skip to primary navigation skip to content
 

HPSS Seminars - archive



HPSS Seminars - archive

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure - seminar series: archive

Return to the list of forthcoming seminars.

# Wednesday 28th February 2024, 1.15pm - Jonathan Neil Chapman (Bologna)
How to Vaccinate the Masses? Safety, compulsion, and the success of vaccination policy in nineteenth-century Britain
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 21st February 2024, 1.15pm - Hillary Vipond (LSE)
Quantifying job loss and job creation, 1851-1911
Venue: Seminar Room 2, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 31st January 2024, 1.15pm - Bernard Harris (Strathclyde University)
Morbidity among working-class men and women in early-twentieth century Sweden
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 14th June 2023, 1.15pm - Asst Professor Daniel Gallardo-Albarran (Wageningen University)
Health resilience and weather changes in Germany, 1890-1913
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 31st May 2023, 1.15pm - Dr Sandra Bree (French National Centre for Scientific Research)
Mariages a la Parisienne: Cohabiting couples in Parise during the inter-war period
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 10th May 2023, 1.15pm - Dr Fiona Gallagher (Dublin City University)
Mapping the Miasma’. The geographies of a forgotten contagion: Ireland and the 1832 cholera epidemic
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 3rd May 2023, 1.15pm - Professor Hilde Sommerseth (The Arctic University of Norway)
The Norwegian Historical Population Register (1801-1964): Current Status, Impact and Future Prospects
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 15th March 2023, 1.15pm - Dr Jord Hanus (University of Antwerp)
Cancelled due to industrial action
CANCELLED: Territorial pervasiveness of epidemics and health emergencies in the Southern Netherlands/Belgium, 1650-1920
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 22nd February 2023, 1.15pm - Louise Ludvigsen and Mads Perner (University of Copenhagen)
The Link-Lives project and studying mortality in 19th century Denmark
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 8th February 2023, 1.15pm - Professor David Earn (McMaster University, Canada)
Revealing disease ecology from historical records over the last seven centuries
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 25th January 2023, 1.15pm - Professor David Green (King's College London)
Joint meeting with the Modern Economic and Social History & Policy Seminar
Addressing Health: Morbidity, mortality and occupational health in the Victorian and Edwardian Post Office
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 9th March 2022, 1.15pm - Sarah Rafferty (University of Cambridge)
Adding to the census: using Medical Officer of Health Reports to further our understanding of child mortality inequalities in early twentieth century London
Venue: Board Room Faculty of History and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 23rd February 2022, 1.15pm - Dr Andrew Hinde (University of Southampton)
Sickness experience in England, 1870-1949
Venue: Board Room Faculty of History and online.

Using data from the Hampshire Friendly Society, a sickness insurance institution in southern England, we examine morbidity trends in England between 1870 and 1949. Morbidity prevalence increased between 1870 and around 1890, mainly because of a rise in the average duration of sickness episodes, but after 1890 average durations fell markedly even though the incidence of sickness rose. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, sickness prevalence increased gradually but this rise was entirely due to the greatly increased duration of claims made by men aged 65 years and over. After the early 1920s both the incidence and the average duration of sickness claims declined. These trends seem to be measuring ‘objective morbidity’: they vary closely with year-on-year changes in the mortality of men of working age, but do not show any clear relationship with real wages or unemployment. Our conclusions are different from those of earlier research using English sickness insurance data. We believe that one reason for this was a methodological problem with the analysis performed by nineteenth-century actuaries.

# Wednesday 16th February 2022, 1.15pm - Prof Kevin Schürer (University of Leicester) and Dr Hannaliis Jaadla (University of Cambridge)
CANCELLED DUE TO STRIKE ACTION - Changing demography: eastern European female migrants to England at the end of 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries
Venue: JCR, Faculty of History and online.

This seminar has been cancelled due to strike action.

# Wednesday 16th June 2021, 1.00pm - Tom Heritage (Southampton)
Poverty, Old Age and Outdoor Relief in Late-Victorian England
Venue: Zoom webinar - link to follow

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 9th June 2021, 1.00pm - Joana Pujadas-Mora (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Disentangling marriage seasonality: Family, politics and economy in the Barcelona area, 18th-19th centuries
Venue: Zoom webinar - link to follow

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 28th April 2021, 1.00pm - Eric Schneider (LSE)
The effect of nutritional status on historical infectious disease morbidity: evidence from the London Foundling Hospital, 1892-1915
Venue: Zoom webinar - link to follow

There is a complex inter-relationship between nutrition and morbidity in human health. Many diseases reduce nutritional status, but on the other hand, having low nutritional status is also known to make individuals more susceptible to certain diseases and to experience more serious illness. Modern evidence on these relationships, determined after the introduction of antibiotics and vaccines, may not be applicable to historical settings before these medical technologies were available. Thus, this paper uses historical data from the London Foundling Hospital to determine the causal effect of nutritional status of children proxied by weight and height-for-age Z-scores on the odds of contracting five infectious diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and whooping cough) and on sickness duration from these diseases. I identify a causal effect by exploiting the randomisation of environmental conditions as foundling children were removed from their original home, then fostered with families in counties nearby London and later returned to the Foundling Hospital’s main site in London. I find no effect of nutritional status on the odds of contracting the five diseases, but I do find a historically important and statistically significant effect of nutritional status on sickness duration for measles and mumps but not for the other diseases. These findings confirm the importance of underlying nutritional status for measles morbidity, provide new evidence of an effect for mumps, but challenge earlier assertions that whooping cough morbidity was related to nutritional status. These results suggest that improving nutritional status in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have reduced the severity (and perhaps case fatality rate) of measles and mumps infections, whereas the decline in pertussis mortality before vaccination was likely caused by other factors.

# Wednesday 10th March 2021, 10.00am - Zhongwei Zhao (School of Demography, Australian National University)
Note unusual time
Major macro-socioeconomic driving forces of China’s mortality decline in recent decades
Venue: Zoom webinar - link to follow

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 24th February 2021, 1.00pm - Jim Oeppen (Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics, University of Southern Denmark)
Can the slope of adult mortality by age be changed? An examination of case fatality for pneumonia under different treatment regimes, 1822-2010
Venue: Zoom webinar - link to follow

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 19th February 2020, 1.15pm - Beata Nowok (University of Edinburgh)
Season of death: mortality in infancy and beyond in Scotland, 1861-1973
Venue: Seminar Room 6, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 5th February 2020, 1.15pm - Catalina Torres (University of Southern Denmark)
Causes of death in Copenhagen, 1876-1900
Venue: Seminar Room 6, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 12th June 2019, 1.15pm - David Green (KCL), Doug Brown (Kingston University), Kathleen McIlvenna (University of Derby) and Nicola Shelton (UCL)
Addressing health: sickness and retirement in the Victorian Post Office
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 22nd May 2019, 1.15pm - Toke Aidt (Faculty of Economics, Cambridge), Romola Davenport (Cambridge Group) and Felix Grey (Faculty of Economics, Cambridge)
A new perspective on the role of public investment in sanitation and mortality decline in urban England 1870-1911
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 8th May 2019, 1.15pm - Liam Kennedy (Queen's University, Belfast) and Peter Solar (Free University, Brussels)
The famine that wasn't? 1799-1801 in Ireland
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 6th March 2019, 1.15pm - Bob Bennett, Harry Smith, Carry van Lieshout, Piero Montebruno (University of Cambridge)
The Age of Entrepreneurship: whole-population analysis of trends in entrepreneurship 1851-1911 from the censuses
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 20th February 2019, 1.15pm - Alice Reid (University of Cambridge)
'If only this could be my last': new ideas about reducing family size during the demographic transition
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Tuesday 5th June 2018, 4.00pm - Richard Smith (University of Cambridge)
Environmental shocks and demographic consequences in England: 1280-1325 and 1580-1640 compared
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Tuesday 22nd May 2018, 4.00pm - Isabelle Séguy (French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED))
New insights into historical plagues using GIS analysis: towards a retrodiagnosis of the unknown 1705 epidemic in Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône, South of France)
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Tuesday 15th May 2018, 4.00pm - Jean-Pascal Bassino (Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Lyon; Lyons Institute of East Asian Studies)
Population growth and female status in 19th century Southeast Asia: evidence from parish-level data for the Philippines
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Tuesday 8th May 2018, 5.00pm - Alan Fernihough (Queen's University Belfast)
Note start time of 5pm
Population and poverty in pre-famine Ireland
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Tuesday 6th February 2018, 4.00pm - Eli Nomes (University of Leuven)
The Mid-Twentieth Century Babyboom and the Role of Social Interaction. An Agent-Based Modelling Approach
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 15th May 2017, 1.00pm - James Boyd (Cambridge)
Commodities, Commerce and Risk: Transforming Access to American Settlement after Napoleon
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, the type of migrant leaving Europe for the United States, and the nature of their migration, changed dramatically. “Commodities, Commerce and Risk” explores pivotal changes in trade and passenger shipping between continental Europe and the United States from the 1790s to 1817, examining how those changes ended the institution of indenture, and in turn defined who could access the young American Republic in the pre-steam age. In a unique period when neither indenture nor extensive remittances could provide cheap access for continental Europeans, capital became more important to the migration decision – and to potential settlement choices – than in any prior period of mass migration, or any subsequent period after the crises of 1846. Using sources from German Europe to examine the changes to trade, commerce and law which helped to define post-Napoleonic migration, this paper seeks not only to explain changes in migration models, but to question the consequences of those changes for the development of the young United States.

# Monday 20th February 2017, 1.00pm - James Perry (Lancaster)
Foreign-born migrants in the Integrated Census Microdata, 1851-1911
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 6th February 2017, 1.00pm - Carry van Lieshout (Cambridge)
Drainage and water supply in 18th century London
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 23rd January 2017, 1.00pm - Diego Carnevale (Birkbeck)
Placing the dead in 18th century European metropolis: institutions, economy, beliefs
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Studying burials, broadly defined, allows a comprehensive perspective on the policies and practices adopted by early modern societies to satisfy an important need of the community. This need is material and immaterial at the same time: in fact, every city faced the attempt to reconcile logistical, economical, juridical, sanitary and spiritual requirements in properly disposing of the dead. Can we define as a “public” service the system of rules and means putted in place to satisfy this need?

Funerals and burials involved a large and diverse number of actors (government, city authorities, Church, confraternities, corporations, and many individuals such as artisans, undertakers, tradesmen, etc.) who worked according to a complex system of formal regulations and customary practices built around the need to give everyone a proper burial.

I will show how the interactions between these actors structured a service for the community in two urban realities of 18th century Europe: Naples and Paris. For most of the operators, such as the secular clergy, this activity was an important source of privileges and financial support, becoming a key element of their concrete action on urban space. Following the two examples of Naples and Paris, I will finally discuss the opportunity to extend the comparison to London during the same period.

# Monday 23rd May 2016, 1.00pm - Frederik Pedersen (University of Aberdeen)
White Lies and Alibis: Litigants, Lawyers and Law in Fourteenth-Century York Marriage Disputes
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 16th May 2016, 1.00pm - Pavla Jirkova (CERGE-EI, Prague)
Consignatio Hoc Calamitoso Tempore Pestis: Mortality Specifics of the Plague Year 1680 in Bohemia
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 9th May 2016, 1.00pm - Joseph Molitoris (University of Copenhagen)
Feeling the Squeeze: The Effect of Birth Spacing on Infant and Child Mortality during the Demographic Transition
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

A negative association between birth spacing and infant and child mortality has been consistently identified within modern populations in developing countries. Generally speaking, children born following shorter birth intervals have been found to have higher mortality (Hobcraft, McDonald, & Rutstein, 1985; Kozuki et al., 2013; Rutstein, 2005). The reasons for this association are unclear, however. Leading hypotheses attempt to explain these differences as a result of maternal depletion, sibling competition, sibling contagion, or unobserved maternal factors that simultaneously influence fertility and infant mortality (e.g. inadequate breastfeeding practices), but none has attained overwhelming support. This study contributes to this body of research in a few important ways. First, it examines this association in a historical context, which has largely been ignored (see Pebley, Hermalin, & Knodel, 1991 for a notable exception). The data come from the Roteman Database, a longitudinal register kept for Stockholm, Sweden between 1878 and 1926. Second, and more importantly, it attempts to isolate some of the hypothesized causal mechanisms by studying variation within families using models that control for maternal fixed-effects thereby eliminating the potential for compositional differences among mothers to drive this relationship. Results suggest that the relationship between preceding interval length and mortality holds even when accounting for unobservable maternal factors. Shorter intervals had the largest impact on post-neonatal and early childhood (age 1-4) mortality, yet had rather small influence on neonatal mortality. No relationship between preceding interval length and older child (age 5-9) mortality could be identified. The importance of the sibling competition and sibling contagion hypotheses were then assessed by exploiting variation in the timing of deaths among previously born children. The results point to greater importance of sibling competition in the prenatal period, but a greater role for sibling contagion in the postnatal period.

# Monday 15th February 2016, 1.00pm - Joe Day (Cambridge Group, University of Cambridge)
A Match Made in...Middlesbrough? Migration and the Marriage Market in the Late Nineteenth Century
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 8th February 2016, 1.00pm - Mikolaj Szoltysek (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Did family matter? Family systems, patriarchy, and human capital inequalities in historical Europe
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 13th July 2015, 12.10pm - Professor Deng Hui, Peking University
Please note earlier start time of 12.10pm. Sandwiches and fruit will be available at the start.
Regional Man-land Relationship in the Northern Chinese Frontier in History
Venue: Seminar Room, Main Geography Department Building, Downing Place

The Ancient northern Chinese frontier zone comprises all or part of seven modern Chinese provinces, Gansu Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, Shanxi, Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang, in an arc spanning more than 2,000 km and ranging from the deserts of Central Asia to the Manchurian forests. Indeed the northern frontier regions have gained near-mythic proportion in Chinese history and culture. Today three dimensions of the North China frontier are particularly important: its geopolitical significance along the Mongolian, Russian borders; its environmental fragility; and its multicultural population and heritage. A historical geography of this region will provide an important and fundamental basis for contemporary understanding and management of regional issues concerning peoples and environments.

Academic research on the northern frontier regions and their significance in Chinese history and development became significant with the landmark studies of Owen Lattimore in the 1920s and 1930s. Lattimore described a frontier increasingly polarized between two vastly different cultures: the Chinese realm of walled cities with intensive, sedentary agriculture and the nomadic world of the steppe with extensive, mobile economy— neither in the long run, able to subdue the other—-separated by the Great Wall, and a transitional zone took shape between the two groups of peoples where political and cultural affiliation vacillated in response to overall geopolitical advantage. Lattimore’s work not only contributed to a better understanding of China, but added new dimensions to world-wide study of frontiers as well.

Seven decades later, in changed intellectual circumstances and with a wealth of new empirical research, the old issue seems worth reopening. The field of historical geography provides a rich and diverse context for studies of frontier history. Historical geographers particularly concerned with understanding historical trends in human use of the environment, environmental history, and settlement patterns. Through an integration of natural science, social science and humanities methodologies, we could be able to achieve a broad-ranging and comprehensive analysis which maintains relevance to contemporary environmental and settlement issues. Thus historical geography serves as a center for the research, which will then draw on multidisciplinary research works in related fields such as history, archeology, and environmental science. Within this broad framework, the research plan will mainly focus on the following four parts: the ecology of frontiers, man-land relationship in history, driving factors behind the landscape changes, and the frontiers and social changes in history.

# Monday 1st June 2015, 1.00pm - Dr Isabelle Devos (Ghent University)
Female labourers in early nineteenth-century rural Flanders. What's in a name?
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 18th May 2015, 1.00pm - Dr Eric Schneider (University of Sussex)
The influence of infant feeding and disease morbidity on children's growth: evidence from the London Foundling Hospital, 1893-1919
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 9th February 2015, 1.00pm - Dr Paul Puschmann (University of Leuven)
Revisiting the Urban Graveyard Debate: An analysis of mortality differences between natives and migrants in North-Western European port cities: Antwerp, Rotterdam and Stockholm, 1850-1930
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 2nd February 2015, 1.00pm - Hannaliis Jaadla (Tallinn University)
The impact of water supply and sanitation on infant mortality in Tartu (Estonia), 1897-1900
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 9th June 2014, 1.00pm - Stefan Öberg (University of Gothenburg)
Long-term changes in sickness among young men in Sweden, 1851-1930: Evidence from military sources
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 12th May 2014, 1.00pm - Dr Antonio Cámara (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
The implications of the relationship between height and mortality for historical demography. Evidence from contextual and individual approaches in 19th-Century Spain
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 28th April 2014, 1.00pm - Dr Samantha Williams (Cambridge)
The maintenance of bastard children in London, 1770-1834
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 24th February 2014, 1.00pm - Professor Janet McCalman and Dr Rebecca Kippen (University of Melbourne)
What happened to them? Life courses of convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) 1812-1852
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 20th January 2014, 1.00pm - Dr Andrew Hinde (University of Southampton)
Mortality in English market towns during the 'parish register era', c1550 - c1825
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 10th June 2013, 12.45pm - Eric Schneider, Department of Economics, University of Oxford
Sandwiches and fruit will be available from 12.30
Real wages and the household: Quantifying the economy of makeshifts of the poor in 18th-century England
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

Abstract not available

# Monday 20th May 2013, 12.45pm - Dr Emmanuel Garnier, University of Caen
Sandwiches and fruit will be available from 12.30
The volcano Laki in 1783: a serial killer? A French-English comparison
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

Abruptly, in April 2010, airlines companies, insurers and politicians discovered that volcanic ash from Iceland could disrupt air traffic throughout western Europe. Like other recent natural disaster (Atlantic storm Xynthia in 2010, the tsunami in Japon in 2011), this was a totally ‘new’ and completely unexpected scenario. However, British and French archives showed that this event was perfectly conceivable. Indeed, on 8 June 1783, the Icelandic volcano Laki entered an eruptive phase lasting nearly a year, producing massive amounts of smoke which, within hours, was observed everywhere in Northern Europe. These ‘sulfurous fogs’, in addition to terrorizing the population, were quickly suspected of being harmful to health.
Based on a comparative approach of classic historical sources as parish registers (Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Normandy, the North of France), medical archives of the Société royale de médecine, the Académie royale des Sciences of Paris and the Royal Society of London as well as English and French meteorological Journals, this work uses an interdisciplinary approach to provide a new perspective on the precise chronology of this health disaster and its climatic and social contexte on a transnational scale.

# Monday 13th May 2013, 12.45pm - Professor Tim Guinnane, Department of Economics, Yale University
Sandwiches and fruit will be available from 12.30
Sample-selection bias in the historical heights literature
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

An extensive literature uses anthropometric measures, typically heights, to draw inferences about living standards in the past. This literature’s influence reaches beyond economic history; the results of historical heights research appear as crucial components in development economics and related fields. The historical heights literature often relies on micro-samples drawn from sub-populations that are themselves selected: examples include volunteer soldiers, prisoners, and runaway slaves, among others. Contributors to the heights literature sometimes acknowledge that their samples might not be random draws from the population cohorts in question, but rely on normality alone to correct for potential selection into the sample. We use a simple Roy model to show that selection cannot be resolved simply by augmenting truncated samples for left-tail shortfall. Statistical tests for departures from normality cannot detect selection in Monte Carlo exercises for small to moderate levels of self-selection, obviating a standard test for selection in the heights literature. We show strong evidence of selection using micro-data on the heights of British soldiers in the late eighteen and nineteenth centuries. Consequently, widely accepted results in the literature may not reflect variations in living standards during a soldier’s formative years; observed heights could be predominantly determined by the process determining selection into the sample. A survey of the current historical heights literature illustrates the problem for the three most common sources: military personnel, slaves, and prisoners.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2261335

# Monday 6th May 2013, 12.45pm - Dr Hiroaki Muppy Matsuura, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford
Sandwiches and fruit will be available from 12.30
State Constitutional Commitment to Health and Health Care and Population Health Outcomes: Evidence from Historical U.S. Data
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

Abstract not available

# Monday 11th March 2013, 12.45pm - Prof. Jeremy Boulton, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Newcastle
Sandwiches and fruit will be available from 12.30
Clerical policy and local population studies: christening fees in Georgian Westminster
Venue: Seminar Room, Main Building, Dept of Geography

Abstract not available

# Monday 28th January 2013, 12.45pm - Dr Amornrat Bunnag, Academic Officer, Centre of Doctrine and Strategic Development, Army Training Command, Bangkok.
Sandwiches and fruit will be available from 12.30
Populating 19th century Siam: war/capture/resettlement versus the recruitment of free labour in a southeast Asian demographic system
Venue: Seminar Room, Main Building, Dept of Geography

The Kingdom of Siam is one of several important Southeast Asian states that formed around the 12th century and continued in various forms to the present. Population numbers in the Siamese Kingdom are mostly a matter of conjecture since virtually all records were destroyed in the sacking of Ayudhya in 1767 by Burmese armies. Even for the time since the kingdom was reestablished and the Chakri Dynasty formed in 1782, the record is fragmented and incomplete throughout the 19th century and until about 1920 (a census was conducted in 1909-1910, and vital registration began in 1920). Nineteenth century demography is known largely by two means: population estimates (the whole kingdom, and sometimes for certain geographic areas, or for language groups) reported by contemporary foreign “travelers” (ambassadors, businessmen, preachers and the like) based on what they could glean from the royal records without actually seeing them. The resulting population estimates are so inconsistent that some investigators have posited their own series of population totals based on extrapolations backward from the time series that began in 1920.

This work of extrapolation, if it is to be more than merely mechanical curve fitting of some sort, requires substantive assumptions about fertility and mortality patterns and levels, and these have always been founded upon prevailing views of typical “developing country” situations. That is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, fertility has always been assumed to have been rather high (TFR at 6 or greater) and mortality at levels high enough to be consistent with that and population growth rates.

However, in the case of Siam a new reading of the existing literature and a new look at the archival evidence spanning the long 19th century suggests an alternative and quite different scenario. The speaker has carried out extensive research in the Kingdom’s archives, and offers a view of population changes based upon indirect methods of analysis (demographic models) linked with political, socioeconomic, and cultural evidence. Two contrasting scenarios regarding population and the components of population changes were first established based on the historical evidence. Then these scenarios were modeled using ‘POPULATE’, a software program that expresses the mathematics of the population renewal equation and the method of Generalized Inverse Projection. The results were then judged on their internal consistency and compared with other evidence.

These scenarios—a Migration-Based Demographic System (MDS) scenario and a Classic Demographic Transition (CDT) scenario–suggest alternate paths of fertility, mortality, and migration between 1782 and 1960. In the migration-based scenario fertility is at a moderate level (held down by the disturbances of frequent warfare), mortality is high, and migration maintains the population balance. This scenario matches very well with historical events in the Bangkok Period including dramatic political, socioeconomic and cultural changes. Among these was the termination around 1850 of a warfare based system of forced population resettlement, and the rapid rise thereafter of spontaneous in-migration from neighboring territories and from Southern China, in response to the dramatic expansion of commercial wet-rice agriculture.

The issues discussed and the alternative models presented highlight the importance of any empirical, archival evidence for the 19th century that can be uncovered. The speaker will describe her work with a set of household-based corvee registers, the Tabien Hangwow, covering selected areas and years. These have not been examined previously for demographic purposes.

# Monday 25th June 2012, 12.00pm - ’ Paul Sharp (University of Southern Denmark), Nina Boberg-Fazlic & Jacob Weisdorf (University of Copenhagen)
Please note that this extended seminar will run from 12 till 3pm. There will be two papers with a break for sandwiches 1.15 to 1.45.
(1) ‘New findings from the family reconstitution data.’ and (2) ‘Nothing but a poor man with money? The changing fertility decisions of the rich before the English demographic transition.’
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

The first paper will present an overview of a number of papers using the Group reconstitutions: ‘Birth spacing’, Jacob Weisdorf, Marc Klemp, Francesco Cinnirella; ‘The child QQ trade-off’, Jacob Weisdorf, Marc Klemp; ‘Survival of the richest’, Jacob Weisdorf, Nina Boberg-Fazlic, Paul Sharp; ‘Lasting damage’, Jacob Weisdorf, Marc Klemp; ‘Human capital’, Jacob Weisdorf, Nina Boberg-Fazlic.
The second paper will present one of the papers more fully.

