I study the rates of, selection into, and sorting of European immigrants’ secondary migration within the United States and their geographic assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration. These phenomena are recognized as important components of the economics of immigration, but data constraints have limited prior study of them in this context. As part of the debate over immigrant distribution, they

This article explores the transnational dimension of women's mobilization in twentieth-century Chile and the connections they established with women's international non-governmental organizations, particularly the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). It sheds light on the political choices women made when forging transnational

The primary aim of this article is to problematize the WIDF's interpretations of the rights of women from (post)colonial countries and its tactics in working for and together with these women. It shows that, in the context of rapid geopolitical changes – the growing anti-colonial struggle and Cold War competition – the WIDF had to change its ideology, ways of working, and communication strategies in

South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle reflected an ideal of heroic masculinity that ignored and depreciated women as active political agents. This has contributed to a post-apartheid social order that accepts formal gender equality but that perpetuates gender inequality by discounting women's experiences. This article examines the little-known and short-lived Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC) and National Liberation

This article recovers the history of the transnational women's movement that arose during Portugal's colonial wars (1961–1974). This movement connected women in Portugal and its colonies and operated independently of the PCP, MPLA, PAIGC, and FRELIMO. Most research on women's activism in Portugal, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique begins with their relationships to the male-dominated

Abundant land and strong property rights are conventionally viewed as key factors underpinning U.S. economic development success. This view relies on the “Pristine Myth” of an empty undeveloped land, but the abundant land of North America was already made productive and was the recognized territory of sovereign Indigenous Nations. We demonstrate that the development of strong property rights for European/American

In existing historiography, the modernity discourse presents modern knowledge as being more economically efficient and technologically advanced compared to traditional skills. This theoretical lens has introduced a hierarchy of production and restructured the meaning of work and division of labour within the profession of weaving. Historically, the contexts of both the modern textile industry and traditional

This paper presents a history of aggregate demand and supply shocks spanning 1900 – 2016 for the United Kingdom. Sign restrictions derived from a workhorse Keynesian model are used to identify the sign of those shocks. We compare the 30 largest shocks implied by a vector autoregressive model in unemployment and inflation with the narrative historical record. Our approach provides a new perspective

This article tests the influential democratic advantage hypothesis – that democratic governments have historically borrowed more cheaply than autocratic governments – in the context of the first financial globalization, from circa 1870 to 1913. We construct indicators of political regime types, then regress government bond spreads of 27 independent capital-importing countries on them. In contrast with

We use data from marriage records in Murcia, Spain, in the eighteenth century to study the role of women in social mobility in the pre-modern era. Our measure of social standing is identification as a don or do?a, an honorific denoting high, though not necessarily noble, status. We show that this measure, which is acquired over the lifecycle, shows gendered transmission patterns. In particular, same-sex

An economic downturn coincided with the start of the epidemic but the recession was short and moderate, compared with that of 1920/21. Cross-sectional high-frequency data indicate that the epidemic affected the labor supply sharply but briefly with no ensuing spill-overs; most of the recession, brief as it was, was due to the end of the war. I analyze weekly city-level mortality data and economic indicators

AbstractBetween the 1870s and 1914, tens of thousands of peasants left Austria-Hungary’s easternmost provinces of Galicia and Bukovina, heading for the Americas. This article places this episode in the context of contemporary global labour migrations while also emphasizing the distinctive characteristics of this mass exodus. Unlike most migrants around the world, Galicians and Bukovinans emigrated

This essay introduces the Special Theme on regulation and domestic service in colonial societies. It provides a brief overview of the key themes of domestic service and regulation in the history of colonial states, and reflects upon the ways in which the colonial past is deployed in contemporary calls for the regulation of domestic work by the state, to secure the rights and protections of present-day

Abstract The topic of “missing girls” in historical Europe has not only been mostly neglected, but previous research addressing this issue usually took the available information too lightly, either rejecting or accepting the claims that there was discrimination against female children, without assessing the possibility that the observed child sex ratios could be attributable to chance, mortality differentials

We examine a tumultuous period in Scottish history beginning from the Reformation in 1560 until a few years after the Revolution of 1688. During this period, the Crown repeatedly provoked political crises by attempting to impose an episcopal structure on the Church of Scotland. Using time series data of witch accusations, we find that the Scottish Presbyterians were substantially more active in persecuting

