Author: Thales Zamberlan Pereira (Sao Paulo School of Economics, Fundaçao Getulio Vargas) Inflation, Prices, and the Myth of Stagnation in Imperial Brazil A new reconstruction of prices in nineteenth-century Brazil suggests that one of the country’s most persistent economic narratives is wrong. Inflation was not continuously rising across the Imperial period, and once prices are […]
Do Individuals Born into Households Without a Male Breadwinner Experience Worse Life Outcomes? The Case of Urban Spain
Authors: Francisco J Marco-Gracia (Universidad de Zaragoza and Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón), Víctor A Luque de Haro (Universidad de Almería and Centro de Investigación Mediterráneo de Economía y Desarrollo Sostenible) and Pablo Delgado (Universidad de Zaragoza and Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón) In early-twentieth-century urban Spain, family structure had long-lasting consequences. Using longitudinal data from Zaragoza, we show […]
Capital and Coercion: Why Slavery Persisted after Britain Banned the Trade
Author: Igor Martins (Lund University) In 1807, Britain outlawed the slave trade across its empire. Yet in the Cape Colony, households continued accumulating slaves for decades afterwards. New evidence from digitised tax censuses suggests the answer lies not in labour demand, but in the financial value of enslaved people as capital assets. A supply shock […]
Tax Farming and State Capacity: Evidence from Colonial Indonesia
Author: Mark Hup (Chinese University of Hong Kong) How and why did modern and centralized fiscal institutions emerge? Prior to centralized tax collection by state actors, tax collection by private parties – tax farming – was widespread. What then drove the use of tax farming as well as its eventual replacement by state-run tax collection? […]
The decline of a fully matured economy: Rural and Urban Real Wages in the Republic of Venice, 1390-1790
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 […]
Rural Penalty in Morbidity: Cause-Specific Morbidity Among Working-Class Men and Women in Early Twentieth Century Sweden
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 […]
Historical Monetary Strategies: Achieving Long-Term Price Stability in Medieval Sweden
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 […]
Inequality in Child Mortality Persists Between Generations in the Netherlands, 1835–1919
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 […]
Women’s Union Awakening: Early Impacts on Gender Wage Gaps (Yecla, Spain, 1895-1935)
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 […]
Procuring Promising Provisions: the British Patent System and the Navy Proviso, 1794-1831
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 […]