This paper examines the role of demographic dynamics in shaping Mexico's evolution between the American invasion (1846-1848) and the French intervention. It shifts focus from state capacity to population trends, revealing how a sparsely populated frontier transformed into a strategically controlled border. This demographic shift strengthened territorial control and state resilience, laying the groundwork for a more robust state. The study provides new insights into Mexico's historical development through the lens of demographic change during this critical period.
This article estimates welfare ratios in San Francisco, California, between 1848 and 1900. The evidence indicates that both unskilled and skilled workers could easily meet their basic needs during the Gold Rush. After 1850, the welfare ratio declined; however, workers were still able to cover their needs. Large families had lower welfare ratios than single workers; nevertheless, even laborers with a wife and several children could afford their basic necessities. An international comparison reveals that San Francisco's welfare ratio was high by global standards.
An influential economic history literature uses distance-based variables as proxies for exposure, or access, to historical "treatment interventions" with potential economic impacts. This paper examines the assumptions underlying this practice and find s historical and econometric problems that engender misleading conclusions. Historical evidence challenges the assumption that physical proximity determined access to ideas or technology even in pre-industrial settings. Replication exercises and statistical simulations reveal that "distance from" variables frequently produce falsely significant estimates in first-stage instrumental variable (IV) and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions, and potentially violate the exclusion restriction in the IV second stage. My findings suggest caution in using distance-based measures as proxies for the diffusion of information and resources.
The welfare effects of extractive activities in developing countries are contested, with limited research on education as a component of well-being. We examine how Zambia's copper mining industry shaped educational development and inequality from the 1920s to the 1980s. Using regional comparisons and within-country spatial analysis, we show that Zambia developed unusually large spatial educational disparities, driven by the strong advantages of mining towns over rural areas. Yet these benefits emerged only after the mid-1940s, when post-war institutional, political, and labor market changes created incentives for companies and the state to invest in African schooling. Mining's positive effects were therefore not automatic but contingent on policy and political economy. The findings highlight both the potential and the limits of resource-driven human capital formation.
The 1807 Slave Trade Act banned slave imports across the British Empire, triggering a sharp supply shock. Using newly digitised tax censuses from the Cape Colony, this article examines slave accumulation patterns in Stellenbosch and Graaff-Reinet following the supply shock. Despite stark ecological and institutional differences, both districts show similar post-abolition trajectories. This challenges models linking coercion to land-labour ratios, supervision costs, or frontier openness. Testing five frameworks, the paper finds the strongest support for the view of slaves as capital assets. Wealthier households continued accumulating slaves, suggesting slavery persisted not only as labour but as an asset strategy amid capital scarcity.
We use detailed microlevel data from the Danish Price History Project to estimate the number of days manorial employers engaged day-laborers in eighteenth-century rural Denmark. We find that agriculture and construction employed men for an average of 170 days per year and women for 104 days-far below the commonly assumed figure of 250 days for full-year employment. These figures likely represent a lower bound on sector-specific labor demand rather than total annual work effort by individuals, who may have supplemented their income with other types of employment. Our findings show strong seasonality in work availability, with most labor occurring during the summer months, and provide new evidence on how labor demand patterns shifted over time. By focusing on sectoral employment patterns, this study contributes to recent literature on the organization of work in pre-industrial economies and highlights the importance of seasonal dynamics in shaping labor markets.
Le colporteur, le réformateur et la police. Les évolutions et la régulation du commerce ambulant en Grande-Bretagne (années 1860–années 1940) La période allant des années 1860 aux années 1940 est souvent associée à la disparition du colportage du fait de l’urbanisation des sociétés européennes et de l’essor des petits magasins. Cette thèse s’inscrit dans la continuité de travaux cherchant à relativiser ce déclin. Elle montre que le nombre de vendeurs itinérants ne décline pas avant les années 1930. Les colporteurs répondent à une demande multiforme, ne se résumant pas aux produits bon marché. L’essor du tourisme et l’urbanisation encouragent, en outre, la vente de rue. Le colportage participe donc du dynamisme commercial de la Grande-Bretagne contemporaine. Du point de vue de l’histoire du travail, la vente itinérante sert parfois de filet de sécurité aux travailleurs pauvres durant les périodes de chômage, s’insérant dans l’économie d’expédients des classes populaires. D’autres individus font de cette activité leur profession principale, et en tirent un bon profit, comme les credit drapers. Ce travail s’insère enfin dans l’histoire des migrations : le colportage est populaire chez les migrants saisonniers et est également une stratégie pour s’insérer sur le marché du travail britannique en vue d’une installation permanente. La thèse étudie ensuite la régulation et l’encadrement policier du colportage. Elle contribue ainsi à l’histoire de la construction de l’Etat et des politiques publiques. Les autorités britanniques tentent à la fois d’encourager et de contrôler la vente itinérante. Elle est vue comme alternative à l’assistance publique par les Libéraux de la fin du XIXe siècle, mais est également perçue comme un danger potentiel, car elle est souvent comparée au vagabondage. Au niveau municipal, l’idée que le colportage doit être un filet de sécurité pour les pauvres est controversée : les problèmes de compétition, de travail des enfants, les soucis d’hygiène ou d’obstructions des voies publiques poussent les autorités locales à l’encadrer. La peur du vagabondage disparaît après 1914. Cependant, la Grande-Bretagne opère un tournant protectionniste et adopte des lois anti-migratoires. Si, au niveau local, l’encadrement des colporteurs se fait de plus en plus strict, les lois nationales du XIXe siècle deviennent anachroniques, notamment face à la diffusion de nouveaux moyens de transport. La Seconde Guerre mondiale vient enfin refondre cet appareil législatif dans le cadre d’une économie contrôlée par l’État. Après 1945, l’idéal du colportage servant de filet de sécurité aux travailleurs pauvres a quasiment disparu. Cette thèse dégage les grandes lignes de l’évolution du colportage et de sa régulation. Elle fait un panorama des différents groupes s’y adonnant et porte une attention particulière aux catégories de genre, aux processus de racialisation et aux conditions socio-économiques des individus. Un panel de sources varié est mobilisé: sources administratives et policières, presse, recensement, mais aussi sources généalogiques, sources publiées et autobiographies.
