Book launch: Globalization and the Rise of Mass Education, edited by D. Mitch and G. Cappelli (Palgrave Macmillan 2019)

Globalization and The Rise of Mass Education explores how global forces shaped national and regional educational trends. The globalization of the world economy, starting in the 19th century, brought about important changes that affected school policy and long-term human capital accumulation. Large migrations prompted brain drain and gain across countries, alongside rapid transformations in the […]

“How the prime minister can suspend Parliament”

For your Friday reading, we bring you a blog post from the Oxford University Press, featuring a paper which Kara Dimitruk published in the European Review of Economic History‘s August 2018 issue. In the post, Kara discusses the political history of Parliamentary closures and the legislative impacts of these closures, as well as how this […]

EHES 2019 Conference Prize Winners

The 13th EHES Conference took place in Paris at the end of last month. With the conference comes two prizes for research conducted during the two years since the previous conference. The first is the Gino Luzzatto Prize, awarded to the best dissertation defended in the previous two years on any topic in economic history. […]

Human Development in the Age of Globalisation

Leandro Prados de La Escosura is a professorat the University of Charles III in Madrid In a new EHES working paper, Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Universidad Carlos III and CEPR) analyses wellbeing which is widely seen as a multi-dimensional phenomenon affected not only by material goods, but also health, education, agency and freedom, environment, […]

Call for Applications ESTER Research Design Course How to strengthen your dissertation project?

The European graduate School for Training in Economic and Social Historical Research (ESTER) is a European platform for postgraduate teaching. ESTER announces its annual Research Design Course (RDC) for economic and social historians on 28 – 30 October in Lyon (France) The ESTER network, established in 1991, involves more than 60 universities throughout Europe and […]

How Britain unified Germany: Endogenous trade costs and the formation of a customs union

Nikolaus Wold is Full Profesor in economic history at Humboldt University in Berlin State borders can change due to both political and economic disputes. This column shows how the formation of the German state can be traced back to British political intervention at the end of the Napoleonic War. In preventing Russia from gaining territory westwards, Britain […]

Without coal in the age of steam and dams in the age of electricity: an explanation for the failure of Portugal to industrialize before the Second World War

Sofia Henriques is a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University In a new EHES working paper, Sofia Henriques, Lund University, and Paul Sharp, University of Southern Denmark, examine the case of Portugal before the Second World War from a hitherto relatively little researched perspective. They thus provide a natural resource explanation for the divergence of the […]

Money and modernization in early modern England

Nuno Palma is an Assistant Professor at the University of Manchester New EHES Working Paper by Nuno Palma (Manchester University) is available here.Classic accounts of the English industrial revolution present a long period of stagnation followed by a fast take-off. However, recent findings of slow but steady per capita economic growth suggest that this is a historically inaccurate portrait […]

Economic consequences of state failure; legal capacity, regulatory activity, and market integration in Poland, 1505-1772

Mikołaj Malinowski is a Postdoctoral Research Fellowat Utrecht University and Lund University New EHES Working Paper by Mikołaj Malinowski (Lund University – Utrecht University) is available here. What factors allowed certain regions of Europe to develop their market economies early on and what were the reasons for the relative stagnation of the less successful areas? Specifically, […]

New ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant in Economic History: Spoils of War: The Economic Consequences of the Great War in Central Europe

Tamás Vonyó is an Assistant Professor at Bocconi University in Milan Dr Tamás Vonyó has been awarded €1.49 million to conduct research on a ‘Spoils of WAR’ project, which aims to set a new standard in the economic history of the world wars by investigating how the First World War affected regional economic development and industrial organisation in the Habsburg Empire […]