Economic History

This paper aims to understand an underexposed aspect of slavery: the financial economics behind it. Did the availability of finance, and the use of enslaved people as collateral, stimulate the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the use of slave labor on plantations? Did financial shocks have long-term consequences for the mortality and health of enslaved people? We study these questions in the context of Surinam in the 18th century using newly collected databases on plantations and enslaved people

This project examines contractual provisions in pre-1929 sovereign bonds in order to explore how sovereigns deployed hypothecation clauses to signal their commitment to repay. Although these contract terms were not enforceable in court, a private ordering institution, the London Stock Exchange, refused new listings from defaulting sovereigns which did not reach satisfactory restructuring agreements with bondholders. These agreements appeared to favor bondholders with hypothecation protections. To document how these clauses imposed meaningful constraints on sovereigns, we build a novel data set, consisting of 202,826 monthly returns of 1279 bonds issued by 71 countries in a time span of 60 years, listed in London between 1869 and 1929. We compare the risk and return characteristics of hypothecated and non-hypothecated bonds, and employ modern portfolio theory to quantify the value of contractual commitments.

The British colonial government set the minimum age at first marriage for females as 14 years in British India in 1929. It was not implemented until 1930, six months after its announcement. Using the princely states as a control group, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the causal impact of the abolition of female child marriage below the age of 14. Analyzing historical census data from 1911 to 1981, we find an anticipation effect: female child marriages increased in 1931 but declined sharply in the post-independence period. In the affected regions, underage female marriages declined and female educational attainment increased in the long term.

In December 1917, during WWI, British troops conquered Palestine from the Ottomans. Fresh from their victory, they forced shut the local branches of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank (OAB). Shortly therafter, evoking British wartime enemy property laws, they seized this bank’s assets and forced it into liquidation. The bank’s assets comprised private deposits and tax revenues collected from thousands of Palestinian peasant farmers. The British promised to release these once the war was over and the Palestine Mandate had been established. But, working from fragmentary archival sources, this research finds that they never did so. Instead, contrary to their official statements, the British Mandate government kept the liquidated assets of the OAB in its treasury for decades. After the violent termination of the Mandate in 1948, they transferred them to the new state of Israel, which reclassified them as “absentee property” and swallowed them into its own treasury. Meanwhile, the Transjordanian branches of the same Ottoman bank – same category of enemy property, run by the same colonial administrators, operating under the same fiscal constraints – flourished during the same period, never liquidated or seized. The divergent histories of the Palestinian and Transjordanian branches of the OAB help us understand why, under the same colonial rulers, some colonies fared better economically than others. As this talk will suggest, the answer is not just that colonialism has a detrimental impact on the financial lives and property of the colonized; it is that the type of colonialism, and the underlying structures, incentives, and staffing, matters. This story thus stresses the importance, to economic development, even under colonialism, of institutional sovereignty. This talk combines the traditions of social and financial history to present a financial history “from below,” focused on the assets of the colonized, rather than the motivations of the colonizer.

Unfettered by the gold standard, Spain’s economic performance in the 1930s should in principle have looked a lot more like those of the United States and the United Kingdom than those of France and Belgium. But the Second Republic’s (1931-1936) response to the economic crisis was divisive and ultimately incomplete. We attribute this outcome to political economy forces. Out study is based on detailed information on government expenditures, tariffs, and Most Favored Nations’ agreements. We match these various policy instruments with election results at the provincial level. Attuned to its support among industrial workers and landless peasants, the leftist first government (1931-1933) was interventionist and favored tariffs on manufacturing; aligned with large landowners and small farmers, the rightist second government (1933-1936) leaned toward austerity and advocated agricultural tariffs. Both governments adopted MFNs to mitigate the effect of tariffs. We conclude that the divergence in policy deepened the prevailing political and social divide between left and right.

During the 1850s, the regime of Napoleon III actively intervened in financial markets to steer capital toward politically desirable investments and away from speculation, which it viewed as both economically unproductive and socially destabilizing. Drawing from my book manuscript on the politics of finance in 19th-century France, this presentation examines how the “authoritarian empire” of the 1850s sought to govern, police, and control capital markets. My archival research highlights the role of French police officials, who monitored and managed financial activity long before the existence of formal securities market regulators. Market interventions revealed inherent tensions between the Bonapartist state and financial actors, as the latter resisted efforts to regulate capital flows, securities prices, market participation, and the dissemination of financial information. That resistance ultimately undermined the regime’s ambitions. By analyzing how these dynamics contributed to market dysfunction and shaped negative public perception, it becomes evident why the regime was increasingly held culpable for financial instability. The eventual liberalization of capital formation and bourse regulations following the crisis of 1857–1858 was less a product of ideological shifts than a pragmatic response to the state’s inability to control the machinery of finance—an interpretation that enhances our understanding of the transition to the “liberal empire” in the 1860s.

