Authors: Tancredi Buscemi (LUMSA University) and Leonardo Ridolfi (University of Siena) Venice has long been central to interpretations of Italy’s early modern decline (Cipolla 1952), shaping assessments of real wages across Italian regions. Yet a long-run perspective on the Republic has remained elusive. Was Venice’s long seventeenth century marked by a generalised decline in real […]

Authors: Liselotte Eriksson (Umeå University), Lars-Fredrik Andersson (Umeå University), Bernard Harris (University of Strathclyde) A new historical dataset from Sweden’s health insurance system provides rare insight into everyday illness during early 20th century, a period of rapid social transformation. The findings challenge the conventional image of the “unhealthy city” and reinforce previous research suggesting that […]

Authors: Rodney Edvinsson (Stockholm University) and Roger Svensson (IFN, Sweden) Ingress While many medieval rulers debased their coinage and triggered inflation, Sweden offers a surprising counterexample. From 1277 to 1540, Swedish prices remained stable despite several external shocks. Our study in the European Review of Economic History explains why. A long-run puzzle Economists and historians […]

Author: Ingrid van Dijk (Lund University) Ingress: In historical the Netherlands, up to half of children did not make it to their first birthday. But not all families were similarly likely to lose a child. Young children are highly dependent on their families to survive. The infants and young children of fathers and mothers from […]

Authors: Pilar Beneito López (University of Valencia), José Joaquín García Gómez (University of Almeria), and Ángel Pascual Martínez Soto (University of Murcia) The persistence of the gender wage gap has been a subject of extensive economic and social inquiry, given its enduring presence across different historical and geographical contexts. While considerable research has focused on […]

Authors: Stephen D. Billington (Ulster University) and Joe Lane (University of Reading) Our paper investigates a little-known instance of State intervention into the administration of the English patent system: the insertion of a legal proviso into select English patents, which we dub the “Navy Proviso”, serving to compel the patentee to supply their invention or […]

Authors: Peter M. Scott and Karina Pavlisa The “industrialisation of the home” is one of the most important economic and social revolutions in the 20thcentury, reducing the time (and especially the effort) of housework and enabling married women to plan for long-term careers. However, it is difficult to disentangle their impacts from other factors – […]

Author: Antoninus M. Samy Abstract: The Edwardian property slump, a significant yet underexplored event in British economic history, saw a dramatic decline in house prices in London between 1900 and 1914. This blog summarises the findings of a recent study by Antoninus M. Samy that uses novel data sources to shed light on the extent and […]

Author: Marcos Castillo Why Did Swedish Immigrants to the U.S. Earn So Much More than Stayers in Sweden? New evidence on the economic returns to migration during the Age of Mass Migration Ingress: During the Age of Mass Migration, over a million Swedes left their homeland in search of better lives in the United States. […]

Author: Tamer Güven (Abdullah Gul University) Why did wages in Ottoman state textile factories stagnate in the second half of the nineteenth century? In Ottoman economic history, Pamuk (2000) constructed a wage series for skilled and unskilled construction workers, and Ergene (1998) did the same for agricultural workers. However, despite numerous studies that have touched […]