Globally, there were dramatic and apparently permanent declines in almost all measures of economic inequality within countries across the 20th century. The UK too experienced these global trends, as…

Although much of the persistence literature has dealt with extractive colonial institutions, no study directly examines the persistent effects of the transition from pure subsistence to market econom...

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In 1609, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) faced a bear raid by a syndicate of short sellers led by Isaac Le Maire, a former director. We reconstruct the forward trade between 1607 and 1611, the act...

Government regulation of the banking sector is pervasive, making it difficult to empirically analyse when banks would voluntarily choose to issue equity if there were no minimum requirements on capit...

Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, billions of cowries arrived in West Africa, leaving one of the few quantitative traces available for historians to measure the Atlantic trade's impact....

Recent historical national accounting data show that the timing of the Great Divergence hinges on the different trends in north-west Europe and the Yangzi Delta region of China. Although north-west E...

The present article employs probate records to analyse private wealth accumulation and distribution in Montevideo between 1760 and 1825. The results reveal four major findings. Firstly, there was a s...

This study examines social-class and urban–rural differentials in childhood mortality in Sweden from 1880 to 1910, a period of steady mortality decline, ongoing industrialization, and urbanization. U...

The fate of the handloom cotton textile industry is one of the most debated topics in the economic history of India. This paper presents novel employment estimates for cotton textile handweaving and ...

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Japan's regional convergence of productivity levels throughout the twentieth century can be best described as a cumulative process of ‘catching up, forging ahead, and falling behind’. Using a novel d...

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Between 1807 and 1815, US imports of manufactured goods were slashed dramatically by a trade embargo, non-importation measures, and the War of 1812. These disruptions are commonly believed to have pr...

Using existing and new price data sets, we provide the first estimates of market integration across England over the entire 200 years of the industrial revolution. We document a significant, though n...

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Using newly collected discount rate data for six Swiss cities from 1846 to 1893, we find no evidence of increasing integration during a 30-year period of lightly regulated free banking. We attribute ...

Why do elite families often maintain their social and economic status across generations? This paper examines the role of adoption in sustaining elite persistence in prewar Japan. Under the Japanese ....

This study analyses the records in the Cairo geniza, the distribution of Chinese ceramics, the reports of travellers (this is the best-known, but least important, dataset), and the discussions of the...

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This article provides the first systematic estimates of living standards in Al-Andalus (the Muslim-ruled Iberian Peninsula) in 950, 1000, and 1200. Drawing on prices and wages from legal documents an...

We study the market for common white bread in the city of Toledo through a new 266-year-long series of bread prices, obtained from the cash purchases and wholesale bread-for-wheat contracts of large ...

Limited liability company legislation was introduced to the Cape Colony in 1861. An amendment in 1892 led to wider adoption, expanding and diversifying the capital market. Using novel data from the C...

This paper investigates how kinship and professional networks shaped labour market outcomes in the guild-based labour market of early modern Genoa. Using a newly constructed dataset of more than 8,00....

To persuade creditors to lend, cities in the Low Countries relied on a community responsibility system that made all citizens personally liable for public debt. This exposed itinerant citizens to sig....

In recent years economic inequality has become a major research topic in economic history. However, much remains to be done to complete our knowledge of long-term distributive dynamics. This article ...

When studying French prices between 1938 and 1949, economists and historians face a paradox: whilst a vast black market shaped daily life, official indices recorded only state-controlled prices. This...

Substantial amounts of British capital flowed to Latin America during the first era of globalization. Companies financed by this capital were typically headquartered in the United Kingdom, but opera...

Housework is central to feminist calls for recognition of women's work, economic histories explaining the sexual division of labour, and claims regarding the progressive role of scientific knowledge....

We identify a new organizational form, the Managing Agency Business Group (MABG), demonstrating how agency houses used interlocking directorships to build groups on the basis of commercial and planta...

Focusing on women entrepreneurs in a large British city, we examine how women's commercially listed businesses populated that city. Using commercial property rental records, our study allows us to un...

During the high and late Middle Ages, the European economy witnessed the emergence and substantial growth of capital markets, a phenomenon connected to urbanization and pestilence, both of which brou...

One of the most contentious issues in the study of the Atlantic slave trade is the profitability of the trade. In this paper, we contribute by pooling all available data on transatlantic slave ship v...

The Bretton Woods system is often described as freeing national monetary policies from the gold-reserve constraints of the gold standard. Breaking the ‘gold fetters’ was essential to the embedded lib...

This paper uses a large individual-record-level dataset on sick leave to examine adult morbidity in the United Kingdom between 1850 and 1908. From 1859 onwards postal workers were eligible to receive...

This study investigates the role of financial elites in the Congo Free State (CFS). An analysis of director interlocks between firms operating in the CFS and Belgian banks listed on the Brussels Stoc....

Our understanding of the relationship between the English patent system and technical change during the industrial revolution is based entirely on the study of successful patents. We address this fea....

The 1430s were characterized by extreme weather conditions, food and fodder shortages, and high mortalities among animals and humans, although the severity of events and their consequences in England...

Italy's slow human capital accumulation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a key determinant of the limited inventive activity of the country. Whilst the education–innovation nexus was ...

Using new evidence from servant contracts, 1600–1890, we estimate women's wages in Japan. Women's wages could only sustain 1.3–2.3 people up to 1900, the lowest recorded in the pre-industrial world. ...

This paper provides a comprehensive time series of historical National Accounts for Scotland (onshore and offshore) from 1948 to 2018. It includes a detailed breakdown by income component and industr...

Economic studies on historical housing markets have gained increased popularity in recent years, yet remain limited by data scarcity. In this paper, a novel housing transaction dataset with more than...

Recent research in economic history argues for using a household life cycle standard-of-living approach that includes the income and expenses of all household members and considers fluctuations in th....