# Monday 14th May 2012, 1.00pm - Professor Marjorie McIntosh (University of Colorado)
*Please note this seminar will start at the later time of 1 p.m.
Poor Relief and Community in Elizabethan Hadleigh
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

Abstract not available

# Monday 30th April 2012, 12.45pm - Eric Schneider (Oxford University)
Real Wages and the Family: Adjusting Real Wages to Changing Demography in Pre-Modern England
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

Abstract not available

# Monday 13th February 2012, 12.45pm - Dr. Peter Kitson (Cambridge Group)
Sandwiches and fruit are available from 12:30 p.m.
‘Industrialisation and the Changing Mortality Environment in an English Community, c. 1600-1684’
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

Abstract not available

# Monday 30th January 2012, 12.45pm - Dr. Simon Szreter
Sandwiches and fruit are available from 12:30.
The prevalence of venereal diseases in 1913. Who was right? Christabel Pankhurst or the Royal Commission?
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room

Abstract not available

# Monday 16th May 2011, 12.45pm - Professor Michael Anderson, University of Edinburgh
Sandwiches available from 12:30
Illusions of exactness: counting Scotland's population before 1801
Venue: Sir William Hardy Building, HB101

Abstract not available

# Monday 7th March 2011, 12.45pm - Tim Leunig and Alex Klein (LSE)
Does Gibrat’s Law hold for all times and all places? A study of the growth of British cities prior to 1913
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building

Abstract not available

# Monday 21st February 2011, 12.45pm - Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda (University College Dublin)
English Living Standards and Mortality since the Middle Ages
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building

Abstract not available

# Monday 7th February 2011, 12.00am - Jelle van Lottum (Cambridge Group)
Cancelled. This talk will be re-scheduled for the Easter term.
Contemporary perceptions of international migrants in England and the Dutch Republic during the 17th and 18th centuries
Venue: Venue to be confirmed

Abstract not available

# Monday 27th November 2006, 1.00pm - Dr Aravindra Guntupalli (University of Tübingen)
Gender inequality and change in stature in India during the Twentieth Century
Venue: Room 121, Sir William Hardy Building

Abstract not available

# Monday 13th November 2006, 1.00pm - Tim Leunig (London School of Economics)
Cities, markets and the sea: Explaining the ups and downs of height in early nineteenth century England and Wales
Venue: Room 121, Sir William Hardy Building

Abstract not available

# Monday 30th October 2006, 1.00pm - Richard Wall (University of Essex)
Widows, wills and economic assets in pre-industrial Britain
Venue: Room 121, Sir William Hardy Building

Abstract not available

# Monday 16th October 2006, 1.00pm - Professor Sam Cohn (University of Glasgow)
Household and plague in early modern Italy
Venue: Room 121, Sir William Hardy Building

Abstract not available

Graduate Workshop in Economic and Social History: archive

Return to the list of forthcoming seminars.

# Monday 11th March 2024, 1.00pm - Jan Altaner (Cambridge)
Sex and the City Centre: Prostitution, Urban Planning, and Sociological Research in 1960s Lebanon
Venue: Room 9, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 26th February 2024, 1.00pm - Michele Bolla (Cambridge)
Income Inequality around the Year Zero: Quantitative Insights from Chinese Literary Sources
Venue: Room 9, Faculty of History

Today long-run inequality trends are a well-established, central research topic of academic research. A truly long-run perspective, however, was only recently achieved, when late medieval and early modern times were added to the picture through intense archival research. Estimates for earlier periods are inherently “shakier”, with wider margins of error resulting from the reliance on archaeological proxies and mixed literary sources.

I construct estimates of income inequality for Han-dynasty China at its demographic peak (ca. 2 CE), which official sources described as severely unequal. In fact, those sources, when combined with comparative evidence, allow to infer that inequality extraction was unexceptional in late Former Han times – at least, by pre-industrial standards. The quantitative methods employed here are similar to those underlying the most recent estimates for the early Roman Empire. However, I take steps to account for regional variation within the Han Empire, which is absent in widely accepted figures for Rome and, I argue, is essential for long-run, comparative debates on inequality in human polities.

# Monday 12th February 2024, 1.00pm - Sandra Ujpetery
Who were the Hand-Spinners and Handloom Weavers When Industrialisation Struck? Findings from Silesia and the Swiss Canton of Glarus, First Half of the 19th Century.
Venue: Room 9, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 29th January 2024, 1.00pm - Lovansh Katiyar (Cambridge) and Saberi Mallick (Delhi)
Deconstructing Development Realities in India
Venue: Room 9, Faculty of History

This paper entails a critical analysis of the Indian developmental regime with specific emphasis on the prevalent developmental paradigm nurtured under predominant neoliberal global institutions, and the persistent utilisation of the didactic visuality of development through imagery, surveillance and technology to connote progress at the exclusion of the demographic majority. The subsequent deconstruction of developmental realities is an exercise in the illumination of the inherent limitations of contemporary developmental frameworks in accommodating the manifold dimensions of development subsuming social, cultural and political facets. The contemporary status quo presents ideas of development in India with idealised imagery so as to invisiblise the chasm between the realities of people at the periphery and the elites. The propaganda of development serves as a spectacle and, therefore, serves to unite the masses into the delusion of progress through the imposition of a hegemonic visuality shaped by the power elite while the realities of the lives of people present a stark opposition. The homogenisation of the Indian body politic as equal benefactors of the pursuit of national development is sustained through the invisibilisation of the diverse marginalities that account for the demographic majority (Bahujan) of the country. The disparity in experiences accentuates a necessity to adopt a developmental paradigm attuned to the actual cultural milieu, as opposed to an ideal, imperative to the construction of an equitable societal framework. This paper will utilise a socio-ethnographic approach to historicise the idea of development and deconstruct developmental realities through an intersectional analytical lens thereby elucidating how disenfranchisement along the vertices of caste and gender informs the persistent marginalisation of certain communities by keeping at the centre of the analysis the foundation of the Indian nation-state – the people of India.

# Monday 27th November 2023, 1.00pm - Magnus Neubert (Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies)
The Socialist Experiment of Yugoslavia: Exploring the Effect of Labour-Managed Socialism on Economic Development
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

This study challenges the consensus in the literature that socialism hampered growth. Most
of these studies neglect the pre-socialist backwardness or ignore the institutional heterogeneity
across time and space. Labour-managed socialism in Yugoslavia was the most decentralized and
most dynamic socialist economy and combined social ownership and workers’ management with
market coordination. Due to the divergent economic development before WWII, it is hard to
disentangle the economic effect of socialist institutions and the uneven economic preconditions.
Therefore, I zoom into the region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and exploit the historical event of
Trieste’s liberation by the Yugoslav partisans which allowed Yugoslavia to expand territorially
to the cost of Italy. The eastern part of the region was treated with socialist institutions, while
the western part remained under capitalist institutions. By introducing a novel micro-regional
panel dataset of decomposed GDP for 1938, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1988, this historical
setting allows for estimating the effect of labour-managed socialism on economic development
for the first time. A spatial regression discontinuity design and additional evidence suggest that
differences in GDP levels occurred already before WWII and are amplified by the exodus of
Italian human capital and uneven market integration. Labour-managed socialism had no significant effect on economic development and let the Yugoslav part of the region even converge
to the Italian part until the period of crisis and austerity in the 1980s. These results shed new
light on the economic performance of labour-managed socialism and require new theoretical
explanations.

# Monday 27th November 2023, 1.00pm - Xavier Jou (University of Barcelona)
Gender Conflicts on the Shopfloor. Barcelona Women at Chocolates Amatller (1890-1914)
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

The cry of “Get married women out of the factories!” echoed within the Spanish industrial landscape at the turn of the 20th century, driven by two intertwined factors. From a societal perspective, the conviction that a married woman’s realm belonged at home rather than within factory walls prevailed. On an economic note, concerns arose that women, due to their lower wages, were displacing men from job opportunities.

This research examines this phenomenon through a compelling case study of a workers’ social claim specifically targeted towards women during the process of feminization in during the latter half of the 19th century. The fundamental aim of this article is to illuminate the intricate interplay of social demands and gender dynamics in the realm of labour and business operations. Through the vehicle of a case study methodology, this research endeavours to gain insights into the intricate complexities of gender dynamics during the industrialization phase, as well as the challenges women encountered when joining the workforce in the modern factories.

On 25 May 1890, the workforce (predominantly comprising men due to the nature of their claim) at the Amatller chocolate factory went a strike. They were protesting because certain job positions, previously occupied by men, had been assigned to women. This strike represents the sparkle to comprehend the casual nature of the stereotype that positioned women as procreators rather than contributors to production, expelling them from the productive sphere and relegating them to domestic roles as wives and mothers. While women were accepted as paid workers, their roles were confined to those undesirable or unwillingly shouldered by men, steering clear of direct competition.

Scrutinizing the role of female factory workers two decades post-strike, it becomes evident that women actively participated in the chocolate factory’s operations, defying the male contention. Nevertheless, the outcome of the 1890 strike cannot be framed as a victory or defeat for either men or women. The male factory workers vocalized their quest for enhanced working conditions, but regrettably, they directed their frustrations at women, swayed by the prevalent social discourse of that era. While women did step into the factory, portraying them as unequivocal victors would be an oversimplification. Their presence was restricted, with scarce avenues for professional advancement and task segregation primarily confining them to manual labour tasks. This gendered task partition perpetuated wage disparities and further marginalized women within the workspace.

The historical significance of the Chocolates Amatller’s case lies in its portrayal of one of Spain’s earliest documented labour gender conflicts, where workers aimed to obstruct the entry of female factory labour. Additionally, the unique archival revelation, detailing vast information about the factory employees, can be a valuable source for the study of labour and business history. The male-initiated strike and its aftermath offer a window into the intricate interplay between gender dynamics, social claims and labour practices during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

# Monday 13th November 2023, 1.00pm - Thomas Laver (Cambridge)
Wine Production and Exchange in Late Antique Egyptian Monasteries: A Micro-Economic Analysis’
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

This paper will examine the crucial role that wine played in the economy of Late Antique Egyptian monasteries. Not only did monks consume wine themselves, but so did their servants, with the large size of Egyptian monasteries – many had over 100 monks, and servants in addition – meaning that meeting this internal demand for wine needed to be a major concern for monastic institutions’ financial strategies. This paper will sketch out how monks met this internal need through credit, leases, and direct production (both through working vineland and by processing the grapes into wine), which allowed them to acquire large volumes of wine more efficiently (at low cost, and a guaranteed supply) than by simple purchase. In fact, it appears that monks acquired much more wine than they could consume, and so either used it to cost-effectively meet other expenditures to servants, suppliers, and the state, or sold it in regional markets.
Throughout this analysis, it will be stressed that the methods used to acquire (and later sell) wine are a product of the small size of the local markets for wine, labour, and other goods in which rural monasteries often operated, which made direct purchase of wine a less rational or viable method of acquisition than alternatives. However, these alternative methods were open only to those with more (financial or labour) capital than the average household, or who had different attitudes to risk, making monasteries almost unique in their ability to manipulate local microeconomic dynamics in their favour.
Wine was therefore a key element of monastic involvement in local microeconomies, presenting an economic need that needed sating, but also an opportunity for enrichment – an opportunity that was frequently taken – which was almost uniquely available to them due to their economic scale and possession of gold coin.

# Monday 30th October 2023, 1.00pm - Emma Diduch (University of Cambridge)
Factory families: textile work and women’s life courses in late nineteenth-century Derbyshire
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 16th October 2023, 1.30pm - Maxence Castiello (Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Railroad Expansion, Local Shocks and Individual Opportunities: Evidence from Nineteenth Century America
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

We provide microeconomic evidence on the effect of railroad infrastructure driving local shocks and shaping individuals’ opportunities. We focus on the roll-out of the railway network between 1850 and 1880 in the United-States. Building on full-count census records and linkages crosswalks, we construct multiple sets of individual-level longitudinal datasets. Precisely, we track nearly four millions of working-age white men for which we observe their occupation and county of residence. In addition, we rely on historical transportation maps to derive time-varying measures of railroad proximity and market access. Exploiting time-variation in railroad connectivity in a DiD fashion, we document substantial shifts in the local economic activities at the county-level. Our set of baseline results shows a positive effect of railroad proximity on population concentration, as a popular proxy for economic growth. Breaking-down the railroad-induced compositional effects on the sectoral and occupational structures, we document that better-connected counties experience an increase in the secondary and tertiary sectors prevalence, and a consequential rise of the frequencies of high- and semi-skilled occupations. The second part of the paper delves into individuals’ trajectories in order to decompose the aggregate effects of railroad exposure. Precisely, we examine the relative contributions of the sectoral and occupational transitions, labor market entry and geographic mobility channels. Our results suggest that railroad proximity poorly affects individuals transitioning on average, with large levels of disparities among individuals. Railroad development primarily benefits young workers and those who relocate closer to railroads, but adversely impacts labor market outcomes of older individuals who stay put. Additionally, we show that changes in railroad access deeply shape initial career choices, especially for the eldest sons. Lastly, we implement a gravity framework underscoring the role of railroads in retaining skilled jobs locally and attracting external individuals.

# Monday 16th October 2023, 1.00pm - Heqi Cai (LSE)
The Capacity of Commerce: The Political Participation of Merchant Groups during the Taiping Rebellion
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

How could commercial groups and individual merchants participate in politics and influence the allocation of political resources? Using 253 prefectures from late Qing China as the historical context, this paper examines the effect of commercial development (as measured by the number of guilds) in reshaping the distribution of quota for shengyuan (this regulated fixed number of county-level exam passers experienced an unexpected increase during the shock of Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864)). By looking into this natural background, the study finds that one more commercial guild in the prefecture would lead to a 0.833 increase in the quota for shengyuan during Taiping time, indicating the more commercially developed areas would earn more opportunities for examination candidates to participate in political bureaucrats. The positive relationship between commercial guilds and the increase in quota can be attributed to a reward mechanism: the indirect taxation (lijin), which was initially established to collect militaryexpenditures for Taiping during this war period, simultaneously provided merchants with a channel through which they could make monetary donations. It demonstrates that prefectures with one more lijin station raised the quota for shengyuan by 0.2 in Taiping-affected prefectures, indicating that when driving the quota for shengyuan reallocation, the capacity of commerce occurred through the indirect taxation system. However, the efforts made by merchants pursuing political upward mobility did not work as expected: this paper uses a difference-in-difference model to test how the increase in quota for shengyuan was related to the change in actual number of jinshi within the same prefecture from1850to the abolishment of civil service exam in 1905. It shows that in the prefecture where the quota for shengyuan increased noticeably, successful passers at the final stage did not exhibit a matching increase. So merchants’ capacity truly stopped at the first stage while attempting to engage in the examination selection procedure, showing a failure to obtain upward mobility for continued political participation in late Qing China.

# Monday 13th March 2023, 12.30pm - Elif Yumru (Cambridge)
Ottoman Women in Cartoons (1870-1911)
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

This paper examines the representations of women living in the Ottoman Empire in the masculine-dominated satirical press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It focuses on two satirical journals: Diyojen, the first journal of its kind, issued between 1870 and 1873; and Kalem, a prominent publication in the empire between 1908 and 1911. This was a significant moment in the political and social life of the empire, with the emergence of nationalist ideas within the public sphere in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution (1908) and the implementation of the Ottoman constitution. Further, women writers and publishers took on more prominent positions within the national press, representing a shift in the social position of women. The paper demonstrates this socio-political change in the visual representation of women during this period through a comparative study of these two journals. Ultimately, the paper reveals several strategies used by the masculine-dominated press to influence public opinion regarding the changing place of women within the society.

# Monday 30th November 2020, 12.30pm - Ella Sbaraini (Clare College, Cambridge)
Embodying Suicidal Emotions, 1700-1850
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom

Abstract not available

# Monday 16th November 2020, 12.30pm - Benjamin Schneider (Merton College, Oxford)
Technological Change and the Inequality of Jobs: American Transport, 1750–1860
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom

Abstract not available

# Monday 2nd November 2020, 12.30pm - Tyler Rainford (University of Bristol)
Pro Bono Publico: James Ashley, Punch, and the Alcoholic Drinks Trade in Eighteenth-Century London
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom

Abstract not available

# Monday 19th October 2020, 12.30pm - Cameron Coventry (Federation University)
A Social History of Keynesian Full Employment in Australia, 1936-75
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom

Abstract not available

# Monday 11th March 2019, 12.30pm - Mustafe, TBD, University of Cambridge
MPhil Presentations
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 4th March 2019, 12.30pm - Eliska, Udayan, and Merel, University of Cambridge
MPhil Presentations
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 25th February 2019, 12.30pm - Moritz Kaiser, University of Aberdeen
The Origins of ‘Penitents’: The Socio-Economic Backgrounds of the Inmates in an English Anglican Magdalen Home, 1848-1914
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 18th February 2019, 12.30pm - Felix Schaff, London School of Economics
Conflicts, State Growth and Economic Inequality in Pre-Industrial Germany, c. 1400-1618
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 11th February 2019, 12.30pm - Yitong Qiu, London School of Economics
Consumption Change in the Early and Mid-Qing: A Case Study of the Lower Yangze Delta
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 4th February 2019, 12.30pm - Christopher Whittel, University of Cambridge
The Crisis of the Monetary System in Cromwellian Ireland
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 28th January 2019, 12.30pm - Andrea Ramazzotti, London School of Economics
The spatial distribution of Italy's population and the emergence of Zipf's Law, 1861-1991
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 21st January 2019, 12.30pm - Ying Dai (University of Cambridge)
The occupational structure of Chongqing in the Upper Yangzi Valley, China, 19th and 20th centuries
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 26th November 2018, 12.30pm - Alex Tertzakian (University of Cambridge)
The diffusion of mechanised technologies in the West Riding of Yorkshire textile industry c.1780­‐1911 and its impact on employment and wages
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 19th November 2018, 12.30pm - Mostafa Abdelaal (University of Cambridge)
Years of Turbulence, Years of Hope: Central African Copperbelt and the Industrial Development in Congo-Léopoldville and Zambia, from the Political Independence to the Economic Nationalization
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

The economic nationalization occurred in Congo-Léopoldville and Zambia roughly after five years of their independence, in 1966 and 1969 respectively.  During the political clouts and the economic vicissitudes that took place in both countries, the Central African Copperbelt (CAC) contributed to a far extent in shaping the historical events. However, these fateful years lie between the political independence to the nationalization of mining companies have been received little attention from historians.  The quest for Africanization the economy and from the European domination became extremely fiercer than the political independence. A group of factors explain the challenges faced by national governments in dirigisme their national economy such as; the global economic relationships, capital flight and foreign direct investment, global copper prices, Africa’s lacking to the technical experience and management of mining companies. This paper will investigate the colonial/national perceptions of industrial development in late colonial/ the immediate post-colonial years, more specifically the weight of the CAC in the colonial/national contexts, from development planning to implementation. A part of this perception could be traced since the colonial authorities Belgians/British set up decennial developmental plans in the 1940s and 50s which extended to another long-term plan but was curtailed by the advent of independence. On the other hand, the national authorities replaced these plans with the transnational and first development plans in Zambia and a chaotic political situation in Congo. Significantly, there were high expectations by African in both countries for reaping the benefits of independence, higher wages and advancement of labour, and this might explain the crucial role of mining areas. Such a role need to be examined from comparative contexts, not limited to the mining industry, but significantly to the CAC role in the question of industrial development in the early years of independence.

# Monday 12th November 2018, 12.30pm - Michalis Bardanis (University of Ioannina, Greece)
Brick and tile making in Athens, Greece, during 20th century
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 5th November 2018, 12.30pm - Yasmin Shearmur (University of Cambridge)
European integration and immigration policy, French and British experiences, 1976-1992
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

This paper examines the making of immigration policy in France and Britain during the 1980s. More  specifically, it examines whether and how European developments fed back into domestic immigration policy. Beginning in the late 1970s and carrying throughout the 1980s, there was a burst of activity at the European level, from the informal, intergovernmental cooperation between interior ministers of the TREVI group; to the Schengen agreements, which abolished internal borders for participating countries; to Maastricht, which incorporated developments of the previous decade into expanded and formalized EU structures.  What, historically, have France and Britain’s priorities regarding immigration been? How is immigration policy made, given that it must respond to contrary imperatives, even within government? Does modern immigration policy reflect Europe’s democratic deficit? How well have states ever been able to implement immigration policy? If poorly, what function does declaring an immigration policy serve? 

# Monday 29th October 2018, 12.30pm - Yushu Geng (University of Cambridge)
Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in China and Singapore, 1919-1937
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 22nd October 2018, 12.30pm - Yiwen Qiu (University of Cambridge)
Industrial development paths from an evolutionary perspective: the Chinese case, 1998-2013
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 15th October 2018, 12.30pm - Eleanor Russell (University of Cambridge)
The Spinelli Family: A mid-sized Florentine firm’s response to the opening of the Americas and Cape Route trade, 1450-1520
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

This paper will ask how much trade and finance changed for smaller companies between the later fifteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries. Extensive research has been performed upon the activities of the great companies, but the lesser ones remain neglected. To address this deficit, this paper will examine the activities of the Spinelli family, a mid-size Florentine company that has left extensive records but has received fairly little attention in the literature. To what degree did they trade in overseas goods? How involved were they with the great companies, particularly the non-Italian ones? Did they become more engaged in European trade beyond Italy, and did their European trade items change? Regarding finance, the paper will question how much the smaller companies mimicked the great firms’ increased lending to rulers and diplomats beyond Italy, and whether any such loans suggest long-term financial involvement.[new para]This paper will largely rely upon an analysis of the mid-fifteenth to mid-sixteenth century inventories, correspondence, tax records and account books in the Spinelli archive at Yale University. The scanty and inconsistent nature of the sources makes it risky to rely upon statistical analyses. The tax and census records are more complete than the account books, but since merchants sought to conceal their wealth to lower taxes they are also not reliable. Thus, while the paper will seek to provide statistics where possible, this will be done with a great deal of caution and it will largely make more general conclusions, noting if new items of trade occur, if places of trade and banking change, and if new companies and borrowers are involved. In tracking the Spinelli’s locations of trade and the people with whom it traded and dealt in banking, this paper will also draw upon the methods of network theory.[new para]I anticipate that this paper will demonstrate that the Spinelli changed to having far more involvement in the trade of non-Italian goods, especially Flemish cloth, in the sixteenth century, and had long-term involvement with companies directly engaged in large-scale colonial trade. I believe that the paper will also show that they had extensive trade and financial dealings with Spain and Portugal, a point that is rarely addressed in analyses of the mid-tier Florentine companies, and that, like the great Florentine companies, they worked closely with German firms and also the court surrounding Charles V.

# Monday 8th October 2018, 12.30pm - Auriane Terki-Mignot (University of Cambridge)
Patterns of female employment in the Pays de Caux and the Perche, 1792-1901
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

The paper begins by exploring the sources available for full reconstructions of the female and male occupational structures of proto-industrial textile regions of France, and makes a case for the use of revolutionary population listings and nineteenth-century population censuses. Data on female and male labour force participation rates and sectoral distributions then enables an exploration of patterns of women’s work and their determinants, in relation with broader debates on the ‘French path’ to industrialisation. Comparison with the British case suggests that data on women’s work could be integral to our understanding of processes of modern economic growth, and force us to redefine current understandings of ‘industrialisation’ and its chronology.