“Religi?se Lektüre k?nnen wir gar nicht finden”, notierte der Hamburger Jurist Ferdinand Beneke 1809 in sein Tagebuch. Beneke, der sich uns als typischer, wo nicht gar idealtypischer Vertreter der gebildeten St?nde in seinem immensen Tagebuchcorpus pr?sentiert, scheiterte bei seiner Suche allerdings nicht etwa daran, dass es keine religi?se Literatur gegeben h?tte. Vielmehr gefiel ihm nicht recht,

This article takes a comparative approach and deals with the issue of the death penalty in Austria and Czechoslovakia after the First World War. Whereas both successor states strived for progressive reforms that would delimit them from the discredited old regime, each of them found a different response to the experience of extreme violence and massive use of the death penalty during the First World

This article examines the attitude of the Polish elite towards the Napoleonic legislation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Based on the primary sources – such as letters, reports, and memoirs – it seeks to prove that this attitude was not as hostile as is commonly believed. From a broader perspective, the article challenges the assumption that the integration of the Napoleonic periphery

In the late 1970s, a group of far-right activists launched a geo-political magazine named Confidentiel and published in Paris. Far from being a domestic project, the magazine was also launched in Spain, Italy and Argentina, thanks to the wide transnational network of which its founders formed a part. Although the magazine was relatively short-lived and enjoyed a modest circulation (despite its transnational

With his concept of neust?ndische Gesellschaft, Reinhard Bl?nkner suggests that education or, rather, Bildung, becomes the practice that defines one's social status in the German lands between 1750 and 1850. I build on this argument by pursuing two separate but closely intertwined ideas: first, that Bildung stems from and, at the same time, displaces an older foundation of social status, honour; and

The upheavals of World War II prepared a new labour regime in twentieth-century India, in employers’ chambers, government offices, and in the newly established Labour Department, but as crucially, at the workplace and on the shop floor. This article studies the case of Calcutta port, an important military port in Southeast Asia after the fall of Singapore and Rangoon, where the complex historical processes

In the originally published version of this manuscript (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab025), the author's name was erroneously given in the HTML as ‘M Rachel'.

Abstract A lack of regional data on the occupational structure in England and Wales during the interwar years has so far prevented extensive study of this time period. In the current paper, we fill this gap by reconstructing the occupational structure at the district level, based on a recently-digitized register for 1939 and by linking this dataset with the population censuses of 1911 and 1921. The

Abstract In the United States, recent studies have demonstrated weight gain over Thanksgiving contributing to a significant portion of annual national weight gain. Understanding the social context of how Thanksgiving celebrations were perceived is critical for preventing and reducing excess weight during this time. Energy intake from present-day data was back-calculated from body weight data collected

Abstract Since the cliometric revolution, the future of economic history has been discussed in relation to its supposedly increasing integration with economics and other disciplines. Any well-grounded argument in this regard would require a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the scientific production of economic historians in recent decades. This article provides a systematic method for collecting

In this article, I will take a fresh look at the allegedly universal belief in the immediate post-war period that the Jews had no future in post-Holocaust Poland. While providing new analysis of reports from Poland in 1946 that were written by Jewish travellers from United States, Western Europe and Palestine, my revisionist goal is to problematize and question the concept of the ‘Holocaust aftermath

AbstractIn the 1830s, plague, which had been all but forgotten by most Europeans, was on everyone’s lips again. Shortly after the Ottoman and Egyptian governments instituted their first permanent quarantines, the disease broke out in the Levant and the Nile delta, and the global medical community watched anxiously to see whether these new western Mediterranean-style quarantines would be able to contain

We argue that heterogeneity in political centralization explains local governance. Specifically, the career incentives and promotion prospects of local officials influence how they spend local resources which in turn impacts local economic growth. We utilize the unique historical case of Edo Japan to explore the effect of institutionalized political relations between central and local governments.