The emergence of Britain as a significant oil producer in the mid-to-late 1970s seemed to open up a brave new world of possibilities. But this newfound optimism soon gave way to bitter disagreement as the spectre of "Dutch Disease" loomed large, and questions abounded as to whether oil exerted a pernicious impact on the fortunes of the manufacturing sector. The empirical analysis herein uncovers evidence supporting core facets of the Dutch Disease hypothesis, thus vindicating earlier warnings foretelling an atrophy of manufacturing. Nevertheless, other significant factors were in play alongside oil, hence I speak of an oil-aggravated rather than oil-induced deindustrialization.
This paper offers a new real wage series for colonial Dakar, French Senegal, from 1914 to 1960, incorporating housing costs for unskilled laborers. Housing costs were sometimes an important share of household budgets and traditional methods of accounting for them in the "welfare ratio" literature will overstate income gains in economic booms. Gains for urban workers during Dakar's growth were muted by higher housing costs, particularly in the 1920s and 1950s. Cross-sectional evidence for the late colonial period displays considerable heterogeneity, suggesting that housing costs were a substantial burden for unskilled workers, though not always and not in all locations.
This paper analyzes the interest-parity condition around the opening of the international telegraph between London and Paris on November 13, 1851. Connecting these financial hubs by the first means of modern information technology changed the financial environment. Before, a London speculator comparing the short-term return between British pounds and French francs had to form an expectation about the current exchange rate in Paris. Thereafter, this expectation became obsolete. Biweekly data around 1851 suggest that the deviations from the interest-parity condition between London and Paris were relatively small. Apparently, speculators had on average already quite accurate exchange rate expectations before the introduction of the telegraph.
We study how European immigrants to the United States influenced the formation of productivity-enhancing cooperatives-the cow-testing associations (CTAs)-which were imported to the US by a Danish immigrant. We hypothesize that Danish immigrant communities were important to their formation by transferring knowledge of the cooperative to dairy farming communities. Using novel data on CTAs, we find evidence that counties with higher influxes of Danes between 1880 and 1900 were more likely to form CTAs. While other immigrant groups were familiar with cooperatives, we only find Danish immigrants to be important, suggesting that familiarity with this specific institution was important to formation.
This paper uses data from a nationwide Swedish health insurance society (1912-1914) to explore how gendered rural and urban living conditions shaped morbidity during a period characterized by the epidemiological transition and an urban penalty in mortality. Infectious diseases were more common in rural areas, driving the urban-rural morbidity gap. Urban regions experienced less sickness episodes due to lower fertility and pregnancy-related illnesses among women and safer workplaces for men. The findings suggest that urban areas led the epidemiological transition, with urban populations benefiting from more favorable living conditions, while rural populations experienced a rural penalty in morbidity.
We construct a county-to-county transport cost dataset for the USA from 1820 to 1860, using freight rates specific to time, region, and transport direction, alongside historical transport networks. We analyze the impact of canals and railways on transport costs, market access, and land values. By 1860, these infrastructures shifted the highest market access from the Atlantic coast to the Midwest and Great Lakes. Market access positively correlated with land value changes in 1850-1860. Both new transport infrastructure and reduced freight costs significantly lowered transport costs, driving economic shifts.
We investigate the relationship between rural and urban pre-industrial labor markets building a new series of real wages of building and agricultural workers for Venice and the Terraferma from 1390 to 1790. We measure the size of the rural-urban real wage gap and discuss its determinants, including rural-urban price, consumption, and fertility differences. We also relate the gap to building cycles and the asymmetric effects of plagues. Our findings have implications not only for measuring the size of the rural-urban wage gap, but also for the construction of real wage series more broadly.
Drawing on 20,000 monthly quotations, this study revises imperial Brazil's inflation and living standards estimates. The new price index eliminates the nineteenth-century ‘low-growth puzzle’: Brazil’s GDP per capita rose in line with the Latin-American average. Earlier series, which relied on baskets disproportionately weighted toward agricultural goods or whose composition varied over time, display continuous growth and overstate inflation by 57–270%. The revised index reveals a sharp rise in the 1850s and stability thereafter. New evidence on exchange and freight rates, terms of trade, regional commerce, and real wages shows that regional specialization in food production helped stabilize prices after the mid-century.
How did centralized fiscal institutions emerge? This study investigates the relationship between state capacity and tax farming-tax collection by private actors-in colonial Indonesia. To do so, I construct a new database that covers the transition from tax farming to state-run tax collection. The results indicate that state capacity expansion reduced reliance on tax farming and that different segments of the state bureaucracy differentially impacted the tax farming transition. Officials from the majority group largely excluded from tax farming (i.e., the indigenous) strongly reduced reliance on tax farming. In contrast, officials from the minority group traditionally wooed as tax farmers (i.e., the non-indigenous Asians) did not reduce such reliance. The findings provide evidence for centralized fiscal institutions emerging when the state becomes less dependent on divide-and-rule strategies that route revenue streams through politically weak intermediaries.