National income research developed in the context of the Great Depression and the world agrarian crisis of the 1930s. However, it played out differently depending on the country. In Eastern Europe, the challenge was to adapt the standard of Western social sciences to local conditions, where the household economy was no less important than the money-commodity economy. The urgency of Great Depression-era index-making revived an old question: how to study areas peripheral or invisible to capitalist markets: artisans or small businesses, self-sufficient farms, or households managed without pay by wives, all forming a vast realm outside the world of contracts and bookkeeping. This talk looks closely at Poland’s national income (prepared by two governmental experts, Ludwik Landau and Michał Kalecki, in 1933) to elucidate the specificity of Eastern Europe’s early macroeconomics. Although much is known about the relationship between national income research and class politics in Western Europe and the US, it’s worth asking why Polish national income research featured “class” (and not multi-ethnicity, the default way of understanding Eastern European populations before World War Two) to understand what this epistemic choice means historically and politically today.

As the global energy transition accelerates, questions arise regarding the potential depletion of renewable natural resources and the role of institutions in regulating their sustainable use. This study examines the historical impact of metallurgical activities on forest conservation in a major iron production region: the southern part of Belgium during the 18th and 19th centuries. Our findings reveal that pre-industrial forges, which heavily relied on charcoal, contributed to the preservation of old-growth forests, thereby exerting a lasting positive influence on biodiversity. To understand the persistence of this phenomenon, we provide suggestive evidence that blacksmiths actively sought to secure access to forest resources, often through the acquisition of forest land. These assets remained valuable to them even after the decline of the charcoal-based iron-making industry, as forests transitioned to serving other purposes, such as timber production, and acquired additional significance for political and social reasons. In particular, land ownership conferred political influence under the censal suffrage system in 18th-century Belgium, while also enhancing social prestige. As a result, contemporary patterns of land ownership in old-growth forests near former forge sites display higher levels of concentration. This study highlights how the intensive use of forest resources during an era of renewable energy paradoxically facilitated their conservation but in a context marked by unequal access and concentrated ownership.

Global historians frequently fall into two camps in their scholarship – those with knowledge of the Eurasian world and those who research the Atlantic world. Much recent research on the history of slavery and early modern capitalism has, in addition, focussed either on sugar capitalism or on cotton capitalism. I want to bring these parts of the world and these different capitalisms together. Accompanying these spatial divisions are further conceptual divisions between commercial, industrial and financial capitalism. These are often treated as chronological stages of capitalism. I also wish to bring together these concepts in my analysis of a global early modern capitalism that led into the sources of industrialisation. I seek to draw out the connected aspects of the commercial, industrial and financial in two trade-centred parts of British industrialization – sugar and cotton.

À partir des contrats d’affrètement dressés au XVIIIe siècle dans les chancelleries consulaires françaises et britanniques en Afrique du nord (à Alger et Tunis), cette présentation vise à réfléchir aux fondements et aux modalités juridiques et diplomatiques des règles du commerce et de la navigation, par-delà les frontières politiques et religieuses de la région. L’étude des contrats permet de réfléchir aux mécanismes de l’offre et de la demande en Méditerranée, entre affréteurs ottomans (musulmans, mais aussi juifs et chrétiens) et capitaines français et britanniques. La présentation se conclura par une étude de cas au sujet de la lucrative économie du pèlerinage à La Mecque par mer à l’époque moderne

In the nineteenth century, as Britain attained a leading economic and political position in Europe, British policymakers embarked on a bold experiment with small and limited government.. By the outbreak of the First World War, however, this laissez-faire philosophy of government had been abandoned and the country had taken its first steps toward becoming a modern welfare state. This book tells the story of Britain’s laissez-faire experiment, examining why it was done, how it functioned, and why it was ultimately rejected in favor of a more interventionist form of governance.

This paper examines housing wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire from 1620 to 1880 using a novel dataset of over 10,000 notarial deeds from ten major cities. By estimating both unadjusted and adjusted house prices, we analyze the evolution of wealth inequality within and between cities and across religious groups. We find a persistent and widening disparity in housing wealth between Muslims and non-Muslims, particularly in the upper quartiles of the market, where non-Muslims increasingly dominated over time. Across most Ottoman cities, inequality followed a steady upward trajectory, mirroring patterns observed in pre-modern Europe. Peaks in inequality coincided with periods of socio-political upheaval, including the Celali rebellions and the Greek Revolution, which facilitated wealth transfers within and between elite groups. We argue that these trends underscore the influence of Ottoman institutions, such as the millet system and property laws, in shaping a religiously segmented housing market.

Starting from an analysis of racial residential segregation in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, this paper seeks to explain the acquisition and subsequent loss of real estate of Black homeowners. The 1855 census of the Argentine capital showed surprisingly high residential segregation indices for the African-born. These were underpinned by high homeownership rates of the Black and African population at the outskirts, favored by an unusually high ratio of wages to real estate value in the early nineteenth century. The city’s massive spatial and demographic growth through European immigration, however, depressed that ratio in subsequent decades. The former poor frontier of urbanization, where formerly enslaved workers had acquired real estate, turned into coveted central-city turf, which entailed displacement and dispossession by European immigrants, especially from Liguria. Based on censuses, tax rolls, notarial documents, and cadastral maps from both sides of the Atlantic, the paper queries the extent to which this story can be understood through wage/rent ratios that in Buenos Aires and Liguria were on opposite trajectories. Finally, it asks how this micro-history relates to broader trans-Atlantic developments in wealth inequality.

