In previous work we have highlighted the importance of revisions to state constitutions that mandated that laws be general and uniform throughout the state. Indiana (in 1851) was the first state to adopt a general-law mandate, but most other states followed suit by the end of the century--most...

This essay provides an historical background for understanding the statistics on veterans that will appear in the millennial edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. It describes changes in the number of veterans, and in the benefits provided by governments to veterans, from...

High finance has been crucial to the development of states and economies since the early Renaissance. The abandonment of traditional constraints on money-lending in the early 1300s enabled the city-states of Italy to develop rapidly. This connection to finance was crucial to the rebirth of art,...

The relationship between state and religion has deep roots in history, being recognized as one of the oldest alliances, or antagonists, known to mankind. Recent evidence suggests that a wall of separation between the two have become widespread. Yet, among our sample of 147 countries, 56 had...

This paper reviews and interprets the history of the economy of modern Greece, from the eve of the war for independence in 1821 to the present day. It identifies three major historical cycles: First, the cycle of state and nation building, 1821-1898, second, the cycle of national expansion and...

Beginning in the late 1970s, China's economy delivered the largest growth spurt in recorded history. Striking discontinuity between recent outcomes and the economic experience of the prior 200 years invites portrayal of recent events as a "China miracle" that requires neither economic nor...

The effect of drug prohibition on drug consumption is a critical issue in debates over drug policy. One episode that provides information on the consumption-reducing effect of drug prohibition is the Chinese legalization of opium in 1858. In this paper we examine the impact of China's opium...

This article develops a method for quantitatively tracking the agenda of the British Parliament--by which I mean the substantive topics on which Parliamentary debate was focused--from 1810-2005 using descriptions of 1.7 million Parliamentary debates from the Parliamentary Hansard. This provides...

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a high interest rate in...

This paper seeks to provide an improved understanding of the origins of democracy. It begins by developing a theoretical model to demonstrate how exogenous economic conditions can influence both the incentives to establish democratic institutions and the likelihood that such institutions...