This thesis aims to contribute to an explanation of how the development of political institutions is influenced by the costs of information and exchange across society in a pre-modern context. The Byzantine Empire in the twelfth century presents an apparent paradox of an expanding economy...

Since the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s seminal book The Great Divergence, the landscape of world and global history has changed dramatically. For the first time, living standards, instead of labour, land and capital productivities, have become the prime concern among historians in various...

This study analyses thousands of corporate annual reports and financial data from 1960-2000 to propose an early history of the term ‘shareholder value’ in the United States. Scholarly interest in ‘shareholder value’ has burgeoned since 2000, but still little is known about the term’s...

This paper uses empirical evidence drawn from newly constructed datasets to assess the impact of geographic clustering on the assimilation and occupational mobility of Irish immigrants in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It finds that geographic clustering was quite pronounced...

This paper studies demand for commercial medical assistance in early modern England. We measure individual consumption of medical and nursing services using a new dataset of debts at death between c.1670-c.1790. Levels of consumption of medical services were high and stable in London from the...

In early modern Venice, a wide range of people offered care, goods and services for the health of the city’s numerous inhabitants. This study utilises Venice’s civic death registers to assess when and why the sick and dying accessed medical care, and how this changed over the course of the...

The cantilever chair is an iconic consumer product of the twentieth century and stands for a modern, progressive lifestyle. It is expensive, often used to furnish exclusive spaces and thereby the opposite of its original artistic vision from the late 1920s. By way of comparing historical prices...

Sovereign debt crises are harmful reoccurring economic phenomena and the subject of how best to achieve sovereign debt sustainability is therefore of paramount importance. For decades economists have struggled to find a robust and consistent means of assessing sovereign debt sustainability. This...

Eyam is an epicentre of Europe’s plague heritage. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the Derbyshire village, drawn by stories of its catastrophic plague and the heroic response it elicited. The story they are told - of a self-imposed quarantine preventing disease spreading to the...