indicator and local breastfeeding practices in the nineteenth-century Netherlands.

This paper studies the relationship between land revenue systems and returns to agricultural labour in colonial India. I provide the first district-level comparative estimates of agricultural labour returns relative to average income, on the basis of wage/income ratios for 1916. I then use those estimates to analyse the impact of the land revenue systems established by the British colonial authorities. Results show that districts with a larger proportion of non-landlord land revenue systems presented higher relative wages, closer to the average income. This effect was mainly driven by differences in land concentration connected to the type of landownership introduced by land revenue systems.

In this paper, we discuss the basis of the illegal slave trade between Africa and Cuba, measuring its volume and profit during the first half of the nineteenth century. Due to its illegal nature, the sources for exploring this trade were systematically destroyed, but we have been able to locate the accountancy of 17 expeditions that gives us a comprehensive understanding of the profits, margins, and risks. The basis to understanding this business was the murderous use of enslaved persons in the sugar mills, which forced a continuous repositioning through an illegal, although tolerated by the Spanish authorities, business. We demonstrate that from an economic point of view, the slave trade after illegalization was highly profitable, as the financial return of successful expeditions was near 100 per cent of the invested capital in less than a year. The risk of capture by the British authorities, associated with its illegal nature, was only high during the initial moments, and became steadily lower afterwards. In terms of volume, the trade of a half million enslaved persons illegally smuggled into Cuba produced what was probably the island's most important market.

Membership in mutual health insurance societies spread among industrial workers in the late nineteenth century. We study determinants of such membership among male workers in Swedish manufacturing by using matched employer–employee data from three industries covering all workers (i.e. members and non-members, N > 12 000) and firms around 1900. We find remarkably high rates of membership overall, and especially among married workers. The association between marital status and health insurance suggests that selection into health insurance societies was ‘propitious’ rather than ‘adverse’. Many workers became members well before the age of 40 years, when their health began to deteriorate, and this coincided with the average age of first marriage for men, occurring in their late twenties. Being married and having membership was more marked in firms with voluntary membership and was important for the viability of the mix of voluntary and compulsory health insurance societies emerging in Nordic countries around 1900. Findings support the idea that health insurance can attract high levels of membership under voluntary schemes and suggest why it took so long before statutory health insurance covering sickness absence and workplace accidents was introduced in Sweden.