This paper examines the effect of the early adoption of technology on the evolution of human capital and on industrialization, in the context of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. It shows that wrights, a group of highly skilled mechanical craftsmen, who specialized in water-powered machinery in...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a...

During the Industrial Revolution, did population growth stimulate innovation, or did causality run primarily from innovation to growth? Previous research fails to explain why between 1700 and 1850: (i) most innovation originated in three clusters of cities in Britain, northern France, and the...

This paper investigates the legacy of ancient colonialism (by the Phoenicians, Greeks and Etruscans) in shaping the modern-day population concentration and economic activity of the Mediterranean region. By combining historical data on ancient colonies and current data on population density and...

Existing series suggest wages in London were substantially higher than in other European cities from 1650 to 1800. This paper presents new evidence from the construction sites that supplied the underlying wage data, and uncovers the contractual and organisational context in which it was...

We explore the connection between social class, social mobility, and voting behavior in nineteenth-century England. To avoid pitfalls associated with survey or aggregate data on voting behavior, we use administrative longitudinal records preceding secret ballot on voters’ choices and...

In this article, I use documents obtained from the NatWest Group archives to examine the work of Alexander Shand as a director of Parr's Bank during the period 1909-1918. A Scottish banker, Alexander Shand was recruited by the Japanese government early in his career to instruct Japanese...