The human costs of famines outlast the famines themselves. An increasing body of research points to their adverse long-run consequences for those born or in utero during them. This paper offers an introduction to the burgeoning literature on fetal origins and famine through a review of research...

Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the...

Recent empirical research has questioned the validity of using Malthusian theory in pre-industrial England. Using real wage and vital rate data for the years 1650-1881, I provide empirical estimates for a different region { Northern Italy. The empirical methodology is theoretically underpinned...

This paper replies to commentaries by Sam White and by Ulf Büntgen and Lena Hellmann on our ‘The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe’. White and Büntgen/Hellmann seek to prove that Europe experienced the kind of sustained falls in temperature between the...

We measure technological progress in oceanic shipping by using a large database of daily log entries from ships of the British and Dutch navies and East India Companies to estimate daily sailing speed in different wind conditions from 1750 to 1850. Against the consensus, dating back to North...

This paper reviews recent contributions to the economics and economic history of famine. It provides a context for the history of famine in the twentieth century, which is unique. During the century, war and totalitarianism produced more famine deaths than did overpopulation and economic...

This paper reviews debates about the role of science and technology before and during the British Industrial Revolution.

This paper complements a much larger study of school attendance in pre-famine Ireland by FitzGerald (2010). It exploits some of the data generated by that study to analyze further some of the determinants of schooling and literacy in the 1820s and 1840s.

This paper tries to be the first step in a systematic comparison of economic growth in Denmark and Ireland between 1870 and 1939. Section 2 ofthis paper sets the scene by discussing broader trends of living standards and agricultural productivity. Section 3 outlines the developments in the...

This is a paper about intercontinental trade, since factor proportions differ far more between continents than within. Long distance intercontinental trade was also the economic event which motivated the theoretical work of Bertil Ohlin.