Economic History Review最新文献

We construct novel data on female population shares by age, district, and religion in South Asia from 1881 to 1931. Sex ratios skew male in Northern India and are more balanced in Southern and Eastern India, including Burma. Male-biased sex ratios emerge most visibly after age 10, and this is not specific to any one region, religion, or time period. Sikhs have the most male-biased sex ratios, followed by Hindus, Muslims, and Jains. The female share correlates across religious groups within districts. Evidence that sex ratios correlate with suitability for wheat and rice is weaker than suggested by the existing literature.

The literature on interwar monetary history has argued that the lack of central bank cooperation contributed to the pervasive economic outcome of the 1930s. The reasons for this failure are still an object of debate. In this paper, we revisit the attitude of individual central banks to the attempts led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to institutionalize central bank cooperation. We present original archival evidence to show that the 1931 crisis in central Europe emerged as an exogenous shock, prompting the BIS to become an international lender of last resort and to increase the resources at its disposal. However, the BIS relied on member central banks’ discretionary behaviour, which was far from supportive. Whilst the literature has mainly focused on the core central banks’ negative attitude towards BIS lending of last resort operations, we observe a general reticence to foster the BIS's structural and autonomous capacity to provide stabilization loans. Whilst politics also played a role in periphery countries, a major claim of this paper is that central banks shared a significant concern about profit-making reserve management, thereby limiting the BIS's available resources and capacity to lend. We conclude that these structural weaknesses profoundly hindered a multilateral response to the crises of the 1930s.

Economic historians have tried to better understand how and why land was redistributed in rural communities, although our empirical insights have been limited by a lack of serial evidence for land distribution within the same locality across a long period. This article exploits the unusual survival of Veldboeken (field books), which allow a careful annual reconstruction of land distribution within an unremarkable seventeenth-century village in the south of the modern-day Netherlands. We show that, despite high levels of dynamism in the local land markets, including high and changing levels of leasehold, varying and flexible tenancies, and frequent transfers of land between parties, the overall aggregate distribution of land did not change very much over time. Employing a systematic lifecycle analysis of active land-market participants, we advance a broader concept of pre-industrial ‘decumulation’ – where landowners and land users used adaptive mechanisms within the land market to not just consolidate land but also work out ways of getting rid of it and achieve optimal (and often smaller) farms and estates. Accordingly, we do not find any social logic or natural tendency towards accumulation, consolidation, and greater inequality.

This study advances a new approach to investigating the resilience of regional banking systems by reconstructing the co-evolving branch and interbank networks in post-Confederation Canada (1879–1900). By digitizing annual banking registers, this study employed a microgeographic approach to constructing a novel longitudinal dataset on city locations and correspondent arrangements of individual branches of Canadian banks. This study uncovered and visualized the divergent growth trajectories of branch and interbank networks across the Canadian provinces, applying network analysis to analyse their structural properties at the city-bank level. Survival analysis revealed significantly different volatility levels in the branch networks of chartered and private banks induced by the recurrent economic downturns and regulatory changes, as measured with their new venturing and survival rates. Mapping the interbank networks at the branch-city level revealed a multi-tier structure of the correspondent system and contributed novel insights into the regional internationalization via cross-border interbank arrangements and foreign trade flows. With the new branch-level evidence, this study addresses a major limitation in the extant literature on banking history in Canada, which, to date, was based on fragmented evidence on banks’ branch establishments and interbank networks. This paper offers implications for future research on international banking history, as well as the financial integration of regions and their cross-border connectivity via interbank networks.

Pérez-Artés, M. C., ‘Numeracy selectivity of Spanish migrants in colonial America (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries)’, Economic History Society, 77 (2024), pp. 503−522. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13279

An updated author affiliation is below:

Department of Economics and Business, University of Almeria; Research Group HEDES (SEJ-667) and Mediterranean Research Center on Economics and Sustainable Development (CIMEDES). The author is a postdoctoral researcher under the Margarita Salas program of the Spanish Ministry of Universities, funded by the European Union—NextGenerationEU.

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The year 2023 saw many publications in the fields of early modern economic and social history. The articles discussed in this round-up cover topics which have been a mainstay over recent years, including histories of labour (especially women's work), colonialism, and slavery. Agrarian history has lately gained renewed attention, and once again featured in this year's scholarship. A notable cluster of articles focused on what petitions – of which large collections survive – can tell us about the early modern economy, society, and the state. The gender split of authors was roughly equal this year, a testament to the rich and diverse topics that this year's articles cover.

Labour history was the focus of several articles. The hiring of over 1000 unskilled workers for the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral in London between 1672 and 1748 is the subject of an article by Paker, Stephenson, and Wallis. Applying econometric analysis to records of labourers hired, the authors find that hiring practices ‘encouraged retention and reduced turnover, giving a core group of laborers more work, priority in rehiring after slowdowns, and access to additional ways to earn.’ (p. 1101). Over time, the share of ‘new’ workers (i.e. those who had not previously worked on St Paul's) fell (p. 1110). Casual, transient work was not the pattern of hiring here at St Paul's; rather, the length of time a worker had been employed was rewarded with additional labour opportunities.

A synthesis of recent publications on work and identity is offered in an article by Hailwood and Waddell. In particular, the article draws attention to recent scholarship on the breadth of working identities that moves beyond categorizing people into ‘sorts’. The authors call for future scholarship which comparatively analyses types of sources (e.g. self-created versus indirect evidence) as well as how working identities might intersect with ‘time, place, gender, forms of labour, and race’ (p. 158). An article by McVitty contributes to this growing scholarship on work and identity. She exposes a pre-modern culture of sexual misconduct and gendered violence in the legal profession through close study of a range of legal records (court records, internal records of Inns of Court, and public proclamations) in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. While junior practitioners regularly participated in these behaviours, she argues, senior practitioners were responsible for condoning it (as well as sometimes participating) and shifting the blame to women. Although the legal community punished offenders, prosecution primarily sought to shield reputation and evade public consequences. Sexual misconduct and gendered violence contributed to the forging of tightly bound homosocial bonds that endure and persist within the legal profession today. To understand modern scandals of sexual misconduct within the common law profession, McVitty maintains, w