One of the most contentious issues in Chinese history has been the assessment of foreign involvement in the Chinese economy since the end of the nineteenth century. Following Allen and Donnithorne's 1954 publication Western Enterprise in Far Eastern Economic Development which claimed the limited...

This paper reviews recent revisionist studies of imperialism that demonstrate the complexities behind the late Qing state's strategy to accommodate to new challenges born out of foreign conflicts exacerbated by domestic crises. These publications have pointed scholars away from the exclusivity...

What was the contribution of intercontinental trade to the development of the European early modern economies? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused on static measures of the weight of trade in the aggregate economy at a given point in time, or on the comparison of the income of...

I analyse the age at death of 121,524 European nobles from 800 to 1800. Longevity began increasing long before 1800 and the Industrial Revolution, with marked increases around 1400 and again around 1650. Declines in violence contributed to some of this increase, but the majority must reflect...

During the decades previous to the Civil War, Spain experienced a rapid process of urbanization, which was accompanied by the demographic transition and sizeable rural-urban migrations. This article investigates how urban housing markets reacted to these far-reaching changes that increased...

This paper uses the spread of disease as a proxy to measure economic interactions. Based on a case study of the Black Death (1346-51) in the Mediterranean region and Europe, we find geographic, institutional, and cultural determinants of trade. To achieve this we create and empirically test a...

During the late seventeenth century the Atlantic trade experienced unprecedented growth. The New Institutional Economists attribute this to the emergence of new institutions for property rights enforcement. During this period, Quakers emerged as the region’s most prominent trading community....

The internationalization of economic history is everywhere except in the publication outputs. Using a new dataset of publications in the top four economic history journals, we investigate this puzzle and attempt to explain why relatively few papers on and from developing countries are published...