Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine was a poor and backward economy. The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s is accordingly often considered the classic example of Malthusian population economics in action. However, unlike most historical famines, the Great Famine was not the product of a harvest...

The Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) in China was the deadliest civil war in history. This paper provides evidence that this cataclysmic event significantly shaped the Malthusian transition and long-term development that followed, especially in areas where the experiences that stemmed from the...

In spite of two centuries of extensive debate, a consistent framework of the classical theory of population on which economists can universally agree has not been established. This means that either the theory lacks consistency or it has been misunderstood in important ways. This paper attempts...

Over the past two decades, there have been numerous attempts in economic theory to model the historical regime of a Malthusian trap as well as the transition to growth in one coherent framework, or in other words, a unified growth theory. However, in most of these models, an important effect...

The link between demographic pressure and economic conditions in pre-Famine Ireland has long interested economists. This paper re-visits the topic, harnessing the highly disaggregated parish-level data from the 1841 Census of Ireland. Using population per value adjusted acre as a measure of...