This article takes the opening of the Brook Advisory Centres in London (1964) and Birmingham (1966) as a comparative case study for exploring the public debate on youth sexuality. The two centers were the first in postwar Britain specifically dedicated to the provision of advice on birth control and emotional problems to unmarried and young people. By focusing on an initiative that launched amid rising

This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in Germany during 1300–1850, introducing a novel database. We document four alternating phases of inequality decline and growth. The Black Death (1347–1352) led to inequality decline, until about 1450. Thereafter, inequality rose steadily. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the 1627–1629 plague triggered a second phase of inequality reduction

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until the late 1890s. Legislators with slave-owning backgrounds were more likely to be Democrats and voted more conservatively even conditional on party membership. A county’s propensity

Abstract Newly available digital resources from the British census identify employers and their workforce size. However, there was a non-response rate of about 2.3% for smaller firms, rising to over 10% for firms over about 300 employees, and higher for the largest manufacturing firms. Non-responses are largely random except for different forms of business organization: significantly higher for corporates

The living standards of the working classes during industrialization continue to be the subject of debate in European historiography. However, other factors closely related to the institutional setting, such as the role played by social economy and the institutions for collective action, are seldom considered. This study focuses on these factors, and attempts to quantify the social impact of consumer

Although anti-Catholicism and anti-Jacobinism primed many Britons to fear what one observer called “the hordes of vagabond French” who reached their shores in the fall of 1792, others launched widespread relief efforts. Among the more remarkable was the Wilmot Committee. This subscription charity convened in September 1792, channeling donations from the public to destitute French priests at a time

Petitioning was a common form of protest, request, or expression across the British Empire, and historians of colonial rule and resistance have often drawn on petitions as sources to investigate particular controversies. This article assesses the significance, variety, and context of petitioning to the Imperial Parliament from both the British Isles and the colonies. To do so, we present new data drawn

We investigate the demographic effects of forced labor under an extractive colonial regime: the Cultivation System in nineteenth-century Java. Our panel analyses show that labor demands are strongly positively associated with mortality rates, likely resulting from malnourishment and unhygienic conditions on plantations and the spread of infectious diseases. An instrumental variable approach, using

When Switzerland was created in 1848, one of its founding fathers went by the name of ‘Borneo Louis’. Before becoming a Swiss state builder, he had served as a mercenary in the Dutch East Indies. There he had founded a family with his native ‘housekeeper’, Silla. In Switzerland, he continued to benefit from Silla’s exploited labour. Stories such as these seem unusual today, not for historical but for

In 1942 more than 110,000 persons of Japanese origin living on the U.S. West Coast were forcibly sent away to ten internment camps for one to three years. This paper studies how internees’ careers were affected in the long run. Combining Census data, camp records, and survey data, I develop a predictor of a person’s internment status based on Census observables. Using a difference-in-differences framework

Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks

We study how political institutions affected the decision of countries to adhere to the classical gold standard. Using a variety of econometric techniques and controlling for a wide range of relevant economic and political factors, we find that the probability of adherence to the gold standard before World War I was ceteris paribus lower for countries which were more democratic. This effect can be

The Malthusian model is the subject of a fierce debate within economic history. Although the positive causal relationship postulated from living standards to population growth is relatively uncontroversial for preindustrial societies, this cannot be said for the other key relationship, diminishing returns due to fixed supplies of land. We argue that Denmark, which was characterized by extreme resource

This article seeks to examine the significance of firearms in the making of the frontier and the ways in which societies on the North-East Frontier of British India encountered and adapted firearms between the 1860s and 1910s. It will study the complex ways in which the entry of firearms was mediated and galvanised by a range of processes such as imperial expansion, the intrusion of capital, access

The Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference in 1889–1890 agreed upon a sales ban of modern firearms for large parts of the African continent, a covenant that served joint imperial interests amid the ‘Scramble for Africa’. This article reconstructs the historical context in which the Brussels provisions came into being and explores the inter-imperial co-operation that paved the way for the agreement. To understand

Several days after a failed assassination attempt on the life of the Russian Tsar on 2 April 1879, a new regime of ‘permission to exercise the right to purchase and carry weapons’ was introduced in St. Petersburg. Despite the fact that the first attempt on Alexander II's life occurred in 1866 (also in St. Petersburg), it took 13 years to make a radical departure from the previously unrestricted regime