# Monday 27th November 2017, 12.30pm - Sara Caputo (University of Cambridge)
Building a Demographic Profile of Foreign Seamen in the British Navy, 1793-1815
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 20th November 2017, 12.30pm - Sabine Schneider (University of Cambridge)
Imperial Germany, Pax Britannica, and the Political Economy of the Gold Standard, 1871-1914
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 13th November 2017, 12.30pm - Damilola A. Adebayo (University of Cambridge)
Between Economic Pragmatism and the 'Civilising Mission': Making a Case for the Domestic Electrification of Southern Nigeria, 1930 to 1960
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 6th November 2017, 12.30pm - Callum Easton (University of Cambridge)
Crime, Punishment, and Body Snatching: Contested Memories of the 1797 Naval Mutinies
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 30th October 2017, 12.30pm - Kayt Button (University of Cambridge)
The Central Electricity Board - Accidental Conservationists?
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 23rd October 2017, 12.30pm - Jonah Miller (King's College London)
The patriarchal republic: local officeholding in early modern England
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 6th March 2017, 12.30pm - Speaker to be confirmed
MPhil Presentations Part II
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 27th February 2017, 12.30pm - Speaker to be confirmed
MPhil Presentations Part I
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 13th February 2017, 12.30pm - Francisco Beltrán Tapia (Cambridge)
Where are the missing girls? Gender discrimination in 19th-century Spain
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 30th January 2017, 12.30pm - Ana Avino-de-Pablo (Ghent)
The Treaty of Westminster: a turning point for the Anglo Iberian trade in the late 15th century?
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 28th November 2016, 12.30pm - Kathryn Gary (Lund University)
Men's daily and annual wages in early modern Sweden
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 21st November 2016, 12.30pm - Walter Jansson (University of Cambridge)
Finance and regional growth in Britain, 1870-1913
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 14th November 2016, 12.30pm - Simon Gallagher (University of Cambridge)
Family structure and the admission of children to the workhouse in post-famine Ireland
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 7th November 2016, 12.30pm - Niccolò Serri (University of Cambridge)
Welfare and industrial conflict in the Italian automobile industry, 1968-1975
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 31st October 2016, 12.30pm - Luis Almenar (University of Valencia)
Eating and drinking as a medieval peasant. Innovations in table manners in late medieval rural Valencia
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 24th October 2016, 12.30pm - Cheng Yang (University of Cambridge)
Occupational structure of late Imperial China, 1738-1899
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 17th October 2016, 12.30pm - Alain Naef (University of Cambridge)
Does sterilised central bank intervention have long term effects on exchange rate? The case of the British Exchange Equalisation Account, 1952-1972
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 10th October 2016, 12.30pm - Spike Gibbs (University of Cambridge)
Patterns of manorial office holding at late medieval and early modern Little Downham, 1300-1600
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 29th February 2016, 12.30pm - Leslie Chang, Jacapo Satori, Ryan Ripamonti, Emiliano Travieso, and Aditya Basrur (University of Cambridge)
M. Phil Presentations II. Financial and Business History
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 22nd February 2016, 12.30pm - Daniel Allemann, Stephanie Ternullo, Rosa Hodgkin, Connor Lempriere, and Callum Easton (University of Cambridge)
M.Phil Presentations I. Economics, Politics and Policy
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 25th January 2016, 12.30pm - Sebastian Keibek (University of Cambridge)
The male occupational structure of England and Wales, 1700-1850
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 18th January 2016, 12.30pm - Paco Ruzzante (University of Cambridge)
Beveridge calling: The social insurance and allied services and the Mediterranean welfare model, 1942-1950s
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 30th November 2015, 12.30pm - Alice Dolan (Institute of Historical Research)
What was linen? Flax and hemp at home and work in 18th-century England
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 23rd November 2015, 12.30pm - Josh Ivinson (Cambridge)
The local and transnational organisation of the nascent Newfoundland dry cod trade, 1550-1650
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 16th November 2015, 12.30pm - Nikita Dmtriev (Pantheon-Sorbonne)
Land market and the long 12th century transformation in Foligno county
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 9th November 2015, 12.30pm - Craig McMahon (Cambridge)
A comparative analysis of payday lending in America and Britain, 1900-1930s
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 2nd November 2015, 12.30pm - Partha Shil (Cambridge)
Recruitment of constabulary labour in colonial Bengal 1861-1900
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 26th October 2015, 12.30pm - Toby Salisbury (Cambridge)
Poaching and sedition in thirteenth century England
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 19th October 2015, 12.30pm - Miguel Morin (Cambridge)
Adapting to workplace technological change over the long run: Evidence from US longitudinal data
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 12th October 2015, 12.30pm - Mike Schraer (Cambridge)
Land and credit in the asset allocations of the Jews in late 14th-century Zaragoza
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 9th March 2015, 12.30pm - Alexandra Digby/Neil Gandhi (Cambridge)
MPhil Presentations
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 2nd March 2015, 12.30pm - Ellen Nye/Tim Rudnicki/Cheng Yang (Cambridge)
MPhil Presentations
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 26th January 2015, 12.30pm - Marta Musso (Cambridge)
The Oil Industry in the Algerian Decolonisation Process
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 1st December 2014, 12.30pm - Hillary Taylor (Yale)
The Affective Economy of Social Relations in Early Modern England
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 24th November 2014, 12.30pm - Stephen Pierpoint (Cambridge)
The Fiscal-Military State and the Land Tax - Observations from Kent and London
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 17th November 2014, 12.30pm - Corinne Boter (Wageningen)
Ideal vs Reality? The Ideal of the Breadwinner-Homemaker Household in Industrializing Regions in the Netherlands, ca. 1890
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 3rd November 2014, 12.30pm - Mingjie Xu (Cambridge)
Disorder and Rebellion in Cambridgeshire in 1381
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 27th October 2014, 12.30pm - Imogen Wedd (Cambridge)
Reconstructing Yeoman Communities in Early Modern Kent
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 20th October 2014, 12.30pm - Keith Sugden (Cambridge)
Note change of speaker
The impact of mechanization upon female and male employment in the English textile industry, circa 1780-1851
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 13th October 2014, 12.30pm - Carolyn Dougherty (York)
Note change of start time: 12.30pm
Carrying Trade
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 10th March 2014, 1.00pm - Sophie McGeevor (Cambridge)
What can autobiographies tell us about women's time-use in 19th century England?
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 17th February 2014, 1.00pm - Vellore Arti (Oxford)
"The Dust Was Long in Settling": Human Capital and the Lasting Impact of the American Dust Bowl
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 3rd February 2014, 1.00pm - Caroline Rusterholtz (University of Fribourg)
The transformation of the costs of children and its impact on reproductive behaviour: a comparative analysis of the second demographic transition in Switzerland
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 27th January 2014, 1.00pm - Sebastian Keibek (Cambridge)
Probate records as a source of occupational information
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 2nd December 2013, 1.00pm - Lyn Boothman (Cambridge)
Office holding, social status and stability in a small town, 1661-1861
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 25th November 2013, 1.00pm - Simon Abernethy (Cambridge)
Deceptive data? The New Survey of London Life and Labour, 1928-31
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 18th November 2013, 1.00pm - Edmond Smith (Cambridge)
The multiplicitous networks of the East India Company, 1599-1603
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 11th November 2013, 1.00pm - Adam Crymble (Cambridge)
Measuring Immigrant Crime in London: The Irish 1801-1820
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 4th November 2013, 1.00pm - Stephen Pierpoint (Cambridge)
17th & 18th century land taxes in England; 'hardly changed since the middle ages' or cutting edge technology. A Kent case study
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 28th October 2013, 1.00pm - Ellen Potter (Cambridge)
Female employment in the nineteenth century censuses: Methods, pitfalls, and prostitutes
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 21st October 2013, 1.00pm - Xuesheng You (Cambridge)
'Kin-servant' in 1881 British Census Enumerators' Books: Actual Work or Random Enumeration
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 14th October 2013, 1.00pm - Anne Hanley (Cambridge)
Venereology at the Polyclinic, 1899-1914
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Monday 17th June 2013, 1.00pm - Keith Sugden, Cambridge
The Male Occupational Structure of Norwich, circa 1720-1841: Evidence from Quarter Session and Other Records
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

The timing of the decline of the Norwich stuffs industry remains the subject of debate. Some believed it occurred during the eighteenth century, some think it held on until well into the nineteenth, post mechanization of worsted manufacture. This paper utilizes a number of occupational sources to pin down the date in an attempt to throw some light onto the discussion.

# Monday 25th February 2013, 1.00pm - Atiyab Sultan
Impoverishing development? Institution-building in Colonial Punjab (1849-1947)
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

Available Soon

# Monday 19th November 2012, 1.00pm - Xuesheng You (Cambridge Group)
Widows' Work: Some Evidence from the 1881 Census Enumerators' Books
Venue: Seminar room, Departement of Geography main building, Downing Site

Available Soon

# Monday 29th October 2012, 1.00pm - Charles Read (Cambridge)
The Irish Famine: Britain’s Biggest Economic Policy Failure?
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

“The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine”. (John Mitchel) Nationalist and revisionist historians have furiously debated British culpability for the famine, instead of examining modern Britain’s worst social and economic disaster in terms of economic policy. This paper takes this new approach to topic, arguing that instead of the British running a “laissez-faire” policy towards the famine, there was a consistent relief policy based on supply-side ideas popular at the time. But these policies misunderstood the underlying cause of the famine, a collapse in monetary incomes, which instead accidentally made Ireland’s problems in the 1840s much worse.

# Monday 22nd October 2012, 1.00pm - Kate Boehme (Cambridge)
Linking Business and Philanthropy: The Social Concerns and Philanthropic Behaviours of Bombay's Mercantile Elite, 1845-1870
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

In the nineteenth century, Bombay became a hub for the export of raw Indian goods such as opium and cotton to overseas locations across the Indian Ocean and to as far away as China. In particular, the dramatic increase in commercial activities brought about by the trade with China facilitated the emergence of a powerful Indian merchant class that possessed great wealth and exerted considerable influence in local political and social matters. This group has been credited by some historians as engaging in some of the earliest coordinated public activity in India and, later in the century, developed coherent economically nationalist discourse. In this paper I will explore the development of this group’s civic mindedness and emerging focus on “Indian” issues through the lens of their philanthropic activities. Through an analysis of their patterns of giving it is possible to gain a greater understanding of how such donations were made through the cooperative efforts of Indian mercantilists from a number of different caste backgrounds, as well as how such giving indicated a growing concern with the general welfare of the Indian community in Bombay.

# Monday 28th May 2012, 12.45pm - Sandra de la Torre Gonzalo (University of Zaragoza)
Business and politics in late medieval Iberia: mercantile elites in the Kingdom of Aragon (1380-1430)
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

Recent works on late-medieval commerce in the Crown of Aragon have made clear the importance of a group of businessmen settled in Zaragoza, the capital of the kingdom of Aragon. At the end of the fourteenth century and beginning of the fifteenth, this small group of businessmen intervened on a large scale in the financing of the state, principally through the market of the institutional public debt and hiring the commercial taxes of the kingdom. Their important businesses suppose the mobilization of very high sums of money and the formation of leading commercial companies that promote mercantile and family connections that spread over the whole kingdom and the Crown from the interior of the Peninsula and the south of France towards the Mediterranean Sea.
The aim of this paper is to provide an overview and an analysis of the political role of this financial and commercial elite. Therefore, we are interested in the targets and the strategies of these people, and their capacity for political performance, expressed in their patrimonies (financial, mercantile, territorial), professional activities, family behaviors and the construction of social networks.
My prosopographical research offers an intermediate approach between the studies on the individual protagonists and the large social groups, and has proved its efficiency in analyzing dispersed and fragmentary sources like the ones we have at our disposal.

# Monday 21st May 2012, 12.45pm - Irene Haycock (University of Cambridge)
Aspects of Agrarian Change in South Staffordshire: A Case Study of Kingswinford, 1650 to 1750
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

This paper examines the nature and extent of agrarian change and early industrial change in the parish of Kingswinford, south Staffordshire (now the West Midlands) in the early modern period. It addresses the dearth of work on pastoral regions as opposed to the much studied arable eastern and southern areas of England. Staffordshire is a county renowned for its precocious early population growth, and early industrial development in minerals such as coal, iron, metal-wares, and glass. It is a classic area of by-employment where, according to Thirsk, farming households took up domestic manufacture when work was slack. Using probate documents (and parish registers for a wider context) a quantitative analysis finds that the wealth of the whole sample of the parish and that of farmers and of the by-employed significantly decreased over time; the wealth-gap between the farmers and industrialists increasingly narrowed. The incentive to become by-employed must lie with the industrialists rather than with farming households, since the farmers were the richer of the two according to gross inventory wealth. However, there were proportionately less of the inventoried population practising by-employment as time progressed.
With regard to changing farming patterns in a predominately pastoral region, the proportions of those involved in mixed farming and keeping livestock significantly decreased over time, particularly in sheep husbandry. The proportion of those farming, in terms of both those with an appropriate occupational designator or with the accoutrements of husbandry appraised in an inventory, appeared to be decreasing in the area with reasons for this decline difficult to determine.

# Monday 5th March 2012, 12.45pm - Richard Jones (University of Cambridge)
The Curious Case of Yorkshire Luddism
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

This argument-driven paper will probe the industrial precedents and
cultural legacy of machine breaking in the West Riding of Yorkshire during
the spring of 1812. The central analysis will characterise Luddism as a
conservative economic and social phenomenon with a provenance in the sense
of entitlement found in earlier trade societies, and argue against seeing
the movement as part of the broader sweep of nineteenth-century political
development.

Although the paper will focus on Luddism in Yorkshire, it will be argued
that the analysis and conclusions can be (substantively) extended to the
other industrial regions in which unrest occurred. A range of evidential
classes will be harnessed in support of this argument, including Luddite
letters, prosecution papers from the Home Office and Treasury Solicitor
deposits at Kew, judicial records from Yorkshire, and a corpus of regional
fiction.

# Monday 27th February 2012, 12.45pm - David Filtness (University of Cambridge)
Schools of Industry and Habits of Industriousness: Making childhood pay in the early Nineteenth Century
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

Amid the wars and economic distress of the late Eighteenth and
early Nineteenth centuries, an influential paradigm shift was occurring
whereby a governing ethic of paternalistic moral economy transitioned into
one of political economy, entailing a discursive re-imagining of the poor
as those who existed in a condition of poverty rather than as individuals
who were poor. This subtle recalibration of the terms of the poor-law
debate drew on recent trends casting the poor as the subject of statistics;
constituting a quantifiable and aggregated morass that could be tamed by
the application of macro-economic principles and the realisation of
self-responsibility on the part of the poor. Nowhere was this discourse
more evidenced or more influential than as it pertained to the experience
of childhood and the agency of children. Particular emphasis was placed on
the economic contribution of youngsters when as children and as future
adults, with a raft of literature detailing policies and institutions for
putting them to work. Children should be bred up into habits of industry’
appropriate to their station, placed into workhouses or ‘schools of
industry’ so as to contribute to their upkeep, and at all times supervised
and molded into ‘useful’ citizens. Impassioned rhetoric espousing the
economic exploitation of children was homologous to that exhorting that the
poor be put to work; such discourse was obsessed with economy and
cost-effectiveness, and there was no space for idle or relaxed youths in
such a schema. By examining the school of industry movement and its
contextualising literature we can understand better the social effects of
industrialisation and the Victorian moralities of self-help and charity
that did so much to pattern subsequent notions of Britishness.

# Monday 6th February 2012, 12.45pm - Lyn Boothman (University of Cambridge)
Studying the Stayers: occupation, kin links and stability
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

my PhD research examines the stable population of one Suffolk parish, Long Melford, from 1661-1861. This presentation will consider the relationship between occupation, social status, kin links and stability in the 1831-61 period and, if there’s time, relate this to evidence of social status and kin links in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

# Monday 28th November 2011, 1.00pm - Mingjie Xu (University of Cambridge)
The Revolt in Rural Cambridgeshire in 1381
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

The events of June in 1381 confronted the English government with a big scale in London. At the same time other areas similarly witnessed outbursts of concerted violent protest against authority. This paper offers an account of the events in rural Cambridgeshire. The account considers the violent incidents in the county, including their chronological and geographical distribution and various forms of violence, which establishes that the scale of the revolt in this region is limited. It also explores the rebels involved in the rebellion, including their social composition, organisation and aims, which show local peculiarities of the revolt in this county. This study, together with recent local studies on the revolt, reveals the complexities of the 1381 Revolt, which is further utilized to demonstrate the limitations of the extant two conflicting interpretations of the revolt.

# Monday 7th November 2011, 1.00pm - Simon Abernethy (University of Cambridge)
Women and Children First: A Brief Look at Working Class Women and Children Commuters in London in the 1890s and 1900s
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

When H.J. Dyos wrote his article ‘Workmen’s fares in south London 1860 – 1914’ he noted that a key problem for working class suburbanisation was the lack of subsidiary employment for women in the suburbs. This he claimed retarded working class migration from the centre. However, an examination of records from the London County Council and the Court of the Railway and Canal Commission show a small but significant number of working class women and children living in the suburbs and using workmen’s trains to get to employment in the centre. This paper examines how prevalent this practise was, the difficulty involved, and uses the limited sources available to give an indication of pay and employment.

# Monday 17th October 2011, 1.00pm - Joe Day (Cambridge Group, University of Cambridge)
"Go --West-- North-East Young Man!" Male & Female Migration in 1881
Venue: Room 101, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Site

Abstract not available

Core Seminar in Economic and Social History: archive

Return to the list of forthcoming seminars.

# Thursday 30th November 2023, 5.15pm - Martin Daunton (Cambridge)
All welcome
The economic government of the world 1933-2023
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

In 1933, Keynes reflected on the crisis of the Great Depression that arose from individualistic capitalism: ‘It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous – and it doesn’t deliver the goods … But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.’ We are now in a similar state of perplexity, wondering how to respond to the economic problems of the world.

Martin Daunton examines the changing balance over ninety years between economic nationalism and globalization, explaining why one economic order breaks down and how another one is built, in a wide-ranging history of the institutions and individuals who have managed the global economy. In 1933, the World Monetary and Economic Conference brought together the nations of the world: it failed. Trade and currency warfare led to economic nationalism and a turn from globalization that culminated in war. During the Second World War, a new economic order emerged – the embedded liberalism of Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – and the post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. These institutions and their rules created a balance between domestic welfare and globalization, complemented by a social contract between labour, capital and the state to share the benefits of economic growth.

Yet this embedded liberalism reflected the interests of the ‘west’ in the Cold War: in the 1970s, it faced collapse, caused by its internal weaknesses and the breakdown of the social contract, and was challenged by the Third World as a form of neo-colonialism. It was succeeded by neoliberalism, financialisation and hyper-globalization. In 2008, the global financial crash exposed the flaws of neoliberalism without leading to a fundamental change. Now, as leading nations are tackling the fall-out from Covid-19 and the threats of inflation, food security and the existential risk of climate change, Martin Daunton calls for a return to a globalization that benefits many of the world’s poor and a fairer capitalism that delivers domestic welfare and equality.

The Economic Government of the World is the first history to show how trade, international monetary relations, capital mobility and development impacted on and influenced each other. Martin Daunton places these economic relations in the geo-political context of the twentieth century, and considers the importance of economic ideas and of political ideology, of electoral calculations and institutional design. The book rests on extensive archival research to provide a powerful analysis of the origins of our current global crisis, and suggests how we might build a fairer international order.

# Thursday 23rd November 2023, 5.15pm - Bruno Blonde (Antwerp)
All welcome
The sweatshops of the consumer revolution. Economic growth, social inequality and material culture in Flanders and Brabant (c.18)
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

For decades historians have been occupied by the critical consumer transitions that marked the late early modern period. While initially coined as a “birth of a consumer society”, the newness, depth and the impact of the consumer changes in the eighteenth century have been qualified in decades of research. Eventually, the paradox of a “slow growth- and material culture-rich society” has been approached in the famous “industrious revolution thesis”. However, even this effort at peaceful reconciliation between moderate income growth and material wealth has been subjected to multiple criticisms. In this lecture, the critical approach to the consumer revolution will be pushed further. The much applauded consumer changes in the late early modern Low Countries account for an increased proletarianization, slow growth and accruing social inequality. On the basis of a comparative research into different urban trajectories across the Flemish and Brabantine urban network, the claim is that the consumer changes (the growing importance of affordable luxuries) were not a solution for a problem (stagnating real incomes and (s)low economic growth), but were a cause of them. In the absence of technological changes fostering productivity changes, the reorientation on “new luxuries” forcefully kept economic growth slow. On top of the global inequalities that were fostered by consumer changes, more attention needs to be paid to the local ramifications at the supply side of the consumer revolution. This will be illustrated by evidence for Brabant and Flanders, two economic core regions of the Low Countries.

# Thursday 16th November 2023, 5.15pm - Alessandro Nuvolari (Pisa)
All welcome
Railroads and inventive activities: new evidence from Italy, 1855-1914
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

Transport infrastructures are a driving force of the diffusion of knowledge and inventive activities. Since the pioneering study of Sokoloff (1988), which established a link between inventive activities and the proximity to navigable waterways in the United States, there has been a stream of research studying the impact of transport infrastructures on the rate and direction of inventive activity in different historical contexts (e.g., Andersson, Berger, and Prawitz 2021; Tsiachtsiras 2023). In Italy, the railroad expansion coincided with the first steps of the industrialization process. This makes Italy a relevant case-study to historically assess the role of the development of transport systems in latecomer industrializing countries.

This paper analyses the impact of railroad expansion on municipal-level measures of innovation in Italy by using two new geo-localized datasets. The first comprises all patents registered in Italy by Italian residents from 1855 to 1914, while the second provides a GIS database indicating the year of construction of all Italian railroad stops. In our main exercise, we use a staggered difference-in-differences empirical approach (Callaway and Sant’Anna 2021).

We find that railroads impacted on the intensity and diffusion of innovation mostly during the first wave of railway construction (“Destra Storica”) which was mostly shaped by political and military goals and nation-building concerns (about 1861-1880). In contrast, the second wave (“Sinistra Storica”) of railway construction (1879-1896) which was supposedly driven by more genuine economic factors, seems to have a more limited impact.

# Thursday 9th November 2023, 5.15pm - Paul Warde, Cambridge
All welcome
Tamlaght 1840: Work, gender and production in a proto-industrial community
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

This paper examines a simple question: what did people actually do in the pre-industrial economy? Many of the indicators used in assessing economic development, and understanding the economic choices available to households and individuals, rely on information about working days, types of labour, and earning opportunities. This information is often scarce, or must be inferred from outside commentators, or simply assumed. The paper uses a (possibly) unique survey taking in the northern Irish parish of Tamlaght in 1840, which gives an almost complete record of the economic resources available to hundreds of households, and highly unusually, detailed information on work by season. This allows a detailed breakdown of the labour input from men and women into specific tasks, and an understanding of productivity and returns. In turn, the information provides insight into the state of Irish rural society on the eve of the Great Famine, arguing that the circumstances of many surviving from small potato plots was a rational response to the pressures on the proto-industrial economy caused by mechanization.

# Thursday 2nd November 2023, 5.15pm - Béatrice Robic (The Sorbonne)
All welcome
New estimates on child labour and education in England and Wales (1870-1914
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

For a long time in Britain, children’s work and absence from school were likely bed-fellows, as emphasised by several historians of child labour and education. This paper attempts to determine the extent to which this was the case in the early period of compulsory schooling. It is based on an innovative approach, which consists in compiling, combining, and comparing two sets of data, namely employment and education statistics. By tracing annual changes in the number of children enrolled in public elementary schools (for each year of age in isolation), the maximum number of school-leavers under fourteen employed full-time is indirectly assessed. It is then compared, on census date, to the number of children officially returned as occupied, using both published and digitised figures. In addition, the extent of part-time work is estimated by collecting figures relating to absenteeism, partial exemptions, and out-of-school employment. This methodology also makes it possible to offer a revised chronology of the decline of child labour and to identify the short-term impact of education and labour laws on the average age at starting work. It is argued that, while State intervention in the child labour market was, in many ways, spasmodic, imperfect, and reluctant throughout, the education policies implemented in the late Victorian era were nonetheless instrumental in the elimination of child labour in England and Wales.

# Thursday 26th October 2023, 5.15pm - Jordan Claridge, LSE
Wages and labour relations in the Middle Ages: It's not (all) about the money
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

For long periods of history, a significant proportion of the labour force has received all or part of their wages in non-monetary in-kind payments. Despite its historical ubiquity, this form of labour remuneration remains poorly understood. This paper presents a framework which allows for the valuation and interpretation of in-kind wages. We apply our method to a new dataset of agricultural wages for labourers in medieval England (1270-1430), most of whom received a composite wage for which in-kind payment was the largest share. Assessing the market value of the wages these workers received, we find an increase in the relative importance of cash payments in the latter decades of the fourteenth century. We show that this was connected to a fundamental shift in labour relations, providing new empirical insights into the so-called `golden age of labour’ that followed the Black Death.

# Thursday 19th October 2023, 5.15pm - Leigh Gardner, LSE.
How was power shared in colonial Africa? Taxation and representation in the British empire
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

Who held power in colonial Africa? Colonial governments made policies which have had lasting impacts on the continent’s development. But they were constrained in many ways – by lack of staff and resources, and by their lack of legitimacy with those they ruled. Recent research in political science has shown that the survival of autocratic regimes in contemporary African countries has depended on the strategic use of patronage, either in the form of power showing with potential rivals or through the use of public resources. Similarly, British colonial governments used strategies of power sharing and resource distribution at various administrative levels to secure the stability of colonial rule. New data on the composition of colonial legislative councils and local governments shows how these methods varied between and within colonies, reflecting local economic and political circumstances.

# Thursday 12th October 2023, 5.15pm - Maria Bach, Walras Pareto Centre, University of Lausanne. (Paper jointly authored with François Allison, Walras Pareto Centre, University of Lausanne)
All welcome
A comparative history of national accounting in India and the USSR
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

We propose using a comparative history of national accounting looking at the same time, the 1920s, in two different places: India and the USSR. In both places there were attempts at defining and counting national wealth. In India, K.T. Shah and K.J. Khambata produced a national wealth estimate to measure the tax capacity of Indians. In the USSR, P. I. Popov published in 1926 with two dozen of collaborators the first “balance” of the Soviet economy for the year 1923-1924 with planning objective in mind. Comparison in the history of national accounting is particularly relevant because the fundamental aim of national accounts is to compare the performance of an economy across time and/or in relation to other economies. The Indian case study and the comparison between India and USSR are scant, if not completely absent, in the history of national accounting. Our aim is to bring India and the comparison with the USSR into the international debates on how measurement was and is done to better understand the relative progress of various populations and territories. Our case studies recover and connect intellectuals tuning into global debates on national accounting and taking part in dialogues on different ways of counting the economy.

# Thursday 5th October 2023, 5.15pm - Jeremy Adelman, University of Cambridge
Earth hunger: Global integration and the need for strangers
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Ever since trade, migration, and finance sutured the world together into one unit, people have been debating the rewards and risks of togetherness. This talk explores the main lines of argument about what it has meant to need strangers, their resources, their labour, and their ideas – and what it has meant for them to need “us.” Since the early nineteenth century, these arguments about interdependence have defined the meaning of modern life at a world scale. Some perspective on them will help understand the distempers of our own times.

