In 1866, the Midland Railway Company demolished Agar Town,an area Victorian writers called the foulest slum in London, tomake way for the development of St Pancras railway station.Most Londoners lauded the action. But what kind of tenantsactually inhabited the area before it was destroyed, and...

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...

We examine the relationship between prices and interest rates for seven advanced economies in the period up to 1913, emphasizing the UK. There is a significant long-run positive relationship between prices and interest rates for the core commodity standard countries. Keynes (1930) labelled this...