Economic History Review最新文献

This study examines how historical rail stations condition long-run development using Colonial Malaya as a laboratory. By constructing novel historical data on rail stations, agglomeration centres, tin mines, and rubber plantations dating back a century and matching contemporary data on economic activity at the 1-km cell level, we find that regions with earlier access to rail stations exhibit higher levels of economic activity today, owing to agglomeration economies. These results persist even in regions that have abandoned colonial stations. This study highlights the role of investment in transport infrastructure in accelerating local economic activity.

This study examines how historical rail stations condition long-run development using Colonial Malaya as a laboratory. By constructing novel historical data on rail stations, agglomeration centres, tin mines, and rubber plantations dating back a century and matching contemporary data on economic activity at the 1-km cell level, we find that regions with earlier access to rail stations exhibit higher levels of economic activity today, owing to agglomeration economies. These results persist even in regions that have abandoned colonial stations. This study highlights the role of investment in transport infrastructure in accelerating local economic activity.

Education drives economic growth. However, many developing countries are characterized by high variation in local education outcomes. This article argues that the expansion of public education in former colonies was shaped by the relative inclusivity of civil registration under colonialism, which determined local information capacity of the state at independence. Where information was low, governments were less likely to build schools, and enforcing policies such as compulsory education was more difficult. These theoretical claims are tested in Morocco, a lower–middle-income country and former French colony characterized by stark variation in local education outcomes.

Education drives economic growth. However, many developing countries are characterized by high variation in local education outcomes. This article argues that the expansion of public education in former colonies was shaped by the relative inclusivity of civil registration under colonialism, which determined local information capacity of the state at independence. Where information was low, governments were less likely to build schools, and enforcing policies such as compulsory education was more difficult. These theoretical claims are tested in Morocco, a lower–middle-income country and former French colony characterized by stark variation in local education outcomes.

Children were an integral part of the workforce during the British Industrial Revolution. The changing patterns of child labour as well as the causes behind its rise and fall have generated much scholarly debate. This study brings in new direct evidence on child labour from children's age certificates and school attendance records from cotton factories. We link individual children identified from these factory records with the 1851 census, and provide, for the first time, concrete evidence on the scale of the census under-reporting of child labour in factories. We find that the British census under-reported the true scale of children's factory employment by a third. On the basis of this finding, we further reconstruct children's labour force participation rates and occupational structure in the mid-nineteenth century. Overall, we argue that technological change and the early Factory Acts did not diminish children's factory employment immediately nor effectively. Children continued to be a valuable labour source in factory production until at least the mid-nineteenth century.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the complex relationship between British economic performance during the Napoleonic wars and the ‘West Indies’, as the Caribbean slave colonies were called. Not only did profits from slave-based commerce provide financing for the growth of the financial sector, as has been claimed, but the risk of financial instability created by the financial sector's investment in and exposure to the Caribbean slave economies made it necessary for the government – and the Bank of England – to support this trade. The Bank of England archival records demonstrate that the Bank developed lending facilities specifically for the purpose of supporting West India merchants through the financial crises of the 1790s and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Not only did the Bank engage in unconventional lending, explicitly providing loans of more than a year, but the Bank also made innovative crisis loans, both accepting goods as collateral and providing large loans that were protected by extensive third-party guarantees. Furthermore, the 1799 loan is a documented instance of the Bank accepting consols as collateral for crisis lending. These innovations made it possible for the Bank to act alongside the government in supporting the West India merchants through the Napoleonic wars and may have been influenced by the growing number of directors of the Bank who were themselves West India merchants.

Did democratization reduce the likelihood of politically connected bank bailouts in the past? What role did private central banks play as independent lenders of last resort? To answer these questions, this article provides new detailed archival evidence on the causes of bank failures in Spain in July 1931. We show how, on the back of a safety net provided by close connections to the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923–30), bankers embarked in a rapid and outward-oriented expansion characterized by politically driven credit misallocation and risk-shifting on the eve of the Great Depression. Transition to democracy with the coming of the Spanish Second Republic in April 1931 terminated the safety net provided by these connections and the collapse of international trade and finance caused insolvency to surface. Democratic fiscal authorities clashed with the opposition of Banco de España – the privately owned lender of last resort – to share losses stemming from a bailout, resulting in bank failures.

Evidence on by-employment in long-run economic development is limited in existing literature worldwide. This study constructed a new dataset comprising 74 515 occupational observations with 4890 by-employed individuals derived from Chinese lineage genealogies. The dataset suggests a double-peak pattern of by-employment in the Yangtze Valley over the long twentieth century, reflecting China's unique historical trajectory and revealing specialization, structural change and the land systems as key shaping factors. Specialization associated with the transition of industrial production towards factories spanned the entire twentieth century, but large-scale shifts of the labour force out of agriculture were delayed until the last two decades of the century. The first peak in by-employment was attributable to low levels of specialization, while the second increase was driven by radical structural changes in the labour force. This latter peak was further facilitated by a land system providing broad access to agricultural land use rights, while the trough between the two peaks was deepened by the collective agricultural system in place between the 1950s and 1970s. Comparative analysis suggests that divergent by-employment patterns across historical Eurasia can be attributed to differing stages of structural change, as well as variations in land systems and gendered divisions of labour.