# Monday 9th January 2023, 5.15pm - Chris Briggs, Cambridge
All welcome
Felons’ possessions and English living standards, 1370-1600
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate about changes in the material well-being of labourers, artisans and farmers in England’s countryside and small towns between c.1370 and c.1470 and compares this period to the sixteenth century. It introduces a hitherto largely unknown source that has the potential to shed light on household wealth: the lists and valuations of goods and chattels preserved in the records of the royal escheator and coroner. These lists were generated by the process of felony forfeiture, which saw the possessions of felons, fugitives and outlaws seized, valued, and sold for the benefit of the crown. The paper describes the felony forfeiture material; considers the methodological challenges involved in quantifying the evidence it contains; and presents and interprets new data on change over time in the number, value and range of goods owned by ordinary households. Overall, the felony forfeiture material suggests surprisingly little change in the ownership of household goods during the fifteenth century, despite this often being viewed in the literature as an era of significant shifts in consumption.

# Thursday 1st December 2022, 5.15pm - James Davis (Queens University Belfast)
The Flow of Information within the Markets of Medieval England
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Abstract not available

# Thursday 24th November 2022, 5.15pm - David Green (Kings College London)
CANCELLED: Post Office Lives: stories of life and death in the British Post Office
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

DUE TO STRIKE ACTION, this seminar will be moved to a later date (in Lent term).

Abstract: Based on the pension records of around 30,000 British postal workers who retired between 1860 and 1908, together with additional information about death, the Addressing Health project is exploring the dimensions and experience of sickness in the Post Office workforce. This individual level information provides an opportunity to compare health outcomes by person (occupation, age, gender), place and time. By following through a subset of workers(c. 8000) to the time of their death, we can also understand better the relationship between sickness and death. Preliminary results show distinct regional variations in health outcomes: Scottish workers, for example, took less time off sick than their equivalent English counterparts. Health outcomes were particularly bad for indoor sorters compared to postmen who delivered the mail, even in similar locations. The majority of retirements were the result of sickness, including poor mental health. By identifying these kinds of health outcomes, we can begin to understand better the significance of the workplace in relation to health, taking into account geographical as well as occupational and personal factors.

# Thursday 17th November 2022, 5.15pm - Samantha Williams (Cambridge)
The Poor Law, the Workhouse and the Construction of Ablebodiedness
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

The workhouse was at the heart of the reforms envisaged by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834, as was the concept of ‘ablebodiedness’. Welfare policy had far-reaching consequences, not just for those who were accommodated in the workhouse, but also for those recipients relieved outdoors, and to the wider working class and notions of manliness and womanliness. This paper explores how the New Poor Law contributed to discourses on the able body – and the disabled body – through a mixture of sources, from the Poor Law Report, changing poor law policy, the census, workhouse records, literature, illustrations, newspapers, and social investigation.

# Thursday 10th November 2022, 5.15pm - A.G. Hopkins (Cambridge)
Capitalism in a Colonial Context: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1921
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

This talk advertises a neglected subject: the role of entrepreneurs in Africa’s long-run development. It analyses the careers of 100 African merchants in the port-city of Lagos between 1851 and 1921 and a revises received opinion about their fortunes. They did not decline, nor did sole-ownership constrain their activities. They made the first attempts to diversify the economy and ensured that limited companies could be registered locally. All firms, indigenous and foreign, struggled during the inter-war period. Lagos merchants adapted by becoming financiers and rentiers. In doing so, they made a vital contribution to the large and diverse economy that characterised Nigeria after 1945.

# Thursday 3rd November 2022, 5.15pm - Sabine Schneider (London School of Economics)
German Silver Diplomacy and the Emergence of the Classical Gold Standard, 1871-1892
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Imperial Germany’s monetary union in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71) necessitated the liquidation of vast quantities of German silver stocks on world markets. Between 1871 and 1879, the German Chancellery engaged an international network of banks and refiners to acquire gold-backed assets in return for selling its silver in Europe and in South and East Asia. This paper reconstructs the Chancellery’s network of financial agents and presents the most comprehensive picture yet of the transcontinental bullion flows that underpinned Germany’s monetary reforms. Based on a wealth of banking and government records, the paper yields a more nuanced understanding of the geographic outlets and strategy of Germany’s bullion trade and its impact on the global silver glut that set in from 1872. The ensuing macroeconomic disruption that accompanied Germany’s demonetization gave rise to both prolonged uncertainty in bullion markets and growing diplomatic tensions across Europe.

Germany’s currency reforms not only released significant bullion and capital flows between the financial centres in Europe; the Chancellery’s secretiveness about its monetary operations also strained its economic relations with Britain, India, and the Latin Monetary Union. Bismarck’s government, as this paper argues, pursued a selling tactic of deliberate ambiguity to exploit its first-mover-position in the silver market. But its tactical advantage proved short-lived, and the government’s official silence about its remaining silver stocks skewed market expectations and amplified concerns over German ‘silver dumping’. Growing Anglo-German tensions over the Reich’s handling of its demonetization eventually culminated in the London ‘silver scare’ of 1875–76, an episode that fuelled international reproval of Germany’s currency diplomacy. This paper finds that the Chancellery’s strategy during the 1870s unintentionally stoked uncertainty around a global silver crisis and reveals how British diplomats and their German counterparts ensured that information asymmetries were gradually mitigated. It further shows that silver’s prolonged depreciation motivated tentative steps towards bilateral cooperation between London and Berlin, with the aim of reducing market volatility in the early period of the classical gold standard.

# Thursday 27th October 2022, 5.15pm - Jane Humphries (London School of Economics)
A Respectable Living and Women’s Work, England, 1270-1860
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

This paper argues that the cost of living respectably can be measured by what it cost to board and lodge the reputable. The methodology allows for changes in the composition of consumption, the introduction of new goods, and the inclusion of the costs of the household services needed to turn commodities into livings. Over 4200 observations, drawn mainly from primary sources, trace levels and trends in board and lodging costs for Britain, 1270-1860. Used to deflate wage series, the board and lodging costs provide an alternative account of long-run trends in living standards which can be compared with conventional welfare ratios.

Over 4200 observations, drawn mainly from primary sources, trace levels and trends in board and lodging costs, taken as indicating trends in the costs of a socially and culturally defined standard of respectable living. Essentially, the paper endogenizes the materiality of respectability and reads its value from the market signals of the past. In this way the paper provides an alternative approach to the cost of living, which, while not replacing conventional indeces, accommodates changes both in the composition and kind of goods and services considered essential for decency and in the cost of the domestic labour needed to transform this changing collection of material inputs into a decorous lifestyle. In this way it circumvents the problems with Laspeyres cost of living indices relating to new goods and to shifting expectations, and simultaneously uncovers the importance of household services in living costs. Respectable living, as it evolved in terms of both the categories of goods and services included and the particular components of those categories, required more and more expensive domestic labour. While the commercialized sector of this labour has been barely recognized, the unpaid sector has been totally ignored. To the extent that domestic labour was provided unpaid by a household member it would drop out of the cost of living as conventionally measured but the board and lodging approach reveals its necessity for a respectable living. The support wage-earners afforded domestically-occupied family members was recompense for productive activity, and a legitimate charge on family earnings not a gratuitous hand-out for a non-worker. Comparisons between board and lodging costs and the costs of the respectability basket both in relation to men’s wages provide a fresh perspective on living standards. They suggest that rising expectations muted the gains implied by standard welfare ratios. Periods of convergence and divergence identify eras when new goods and services, permanently excluded from the basket, edged into respectable living as understood by aspirant forebears and became reflected in costs. This alternative history of living standards suggests that the quest for respectability through its pressure on wages contributed to the industriousness of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and provided more work for those specialized in ‘housewifery’ whether waged or unwaged. And this raises a final more speculative point. A hedonic regression identifies the cost of the domestic labour needed to provide board and lodging of different types in different times and places, and so provides a market equivalent for the value of unpaid domestic service. Relaying these market equivalents into a full-scale computation of the historical values of unpaid domestic service would provide wholly new insight into understanding women’s contribution to economic growth and wellbeing, a vital task for the future.

# Thursday 20th October 2022, 5.15pm - Catia Antunes (Leiden)
Exploiting the Empires of Others: Reflections towards a Model of European Colonial Exploitation
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Early Modern European empires are portrayed and perceived as nationally geared enterprises, as entangled spaces at the peripheries and as zones of contact. In the Netherlands, these perceptions have filtered into the public debate that seeks to define material and immaterial responsibilities for the colonial past. What the historiographical perceptions, academic portrayals and public debate seem, however, to ignore is the role played by foreigners (being non-subjects of a specific king or republic) in exploiting the empires of other countries. It is thus important to determine how and why Dutch entrepreneurs (being those taking risks in matters of trade or production, introducing innovations, making decisions based on information that others did not possess and searching for opportunities where most perceived risk) participated in exploiting the English, French and Iberian empires, as Dutch firms are particularly prominent in the European colonial landscape. Since Dutch entrepreneurs engaged in exploiting the resources of those other countries, what is the future of the public debate in the Netherlands, and Europe at large, regarding a shared responsibility for the colonial past? The answer(s) to these questions can be found in the multiple public and private archives that house extensive collections of the firms that operated from the Dutch Republic into the four largest empires in Western Europe. By combining original and recently uncovered archival sources pertaining to the relevant men (and some women), businesses and activities and their relationships with fellow traders, investors and political powers in situ, this project carries the seed to change commonly held perceptions regarding colonial participation and how these perceptions are often filtered into the public debate. This socio-economic entanglement of empires may have resulted, I hypothesize, in a shared European culture of exploitation that is impossible to disentangle within public debates that remain nationally bound.

# Thursday 13th October 2022, 5.15pm - William H. Janeway (Cambridge)
The Necessity of Bubbles
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error and error and error: upstream exercises in research and invention, and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Each of these activities necessarily generates much waste along the way: dead-end research programs, useless inventions, and failed commercial ventures. In between, the innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy, from railroads to the internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment. And so, at each stage, the Innovation Economy depends on sources of funding that are decoupled from concern for economic return. Historically we can observe two such sources: states motivated by national purposes, defence or development; and financial speculation – bubbles. Bubbles are ubiquitous wherever assets are traded: from tulip bulbs to cryptocurrencies. But not all bubbles are the same. Occasionally, the focus of speculation is one of those transformational technologies which, when, which when deployed at scale, actually does create a ‘new economy’.

# Thursday 6th October 2022, 5.15pm - Jane Whittle (Exeter)
A New History of Work in Early Modern England: Gender, Tasks and Occupations
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Since 2015 Mark Hailwood and I have been collaborating on a project, funded first by the Leverhulme Trust and then by the European Research Council, that collects evidence of work tasks from the court documents of early modern England, developing a methodology which has many similarities to modern time-use studies. The work task database is now complete and contains records of 9650 tasks and the people who undertook them from south-west, northern and east-central England between 1500-1700. In this paper I focus how this approach to the history of work challenges existing ideas about the early modern economy and its development over time. In doing so, I argue for a more inclusive definition of work, and explore the implications of our findings for two areas in particular, women’s work and changing occupational structures. The findings demonstrate the involvement of women in all areas of the economy and prompt a re-evaluation of the history of housework and care-work. The range of tasks undertaken by men with different occupational titles is analysed, demonstrating the degree to which those with non-agricultural occupations remained involved in agricultural work, as well as combining crafts, commerce, and transport. Overall, our results show very little change over time at the level of the work task, which suggests a new perspective for characterising preindustrial economic development.

# Thursday 2nd December 2021, 5.15pm - David Fox
Locating cryptocurrencies in the Western legal tradition
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

Cryptocurrencies and financial assets represented in digital form on a blockchain are a recent development. They are however likely to move into the mainstream in the coming years as traditional systems for making payments and holding financial assets are converted to blockchain systems of technology.
This change in the technical form has presented all systems of private law with difficult conceptual problems. Many fundamental legal conceptions such as property, payment, holding and transfer are technologically dependent. They were devised throughout a long tradition of legal thought when the financial world was populated by tangible things, paper documents, and credit networks operating between legal persons.
This presentation considers how well traditional legal concepts can adapt to the new blockchain forms of delivery. Legal concepts which were developed in an earlier financial world will either need to evolve to include the new digital forms or else be replaced by different rules that directly describe the legal consequences of these new digital methods of dealing with currency and financial assets.

# Thursday 25th November 2021, 5.15pm - Nuala Zahedieh, Cambridge
The Atlantic slave system and skills in industrialising Britain
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

This talk responds to Joel Mokyr’s recent work emphasising supply side explanations for the unique mechanical competencies which characterised industrialising Britain. Mokyr pays little attention to the demand side of the human capital market and is especially dismissive of the view that the rise of the Atlantic slave system might have played a critical role. Using data on trade and patents, this paper argues, on the contrary, that overseas expansion, powered by enslaved labour, transformed the market for knowledge and skills and played a very critical role in shaping Britain’s industrial revolution.

# Thursday 18th November 2021, 5.15pm - Rory Naismith, Cambridge
Making money in the early Middle Ages
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 11th November 2021, 5.15pm - Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics
Tropical development
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

The scholarship on the history of economic development shows that countries in the intertropical zone have remained poorer than the rest of the world, suggesting that they struggle harder to achieve economic growth. What does tropical have to do with the struggle to grow? The talk will address that question. Defining tropicality as the composite of two conditions, persistent moisture-stress, and seasonality, and using examples from Africa and South Asia, I suggest that the struggle to grow is essentially a struggle to secure water and distribute water across seasons. Doing this with rainwater carries hazards, and groundwater is a finite resource, making the struggle harder as the process goes on.

# Thursday 4th November 2021, 5.15pm - Xuesheng You, University of Swansea
Railways, divergence, and structural change in nineteenth-century England and Wales
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

Railways transformed inland transport during the nineteenth century. In this paper, we study how railways led to local population change and divergence in England and Wales as it underwent dramatic urbanization. We make use of detailed data on railway stations, population, and occupational structure in more than 9000 spatial units. A network of least cost paths based on major towns and the length of the 1851 rail network is also created to address endogeneity. Our instrumental variable estimates show that having a railway station in a locality by 1851 led to significantly higher population growth from 1851 to 1891 and shifted the male occupational structure out of agriculture. Moreover, we estimate that having stations increased population growth more if localities had greater initial population density and for those 3 to 15 km from stations, they had less growth compared to localities more distant from stations. Overall, we find that railways reinforced the population hierarchy of the early nineteenth century and contributed to further spatial divergence. Their implications for the geographic distribution of population were large.

# Thursday 28th October 2021, 5.15pm - Ian Cawood, University of Stirling
Whitehall and the problem of public service in nineteenth-century institutional reform
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

The historiography of nineteenth public service reform has been, and still is, dominated by scholarly and professional focus on the battles within Whitehall to reform the behaviour of senior officials. This has led to an over-concentration on the 1854 Treasury Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, usually referred to as the “Northcote-Trevelyan Report”, and much over-exaggeration as to its immediate effects and cultural significance. This paper will attempt to place the 1854 Report within its social and cultural context and to contend that a genuine public service ethos emerged endogenously from within the branches of provincial administration in the years after 1832 and that the 1854 Report was an attempt to restrain and reformulate this ethos to suit the needs of the elite classes of Britain rather than the common needs of the British public.

# Thursday 21st October 2021, 5.15pm - Benedetta Rossi, University College London
Euro-American abolitionism in the African mirror
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

There is an extensive literature on Euro-American abolitionism, its causes and consequences, its merits and shortcomings. By contrast, little has been written about African abolitionism. The history of African emancipation is seen as structured primarily by the legal stages of European abolitionism. But what do we find if we try to write a history of African anti-slavery that prioritizes African ideas, voices, and political struggles? When, how, and why did Africans begin to challenge the legitimacy of slavery as an institution? How did Africans relate to European and American abolitionism? Who were the main ideologues of African abolitionism, and what were their networks and strategies? How do their approaches compare to those of Euro-American abolitionism? These questions are at the heart of a five-year ERC Advanced Research Project that started on 1 October 2020. At this talk, I will discuss some preliminary findings and ideas, and ask how (if at all) a better understanding of African abolitionism could modify our interpretation of global abolitionism.

# Thursday 14th October 2021, 5.15pm - Craig Muldrew, Cambridge
Capitalism – a concept too big to fail?
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

The use of the term capitalism is so pervasive today that trying to define what it means in practice seems impossible. There are many things we might term ‘capitalist’, but just as many exceptions and different ways of putting parts of the economy under state control. Thirty five years ago it was easier to define capitalism by simply pointing to what it was not –it was not a planned communist economy aimed at equality of access to, and distribution of goods and services. Now, however, capitalism is used to describe most economies, even that of the officially communist PCR. Yet, understanding it is undeniably crucial to any aspect of politics, individual choice, and collective action. This paper will examine how the term came into being in the early twentieth century, and then how different historians took it up to argue that it emerged in European societies in the period from roughly the Italian Renaissance until the end of the eighteenth century. The concept was used, and continues to be used, in many different and ambiguous ways. This paper will argue that greater understanding can only be gained by being more precise about how we conceptualize different aspects of the emerging European and global economy of the early modern period.

# Thursday 3rd December 2020, 5.00pm - David Todd (King’s College, London)
Champagne capitalism: the economics of French informal empire in the nineteenth century
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 26th November 2020, 5.00pm - Ariadne Schmidt (Leiden)
Prosecuting women: a comparative perspective on crime and gender before the Dutch criminal courts, c. 1600-1810
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 19th November 2020, 5.00pm - Alexis Litvine (Cambridge)
Comparing the incomparable: economic development in Britain and France 1700-1850
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 12th November 2020, 5.00pm - David Edgerton (King’s College, London)
The UK’s disappearing wartime imports 1939-1945: a statistical, ideological, and historiographical accounting
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 5th November 2020, 5.00pm - Joe Day (Bristol)
Internal migration in England and Wales, 1851-1911: the where, when, why and how
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 29th October 2020, 5.00pm - Harold James (Princeton)
Making a modern central bank: the Bank of England 1979–2003
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 22nd October 2020, 5.00pm - Peter Mandler (Cambridge)
Writing the history of education as social and economic history
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 15th October 2020, 5.00pm - Marlous van Waijenburg (Harvard Business School)
Financing the African colonial state: fiscal capacity building and forced labor
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 8th October 2020, 5.00pm - Mark Bailey (University of East Anglia)
The Black Death in England and the origins of the Little Divergence, 1348-1400
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 5th December 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Richard Smith, Cambridge
The Tyranny of a Concept: the Origins of the European Marriage Pattern
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 28th November 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Peter Scott, Reading
CANCELLED: The anatomy of Britain’s inter-war super-rich: reconstructing the 1928 ‘millionaire’ population
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

CANCELLED due to industrial action. See http://www.ucu.cam.ac.uk/2019-strike-faq/

# Thursday 21st November 2019, 5.00pm - Alexandra Sapoznik, King's College London
Did peasants plough? Agricultural technology and the growth of the medieval economy
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 14th November 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Guido Alfani (Bocconi, Milan) and Dr Matteo di Tullia (Pavia)
Roundtable discussion of "The Lion's Share: Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe" (2019)
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 7th November 2019, 5.00pm - Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Utrecht
Women Workers of the World United: Towards a global history of households, gender and work
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 31st October 2019, 5.00pm - Cheng YANG (University of Cambridge)
The occupational structure of China (1736-1898) and the Great Divergence
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 24th October 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Tracy Dennison, California Institute of Technology
The Political Economy of Serfdom: State Capacity and Institutional Change in Prussia and Russia
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 17th October 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Morgan Kelly, University College Dublin
The safety revolution in oceanic shipping, c. 1780-1825
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 10th October 2019, 5.00pm - Simon Szreter
Drawing on History for Radical Policy: Incentivising an Ethical Economics
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 29th November 2018, 5.00pm - Professor John Styles (University of Hertfordshire)
Inducements to technical innovation in the British Industrial Revolution: markets, materiality and the invention of the spinning jenny
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 22nd November 2018, 5.00pm - Dr Eilidh Garrett (Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure)
Movers and stayers: populations, movement and measurement in historical demography
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 15th November 2018, 5.00pm - Dr Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz (University of Amsterdam)
Conflict management in northern Europe, 1350-1570
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 25th October 2018, 5.00pm - Professor Patrick O’Brien (London School of Economics)
Britain's wars with France, 1793-1815 and their contribution to the consolidation of the Industrial Revolution
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 18th October 2018, 5.00pm - Professor Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale University)
Opening the black box of the common-law legal regime: contrasts in the development of corporate law in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 11th October 2018, 5.00pm - Dr Lucy Newton (University of Reading)
Women in banking: the introduction of the ‘Personal Banker’ at Barclays Bank in the 1970s
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 4th October 2018, 5.00pm - Professor Pat Thane (King’s College London)
Divided Kingdom: inequalities in the UK since 1900
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 30th November 2017, 5.00pm - Professor Ewout Frankema, Wageningen University & Research
Why Malthus wasn’t African. Reviewing explanations and implications of low population densities in pre-1900 Sub-Saharan Africa
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Low population densities and open land frontiers, or alternatively, the absence of Malthusian conditions, have been foundational to a range of deep explanations of long-term comparative development in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to theories of factor-biased technological change high ratios of land to labour have induced long-term patterns of economic specialisation in land and resource extensive commodities (Austin 2008). High land-labour ratios have also been argued to have shaped African labour regimes (e.g. slavery, pawning), lineage systems and household formation strategies (e.g. polygamy) (Domar 1970, Iliffe 2007, Fenske 2014). It has also been argued that scarce supplies of human labour have induced particular colonial policies with respect to labour mobilisation and commodification (Cooper 1996, Frankema and van Waijenburg 2012). In addition, land abundance and limited capacities to tax vast empty hinterlands have been pointed to as barriers to pre-colonial state centralisation (Young 1994, Herbst 2000).
Very few scholars, however, have made attempts to trace back demographic developments into the distant past (see Manning 2010 for the most important exception). The dearth of quantitative evidence prevents the field from engaging in a more systematic discussion of the possible factors that may have suppressed the growth of African populations before 1900. Of course, centuries of slave trading are part of such explanations as several scholars have pointed out (Manning 2010, Inikori 2007), but they are not necessarily the dominant factor. This paper reviews the possible explanations for the comparatively slow evolution of African populations in pre-colonial times by distinguishing time-variant from time-invariant factors, and by using variation in population densities around 1950 to develop some systematic arguments. In my discussion I will pay attention to at least five factors: 1) the ecological conditions of food crop cultivation, 2) ecological conditions for the survival of domesticated and wild animals, 3) tropical disease incidence, 4) deliberate practices of population control, 5) unintended checks on population growth. I will not try to weigh these factors and rank them in order of importance. Instead, my focus will be on the question how these factors may be related in determining the long-term evolution of populations in specific areas and periods of time.

# Thursday 23rd November 2017, 5.00pm - Professor Kevin Schürer, University of Leicester
Using 'big data' to explore household and family structures in England and Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

This presentation will explore the rise of ‘big data’ in historical research with specific reference to the Integrated Census Microdata database (I-CeM) covering England, Scotland and Wales for the period 1851 to 1911 and examine the potential (and problems) of such data. It will focus on a study in household and family structure for the period covered by the I-CeM data and provide examples of where ‘big data’ can add to our knowledge in comparison to more traditional localised studies – and where it can’t.

# Thursday 16th November 2017, 5.00pm - Dr Siân Pooley, University of Oxford
The children of the state? The social impact of welfare in modern Britain
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

This paper examines the social impact of private and public investments in the early years of people’s lives in twentieth-century Britain. We know a lot about the politics behind the creation of pioneering welfare provision since the 1880s, much of which sought to preserve and improve the lives of the nation’s young. These services included: legislation and organisations to protect children from abuse and neglect from the 1880s; infant welfare services, free school meals and medical inspections from the 1900s; and following the Second World War the payment of family allowances (from 1975 child benefit) and free healthcare. We know far less about the social impact of this care on children and their families. This on-going research examines the experiences of children and the impact of changing welfare policies in Britain since the 1880s. In seeking to place a spotlight on children’s embodied and subjective experiences, this project uses archived case files to consider not only how welfare provision was used, but also how these uses – sometimes unintentionally – contributed to sustained and cumulative inequalities. The approach taken to studying archived case files is primarily qualitative, seeking to bring together microhistorical studies of subjectivity, epidemiological approaches to the life-course, and the attention to power dynamics afforded by histories of gender and of childhood. The findings discussed in this paper focus principally on previously unexamined case files relating to children born immediately after the Second World War.

# Thursday 9th November 2017, 5.00pm - Ian Kumekawa, Centre for History and Economics
The first serious optimist: A.C. Pigou and the politics of welfare economics
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

The Cambridge economist A.C. Pigou was a founding figure in the economics of welfare. In the years since his death in 1959, Pigou has been figured as a pre-war liberal, a centrist, and even an anti-Keynesian conservative. This paper re-evaluates the politics of Pigou’s economic thought during Pigou’s lifetime. His enduring ideas about welfare were generated largely before World War I, in a period of Liberal optimism about the ability of economic science and the state to improve societal wellbeing. In the wake of World War I, Pigou’s own optimism abated. However, with the rise of the Labour party’s fortunes during and after World War II, Pigou returned to the hopefulness of his early work, reinvigorated by changes he saw around him.

