At the end of the eighteenth century, England and France both underwent revolutions: France the French Revolution, England the industrial revolution. This note sheds new light on these contrasting experiences in the histories of England and France by looking at the evolution of real consumer...

Employing recently assembled wage and price data, this paper sketches the long-term development of real wages at the Cape of Good Hope, from its foundation in 1652 up to the unification of South Africa in 1910. The results show that real wages were consistently above subsistence level, and...

Why did the European Marriage Pattern that emerged in the North-Sea region in the late Medieval Period not result in a continuous shift from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’? This paper addresses this question focusing on the changing labour market position of women in England between 1500 and...

This paper examines age at first marriage for women and spousal age gap as an indicator for female agency from 1950 until 2005. Using a dataset of 77 LDCs this paper seeks to explore which variables determine differences at a country level in marriage patterns. We look at the influence of...

In this paper we contribute to literature on human capital formation by investigating age references on early-modern portraits from the Low Countries. We use the very popular aetatis formulae to estimate to what degree sitters to portraits were able to give their age in an accurate way. This...

This study examines the determinants of citation success among authors who have recently published their work in economic history journals. Besides offering clues about how to improve one’s scientific impact, our citation analysis also sheds light on the state of the field of economic history....

This study attempts to reconstruct the GDP of the Lower Yangzi Delta in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is part of a cooperative research project carried out by myself and Jan Luiten van Zanden. We have applied the same methods, standards, and measures to reconstruct the economies of...

Migration always played an important role in Dutch society. However, little quantitative evidence on its effect on economic development is known for the period before the 20th century even though some stories exist about their effect on the Golden Age. Applying a new dataset on migration and...

Pre-modern growth was to a large extent dependent on processes of commercialization and specialization, based on cheap transport. Seminal interpretations of the process of economic growth before the Industrial Revolution have pointed to the strategic importance of the rise of the Atlantic...

Recent studies on African economic history have emphasized the structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions and extractive colonial institutions. The evidence is mainly drawn from cross-country regressions on late 20th century income levels, assuming...