Studies of the violent transition in 1948 from Mandate Palestine to Israel have tended to focus on people and lands. Less has been said about the freezing and eventual expropriation in 1948, by Israeli authorities shortly after the creation of the state of Israel, of financial assets belonging to private Palestinian account holders. This talk attempts to rectify that silence. Placing at its core the stories of ordinary Palestinians, it explores how their financial property (bank accounts, bonds, checks, pensions, life insurance policies and safety deposit boxes) was confiscated by the new state of Israel. It underlines the legalization and bureaucratization that enabled the confiscation, and highlights the role of two international banks as agents of confiscation. It estimates the amounts and types of assets involved. Finally and most importantly, it recounts how the Palestinians fought to regain their financial property as best they could, using the law as their weapon. The ultimate aim of this talk is to underline how the absence of sovereignty impacts the economic lives of ordinary people and robs them not just of their financial property, but of their very means of building their present, and their future

While there has been a lot written on interwar trade policy in the British Empire, interwar protectionism in the Dutch Empire remains understudied. The English-language literature only mentions the Netherlands and Dutch East Indies in passing, typically as examples of more general phenomena: strongholds of liberal sentiment reluctantly going with the protectionist flow of the times (Kindleberger, 1989), or gold standard stalwarts forced to impose tariffs and quotas to protect the balance of payments (Eichengreen and Irwin, 2010). The Dutch-language literature contains some (mutually contradictory) assertions, with disagreement on two key issues. First, was Dutch trade policy relatively open? Neytzell de Wilde and Moll (1936), Blaisse (1938) and Klemann (1990) argue that it was, and that any protection that did occur was largely ineffective; Brugmans (1961) and van Shaik (1986) argue that Dutch protection had a significant impact on imports. Second, did Dutch interwar protection help the Dutch East Indies more than Indonesian protection helped the Netherlands? The Dutch government at the time, and subsequent Dutch scholarship, argued that it did, while Indonesian politicians and scholars have argued that the balance of advantage was strongly in favour of the Dutch coloniser. Detailed quantitative evidence is required to resolve such disputes. In this paper we provide such evidence, using a recently constructed commodity-level database of imports, tariffs, and non-tariff barriers to trade for both the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s and 1930s (de Zwart et al., 2024). We use modern structural gravity methods to estimate trade elasticities and the ad valorem tariff equivalents of quotas and other non-tariff barriers to trade. We then embed these elasticities into detailed models of import demand for both economies, using CGE techniques as in earlier work on the British Empire (e.g. de Bromhead et al., 2019). Finally, we use these models to obtain counterfactual estimates of how imports would have changed, had trade policy remained unaltered after the onset of the Great Depression. Trade policy in the interwar Dutch Empire was not relatively open: it lowered imports by at least as much as did British and Indian trade policy (the two natural comparators), if not more. Tariffs played a smaller role than in the British Empire, but this was outweighed by the large impact of quotas and other non-tariff barriers. The impact of imperial preferences was highly asymmetric: the impact of Dutch protection on Indonesian exports to the metropole was much lower than the impact of Dutch East Indies protection on Dutch exports to its largest colony. To the extent that Indonesian exports to the Netherlands benefitted, this was largely the result of a deal whereby Unilever agreed to buy at least 60% of their oil needs from Indonesia. It seems that nationalist writers were correct: Dutch protection was highly unequal in its effects during this period.

Sustained human development is often seen as a recent phenomenon, primarily linked to Europe’s Industrial Revolution. This view has shaped much of our historical understanding but is based on a limited set of economic indicators. In this article, we use cultural production as an alternative measure of human development. Unlike GDP, which captures market-based production, cultural production encompasses a range of intellectual and artistic outputs that reflect societal wellbeing, education, creativity and social progress. We leverage massive digital archives and build a novel Cultural Production Measure that tracks the number of distinct cultural producers (e.g. scientists, artists, writers; N = 127,271). Use of such measures is often considered doubtful because of differential survivorship bias. Here, we apply methods from ecology (unseen species models) to estimate the number of unrecorded cultural producers. Our proposed measure provides higher temporal and geographical resolution compared to traditional proxies of development (e.g., GDP per capita, urbanization rates). Our results suggest that the often-claimed stagnation of non-European regions before the 20th century is an artifact of relying exclusively on GDP and related metrics. We demonstrate that all major regions, including non-European societies, transitioned from stagnation to sustained growth well before the Industrial Revolution—some as early as 1000 CE. These results suggest a more widespread and earlier pattern of human development across civilizations than previously recognized.