# Thursday 2nd November 2017, 5.00pm - Professor Jane Whittle, University of Exeter
The gender division of labour in Early Modern England: a new approach with new findings
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

This paper presents the main findings of a Leverhulme Trust funded research project on ‘Women’s work in rural England, 1500-1700: a new methodological approach’. The methodology used aims, as far as possible, to mimic modern time-use surveys, by collecting incidental data about the types of work activities people were engaged in from court documents. In doing so it moves away from conventional approaches to the historical division of labour, which have relied either on didactic literature or records of wage labour. It also deploys a definition of work derived from Margaret Reid’s third party criterion, as an activity that could be replaced with purchased goods or services. The project has collected information about 4300 work tasks undertaken by men and women from three types of court document (church court depositions, quarter sessions examinations and coroners’ reports) from the southwestern counties of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Initial analysis shows that women dominated housework and care work, as we might expect, but their involvement in other areas of the economy was also high. Using figures that compensate for the under-recording of women’s tasks, women carried out 37% of agricultural tasks, 44% of tasks in craft production, 44% of food processing tasks, and 51% of petty commerce. Together housework and care work made up only 26% of the work tasks recorded for women. The paper will these findings, making comparisons with other similar studies of Sweden and SW Germany for the early modern period.

# Thursday 26th October 2017, 5.00pm - Dr Lluís To Figueras, Universitat de Girona
Cloth consumption and commercialisation in the Western Mediterranean before the Black Death
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

During the thirteenth century a large amount of textiles made their way from the manufacturing centres of Flanders and the north of France towards the Mediterranean cities. The cloth trade has been analysed by economic historians chiefly as part of a commercial revolution led by Italian merchants. New evidence (bridal trousseaus recorded in notarial registers from thirteenth-century Catalonia) shows cloth as a key element of the commercialisation of rural society. Flanders and northern France were producing luxury textiles as well as coarse and relatively cheap woollens that were distributed through a network of local markets and retailers (drapers) specialised in selling foreign cloth along with local fabrics. Changes in the patterns of consumption related to colour and quality of fabrics triggered a social awareness on clothing as a means of social differentiation. Cloth became crucial not only as a way to single out the clergy and nobility, but also to differentiate the wealthier from the poorer peasants and artisans. Investment in garments not only explains the success of a dense marketing infrastructure across southern Europe, it also stimulated improvements in the textile production in those areas. Several small towns in the medieval Languedoc and Catalonia tried to emulate northern textile centres by welcoming foreign specialist-dyers in order to improve the quality of their products. By the beginning of the fourteenth century Mediterranean fabrics were able to compete with the woollens from northern Europe. Despite the century before the plague, being considered a period of scarcity, in some areas of southern Europe at least, peasant households purchased textiles of a variety of origins and qualities and as a consequence they made a substantial contribution to labour specialization and the development of local manufactures.

# Thursday 12th October 2017, 5.00pm - Dr Phil Slavin, University of Kent
The Great European Famine of 1315-7 revisited: nature, institutions and demography
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

This paper, largely based on my forthcoming book ‘Communities of Famine’ looks at what could have been the single harshest subsistence crisis in European history: the Great European Famine of 1315-7. The discussion is linked to a larger scholarly controversy regarding the causes and nature of famine as historical phenomena. Some scholars consider famines as exogenous disasters, caused by natural forces; another school of thought sees famine as an anthropogenic catastrophe, brought about by purely institutional factors; finally, some historians blame the so-called ‘Malthusian trap’ in creating famines. The present paper uses the remarkably rich documentation related to the Great Famine in England, to test all three models of famine and determine which one fits the crisis the best. As expected, there is no uniform answer and it was a combination of all three factors (referred to as ‘meta-structures’), with their complex mechanisms and derivatives, that created the Great Famine.

# Thursday 5th October 2017, 5.00pm - Dr Anthony Hotson, Centre for Financial History and Darwin College
Respectable banking: the search for stability in London’s money and credit markets since 1695
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

The financial collapse of 2007–8 questioned our assumptions about the underlying basis for stability in the financial system. Anthony Hotson offers a reassessment of the development of London’s money and credit markets since the great currency crisis of 1695. He shows how this period has seen a series of intermittent financial crises interspersed with successive attempts to find ways and means of stabilizing the system. He emphasises, in particular, the importance of various principles of sound banking practice, developed in the late nineteenth century, that helped to stabilize London’s money and credit markets. He shows how these principles informed a range of market practices that limited aggressive forms of funding, and discouraged speculative lending. A tendency to downplay the importance of these regulatory practices encouraged a degree of complacency about their removal, with consequences right through to the present day.

# Thursday 1st December 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Osamu Saito (Hitotsubashi, Japan)
Industrialisation, inter-sectoral linkage and occupational structure: Britain, Germany and Japan, c.1850-1935
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Economists and economic historians since Sir William Petty have long held a belief that economic development follows the stylised sequence that, first, the primary sector declines and the secondary sector grows, then at a later stage the tertiary sector grows. If sectoral shares are defined with respect to output only, this probably holds in many countries. As for the labour force, however, the developmental sequence seems different. Findings so far available from the International Network for the Comparative History of Occupational Structure (INCHOS) have revealed that in Britain, the secondary-sector share of employment grew very little during the industrial revolution, in which the dominant feature was a shift away from the primary to the tertiary sector, while in the case of Japan, industrialisation was accompanied by a sluggish reduction in the share of primary-sector employment (no reduction in the number of farm households in absolute terms). Among the countries surveyed, Germany is the only one whose evolution fits in with Petty’s sequential pattern. In order to account for such diverse experiences, this paper focuses on inter-sectoral linkages as well as the varying capital-labour ratio across the branches in the secondary sector. On the basis of input-output tables available for Britain, Germany and Japan, calculation will be made of the direct and indirect effects that manufacturing growth would have on the creation of employment, which will enable us to determine to what extent the differential employment creation impact on the primary and tertiary sectors can account for the observed differences in occupational structural change that took place in the three countries.

# Thursday 24th November 2016, 5.00pm - Sebastian Keibek, University of Cambridge
The development of the male occupational structure of England and Wales between 1600 and 1850
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Historical occupational structures provide excellent insight into economic developments, particularly at sub-national levels, for which they are often the only quantifiable data available. This paper builds on earlier work of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911’ project. It presents new methods for addressing key challenges in creating reliable occupational structures, such as the allocation of labourers to occupational sectors, and the incorporation of by-employments. It combines the existing dataset of three million parish register observations with a new dataset of one-and-a-half million probate records in such a way that the strengths of each data source are used to neutralise the weaknesses in the other. This results in a set of national estimates at much higher frequency (every twenty years) than were available before, and going back a full century earlier in time, as well as the first set of robust regional and local estimates. These form the basis for a reflection on the existing literature on the long-run history of British industrialisation, in particular on levels of productivity growth and on the balance between national and regional forces of change.

# Thursday 17th November 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Chris Dyer, University of Leicester
Inequality and social mobility in medieval England
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 10th November 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Pat Hudson and Dr Keith Tribe
The Piketty opportunity: inequality, global comparisons and a new agenda for economic history
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

This seminar will focus upon a recently published collection of essays, The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-first Century: the Piketty Opportunity (Newcastle, Agenda Publishing 2016). First the editors will briefly explain the purpose and the structure of the volume. They will make clear that, in its attention to key definitions and concepts, relating to inequality, and in its focus upon regional specificities on a global scale, the volume attempts to promote Piketty’s work as a springboard for developing new ideas and approaches in economic history and for re-introducing politics and political power into the heart of economics.
Pat Hudson will outline some of long-standing debates, concepts, measures and methods, in economics and economic history that Piketty’s work exposes for examination. Comparative measures of ‘development’, growth theory, definitions and measures of capital and wealth, technological innovation, ideas about convergence and divergence, the central importance of politics and ideology in economic change – these can all be placed in the spotlight created by Piketty, with salutary implications.
In his insistence on the importance of understanding the dynamics and the implications of accumulation and inequality, Piketty offers a new angle on development. In his preference for induction, for new data gathering, for descriptive rather than analytical statistics, and in his questioning of the utility of multiple regression analysis especially in relation to complex cross national data, he opens up ground for a critique of approaches and methods that have dominated the fields of economics and economic history for decades. Piketty and his colleagues also fundamentally unsettle the assumption that the night watchman state and liberalised markets are good for growth.
Piketty’s data and his thesis (with their absences as well as their presences) demand that many lines of conventional research be given renewed attention, in particular the impact of inequality upon the distribution of financial assets and investment patterns, on aggregate and differentiated patters of demand (hence of innovation and economies of scale), on human capital (through unequal access to education and training as well as nutrition and health), and on the nature of the state and political instability.
Keith Tribe will next seek to open out issues of comparative method in the study of economic history, whilst also emphasising the major argument of the volume: that Piketty has created an opportunity to bring economic, political and historical analysis closer together. Drawing upon the chapters that address the specificities of the economies treated by Piketty as “the developed world” (France, Germany, Sweden, UK, USA), he will first point out differences in institutional structure and chronology raised by the authors, suggesting that these undermine the usual practice of making comparisons in which either an abstract model, or one particular national developmental model, is used both to elucidate basic trends and also to register “deviations” from this trend. He will argue that this is as much a problem for long-run economic historical work on one particular territory/state as it is for cross-country comparisons in a restricted timeframe. The big question is how best to make sense of social and economic development without falling back upon conceptual frameworks that suppress difference and impose artificial uniformity. This is both a very old story – the origins of capitalism, the emergence of individualism, the story of industrialisation etc. – but also an argument that seems to need constant re-emphasis, given the persistence of presentist historiographies of the past.
To move on from the opportunity that Piketty has created it will be necessary further to question the goals of growth and development: how to promote better social outcomes from economic growth, how to reconcile growth with equity and sustainability. The ways in which the success or failure of national economies (and of the international economy) might be measured will also need more sophisticated yardsticks than are currently applied, yardsticks that place distributional issues back at centre stage. The role of new technologies in determining growth rates and income distribution, in developing as well as in leading nations, will need more attention than Piketty gives it. Above all, we must take Piketty’s lead in finding better ways to link economic analysis nationally and internationally to politics and to the exercise of economic and political power. Economics in the twenty-first century, both nationally and globally, must be related to the trajectory of democracy and its abuses.

# Thursday 3rd November 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Bernard Harris, University of Strathclyde
The growth of sanitary intervention in nineteenth-century England and Wales
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

This paper examines the loans contracted by local authorities and other public bodies for public works during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The value of these loans has often been regarded as a sensitive barometer of sanitary effort, and they have been used to measure the impact of sanitary reform on mortality decline in England and Wales between 1850 and 1914. However, the extent, distribution and purposes of the loans themselves have rarely been examined in any detail. This is particularly true of loans which were authorized under Local Acts from the early-nineteenth century onwards This paper presents new data on the development of these loans following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In addition to loans which were sanctioned by the Local Government Board after 1871, it also examines loans which were sanctioned by the Public Works Loans Board after 1817, and by the General Boards of Health and the Privy Council after 1848. It also investigates the loans authorized under Local Acts from 1817. By combining data from these sources, we shed new light on the relationship between sanitary intervention and mortality change from the middle of the nineteenth century.

# Thursday 27th October 2016, 5.00pm - Dr Judy Stephenson, University of Oxford
Labouring in early modern London
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Although they are often referred to, labourers in early modern London are an ill defined and little studied group. They are usually taken to be the ‘unskilled’. This paper draws on business and institutional records to give long needed detail on labourers employment in London from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Using case studies from various sites around London it examines what sorts of work labourers did, in construction and elsewhere, how they were hired and deployed for it, how they were paid, and what their relationship to others working around them were.

The labourers that existing literature has referred to were semi-skilled assistants to craftsmen in the construction industry, such as masons, bricklayers and carpenters, and they worked in mixed teams in large firms. Many of them worked for the same firm or contractor for many years. This was not the only group, however. Large contracting firms of labourers deployed general or common labourers, who carried out digging and hauling work, across numerous sites for the Crown and City. Other unskilled men in brewing, maintenance, on the river, at docks, and in other trades were called ‘labourers’, and provided varying levels of strength and biological capital for varied levels of pay.

Labouring men were paid by the contracting firms who placed them, not by the institutions where they worked. Only a small elite of foremen earned the day wages of the traditional literature. The vast majority of London labourers earned substantially less, over unpredictable hours, lived without security of employment, and by the end of the eighteenth century were no better off than their predecessors a century and a half before.

# Thursday 20th October 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Paul Lovejoy, York University, Ontario
The economics of the ‘Second Slavery’ in the Jihad states of West Africa
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

This paper argues that an understanding of the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolutions from the late eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century must take account of the jihadist revolutions that swept most of West Africa during the same period. The paper specifically focuses on the political economy of the jihad movement and the economic transformation of the region that ensued with the foundation of the jihad states, particularly the Sokoto Caliphate, by far the largest of the new states. The Sokoto Caliphate, established in 1804-1808, in what is now northern Nigeria and parts of neighbouring Niger, Burkino Faso, and Cameroon, developed an economy based on slave plantations and a vibrant textile industry. It is argued that the economic ramifications of the jihad movement challenge many recent interpretations of the economic history of Africa.

# Thursday 13th October 2016, 5.00pm - Professor John Turner, Queen's University Belfast
Common Law and the origins of shareholder protection
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 6th October 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Gareth Stedman Jones, University of Cambridge and Queen Mary, London
'Pressure from without': Karl Marx and the politics and economics of 1867
Venue: Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

1867 was the year of the publication of ‘Capital’, and the intention right up to the spring of that year was to publish the whole treatise, not just the first volume. It was also the year in which the International Working Men’s Association made its greatest impact in Europe and in which growing political agitation in Britain resulted in the Second Reform Bill. My paper explores the connection between these events.

Quantitative History Seminar: archive

Return to the list of forthcoming seminars.

# Wednesday 6th March 2024, 1.15pm - Amanda Gregg (Middlebury College), co-authored with Amy Dayton (Strider Technologies) and Steven Nafziger (Williams College)
Shareholder Democracy under Autocracy: Voting Rights and Corporate Performance in Imperial Russia
Venue: Board Room (Faculty of History) and on Zoom

This paper investigates how the rules that corporations wrote for themselves related to their financing and performance in an environment characterized by poor investor protections, Imperial Russia. We present new data on detailed governance provisions from Imperial Russian corporate charters, which we connect to a comprehensive panel database of corporate balance sheets from 1899 to 1914. We document how variation in votes per share and other shareholder rights provisions were related to corporate choices of using debt vs. equity and whether these governance provisions correlated systematically with performance measures on the balance sheet and in terms of the market-to-book ratio. This investigation reveals the tradeoffs weighed by Imperial Russian corporations and demonstrates the surprising flexibility that Russian corporations enjoyed, conditional on obtaining a corporate charter.

The seminar meets Wednesdays at 1:15 pm in the History Faculty and online on Zoom
https://zoom.us/j/96176307098?pwd=aHNlWEZ4SHd1a0MrVkpUQ05aZVFuUT09

# Wednesday 14th February 2024, 1.15pm - Benjamin Schneider (Oslo Metropolitan University)
Technological Unemployment in the British Industrial Revolution: The Destruction of Hand Spinning
Venue: Seminar Room 5 (Faculty of History) and on Zoom

This paper analyzes the elimination of hand spinning in Britain during the Industrial Revolution and shows that it was one of the earliest examples of large-scale technological unemployment. First, it uses new empirical evidence and sources to estimate spinning employment before the innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. The estimates show that spinning employed up to 8% of the population by c. 1770. Next, the paper systematically analyzes the course, extent, and locations of technological unemployment produced by mechanization using more than 200 detailed qualitative sources. It first presents an estimate of job loss in hand spinning of cotton by the late 1780s. It then uses evidence from more than 2200 observations by contemporary social commentators, county agricultural surveys, and the 1834 Poor Law Commission’s Rural and Town Queries to show the breadth and duration of unemployment produced by mechanization. The destruction of hand spinning began to impact women and households in the 1780s, and the effects persisted until at least the mid-1830s. Finally, it shows that this technological shock likely had an unequal effect on family incomes that resulted from variation in household composition and local labor market conditions. The findings demonstrate that unemployment must be incorporated into analysis of the impacts of industrialization on living standards and highlight the potential long-run costs of job-replacing technology.

The seminar meets Wednesdays at 1:15 pm in the History Faculty and online on Zoom
https://zoom.us/j/96176307098?pwd=aHNlWEZ4SHd1a0MrVkpUQ05aZVFuUT09

# Wednesday 7th February 2024, 1.15pm - Konrad Wnęk (Jagiellonian University)
Demographic Losses in Poland during World War II 1939–1945. Verification of Mass Sources and the Method of Estimation during Border Changes
Venue: Board Room (Faculty of History) and on Zoom

The paper discusses the applied method of verification of source data collected by local administration units after the end of World War II in Poland in relation to demographic losses during this conflict. The basic research problem was the question of the reliability and completeness of the questionnaires and the tabular summaries compiled on their basis. Such questionnaires, however, are lacking for the areas of Poland that fell within the borders of the USSR after 1945, and therefore cannot be used to investigate population losses in this area. In this case, the results of the 1931 census and a lesser known census conducted by the occupying German authorities on 1 March 1943 were used. The analysis was hampered by border shifts and subsequent changes of occupants, so in this case methods of geostatistical analysis based on a population density grid were used.

The seminar meets Wednesdays at 1:15 pm in the History Faculty and online on Zoom
https://zoom.us/j/96176307098?pwd=aHNlWEZ4SHd1a0MrVkpUQ05aZVFuUT09

# Wednesday 17th May 2023, 1.15pm - Speaker to be confirmed
The occupational structure of the twentieth-century Yangtze Valley: institutions, gender, and experiences
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 26th April 2023, 1.15pm - Speaker to be confirmed
Occupational structures and the composition of the rich in pre-industrial Italy​
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

During the last few years, research conducted on the Italian property tax records (estimi) has led to the identification of relatively rare cases when these sources include good-quality information about occupations across society. Combined with other, more sporadic sources, the estimi allow us to get an impression of the occupational structures prevailing in different Italian regions and epochs, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Additionally, as the same sources also allow to establish the relative wealth of different households, it is possible to explore the occupations prevailing across different social-economic strata: beginning with the rich, who are those for whom we have the most complete information.​

# Wednesday 8th March 2023, 1.15pm - Dr Stefan Nikolic (Universita Bocconi, Milan)
Industrialization in the Habsburg Empire: A spatial analysis
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

We combine data from occupational and business censuses of the Habsburg Empire to examine the spatial concentration of manufacturing before World War I. We map industry location in 50 regions across 13 industries, differentiating employment in factory industry from handcrafts. We establish that industries dominated by factory employment were spatially concentrated, while craft industries were spatially diffused. Using occupational data for almost one thousand districts, we find that local agglomeration effects and path dependency were more important industry location determinants than market access. Exploiting different spatial units, we demonstrate in an historical context the relevance of the modifiable unit area problem.

# Wednesday 1st February 2023, 1.15pm - Dr Guido Alfani (Universita Bocconi, Milan)
Postponed due to industrial action. This talk has been moved to the Easter term, further details to follow.
POSTPONED: Occupational structures and the composition of the rich in pre-industrial Italy
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Faculty of History (stair access only) and online.

During the last few years, research conducted on the Italian property tax records (estimi) has led to the identification of relatively rare cases when these sources include good-quality information about occupations across society. Combined with other, more sporadic sources, the estimi allow us to get an impression of the occupational structures prevailing in different Italian regions and epochs, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Additionally, as the same sources also allow to establish the relative wealth of different households, it is possible to explore the occupations prevailing across different social-economic strata: beginning with the rich, who are those for whom we have the most complete information.

# Wednesday 26th May 2021, 1.00pm - Xuesheng You (Swansea)
Transport development and urban population change in the age of steam: A market access approach
Venue: ONLINE - Details to be sent by email

This article takes a market access approach to study the effect of a major transport development, the introduction of steam-powered transport, on urban population change for 415 towns in England and Wales between 1830 and 1911. The totality of the roads, inland waterways, coastal routes and railway networks recorded in available sources for these two dates were digitised with unprecedented accuracy, in order to build a multimodal transport network accordingly. Our baseline model produces the unexpected result that, on average, improved market access had a negative effect on urban population growth. More specifically, the elasticity of population change with respect to market access change was of approximately -0.25. We argue that this unexpected effect was due to the strong heterogeneous effects of market access according to initial town size. Indeed, our estimates show that while market access had a significantly positive effect on population growth in large towns, it had a significantly negative effect on small towns. We argue that this heterogeneous effect was due to the fact that improved transport networks reinforced agglomeration effects in large urban centres while diminished the dispersion effect that had previously protected small towns.

# Wednesday 19th May 2021, 1.00pm - Zijing Shen (Cambridge)
The occupational structure of Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta 1949-2010: A reconstruction from a High School Survey
Venue: ONLINE - Details to be sent by email

This paper reconstructs the occupational structure of Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta Region (PRDR) since the 1940s, using an original data source of a high school survey. This method, namely “Oral Quantitative History”, provides us with a new perspective and evidence to identify the changes in economic and social structure that occurred in the PRDR, and to assess the causal role of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of 1978. The reliability and correction of the data source are also discussed in this paper, via a comparison with traditional data sources such as the census and yearbooks.

# Wednesday 12th May 2021, 1.00pm - Dan Bogart (University of California, Irvine)
Transport and urban growth in the first industrial revolution
Venue: ONLINE - Details to be sent by email

During the first industrial revolution the English economy underwent a spatial transformation to go along with its structural transformation in employment. It became highly urbanized and, apart from London, its urban growth shifted to the northwest. This paper examines the role of transport and access to markets in causing this spatial transformation. Transport changed greatly with infrastructure improvements and technological and organizational innovations. We focus on those occurring before the era of railways and steam ships, when wagons, canals, and sail ships were dominant. We construct a measure of market access for 458 towns in 1680 and 1830 using a new multi-modal transport model and then estimate the effects of lower trade costs through changes in market access. Our regression model controls for various town characteristics, including coal endowments. The results show that changes in market access had a large positive effect on changes in urban population. The results contribute to a new understanding of the industrial revolution and spatial economic growth more generally.

# Wednesday 29th April 2020, 1.00pm - Yoko Morita and Chiaki Yamamoto
When did mothers work? Determinants of the labour supply behaviour of married women in nineteenth century Britain
Venue: ONLINE - Details to be sent by email

It is widely recognised that the labour force participation rate of women in England and Wales declined significantly during the second half of nineteenth century. The theoretical explanation of this decline is an association with Z-goods production by mothers getting more valued. However, empirical evidence supporting this explanation have not been thoroughly explored. While previous studies have been based on smaller samples compiled from collections of patchy data or datasets at a single point in time, this study carries out a comparative static analysis using the full samples of the 1851 and 1891 Census Enumerators Books (I-CeM data). Verifying changes in labour supply behaviours of married women between the two periods, this exercise suggests that married women became more likely to respond to husbands’ income and the importance of Z-goods production for childcare increased.

# Wednesday 29th January 2020, 1.15pm - Yuzuru Kumon (Bocconi University)
How Equality Created Poverty: Japanese Wealth Distribution and Living Standards 1600-1870
Venue: Seminar Room 6, Faculty of History

Despite its sophistication, Early Modern Japan, 1600-1868 had among the lowest real wage levels ever recorded, 40% of those in pre-industrial England. This paper shows that this puzzle can be partly resolved if we take into account the greater equality of land-holdings in pre-industrial Japan than in Europe. In England by 1700, 70% of the rural population were landless but in Japan only 13%. Paradoxically, as I show theoretically, in the Malthusian demographic regime of the pre-industrial world greater equality should generate lower living standards. I show empirically that landless families in Japan were unable to reproduce demographically. Had most households been landless, as in Europe, the population would have been unsustainable without higher wages. If, as many historians believe, high wages and living standards in western Europe explain the onset of the Industrial Revolution, then Japan’s failure to industrialize could have been shaped by its unusual pre-industrial equality.

# Wednesday 15th January 2020, 1.15pm - Dácil Juif (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)
The Impact of Copper Mining Activities on Schooling in Zambia from a Long-Term Perspective (1920 to 2000)
Venue: Seminar Room 6, Faculty of History

The “resource curse” literature links dependence on minerals to worsening socio-economic outcomes, including education. Copper mining has been the backbone of the Zambian economy for almost a century. This study assesses the impact of large-scale mining activities on schooling in Zambia at the local level since the 1920s. In regression analyses I control for a set of geographic variables as well as early mission location. Contrary to what previous African economic history literature has claimed, early mission location has no effect on the comparative development of education. On the other hand, mine areas overtake non-mine areas in education levels soon after mine openings. The mechanisms explored include income and wealth, urbanization, relatively skill-intensive job opportunities, and supply of schooling by state and mine companies in mine-proximate areas.

# Wednesday 15th May 2019, 1.15pm - Andrea Caracausi (University of Padova) and Giulio Ongaro (Bicocca University Milan)
Occupational Structures in the Republic of Venice (1780–1790)
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 27th February 2019, 1.15pm - Sir Roderick Floud
Purchasing Paradise: gardens in the English economy, 1660-1815
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

The landscape garden has been said to be England’s greatest contribution to European culture. Behind the hyperbole lies a century and a half of garden making, from the enormous formal gardens of the Restoration period and the time of William and Mary, which were then swept away by the landscape movement typified by Capability Brown and complemented finally by the more restrained designs of Humphry Repton and the picturesque school. These gardens represent the expenditure of billions of pounds, in modern values, in what is arguably the most conspicuous example of all of the luxury consumption of the period, literally reshaping the English countryside. But who paid for them, with what sources of funds, what was the nature of the industry which produced them and what was the impact on the economy? This paper explores these questions and in particular the role of public expenditure as well as the technological innovations which were spawned. These are topics which have been entirely ignored by both economic and garden historians but which throw new light on the economics, politics and social evolution of the long eighteenth century.