This article analyses attempts to regulate the access to arms in Central America from the beginning of the World War I to the end of the 1920s. During these years, the USA was not only the politically and economically dominant force in the region – they were also the main provider of weapons. In a region where societies were reshaped by the integration into a global economy, political groups depended

Drawing on research on the international disarmament efforts of the inter-war years as well as on arms control in the empires, this article argues that arms control in the imperial periphery was an integral and very tangible part of the inter-war years’ international disarmament policies. It demonstrates that arms control in the periphery was conceived by the imperial actors involved as a pivotal part

This paper examines transportation infrastructure in the Japanese empire and its role in positioning Korean migrants in the labor markets of the metropole. To do so, it focuses on the Pusan–Shimonoseki ferry which, between 1905 and 1945, transferred over 30 million people between Japan and Korea. During this time, the ships that comprised this ferry line helped articulate new borders between the metropole

Almost exactly a hundred years after the Permanent Settlement of 1793 revolutionized property relations in Bengal, a far less studied legislation would subtly extend the rule of property to include the province’s waters. Bengal’s Private Fisheries Protection Act 1889, which is usually regarded as having been motivated by conservationist or economic concerns, was in fact an attempt to resolve intractable

This article provides new insights into long-standing debates on lord-tenant relations in medieval England and how they were negotiated through the manorial court. We examine an institution, which we term the stray system, that facilitated cooperation between lords and tenants to manage stray livestock. Specifically, we argue that the stray system is a clear example of a public good. In this context

This article studies the intertwined processes of popular protest and archival suppression in early modern Venice. It concentrates on a cycle of contention extending over several months in 1569, including a labour protest that started among the workers of the state shipyard and turned into a large revolt, anonymous placards and food riots. Such was the extent of the unrest that a major explosion in

West European visitors to the Ottoman Empire in the early-modern period frequently referred to sodomy. They depicted it as a common practice there, associated particularly with ‘renegades’ (converts to Islam). The report of an investigation into a sexual scandal at the Venetian embassy in Istanbul in 1588, discussed here, shows special sensitivity to this issue. Historians generally discount the comments

This paper analyzes the determinants of providing financial support to revolutionaries, using a hand-compiled dataset of 17,000 donations to the Irish National Aid Association after the Easter Rising of 1916. Financial support is best predicted by literacy, marital status, religious affiliation, and relatively high socio-economic status. In this sense, donations to revolutionaries share some characteristics

Abstract This paper presents a probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to many sources of digitized historical records. The method links records using a two-step approach, first establishing high confidence matches among men by exploiting a comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics. The method then proceeds

We study the effects of domestic conflict and external shocks on Spanish trade policy in the interwar period. Our account mobilizes a new granular dataset on exports and imports, and good-country level information on tariffs, trade agreements, and quotas. Into the Depression, the mainstay of policy was the tariff. The establishment of the Second Republic in 1931 was a turning point in policymaking

In the 1880s, ordinary fishers and other commoners who were intimately familiar with the seas left the Japanese archipelago in search of bluer waters. Ending up in South-East Asia and Australasia, these hyakushō used their local knowledge of nature to navigate unfamiliar ecological contexts and create ocean-spanning infrastructures capable of facilitating their everyday lives. The resulting transnational

We present quantitative evidence that the mita introduced by the Spanish crown in 1573 caused the decimation of the native-born male population. The mass baptisms after the conquest of Peru in 1532 resulted in the assignation of surnames for the first time. We argue that past mortality displacement and mass out-migration were responsible for differences in the surnames observed in mita and non-mita

This article opens up a new perspective on market liberalism's triumph in the late twentieth century through an examination of the political battles that were fought in Britain over the regulation of homework. Ubiquitous in the late Victorian era, this form of waged labor was curtailed by Edwardian wage regulations but resurged in the 1970s as a result of competition from low-wage economies abroad

It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984–1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical

Cash-crop diffusion in colonial Africa was uneven and defied colonizers’ expectations and efforts, especially for cotton. This study investigates how agricultural seasonality affected African farmers’ cotton adoption, circa 1900–1960. A contrast between British Uganda and the interior of French West Africa demonstrates that a short rainy season and the resulting short farming cycles generated seasonal