An innovative historical analysis of the intersection of religion and technology in making the modern state, focusing on bodily production and reproduction across the human-animal divide. In Milk and Honey, Tamar Novick writes a revolutionary environmental history of the state that centers on...

Recent crises have cast doubt on the legitimacy of technocratic power, yet its role in global economic governance remains poorly understood. Revisiting the collapse of Bretton Woods, we propose a dynamic theory of global monetary governance to explain how expanding central bank discretion can...

While several studies have shed light on the emergence of consumer society in Western Europe and the Atlantic world, our knowledge on the spread of new consumption patterns in regions beyond the core areas of European economic development is still limited. To gain insights into patterns of...

Europe must rapidly increase its military spending, but how? We collect 150 years of data to study what governments in similar situations have done. How were past military buildups financed? What was the relative importance of debt financing, budget cuts, and taxes? Our main finding is that...

We introduce a new dataset on British exports at the bilateral, commodity-level from 1700 to 1899. We then pit two primary determinants of bilateral trade against one another: the trade-diminishing effects of distance versus the trade-enhancing effects of the British Empire. We find that the...

Explaining President Trump's "Liberation-day" tariffs on April 2nd, 2025, Stephen Miran, President Trump's chairman of the council of economic advisors suggested that countries accept the U.S. tariffs without retaliation to come to a fair "burden sharing"(Miran: 2025). History shows that this...

The correspondence of historical personalities serves as a rich source of psychological, social, and economic information. Letters were indeed used as means of communication within the family circles but also a primary method for exchanging information with colleagues, subordinates, and...

This paper examines the evolution of the biological standard of living using anthropometric data from approximately 22,000 Swiss mercenaries born between c. 1725 and c. 1865. Analyzing mercenary data presents two key challenges: left-truncation due to height requirements and potential selection...

Diese Studie untersucht die Entwicklung der Assekuranz in den letzten 30 Jahren und gibt einen Ausblick auf zukünftige Trends in der Branche. Während sich einige der in früheren Studien prognostizierten Entwicklungen, wie die Internationalisierung und Konsolidierung, bestätigt haben,...

As seldom before, the current war in Ukraine has seen the use of World War II analogies by belligerents and also some Western non-belligerents. They thereby follow in the footsteps of such political leaders as Anthony Eden, Margaret Thatcher, Joseph Stalin, or John F. Kennedy. Indeed, statesmen...

Are railways always a harbinger of prosperity? We examine the economic effects of railways in Bosnia-Herzegovina under Habsburg colonial rule. Our novel dataset consistently tracks the non-agrarian population share of over 4,500 settlements in Habsburg Bosnia in 1885, 1895, and 1910, based on...

The transition from sail to steam for emigrant ships on the route to Australia took place in the early 1880s, nearly two decades later than on the route across the Atlantic. The lag can be accounted for by the incremental improvement in steam technology and by aspects of economic and business...

Gesellschaftliche Einstellungen zur Rolle von Männern und Frauen am Arbeitsmarkt, in der Familie, Bildung oder Politik unterliegen einem zeitlichen Wandel. Berechnungen auf der Grundlage von Daten des World Value Survey zeigen, dass das gesellschaftliche Rollenbild der Frau in den letzten...

This paper explores how historical gender roles become entrenched as norms over the long run. In the historical United States, gender roles on the frontier looked starkly different from those in settled areas. Male-biased sex ratios led to higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land...

In December 1984, an agreement between the European Commission and the European University Institute laid the foundation for what would become the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). The HAEU has since become the EU institutions' official archival centre for the preservation and...

In December 1984, an agreement between the European Commission and the European University Institute laid the foundation for what would become the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). The HAEU has since become the EU institutions' official archival centre for the preservation and...

This brochure informs scholars and citizens about the HAEU (Historical Archives of the European Union), its functions, its precious holdings and research opportunities, and invites people to get involved through learning, discussion and debate on recent European history. Thousands of visitors,...

This brochure informs scholars and citizens about the HAEU (Historical Archives of the European Union), its functions, its precious holdings and research opportunities, and invites people to get involved through learning, discussion and debate on recent European history. Thousands of visitors,...

Duisburg was the first German city to establish official relations with a Chinese city, Wuhan. Less out of strategic calculation or recognition of the global significance of China's reform and opening-up policy, but rather thanks to their common industrial roots in the steel industry, the two...

World War 1 exacerbated the cost of the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 in two ways. First, it facilitated the spread the flu virus through the movement of clusters of infected soldiers and sailors. Second, it constrained public health measures that would have reduced mortality (as during the...

This paper introduces the concept of "climate matching" as a driver of migration and establishes several new results. First, we show that climate strongly predicts the spatial distribution of immigrants in the US, both historically (1880) and more recently (2015), whereby movers select...