# Wednesday 13th February 2019, 1.15pm - Nikolaus Wolf (Humboldt University Berlin)
The return of regional inequality: Europe from 1900 to today
Venue: Room 12, Faculty of History

We provide the first long-run dataset of regional employment structures and regional GDP and GDP per capita in 1990 international dollars, stretching over more than 100 years. These data allow us to compare regions over time, among each other, and to other parts of the world. After some brief notes on methodology we describe the basic patterns in the data in terms of some key dimensions: variation in the density of population and economic activity, the spread of industry and services and the declining role of agriculture, and changes in the levels of GDP and GDP per capita. We next discuss patterns of convergence and divergence over time and their explanations in terms of short-run adjustment and long-run fundamentals. Also, we document for the first time a secular decrease in spatial coherence from 1900 to 2010. We find a U-shaped development in geographic concentration and regional income inequality, similar to the finding of a U-shaped pattern of personal income inequality.

# Tuesday 19th June 2018, 4.00pm - Cheng Yang (University of Cambridge)
Note change of date
160 years of occupational structure: Late Imperial China and its regions
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Despite extensive debates around West-East divergence in economic developments before and during the Industrial Revolution, empirical evidence of China remains thin. Using Xingke Tiben (judicial records of Chinese homicide trials), a hitherto unused source for occupational data, a new occupational database has been created that comprises individual-level occupational data and other key variables; over 31,000 individuals in 8,000 randomly sampled Xingke Tiben from the Qing Empire’s 320 prefectures in 1736-1898 are recorded. This paper discusses the core methodology (assessment of the inherent biases; reweighting) and key results of reconstructing the occupational structure of China and its regions from this database.

# Tuesday 23rd January 2018, 4.00pm - Frances Richardson (University of Oxford)
Were nonconformist occupations different? A comparison with fathers' occupations from Anglican baptisms in six Welsh hundreds, 1813-20
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure used fathers’ occupations from Anglican baptisms to construct a ‘census’ of adult male occupations 1813-20. However, in areas where nonconformity was strong, a significant proportion of baptisms were missing from parish registers, especially in Wales. This study assesses the availability of nonconformist baptism records in six Welsh hundreds, and analyses whether there were significant differences between the occupations of Anglican and nonconformist fathers or between nonconformist denominations. As fathers’ occupations were only available for an estimated 31% of nonconformist baptisms, the representativeness of this data is considered, and ways of estimating missing occupations explored.

# Monday 22nd May 2017, 1.00pm - Piotr Koryś (University of Warsaw)
The road from serfdom. The evolution of occupational structure of Polish lands in the long 19th century
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

In the year 1795 Poland ceased to exist. It was partitioned into three parts: Prussian, Russian and Austrian. One of the last “late-feudal” European states disappeared. The foundation of economy of Poland was agricultural sector, and rural, peasant labor force consisted mostly of serfs. I will
show the occupational structure of Polish lands in late 18th/early 19th century and its evolution during 19th century (on regional level). Finally, the occupational structure of Polish lands before the outbreak of WWI was similar to the labor structures of other European industrializing peripheries. The analyzed territory is limited to the territory of Duchy of Warsaw and Austrian Western Galicia (then German province Posen, Russian Congress Kingdom of Poland and Austrian Western Galicia). This is the territory continuously inhabited by Polish ethnic majority, contrary to most of other territories included into interwar and contemporary Polish borders.

# Monday 8th May 2017, 1.00pm - Frank Geary and Tom Stark
150 years of regional GDP: United Kingdom and Ireland
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Estimates of regional GDP for the UK for the census years between 1861 and 2011 indicate that regional inequality displays a U shape. Outer Britain and Ireland caught up on London and the South East to 1911. Convergence became divergence after 1911. Between 1931 and 1951, convergence picked up again. Measured dispersion of regional incomes remained at historic lows between 1951 and 1971. This has gone decisively into reverse since 1991. The Republic Ireland has gone from being the poorest region of the UK in the nineteenth century to the second richest in the British Isles in the twenty first.

# Monday 6th June 2016, 1.00pm - Cristiano Ristuccia (Cambridge)
Saved by the British Empire: how the US escaped the Great Depression
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

This paper presents a new set of data on installed machine-tools in the metalworking sector that goes a long way towards remedying the long-standing knowledge gap on the evolution of US installed capital over the late 1930s and early 1940s that has crippled analyses of productivity dynamics in the central part of the twentieth century. On the basis of these new data, I challenge recent positive assessments of productivity in the 1930s (Field 2011), and re-formulate the case for the central contribution of WW2 to the end of the Great Depression on the basis of a export-led supply boom. Yet, by the same token, the war-related investment effort of the period 1939-1943 contributed little to the revival of the US peace economy in the late 1940s.

# Monday 25th April 2016, 1.00pm - Mark Thomas (University of Virginia)
Anglo-American productivity differentials once again
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

This paper re-examines the current standard interpretation of relative productivity levels in British and American agriculture and manufacturing, using, inter alia, new data from the US Censuses of Manufactures and Agriculture in 1850 and the Feinstein-Thomas input-output table for 1851, as well as a new accounting framework that places emphasis on value-added rather than gross output as the appropriate basis for comparison.

# Monday 7th March 2016, 1.00pm - Professor B. Zorina Khan (Bowdoin College, USA, and National Bureau of Economic Research)
Knowledge, human capital and economic development: evidence from the British industrial revolution, 1750-1930
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Endogenous growth models raise fundamental questions about the nature of human creativity, and the sorts of resources, skills, and knowledge inputs that shift the frontier of technology and production possibilities.   Many argue that the nature of early British industrialization supports the thesis that economic advances depend on specialized scientific training or the acquisition of costly human capital.  This paper examines the contributions of different types of knowledge to British industrialization, by assessing the backgrounds, education and inventive activity of the major contributors to technological advances in Britain during the crucial period between 1750 and 1930.  The results indicate that scientists, engineers or technicians were not well-represented among the British great inventors until very late in the nineteenth century.   Instead, important discoveries and British industrial advances were achieved by individuals who exercised commonplace skills and entrepreneurial abilities to resolve perceived industrial problems.  For developing countries today, the implications are that costly investments in specialized human capital resources might be less important than incentives for creativity, flexibility, and the ability to make incremental adjustments that can transform existing technologies into inventions that are appropriate for prevailing domestic conditions.

# Monday 1st February 2016, 1.00pm - Dr Jean-Pascal Bassino (ENS Lyon), Dr Kyoji Fukao (IER, Hitotsubashi University) and Dr Tokihiko Settsu (Musashi University)
Revisiting Meiji Japan's economic miracle: the structural and regional dimensions of productivity growth (1874-1909)
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

The Japanese economy embarked in the last decades of the 19th century in a process of innovation leading to an acceleration of economic growth. As available national accounts estimates (Ohkawa and Shinohara 1979) provide only country level figures starting in 1885, the distinctive features of the early phase of Japanese economic development remain a matter of debate and conjecture. Relying on new sectoral GDP estimates for 1874, 1890, and 1909, for each of the 47 prefectures (Fukao et al. 2015), we conduct a quantitative analysis of structural change during Meiji Japan’s economic miracle, accounting also for its regional dimension.

# Monday 11th May 2015, 12.30pm - Eduard Alvarez (Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain) and Professor Jordi Marti Henneberg (University of Lleida, Spain)
Note: this seminar will start at 12.30pm. Sandwiches and fruit will be available from 12.15pm.
Railways and population: spatial interactions
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

This work presents case studies that quantify the different impacts that the railway network has had upon population geography since the mid-19th century. The use of HGIS techniques has been a key element in these studies, facilitating both data storage and the development of spatial models. It helped us to obtain a series of qualitative and quantitative indicators that help us to understand the spatial expansion of the railway network. The themes examined here include: the geopolitical role of railways as an instrument for controlling boundary’s stability; the interrelationship between access to railway transport and population growth; the correlation between access to the rail network and the growth of GDP; the influence of local railway networks in shaping metropolitan areas; and how urban growth has been conditioned by the location of railway stations.

# Monday 27th April 2015, 1.00pm - Dr Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia (with Julio Martínez-Galarraga) (Cambridge)
Land Access Inequality and Education in Pre-industrial Spain
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

This paper analyses information from the 464 districts existent in mid-19th century Spain and confirms that there is a negative relationship between land access inequality and literacy rates. This result does not disappear when a large set of potential confounding factors are included in the analysis. The use of the Reconquest as a quasi-natural experiment allows us to rule out further concerns about potential endogeneity. Likewise, by employing data on schooling enrolment rates and number of teachers, this paper explores the mechanisms behind the observed relationship in order to ascertain to which extent demand or supply factors are responsible for it. Lastly, the gender composition of the data, which enables distinguishing between female and male literacy levels, together with boys and girls schooling enrolment rates, is also examined.

# Monday 23rd February 2015, 1.00pm - Dr Miguel Morin (Cambridge)
The labor market consequences of electricity adoption: concrete evidence from the Great Depression
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

It remains a puzzle that job creation was so low during the Great Depression despite the quick recovery of productivity. This paper tests whether the adoption of electricity can explain both facts. It uses geography as an instrument for the change in the price of electricity and the concrete industry as a detailed case study. It finds that cheaper electricity caused a decrease in employment and in the labor share of income, as well as an increase in labor quantity productivity and electrical intensity. The findings lend support to the theory of technological unemployment during the Great Depression.

# Monday 19th January 2015, 1.00pm - Professor Carmen Sarasúa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Women’s work and structural change. Manufactures in 18th-century rural Spain
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Economic modernization is understood as the process by which societies moved from peasant to urban, and production and employment from agricultural to industrial. The main indicators of this transition are the share of GDP originated by the industrial and service sectors, and the share of population in non-agricultural, i.e., industrial and service, occupations.This paper does two things: first, it calculates women’s participation in 18th century inland Spain, thus contributing to knowledge on women’s work and on labor market segregation by gender in pre-industrial Europe. Secondly, it shows that taking into account women’s paid work transforms our vision of the structure of employment in preindustrial times, and thus the conventional vision of how economic and social modernization occurred.

# Monday 2nd June 2014, 1.00pm - Dr Natalia Mora-Sitja (Cambridge)
Female employment, occupational structure, and industrialisation in comparative perspective
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Facilitated by the creation of new datasets under the INCHOS project, and using consistent labour force definitions and the same PST classification scheme, this paper will explore and compare the evolution of female employment in several economies since the nineteenth century. By examining in a comparative perspective the evolution of female labour force participation rates over industrialisation, and the impact of sectoral changes on female employment, this session will offer an analysis of the relationship between women’s work characteristics and economic growth.

# Monday 19th May 2014, 1.00pm - Dr Alexis Litvine (Cambridge)
French occupational structure and labour productivity: what can new estimates tell us about the pace and nature of French industrialisation?
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

This paper will use new data on labour force to discuss the evolution of French apparent labour productivity since the end of the C18th. It shows that revisionist historians (Cameron, O’Brien and Keyder) were far too optimistic regarding C19th French industrial performance, but that subsequent counter-revisionists accounts failed to acknowledge the essential structural transformation that defined the French model of development before WW1. Thus, this new evidences partially confirm Crafts’ assessment of France’s modest but not inconsiderable economic performance in the nineteenth century, though they significantly revise downward French industrial productivity throughout the period.  The paper also analyses the productivity gap between the two countries suggesting that whereas French industry mostly followed British achievements (emulation), the key difference between the two countries was in the structure of agricultural production. The combination of labour-intensive agricultural production and low concentration of industrial waged labour (generalised by-employment) made possible by the unique distribution of landownership was the keystone of French economic development before the war.

# Monday 5th May 2014, 1.00pm - Professor M. Erdem Kabadayi (Istanbul Bilgi University)
Occupational Structures of Ottoman Cities in Mid-Nineteenth Century: Regional Differentiation or Cohesion? 
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

For this paper occupational titles of entire household heads in 14 cities will be coded into PSTI and compared to each other. The source material of this analysis is an empire wide survey conducted in 1845. This year is relevant to assess the effects of industrialization on the occupational structures of major Ottoman urban economies in a comparative context. It falls in the immediate aftermath of the game changing international free trade agreements of the Ottoman Empire first with Britain and then with other European countries. Moreover, it is also close to the benchmark UK 1851 census.

# Monday 3rd March 2014, 1.00pm - Professor Richard Smith (Cambridge)
Reconsidering recent estimates of the occupational structure of late fourteenth century England
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Two recent studies of occupational structure using poll taxes of 1379 and 1380-81 surprisingly conclude that agricultural employment in late fourteenth century England accounted for less than 60 per cent of the combined male and female working population. This paper considers systematic links between the degree of evasion, which was very great between the two taxes, and the occupational distributions and the heavily masculine tax-payer sex ratios. ‘Missing’ males and especially females were disproportionately from the young unmarried section of the population where female participation rates were likely to have been high in a demographic phase when male labour shortages prevailed. Estimates of female occupational structures are made, taking account of the occupations of those who evaded and making different assumptions regarding female participation rates.

# Monday 10th February 2014, 1.00pm - Dr Mohamed Saleh (University of Toulouse)
The Reluctant Transformation: Modernization, Religion, and Human Capital in Nineteenth Century Egypt
Venue: Seminar Room 5, Faculty of History

Over the nineteenth century, Egypt embarked on one of the world’s earliest state-led modernization programs in production, education, and the army. The paper examines the impact of this ambitious program on long-standing human capital differentials and occupational and educational segregation between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. It employ a new and unique data source, samples of the 1848 and 1868 Egyptian censuses digitized from the original manuscript forms, to examine this question. Overall, occupational and educational segregation was not attenuated by modernization, both because the traditional institutions in production and education were still the major routes for skill-acquisition, and because the new routes for mobility that modernization created were themselves segregated.

# Monday 4th March 2013, 12.45pm - Mr Xuesheng You, University of Cambridge
Sandwiches and fruit will be available from 12.30
Women's work by marital status in England and Wales in 1881: Evidence from the Census Enumerator's Books
Venue: Seminar Room, Main Geography Department Building, Downing Place

This paper utilizes a digitized version of the 100% sample of 1881 Census Enumerators’ Books (hereafter CEBs) to investigate women’s work by marital status in England and Wales. Prior to the availability of this 100% sample of 1881 CEBs in a machine-readable form, analysis of women’s work by marital status in the nineteenth century was either done by using tabulated figures in a couple of published censuses or only a small number of CEBs confined to a small area. With the digitized 100% sample of CEBs in England and Wales, this paper can offer a systematic analysis of women’s work by marital status with a wide geographical coverage. The nominal data in the CEBs allow me to investigate the employment of single women, married women and widows through various aspects of the household such as co-residence pattern and kin’s occupation etc. This allows me to identify some of the important factors behind women’s labour force participation.

Additional seminars of interest to Campop members: archive

Return to the list of forthcoming seminars.

# Thursday 7th March 2024, 5.00pm - Juan Rivas Moreno, London School of Economics
Faith and Finance in the Early Modern World: The capital market of Manila and the financing of the Pacific Trade, 1668-1820
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

This paper reviews the role of endowment funds and religious associations in structuring the financing of the Pacific trade between Asia and Spanish America during the long eighteenth century. The city of Manila, the centre of this trade, evolved a model of trade finance different from the joint-stock East India companies or private networks and cultural coalitions, yet equally capable of solving the challenges of long-distance trade during the age of the first wave of globalization.

# Thursday 22nd February 2024, 5.00pm - Perry Gauci, Oxford
Friends and Countrymen: The London private banker and eighteenth-century society
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

This paper examines the emergence of a distinctive London banking profession across the eighteenth century. While the business side of this important development has received much attention, this study will prioritize the social and cultural forces behind this process as a guide to wider metropolitan change. It will analyse a variety of exchanges between bankers and customers as the former sought both professional and individual advancement. Their experience can illuminate the broader interaction of the commercial and landed classes at a key stage of societal transition.

# Thursday 8th February 2024, 5.00pm - Amy Erickson, Cambridge
'Let not the flesh seduce thy soul, but remember these things well and learn to spell': London girls’ education in the first half of the eighteenth century
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

Much has been written on the marked increase in literacy and publication of the later seventeenth century, especially among women, and on the girls’ schools and educational tracts of the late eighteenth century. This paper uses a sampler – that quintessential emblem of female education – to explore the range of education for girls in the capital in the missing first half of the eighteenth century.

# Thursday 25th January 2024, 5.00pm - Alexander Wakelam, Cambridge
A Run on the Bank of the Person: A crisis in London's informal credit market, 1761
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

In the summer of 1761, London commerce appeared on the verge of collapse. Newspapers spoke of the end of trade, thousands were hurried into debtors’ prison, and civic authorities demanded the immediate intervention of parliament. As quickly as the Compulsive Clause crisis arose – a result of misinterpretation of otherwise mundane insolvency legislation – it was forgotten, commerce restored unaltered as if nothing had occurred. This paper examines this previously unexplored panic in informal credit networks to reveal the surprising fragility of mid-century trade and highlight the contribution of population growth in the development of modern transactional mechanisms.

# Thursday 30th November 2023, 5.15pm - Martin Daunton (Cambridge)
All welcome
The economic government of the world 1933-2023
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

In 1933, Keynes reflected on the crisis of the Great Depression that arose from individualistic capitalism: ‘It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous – and it doesn’t deliver the goods … But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.’ We are now in a similar state of perplexity, wondering how to respond to the economic problems of the world.

Martin Daunton examines the changing balance over ninety years between economic nationalism and globalization, explaining why one economic order breaks down and how another one is built, in a wide-ranging history of the institutions and individuals who have managed the global economy. In 1933, the World Monetary and Economic Conference brought together the nations of the world: it failed. Trade and currency warfare led to economic nationalism and a turn from globalization that culminated in war. During the Second World War, a new economic order emerged – the embedded liberalism of Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – and the post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. These institutions and their rules created a balance between domestic welfare and globalization, complemented by a social contract between labour, capital and the state to share the benefits of economic growth.

Yet this embedded liberalism reflected the interests of the ‘west’ in the Cold War: in the 1970s, it faced collapse, caused by its internal weaknesses and the breakdown of the social contract, and was challenged by the Third World as a form of neo-colonialism. It was succeeded by neoliberalism, financialisation and hyper-globalization. In 2008, the global financial crash exposed the flaws of neoliberalism without leading to a fundamental change. Now, as leading nations are tackling the fall-out from Covid-19 and the threats of inflation, food security and the existential risk of climate change, Martin Daunton calls for a return to a globalization that benefits many of the world’s poor and a fairer capitalism that delivers domestic welfare and equality.

The Economic Government of the World is the first history to show how trade, international monetary relations, capital mobility and development impacted on and influenced each other. Martin Daunton places these economic relations in the geo-political context of the twentieth century, and considers the importance of economic ideas and of political ideology, of electoral calculations and institutional design. The book rests on extensive archival research to provide a powerful analysis of the origins of our current global crisis, and suggests how we might build a fairer international order.

# Thursday 23rd November 2023, 5.15pm - Bruno Blonde (Antwerp)
All welcome
The sweatshops of the consumer revolution. Economic growth, social inequality and material culture in Flanders and Brabant (c.18)
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

For decades historians have been occupied by the critical consumer transitions that marked the late early modern period. While initially coined as a “birth of a consumer society”, the newness, depth and the impact of the consumer changes in the eighteenth century have been qualified in decades of research. Eventually, the paradox of a “slow growth- and material culture-rich society” has been approached in the famous “industrious revolution thesis”. However, even this effort at peaceful reconciliation between moderate income growth and material wealth has been subjected to multiple criticisms. In this lecture, the critical approach to the consumer revolution will be pushed further. The much applauded consumer changes in the late early modern Low Countries account for an increased proletarianization, slow growth and accruing social inequality. On the basis of a comparative research into different urban trajectories across the Flemish and Brabantine urban network, the claim is that the consumer changes (the growing importance of affordable luxuries) were not a solution for a problem (stagnating real incomes and (s)low economic growth), but were a cause of them. In the absence of technological changes fostering productivity changes, the reorientation on “new luxuries” forcefully kept economic growth slow. On top of the global inequalities that were fostered by consumer changes, more attention needs to be paid to the local ramifications at the supply side of the consumer revolution. This will be illustrated by evidence for Brabant and Flanders, two economic core regions of the Low Countries.

# Thursday 16th November 2023, 5.15pm - Alessandro Nuvolari (Pisa)
All welcome
Railroads and inventive activities: new evidence from Italy, 1855-1914
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

Transport infrastructures are a driving force of the diffusion of knowledge and inventive activities. Since the pioneering study of Sokoloff (1988), which established a link between inventive activities and the proximity to navigable waterways in the United States, there has been a stream of research studying the impact of transport infrastructures on the rate and direction of inventive activity in different historical contexts (e.g., Andersson, Berger, and Prawitz 2021; Tsiachtsiras 2023). In Italy, the railroad expansion coincided with the first steps of the industrialization process. This makes Italy a relevant case-study to historically assess the role of the development of transport systems in latecomer industrializing countries.

This paper analyses the impact of railroad expansion on municipal-level measures of innovation in Italy by using two new geo-localized datasets. The first comprises all patents registered in Italy by Italian residents from 1855 to 1914, while the second provides a GIS database indicating the year of construction of all Italian railroad stops. In our main exercise, we use a staggered difference-in-differences empirical approach (Callaway and Sant’Anna 2021).

We find that railroads impacted on the intensity and diffusion of innovation mostly during the first wave of railway construction (“Destra Storica”) which was mostly shaped by political and military goals and nation-building concerns (about 1861-1880). In contrast, the second wave (“Sinistra Storica”) of railway construction (1879-1896) which was supposedly driven by more genuine economic factors, seems to have a more limited impact.

# Thursday 9th November 2023, 5.15pm - Paul Warde, Cambridge
All welcome
Tamlaght 1840: Work, gender and production in a proto-industrial community
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

This paper examines a simple question: what did people actually do in the pre-industrial economy? Many of the indicators used in assessing economic development, and understanding the economic choices available to households and individuals, rely on information about working days, types of labour, and earning opportunities. This information is often scarce, or must be inferred from outside commentators, or simply assumed. The paper uses a (possibly) unique survey taking in the northern Irish parish of Tamlaght in 1840, which gives an almost complete record of the economic resources available to hundreds of households, and highly unusually, detailed information on work by season. This allows a detailed breakdown of the labour input from men and women into specific tasks, and an understanding of productivity and returns. In turn, the information provides insight into the state of Irish rural society on the eve of the Great Famine, arguing that the circumstances of many surviving from small potato plots was a rational response to the pressures on the proto-industrial economy caused by mechanization.

# Thursday 2nd November 2023, 5.15pm - Béatrice Robic (The Sorbonne)
All welcome
New estimates on child labour and education in England and Wales (1870-1914
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

For a long time in Britain, children’s work and absence from school were likely bed-fellows, as emphasised by several historians of child labour and education. This paper attempts to determine the extent to which this was the case in the early period of compulsory schooling. It is based on an innovative approach, which consists in compiling, combining, and comparing two sets of data, namely employment and education statistics. By tracing annual changes in the number of children enrolled in public elementary schools (for each year of age in isolation), the maximum number of school-leavers under fourteen employed full-time is indirectly assessed. It is then compared, on census date, to the number of children officially returned as occupied, using both published and digitised figures. In addition, the extent of part-time work is estimated by collecting figures relating to absenteeism, partial exemptions, and out-of-school employment. This methodology also makes it possible to offer a revised chronology of the decline of child labour and to identify the short-term impact of education and labour laws on the average age at starting work. It is argued that, while State intervention in the child labour market was, in many ways, spasmodic, imperfect, and reluctant throughout, the education policies implemented in the late Victorian era were nonetheless instrumental in the elimination of child labour in England and Wales.

# Thursday 26th October 2023, 5.15pm - Jordan Claridge, LSE
Wages and labour relations in the Middle Ages: It's not (all) about the money
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

For long periods of history, a significant proportion of the labour force has received all or part of their wages in non-monetary in-kind payments. Despite its historical ubiquity, this form of labour remuneration remains poorly understood. This paper presents a framework which allows for the valuation and interpretation of in-kind wages. We apply our method to a new dataset of agricultural wages for labourers in medieval England (1270-1430), most of whom received a composite wage for which in-kind payment was the largest share. Assessing the market value of the wages these workers received, we find an increase in the relative importance of cash payments in the latter decades of the fourteenth century. We show that this was connected to a fundamental shift in labour relations, providing new empirical insights into the so-called `golden age of labour’ that followed the Black Death.

# Thursday 19th October 2023, 5.15pm - Leigh Gardner, LSE.
How was power shared in colonial Africa? Taxation and representation in the British empire
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

Who held power in colonial Africa? Colonial governments made policies which have had lasting impacts on the continent’s development. But they were constrained in many ways – by lack of staff and resources, and by their lack of legitimacy with those they ruled. Recent research in political science has shown that the survival of autocratic regimes in contemporary African countries has depended on the strategic use of patronage, either in the form of power showing with potential rivals or through the use of public resources. Similarly, British colonial governments used strategies of power sharing and resource distribution at various administrative levels to secure the stability of colonial rule. New data on the composition of colonial legislative councils and local governments shows how these methods varied between and within colonies, reflecting local economic and political circumstances.

# Thursday 12th October 2023, 5.15pm - Maria Bach, Walras Pareto Centre, University of Lausanne. (Paper jointly authored with François Allison, Walras Pareto Centre, University of Lausanne)
All welcome
A comparative history of national accounting in India and the USSR
Venue: Room 6, Faculty of History

We propose using a comparative history of national accounting looking at the same time, the 1920s, in two different places: India and the USSR. In both places there were attempts at defining and counting national wealth. In India, K.T. Shah and K.J. Khambata produced a national wealth estimate to measure the tax capacity of Indians. In the USSR, P. I. Popov published in 1926 with two dozen of collaborators the first “balance” of the Soviet economy for the year 1923-1924 with planning objective in mind. Comparison in the history of national accounting is particularly relevant because the fundamental aim of national accounts is to compare the performance of an economy across time and/or in relation to other economies. The Indian case study and the comparison between India and USSR are scant, if not completely absent, in the history of national accounting. Our aim is to bring India and the comparison with the USSR into the international debates on how measurement was and is done to better understand the relative progress of various populations and territories. Our case studies recover and connect intellectuals tuning into global debates on national accounting and taking part in dialogues on different ways of counting the economy.

# Thursday 5th October 2023, 5.15pm - Jeremy Adelman, University of Cambridge
Earth hunger: Global integration and the need for strangers
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

Ever since trade, migration, and finance sutured the world together into one unit, people have been debating the rewards and risks of togetherness. This talk explores the main lines of argument about what it has meant to need strangers, their resources, their labour, and their ideas – and what it has meant for them to need “us.” Since the early nineteenth century, these arguments about interdependence have defined the meaning of modern life at a world scale. Some perspective on them will help understand the distempers of our own times.

# Thursday 1st June 2023, 5.00pm - Marjoleine Kars (MIT)
Multiple Crossings: Black Biographies in the Dutch Atlantic
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

Accara and Gousarie were two African leaders in the 1763 Berbice slave rebellion, they next served as slave hunters, army drummers in the Dutch Republic, and Maroon fighters in Suriname. How do we write the biographies of people forced to shape-shift across boundaries and allegiances and whose presence in the archives is equally slippery?

# Thursday 25th May 2023, 5.00pm - Christopher Pihl (Uppsala)
Monetary policies and practices: money, popular politics and state formation in early modern Europe
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

This talk presents a research project on monetary change, popular politics and everyday life in early modern Sweden. As in many other Europeans of the time, early modern Swedes had to cope with a volatile monetary system causing periods of inflation, cash shortages but also to comprehend and use novelties such as copper and paper money. The aim of the project is to understand the social and political ramifications of this process by examining money as a practical and political problem to be solved involving not only the elite but also regular people and their concepts and uses of money.

# Thursday 11th May 2023, 5.00pm - Charmian Mansell (Cambridge)
The Death of Richard Howell and the Labour of Care in Early Modern England
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

Care work occupies a shadowy place in both histories of medicine and the economy. What was care? How was the labour of care distributed? What social relationships and obligations underpinned it? Who was paid and who wasn’t? Using records of testamentary disputes heard in the early modern English church courts, this paper sheds new light on the mechanics of informal care work.

# Thursday 4th May 2023, 5.00pm - Tim Stretton (Saint Mary’s University, Canada)
Masculinity and cuckoldry in early modern English litigation records
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

In the early modern English imagination, a cuckold was the epitome of a failed patriarch. Yet, in the legal sphere the insult “cuckold” was not actionable and barely had a presence. This paper explores this apparent paradox using accusations of cuckoldry in a 17th century church court and Chancery marital separation suit.

# Thursday 27th April 2023, 5.00pm - Julie Hardwick (UT Austin)
Enslaved in France: household colonialism, adolescents of African descent, and everyday practices of race making in the Old Regime
Venue: History Faculty Room 11

What if we begin modern French history in 1659, when France established a foothold in West Africa to enter the slave trade rather than in the conventional revolutionary year of 1789? This paper focuses on working households in western Brittany where enslaved (mostly male) teenagers were placed, in theory to be educated as Catholics and trained in a trade, to explore the daily racial dynamics of the emergence of a multi-racial population in France.

# Wednesday 15th March 2023, 5.00pm - Hugo Bromley (Cambridge)
CANCELLED: ‘Rendered much cheaper, than our work-people can make’; Women’s employment in textile manufacturing and English political economy, 1688-1722
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

How did the English and later British state understand women’s work in textile manufacturing at the start of the long eighteenth century? A close study of petitions, pamphlets, private correspondence and parliamentary journals suggests that English political economy was based on a much more complex economic understanding, particularly of women’s work, than has often been assumed, that attempted to sustain household incomes, regardless of who in the household was employed. Women played an active role in shaping the economic knowledge that formed the basis of state decision-making. At the same time, female consumers were attacked for buying ‘luxury’ textiles from overseas and undermining domestic employment. The need for manufacturing to provide employment to households that would otherwise be dependent on poor relief drove measures to restrict Irish woollen production, ban the export of raw wool, and restrict trade with India. Recognising the importance of household employment in British economic thinking helps explain the dominant position of textile manufacturing in shaping British political economy before the Industrial Revolution.

# Thursday 9th March 2023, 5.00pm - Marjoleine Kars (MIT)
Multiple Crossings: Black Biographies in the Dutch Atlantic
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Accara and Gousarie were two African men caught up in Dutch slavery and colonialism during the Age of Revolution. Leaders in the 1763 Berbice slave rebellion, they next served as slave hunters, army drummers in the Dutch Republic, and Maroon fighters in Suriname. Defying easy characterization, the pair were victims, perpetrators, resisters, and collaborators – sequentially and, at times, simultaneously. How do we write the biographies of people forced to shape-shift across boundaries and allegiances and whose presence in the archives is equally slippery?

# Thursday 16th February 2023, 5.00pm - Eugene Costello (UC Cork & Stockholm University)
Environmental knowledge and economic interaction: pastoralism in north-west Europe, 1350-1850
Venue: Crausaz Wordsworth Building, Robinson College, Adams Road

This talk presents initial results from an interdisciplinary project on livestock rearing during the medieval-to-modern transition. Focusing on Ireland and Sweden, I will show how it becomes possible to track livestock husbandry and its economic importance when the landscape is considered along with historical evidence. Moreover, I will discuss the environmental adaptability of people in these previously-overlooked places.

# Thursday 2nd February 2023, 5.00pm - Li Jiang (Exeter)
Wage labour and living standards in early modern England: evidence from Lancashire, 1580-1620
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Based on the Shuttleworth accounts, 1582-1621, probate inventories and other supporting documents, this paper discusses life-cycle changes of Lancashire wage workers’ living standards during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The discussion is divided into three sections: cost of living, annual wage income and levels of wealth. The accounts record the cost of ‘tabling’ workers, which involved providing food and drink. Using this evidence, it is argued that instead of following a stable basket of consumables, the costs of feeding wage workers ranged widely and were influenced by diverse factors, such as the prices of food, the demand for labour strength and the skills applied in tasks. Low annual wage incomes and high turnover rates of workers do not suggest a high-pressure labour market where workers were desperate for employment, but rather an economy where waged work was a supplement to other activities. This is further supported by the comparison between monetary wages recorded in the Shuttleworth accounts and the material wealth recorded in the Shuttleworth employees’ probate inventories. The findings show that monetary wages could only be used to measure the purchasing power of wage workers during a specific period of their life cycle and did not have a positive correlation with wage workers’ living standards measured using inventories. In conclusion, it is argued that current research on living standards of early modern period presents an incomplete picture of the real lives of wage workers.

# Thursday 19th January 2023, 5.00pm - Hillary Taylor (Cambridge)
Paternalism and the politics of “toll corn” in early modern England
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

This paper examines controversies related to a neglected aspect of early modern English grain marketing: toll corn. Such disputes and the litigation that they occasioned provided opportunities for individuals of various positions — including grain sellers — to reassert normative ideals about the considerations that should take precedence in the market: specifically, the belief that the needs of the poor should outweigh the interests of private individuals (or corporate entities), and that authorities had a paternalistic duty to ensure that the poor’s needs were met. That these points were articulated in toll corn disputes throughout the period ­indicates their continued hold in some quarters, even after they had ceased to be reflected in ‘official’ policies regarding grain provision and marketing. However, controversies about toll corn also demonstrated the extent to which such thinking could ring hollow in practice. Individual authorities’ willingness to fulfil the material component of their duty to their inferiors was not accompanied by a mandate that they do so kindly. The politics of toll corn — like contemporary ideologies and practices of paternalism — both enabled and circumscribed the labouring population’s ability to shape the terms of their subordination in early modern England.

# Monday 9th January 2023, 5.15pm - Chris Briggs, Cambridge
All welcome
Felons’ possessions and English living standards, 1370-1600
Venue: Room 5, Faculty of History

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate about changes in the material well-being of labourers, artisans and farmers in England’s countryside and small towns between c.1370 and c.1470 and compares this period to the sixteenth century. It introduces a hitherto largely unknown source that has the potential to shed light on household wealth: the lists and valuations of goods and chattels preserved in the records of the royal escheator and coroner. These lists were generated by the process of felony forfeiture, which saw the possessions of felons, fugitives and outlaws seized, valued, and sold for the benefit of the crown. The paper describes the felony forfeiture material; considers the methodological challenges involved in quantifying the evidence it contains; and presents and interprets new data on change over time in the number, value and range of goods owned by ordinary households. Overall, the felony forfeiture material suggests surprisingly little change in the ownership of household goods during the fifteenth century, despite this often being viewed in the literature as an era of significant shifts in consumption.

# Thursday 1st December 2022, 5.15pm - James Davis (Queens University Belfast)
The Flow of Information within the Markets of Medieval England
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Abstract not available

# Thursday 24th November 2022, 5.15pm - David Green (Kings College London)
CANCELLED: Post Office Lives: stories of life and death in the British Post Office
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

DUE TO STRIKE ACTION, this seminar will be moved to a later date (in Lent term).

Abstract: Based on the pension records of around 30,000 British postal workers who retired between 1860 and 1908, together with additional information about death, the Addressing Health project is exploring the dimensions and experience of sickness in the Post Office workforce. This individual level information provides an opportunity to compare health outcomes by person (occupation, age, gender), place and time. By following through a subset of workers(c. 8000) to the time of their death, we can also understand better the relationship between sickness and death. Preliminary results show distinct regional variations in health outcomes: Scottish workers, for example, took less time off sick than their equivalent English counterparts. Health outcomes were particularly bad for indoor sorters compared to postmen who delivered the mail, even in similar locations. The majority of retirements were the result of sickness, including poor mental health. By identifying these kinds of health outcomes, we can begin to understand better the significance of the workplace in relation to health, taking into account geographical as well as occupational and personal factors.

# Thursday 17th November 2022, 5.15pm - Samantha Williams (Cambridge)
The Poor Law, the Workhouse and the Construction of Ablebodiedness
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

The workhouse was at the heart of the reforms envisaged by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834, as was the concept of ‘ablebodiedness’. Welfare policy had far-reaching consequences, not just for those who were accommodated in the workhouse, but also for those recipients relieved outdoors, and to the wider working class and notions of manliness and womanliness. This paper explores how the New Poor Law contributed to discourses on the able body – and the disabled body – through a mixture of sources, from the Poor Law Report, changing poor law policy, the census, workhouse records, literature, illustrations, newspapers, and social investigation.

# Thursday 10th November 2022, 5.15pm - A.G. Hopkins (Cambridge)
Capitalism in a Colonial Context: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1921
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

This talk advertises a neglected subject: the role of entrepreneurs in Africa’s long-run development. It analyses the careers of 100 African merchants in the port-city of Lagos between 1851 and 1921 and a revises received opinion about their fortunes. They did not decline, nor did sole-ownership constrain their activities. They made the first attempts to diversify the economy and ensured that limited companies could be registered locally. All firms, indigenous and foreign, struggled during the inter-war period. Lagos merchants adapted by becoming financiers and rentiers. In doing so, they made a vital contribution to the large and diverse economy that characterised Nigeria after 1945.

# Thursday 3rd November 2022, 5.15pm - Sabine Schneider (London School of Economics)
German Silver Diplomacy and the Emergence of the Classical Gold Standard, 1871-1892
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Imperial Germany’s monetary union in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71) necessitated the liquidation of vast quantities of German silver stocks on world markets. Between 1871 and 1879, the German Chancellery engaged an international network of banks and refiners to acquire gold-backed assets in return for selling its silver in Europe and in South and East Asia. This paper reconstructs the Chancellery’s network of financial agents and presents the most comprehensive picture yet of the transcontinental bullion flows that underpinned Germany’s monetary reforms. Based on a wealth of banking and government records, the paper yields a more nuanced understanding of the geographic outlets and strategy of Germany’s bullion trade and its impact on the global silver glut that set in from 1872. The ensuing macroeconomic disruption that accompanied Germany’s demonetization gave rise to both prolonged uncertainty in bullion markets and growing diplomatic tensions across Europe.

Germany’s currency reforms not only released significant bullion and capital flows between the financial centres in Europe; the Chancellery’s secretiveness about its monetary operations also strained its economic relations with Britain, India, and the Latin Monetary Union. Bismarck’s government, as this paper argues, pursued a selling tactic of deliberate ambiguity to exploit its first-mover-position in the silver market. But its tactical advantage proved short-lived, and the government’s official silence about its remaining silver stocks skewed market expectations and amplified concerns over German ‘silver dumping’. Growing Anglo-German tensions over the Reich’s handling of its demonetization eventually culminated in the London ‘silver scare’ of 1875–76, an episode that fuelled international reproval of Germany’s currency diplomacy. This paper finds that the Chancellery’s strategy during the 1870s unintentionally stoked uncertainty around a global silver crisis and reveals how British diplomats and their German counterparts ensured that information asymmetries were gradually mitigated. It further shows that silver’s prolonged depreciation motivated tentative steps towards bilateral cooperation between London and Berlin, with the aim of reducing market volatility in the early period of the classical gold standard.

# Thursday 27th October 2022, 5.15pm - Jane Humphries (London School of Economics)
A Respectable Living and Women’s Work, England, 1270-1860
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

This paper argues that the cost of living respectably can be measured by what it cost to board and lodge the reputable. The methodology allows for changes in the composition of consumption, the introduction of new goods, and the inclusion of the costs of the household services needed to turn commodities into livings. Over 4200 observations, drawn mainly from primary sources, trace levels and trends in board and lodging costs for Britain, 1270-1860. Used to deflate wage series, the board and lodging costs provide an alternative account of long-run trends in living standards which can be compared with conventional welfare ratios.

Over 4200 observations, drawn mainly from primary sources, trace levels and trends in board and lodging costs, taken as indicating trends in the costs of a socially and culturally defined standard of respectable living. Essentially, the paper endogenizes the materiality of respectability and reads its value from the market signals of the past. In this way the paper provides an alternative approach to the cost of living, which, while not replacing conventional indeces, accommodates changes both in the composition and kind of goods and services considered essential for decency and in the cost of the domestic labour needed to transform this changing collection of material inputs into a decorous lifestyle. In this way it circumvents the problems with Laspeyres cost of living indices relating to new goods and to shifting expectations, and simultaneously uncovers the importance of household services in living costs. Respectable living, as it evolved in terms of both the categories of goods and services included and the particular components of those categories, required more and more expensive domestic labour. While the commercialized sector of this labour has been barely recognized, the unpaid sector has been totally ignored. To the extent that domestic labour was provided unpaid by a household member it would drop out of the cost of living as conventionally measured but the board and lodging approach reveals its necessity for a respectable living. The support wage-earners afforded domestically-occupied family members was recompense for productive activity, and a legitimate charge on family earnings not a gratuitous hand-out for a non-worker. Comparisons between board and lodging costs and the costs of the respectability basket both in relation to men’s wages provide a fresh perspective on living standards. They suggest that rising expectations muted the gains implied by standard welfare ratios. Periods of convergence and divergence identify eras when new goods and services, permanently excluded from the basket, edged into respectable living as understood by aspirant forebears and became reflected in costs. This alternative history of living standards suggests that the quest for respectability through its pressure on wages contributed to the industriousness of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and provided more work for those specialized in ‘housewifery’ whether waged or unwaged. And this raises a final more speculative point. A hedonic regression identifies the cost of the domestic labour needed to provide board and lodging of different types in different times and places, and so provides a market equivalent for the value of unpaid domestic service. Relaying these market equivalents into a full-scale computation of the historical values of unpaid domestic service would provide wholly new insight into understanding women’s contribution to economic growth and wellbeing, a vital task for the future.

# Tuesday 25th October 2022, 1.00pm - Arvand Mirsafian, Uppsala University
Labour History Lunch: Worker Resistance to Scientific Management in Sweden 1930-1950
Venue: History Faculty Board Room

Arvand Mirsafian will briefly present his research on ‘Worker Resistance to Scientific Management in Sweden 1930-1950’, with comment from Alastair Reid to introduce discussion of connections with other research fields. As the first event of the Labour History Cluster this year, we look forward to learning about your research and discussing our plans for the year.
Lunch will be provided.

# Thursday 20th October 2022, 5.15pm - Catia Antunes (Leiden)
Exploiting the Empires of Others: Reflections towards a Model of European Colonial Exploitation
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Early Modern European empires are portrayed and perceived as nationally geared enterprises, as entangled spaces at the peripheries and as zones of contact. In the Netherlands, these perceptions have filtered into the public debate that seeks to define material and immaterial responsibilities for the colonial past. What the historiographical perceptions, academic portrayals and public debate seem, however, to ignore is the role played by foreigners (being non-subjects of a specific king or republic) in exploiting the empires of other countries. It is thus important to determine how and why Dutch entrepreneurs (being those taking risks in matters of trade or production, introducing innovations, making decisions based on information that others did not possess and searching for opportunities where most perceived risk) participated in exploiting the English, French and Iberian empires, as Dutch firms are particularly prominent in the European colonial landscape. Since Dutch entrepreneurs engaged in exploiting the resources of those other countries, what is the future of the public debate in the Netherlands, and Europe at large, regarding a shared responsibility for the colonial past? The answer(s) to these questions can be found in the multiple public and private archives that house extensive collections of the firms that operated from the Dutch Republic into the four largest empires in Western Europe. By combining original and recently uncovered archival sources pertaining to the relevant men (and some women), businesses and activities and their relationships with fellow traders, investors and political powers in situ, this project carries the seed to change commonly held perceptions regarding colonial participation and how these perceptions are often filtered into the public debate. This socio-economic entanglement of empires may have resulted, I hypothesize, in a shared European culture of exploitation that is impossible to disentangle within public debates that remain nationally bound.

# Thursday 13th October 2022, 5.15pm - William H. Janeway (Cambridge)
The Necessity of Bubbles
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error and error and error: upstream exercises in research and invention, and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Each of these activities necessarily generates much waste along the way: dead-end research programs, useless inventions, and failed commercial ventures. In between, the innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy, from railroads to the internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment. And so, at each stage, the Innovation Economy depends on sources of funding that are decoupled from concern for economic return. Historically we can observe two such sources: states motivated by national purposes, defence or development; and financial speculation – bubbles. Bubbles are ubiquitous wherever assets are traded: from tulip bulbs to cryptocurrencies. But not all bubbles are the same. Occasionally, the focus of speculation is one of those transformational technologies which, when, which when deployed at scale, actually does create a ‘new economy’.

# Thursday 6th October 2022, 5.15pm - Jane Whittle (Exeter)
A New History of Work in Early Modern England: Gender, Tasks and Occupations
Venue: History Faculty, Room 6

Since 2015 Mark Hailwood and I have been collaborating on a project, funded first by the Leverhulme Trust and then by the European Research Council, that collects evidence of work tasks from the court documents of early modern England, developing a methodology which has many similarities to modern time-use studies. The work task database is now complete and contains records of 9650 tasks and the people who undertook them from south-west, northern and east-central England between 1500-1700. In this paper I focus how this approach to the history of work challenges existing ideas about the early modern economy and its development over time. In doing so, I argue for a more inclusive definition of work, and explore the implications of our findings for two areas in particular, women’s work and changing occupational structures. The findings demonstrate the involvement of women in all areas of the economy and prompt a re-evaluation of the history of housework and care-work. The range of tasks undertaken by men with different occupational titles is analysed, demonstrating the degree to which those with non-agricultural occupations remained involved in agricultural work, as well as combining crafts, commerce, and transport. Overall, our results show very little change over time at the level of the work task, which suggests a new perspective for characterising preindustrial economic development.

# Thursday 2nd June 2022, 5.00pm - Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck)
The People, the State, and the Power of Local Petitioning in Early Modern England
Venue: History Faculty Room 5

The county and city magistrates of early modern England received numerous ‘petitions’ every year from local communities and individuals. These requests and complaints often focused on responsibility for poor relief and other ‘public’ social and economic issues, drawing on a rhetoric of justice and statutory rights for legitimacy. This paper examines a large corpus of these local petitions to better understand how ‘the will of the people’ shaped governance on the ground.

# Thursday 26th May 2022, 5.00pm - Danielle van de Heuvel & Marie Yasunaga (University of Amsterdam)
Illuminating Gender in the Early Modern Urban Space of Edo: A study on Edo Meisho Zue
Venue: History Faculty Room 5

Within the framework of the research project, The Freedom of the Streets: Gender and Urban Space in Eurasia 1600-1850, which analyses the gendering of early modern urban space, this paper explores the East Asian capital of Edo (present-day Tokyo). The primary focus will be on the streetscapes in the topography Illustrated Book of Famous Places in Edo (Edo Meisho Zue, 1834-36) and a methodology developed for the historical visual sources.

# Thursday 19th May 2022, 5.00pm - Maïka de Keyzer (KU Leuven)
The paradox of being poor, yet well fed and warm. Material welfare levels in the 17th and 18th century Southern Low Countries
Venue: History Faculty Room 5

The Campine area in the Southern Low Countries has been considered as extremely poor. As a region dominated by commons and an absence of proletarianized labourers, typical indicators such as real wages and land ownership are irrelevant. In my research I move beyond GDP figures and real wages and study the total obtained material welfare levels. For this paper I will explain one particular paradox: the abundant
availability of fuel and food in the average smallholder cottage.

# Thursday 12th May 2022, 5.00pm - Rebecca Mason (Glasgow University)
Family conflict, legal strategies, and women’s litigation in early modern Scotland
Venue: History Faculty Room 5

This talk explores the motivations and strategies of women who engaged in legal action against close family members and kin relations, focusing closely on disputes before the burgh (town) and commissary (reformed church) courts of early modern Scotland. It argues that an in-depth study of women’s legal activity as litigants, arbiters, and users sheds new light on their position in the wider kin network, their public role in the judicial system, and in the development of property law.

# Thursday 5th May 2022, 5.00pm - Jonas Lindström (Uppsala universitet)
Real wages and wages in reality: Lessons from a Swedish royal stud farm
Venue: History Faculty Room 5

Wages in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sweden involved much more than monetary remuneration, and wage payments were generally only a part of the family income. This paper presents a case study of a group of rural wage labourers, the stablemen of a royal stud farm, and their family economy.

# Thursday 28th April 2022, 5.00pm - Misha Ewen (Historic Royal Palaces)
Barbary Newton: An Absentee Slave-Owner in Late Seventeenth-Century England
Venue: History Faculty Room 5

This paper utilises the correspondence of plantation and slave-owner Barbary Newton to explore how metropolitan English women were implicated in Caribbean plantation slavery. It will interrogate how women’s intimate networks and understandings of kinship shaped absenteeism during this early period.

# Thursday 2nd December 2021, 5.15pm - David Fox
Locating cryptocurrencies in the Western legal tradition
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

Cryptocurrencies and financial assets represented in digital form on a blockchain are a recent development. They are however likely to move into the mainstream in the coming years as traditional systems for making payments and holding financial assets are converted to blockchain systems of technology.
This change in the technical form has presented all systems of private law with difficult conceptual problems. Many fundamental legal conceptions such as property, payment, holding and transfer are technologically dependent. They were devised throughout a long tradition of legal thought when the financial world was populated by tangible things, paper documents, and credit networks operating between legal persons.
This presentation considers how well traditional legal concepts can adapt to the new blockchain forms of delivery. Legal concepts which were developed in an earlier financial world will either need to evolve to include the new digital forms or else be replaced by different rules that directly describe the legal consequences of these new digital methods of dealing with currency and financial assets.

# Thursday 25th November 2021, 5.15pm - Nuala Zahedieh, Cambridge
The Atlantic slave system and skills in industrialising Britain
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

This talk responds to Joel Mokyr’s recent work emphasising supply side explanations for the unique mechanical competencies which characterised industrialising Britain. Mokyr pays little attention to the demand side of the human capital market and is especially dismissive of the view that the rise of the Atlantic slave system might have played a critical role. Using data on trade and patents, this paper argues, on the contrary, that overseas expansion, powered by enslaved labour, transformed the market for knowledge and skills and played a very critical role in shaping Britain’s industrial revolution.

# Thursday 18th November 2021, 5.15pm - Rory Naismith, Cambridge
Making money in the early Middle Ages
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 11th November 2021, 5.15pm - Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics
Tropical development
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

The scholarship on the history of economic development shows that countries in the intertropical zone have remained poorer than the rest of the world, suggesting that they struggle harder to achieve economic growth. What does tropical have to do with the struggle to grow? The talk will address that question. Defining tropicality as the composite of two conditions, persistent moisture-stress, and seasonality, and using examples from Africa and South Asia, I suggest that the struggle to grow is essentially a struggle to secure water and distribute water across seasons. Doing this with rainwater carries hazards, and groundwater is a finite resource, making the struggle harder as the process goes on.

# Thursday 4th November 2021, 5.15pm - Xuesheng You, University of Swansea
Railways, divergence, and structural change in nineteenth-century England and Wales
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

Railways transformed inland transport during the nineteenth century. In this paper, we study how railways led to local population change and divergence in England and Wales as it underwent dramatic urbanization. We make use of detailed data on railway stations, population, and occupational structure in more than 9000 spatial units. A network of least cost paths based on major towns and the length of the 1851 rail network is also created to address endogeneity. Our instrumental variable estimates show that having a railway station in a locality by 1851 led to significantly higher population growth from 1851 to 1891 and shifted the male occupational structure out of agriculture. Moreover, we estimate that having stations increased population growth more if localities had greater initial population density and for those 3 to 15 km from stations, they had less growth compared to localities more distant from stations. Overall, we find that railways reinforced the population hierarchy of the early nineteenth century and contributed to further spatial divergence. Their implications for the geographic distribution of population were large.

# Thursday 28th October 2021, 5.15pm - Ian Cawood, University of Stirling
Whitehall and the problem of public service in nineteenth-century institutional reform
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

The historiography of nineteenth public service reform has been, and still is, dominated by scholarly and professional focus on the battles within Whitehall to reform the behaviour of senior officials. This has led to an over-concentration on the 1854 Treasury Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, usually referred to as the “Northcote-Trevelyan Report”, and much over-exaggeration as to its immediate effects and cultural significance. This paper will attempt to place the 1854 Report within its social and cultural context and to contend that a genuine public service ethos emerged endogenously from within the branches of provincial administration in the years after 1832 and that the 1854 Report was an attempt to restrain and reformulate this ethos to suit the needs of the elite classes of Britain rather than the common needs of the British public.

# Thursday 21st October 2021, 5.15pm - Benedetta Rossi, University College London
Euro-American abolitionism in the African mirror
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

There is an extensive literature on Euro-American abolitionism, its causes and consequences, its merits and shortcomings. By contrast, little has been written about African abolitionism. The history of African emancipation is seen as structured primarily by the legal stages of European abolitionism. But what do we find if we try to write a history of African anti-slavery that prioritizes African ideas, voices, and political struggles? When, how, and why did Africans begin to challenge the legitimacy of slavery as an institution? How did Africans relate to European and American abolitionism? Who were the main ideologues of African abolitionism, and what were their networks and strategies? How do their approaches compare to those of Euro-American abolitionism? These questions are at the heart of a five-year ERC Advanced Research Project that started on 1 October 2020. At this talk, I will discuss some preliminary findings and ideas, and ask how (if at all) a better understanding of African abolitionism could modify our interpretation of global abolitionism.

# Thursday 14th October 2021, 5.15pm - Craig Muldrew, Cambridge
Capitalism – a concept too big to fail?
Venue: History Faculty Room 6, and online via zoom (for login details sign up to ucam-ecosochist@lists.cam.ac.uk)

The use of the term capitalism is so pervasive today that trying to define what it means in practice seems impossible. There are many things we might term ‘capitalist’, but just as many exceptions and different ways of putting parts of the economy under state control. Thirty five years ago it was easier to define capitalism by simply pointing to what it was not –it was not a planned communist economy aimed at equality of access to, and distribution of goods and services. Now, however, capitalism is used to describe most economies, even that of the officially communist PCR. Yet, understanding it is undeniably crucial to any aspect of politics, individual choice, and collective action. This paper will examine how the term came into being in the early twentieth century, and then how different historians took it up to argue that it emerged in European societies in the period from roughly the Italian Renaissance until the end of the eighteenth century. The concept was used, and continues to be used, in many different and ambiguous ways. This paper will argue that greater understanding can only be gained by being more precise about how we conceptualize different aspects of the emerging European and global economy of the early modern period.

# Thursday 3rd December 2020, 5.00pm - David Todd (King’s College, London)
Champagne capitalism: the economics of French informal empire in the nineteenth century
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 26th November 2020, 5.00pm - Ariadne Schmidt (Leiden)
Prosecuting women: a comparative perspective on crime and gender before the Dutch criminal courts, c. 1600-1810
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 19th November 2020, 5.00pm - Alexis Litvine (Cambridge)
Comparing the incomparable: economic development in Britain and France 1700-1850
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 12th November 2020, 5.00pm - David Edgerton (King’s College, London)
The UK’s disappearing wartime imports 1939-1945: a statistical, ideological, and historiographical accounting
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 5th November 2020, 5.00pm - Joe Day (Bristol)
Internal migration in England and Wales, 1851-1911: the where, when, why and how
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 29th October 2020, 5.00pm - Harold James (Princeton)
Making a modern central bank: the Bank of England 1979–2003
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 22nd October 2020, 5.00pm - Peter Mandler (Cambridge)
Writing the history of education as social and economic history
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 15th October 2020, 5.00pm - Marlous van Waijenburg (Harvard Business School)
Financing the African colonial state: fiscal capacity building and forced labor
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 8th October 2020, 5.00pm - Mark Bailey (University of East Anglia)
The Black Death in England and the origins of the Little Divergence, 1348-1400
Venue: Delivered online via Zoom (for login details contact campop@geog.cam.ac.uk)

Abstract not available

# Thursday 20th February 2020, 5.00pm - Karolina Hutkova (London School of Economics)
CANCELLED West Indies technologies in the East Indies: Imperial preference and sugar business in Bihar, 1800-1850s
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

European sugar entrepreneurs in Bihar adopting West Indian sugar technologies in the 1830s-40s faced a lack of irrigation technologies, a lack of internal transport networks, and low yielding sugar cane varieties. When Britain equalised duties on slave and non-slave sugar, London prices fell and Indian sugar producers went bankrupt. Sugar was among the chief Indian exports and a major source of foreign exchange. This policy change betrays inconsistency in British imperial policies towards overseas colonies and a lack of consideration of colonial manufacturing.

# Thursday 23rd January 2020, 5.00pm - Samantha Williams (Cambridge)
The ‘unruly infected’: enforcing the plague orders in Cambridge in 1625
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

The plague orders that were issued by the English government between 1518 and 1666 aimed to ensure treatment of the sick and limit the spread of the disease, but government orders were only as good as their enforcement at the local level. Focussing on Cambridge, this paper examines the way in which plague orders were implemented, and infringements against them punished, as heard at the Vice Chancellor’s and Mayor’s Court in 1625.

# Thursday 5th December 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Richard Smith, Cambridge
The Tyranny of a Concept: the Origins of the European Marriage Pattern
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 28th November 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Peter Scott, Reading
CANCELLED: The anatomy of Britain’s inter-war super-rich: reconstructing the 1928 ‘millionaire’ population
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

CANCELLED due to industrial action. See http://www.ucu.cam.ac.uk/2019-strike-faq/

# Thursday 21st November 2019, 5.00pm - Alexandra Sapoznik, King's College London
Did peasants plough? Agricultural technology and the growth of the medieval economy
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 14th November 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Guido Alfani (Bocconi, Milan) and Dr Matteo di Tullia (Pavia)
Roundtable discussion of "The Lion's Share: Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe" (2019)
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 7th November 2019, 5.00pm - Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Utrecht
Women Workers of the World United: Towards a global history of households, gender and work
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 31st October 2019, 5.00pm - Cheng YANG (University of Cambridge)
The occupational structure of China (1736-1898) and the Great Divergence
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 24th October 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Tracy Dennison, California Institute of Technology
The Political Economy of Serfdom: State Capacity and Institutional Change in Prussia and Russia
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 17th October 2019, 5.00pm - Prof. Morgan Kelly, University College Dublin
The safety revolution in oceanic shipping, c. 1780-1825
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 10th October 2019, 5.00pm - Simon Szreter
Drawing on History for Radical Policy: Incentivising an Ethical Economics
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 16th May 2019, 5.00pm - Oscar Gelderblom (Utrecht) and Joost Jonker (Amsterdam)
The Evolution of Financial Markets in the Early Modern Netherlands
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

To understand the development of financial markets in the Low Countries before the Industrial Revolution we have to look beyond the world of high finance centered around Antwerp and Amsterdam. Empirically, this is difficult, however, because primary sources on ordinary households and small-scale businesses are scarce. We try to remedy this shortcoming through an explicit focus on the demand for four key financial services: payments, loans, savings, and insurance.

# Thursday 9th May 2019, 5.00pm - Jessica Dijkman, University of Utrecht
Relief Stocks in Early Modern Holland
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

In the towns of early modern Holland, grain price peaks triggered reactions by the urban authorities. Among them were public grain purchases, to be used for relief. This paper analyses the development of this practice in Amsterdam between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth century, looking at volumes purchased, expenses incurred and methods employed for the distribution of relief. The crises of 1556-57 and 1698-1700 are examined in greater detail.

# Thursday 25th April 2019, 5.00pm - Richard Bell, Oxford University
Charity, Debt and Social Control in > England's Early Modern Prisons
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

This paper explores the nature, scope and distribution of prison charity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, particularly among incarcerated debtors. It reveals its significance as a vector of moral judgement, and how the ethical context of credit relations gave prisons new significance as institutions of discipline, punishment and rehabilitation.

# Thursday 21st February 2019, 5.00pm - Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist (Stockholm)
European building activity in times of crisis, 13th-17th centuries
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 20th February 2019, 5.00pm - Miriam Müller (University of Birmingham)
The freedom to act incompetently and the right to be fed suitably: Childhood and agency in the medieval English village
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 6th February 2019, 5.00pm - Charlotte Berry (Goldsmiths’ Company)
Neighbourhood, city and region: social networks on the margins of late medieval London
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 31st January 2019, 5.00pm - Nuala Zahedieh (Edinburgh)
Eric Williams and William Forbes: Copper, colonies, and the industrial revolution
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 23rd January 2019, 5.00pm - John Lee (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York)
The medieval clothier
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 29th November 2018, 5.00pm - Professor John Styles (University of Hertfordshire)
Inducements to technical innovation in the British Industrial Revolution: markets, materiality and the invention of the spinning jenny
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 22nd November 2018, 5.00pm - Dr Eilidh Garrett (Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure)
Movers and stayers: populations, movement and measurement in historical demography
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 15th November 2018, 5.00pm - Dr Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz (University of Amsterdam)
Conflict management in northern Europe, 1350-1570
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 25th October 2018, 5.00pm - Professor Patrick O’Brien (London School of Economics)
Britain's wars with France, 1793-1815 and their contribution to the consolidation of the Industrial Revolution
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 18th October 2018, 5.00pm - Professor Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale University)
Opening the black box of the common-law legal regime: contrasts in the development of corporate law in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 11th October 2018, 5.00pm - Dr Lucy Newton (University of Reading)
Women in banking: the introduction of the ‘Personal Banker’ at Barclays Bank in the 1970s
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 4th October 2018, 5.00pm - Professor Pat Thane (King’s College London)
Divided Kingdom: inequalities in the UK since 1900
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 24th May 2018, 5.00pm - Tawny Paul, University of Exeter, and Jeremy Boulton, Newcastle University
Debtors’ schedules: a new source for understanding the economy in 18th-century England
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Debtors’ schedules, or inventories of wealth produced in the wake of Debtor Insolvency Acts, constitute a significant and relatively unused source related to the economy of eighteenth-century England. This paper presents new research on the scope and significance of schedules. It explores their potential to provide new insights into wealth, credit and work, and considers their relationship to probate material.

# Wednesday 23rd May 2018, 5.00pm - Spike Gibbs (University of Cambridge)
Lord, state and community elites in the late medieval and early modern village: the evidence of manorial officeholding
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 10th May 2018, 5.00pm - Kathryn Gary, University of Lund
The extreme seasonality of early modern casual labour and what it means for workers’ incomes: Sweden 1500-1830
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Using observations of over 151,000 individuals’ workdays in the construction industry, this paper investigates individual work patterns, work availability, and the changes in work seasonality over time. The sample includes unskilled men and women as well as skilled craftsmen. Some are ‘full-time’, but even these do not work as many days as real wage models assume. Real wage methodology becomes more problematic the further into the past we look.

# Wednesday 9th May 2018, 5.00pm - Milan Pajic (University of Cambridge)
Fortunes of urban fullers in fourteenth-century England
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 3rd May 2018, 5.00pm - Eleanor Robson, University of Cambridge
Contested ground: Agricultural improvement in Hatfield Level, 1625-1660
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Seventeenth-century drainage of the English fens was a flagship project of state-led ‘improvement’, which promised to alchemise unproductive wetland commons into profitable, enclosed terra firma. This paper examines how drainage was experienced and navigated by local people in the northern fens to illuminate how it produced differential improvement and contested environments.

# Thursday 26th April 2018, 5.00pm - Matthew Pawelski, University of Lancaster
‘Women’, ‘Lads’ and ‘Copers’: Household, community, and the divisions of labour at the Derbyshire lead mines, c.1736-1765
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Research based on account books from Miners Engine Mine, Derbyshire, shines light on the divisions of labour in an eighteenth-century workplace. The findings suggest continuities in the artisanal structures of the industrial workforce during the eighteenth century, and highlight the importance of household and community in determining the roles of age and gender groups.

# Wednesday 21st February 2018, 5.00pm - Richard Kelleher (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Coinage in the later medieval countryside: single-finds and the evidence from Rendlesham, Suffolk
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 15th February 2018, 5.00pm - Dr Jonathan Healey, University of Oxford
Religion, revelry and resistance in Jacobean Lancashire
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 7th February 2018, 5.00pm - Gabriel Byng (Cambridge)
Architecture and the English economy, 1200-1500: a new history of the parish church over the longue durée
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 1st February 2018, 5.00pm - Dr Briony McDonagh, University of Hull
Elite women and the agricultural landscape
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 24th January 2018, 5.00pm - Katie Ball (Oxford)
The exceptional case of the late medieval English economy: comparing price, wage and rent trends to Scotland and the Southern Low Countries
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 18th January 2018, 5.00pm - Prof. Laurence Fontaine
Whom to trust to moralise the market
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Abstract not available

# Thursday 30th November 2017, 5.00pm - Professor Ewout Frankema, Wageningen University & Research
Why Malthus wasn’t African. Reviewing explanations and implications of low population densities in pre-1900 Sub-Saharan Africa
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

Low population densities and open land frontiers, or alternatively, the absence of Malthusian conditions, have been foundational to a range of deep explanations of long-term comparative development in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to theories of factor-biased technological change high ratios of land to labour have induced long-term patterns of economic specialisation in land and resource extensive commodities (Austin 2008). High land-labour ratios have also been argued to have shaped African labour regimes (e.g. slavery, pawning), lineage systems and household formation strategies (e.g. polygamy) (Domar 1970, Iliffe 2007, Fenske 2014). It has also been argued that scarce supplies of human labour have induced particular colonial policies with respect to labour mobilisation and commodification (Cooper 1996, Frankema and van Waijenburg 2012). In addition, land abundance and limited capacities to tax vast empty hinterlands have been pointed to as barriers to pre-colonial state centralisation (Young 1994, Herbst 2000).
Very few scholars, however, have made attempts to trace back demographic developments into the distant past (see Manning 2010 for the most important exception). The dearth of quantitative evidence prevents the field from engaging in a more systematic discussion of the possible factors that may have suppressed the growth of African populations before 1900. Of course, centuries of slave trading are part of such explanations as several scholars have pointed out (Manning 2010, Inikori 2007), but they are not necessarily the dominant factor. This paper reviews the possible explanations for the comparatively slow evolution of African populations in pre-colonial times by distinguishing time-variant from time-invariant factors, and by using variation in population densities around 1950 to develop some systematic arguments. In my discussion I will pay attention to at least five factors: 1) the ecological conditions of food crop cultivation, 2) ecological conditions for the survival of domesticated and wild animals, 3) tropical disease incidence, 4) deliberate practices of population control, 5) unintended checks on population growth. I will not try to weigh these factors and rank them in order of importance. Instead, my focus will be on the question how these factors may be related in determining the long-term evolution of populations in specific areas and periods of time.

# Thursday 23rd November 2017, 5.00pm - Professor Kevin Schürer, University of Leicester
Using 'big data' to explore household and family structures in England and Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

This presentation will explore the rise of ‘big data’ in historical research with specific reference to the Integrated Census Microdata database (I-CeM) covering England, Scotland and Wales for the period 1851 to 1911 and examine the potential (and problems) of such data. It will focus on a study in household and family structure for the period covered by the I-CeM data and provide examples of where ‘big data’ can add to our knowledge in comparison to more traditional localised studies – and where it can’t.

# Thursday 16th November 2017, 5.00pm - Dr Siân Pooley, University of Oxford
The children of the state? The social impact of welfare in modern Britain
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

This paper examines the social impact of private and public investments in the early years of people’s lives in twentieth-century Britain. We know a lot about the politics behind the creation of pioneering welfare provision since the 1880s, much of which sought to preserve and improve the lives of the nation’s young. These services included: legislation and organisations to protect children from abuse and neglect from the 1880s; infant welfare services, free school meals and medical inspections from the 1900s; and following the Second World War the payment of family allowances (from 1975 child benefit) and free healthcare. We know far less about the social impact of this care on children and their families. This on-going research examines the experiences of children and the impact of changing welfare policies in Britain since the 1880s. In seeking to place a spotlight on children’s embodied and subjective experiences, this project uses archived case files to consider not only how welfare provision was used, but also how these uses – sometimes unintentionally – contributed to sustained and cumulative inequalities. The approach taken to studying archived case files is primarily qualitative, seeking to bring together microhistorical studies of subjectivity, epidemiological approaches to the life-course, and the attention to power dynamics afforded by histories of gender and of childhood. The findings discussed in this paper focus principally on previously unexamined case files relating to children born immediately after the Second World War.

# Thursday 9th November 2017, 5.00pm - Ian Kumekawa, Centre for History and Economics
The first serious optimist: A.C. Pigou and the politics of welfare economics
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

The Cambridge economist A.C. Pigou was a founding figure in the economics of welfare. In the years since his death in 1959, Pigou has been figured as a pre-war liberal, a centrist, and even an anti-Keynesian conservative. This paper re-evaluates the politics of Pigou’s economic thought during Pigou’s lifetime. His enduring ideas about welfare were generated largely before World War I, in a period of Liberal optimism about the ability of economic science and the state to improve societal wellbeing. In the wake of World War I, Pigou’s own optimism abated. However, with the rise of the Labour party’s fortunes during and after World War II, Pigou returned to the hopefulness of his early work, reinvigorated by changes he saw around him.

# Thursday 2nd November 2017, 5.00pm - Professor Jane Whittle, University of Exeter
The gender division of labour in Early Modern England: a new approach with new findings
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

This paper presents the main findings of a Leverhulme Trust funded research project on ‘Women’s work in rural England, 1500-1700: a new methodological approach’. The methodology used aims, as far as possible, to mimic modern time-use surveys, by collecting incidental data about the types of work activities people were engaged in from court documents. In doing so it moves away from conventional approaches to the historical division of labour, which have relied either on didactic literature or records of wage labour. It also deploys a definition of work derived from Margaret Reid’s third party criterion, as an activity that could be replaced with purchased goods or services. The project has collected information about 4300 work tasks undertaken by men and women from three types of court document (church court depositions, quarter sessions examinations and coroners’ reports) from the southwestern counties of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Initial analysis shows that women dominated housework and care work, as we might expect, but their involvement in other areas of the economy was also high. Using figures that compensate for the under-recording of women’s tasks, women carried out 37% of agricultural tasks, 44% of tasks in craft production, 44% of food processing tasks, and 51% of petty commerce. Together housework and care work made up only 26% of the work tasks recorded for women. The paper will these findings, making comparisons with other similar studies of Sweden and SW Germany for the early modern period.

# Thursday 26th October 2017, 5.00pm - Dr Lluís To Figueras, Universitat de Girona
Cloth consumption and commercialisation in the Western Mediterranean before the Black Death
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

During the thirteenth century a large amount of textiles made their way from the manufacturing centres of Flanders and the north of France towards the Mediterranean cities. The cloth trade has been analysed by economic historians chiefly as part of a commercial revolution led by Italian merchants. New evidence (bridal trousseaus recorded in notarial registers from thirteenth-century Catalonia) shows cloth as a key element of the commercialisation of rural society. Flanders and northern France were producing luxury textiles as well as coarse and relatively cheap woollens that were distributed through a network of local markets and retailers (drapers) specialised in selling foreign cloth along with local fabrics. Changes in the patterns of consumption related to colour and quality of fabrics triggered a social awareness on clothing as a means of social differentiation. Cloth became crucial not only as a way to single out the clergy and nobility, but also to differentiate the wealthier from the poorer peasants and artisans. Investment in garments not only explains the success of a dense marketing infrastructure across southern Europe, it also stimulated improvements in the textile production in those areas. Several small towns in the medieval Languedoc and Catalonia tried to emulate northern textile centres by welcoming foreign specialist-dyers in order to improve the quality of their products. By the beginning of the fourteenth century Mediterranean fabrics were able to compete with the woollens from northern Europe. Despite the century before the plague, being considered a period of scarcity, in some areas of southern Europe at least, peasant households purchased textiles of a variety of origins and qualities and as a consequence they made a substantial contribution to labour specialization and the development of local manufactures.

# Thursday 12th October 2017, 5.00pm - Dr Phil Slavin, University of Kent
The Great European Famine of 1315-7 revisited: nature, institutions and demography
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

This paper, largely based on my forthcoming book ‘Communities of Famine’ looks at what could have been the single harshest subsistence crisis in European history: the Great European Famine of 1315-7. The discussion is linked to a larger scholarly controversy regarding the causes and nature of famine as historical phenomena. Some scholars consider famines as exogenous disasters, caused by natural forces; another school of thought sees famine as an anthropogenic catastrophe, brought about by purely institutional factors; finally, some historians blame the so-called ‘Malthusian trap’ in creating famines. The present paper uses the remarkably rich documentation related to the Great Famine in England, to test all three models of famine and determine which one fits the crisis the best. As expected, there is no uniform answer and it was a combination of all three factors (referred to as ‘meta-structures’), with their complex mechanisms and derivatives, that created the Great Famine.

# Thursday 5th October 2017, 5.00pm - Dr Anthony Hotson, Centre for Financial History and Darwin College
Respectable banking: the search for stability in London’s money and credit markets since 1695
Venue: Old Library, Darwin College

The financial collapse of 2007–8 questioned our assumptions about the underlying basis for stability in the financial system. Anthony Hotson offers a reassessment of the development of London’s money and credit markets since the great currency crisis of 1695. He shows how this period has seen a series of intermittent financial crises interspersed with successive attempts to find ways and means of stabilizing the system. He emphasises, in particular, the importance of various principles of sound banking practice, developed in the late nineteenth century, that helped to stabilize London’s money and credit markets. He shows how these principles informed a range of market practices that limited aggressive forms of funding, and discouraged speculative lending. A tendency to downplay the importance of these regulatory practices encouraged a degree of complacency about their removal, with consequences right through to the present day.

# Wednesday 24th May 2017, 5.00pm - Marta Gravela (University of Turin)
The value of goods and value of people. Assessing urban fiscal policies in late medieval Italy
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

The financial needs of late medieval Italian cities prompted their governments to impose, alongside indirect charges, direct taxes upon property. Proportional division of tax burdens thus required the registration and evaluation of the citizens’ possessions in appropriate books called ‘estimi’. To what extent did this estimation match actual wealth? By comparing various fiscal systems, I will argue that the evaluation of goods was the result of a complex assessment of the social value of citizens rather than a merely economic appraisal of property.

# Thursday 18th May 2017, 5.00pm - Susan Flavin (Anglia University)
Institutional Diets in Sixteenth-Century Ireland
Venue: History Faculty Room 9

The study of diet has been almost entirely neglected in Irish historiography. Recent analysis of the English Exchequer Customs accounts has shed some light on Irish developments this period, but the nature of the data limited analysis to luxury goods and macro-historical trends. This paper approaches diet by integrating the customs data with new evidence from a series of household accounts, along with provisioning accounts for the Elizabethan soldiery in Ireland, to build the first detailed picture of comparative dietary trends in this period.

# Wednesday 10th May 2017, 5.00pm - Judith Spicksley (University of York)
Revisiting Vinogradoff’s interpretation of Bracton: why was a servus not a slave?
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Historians interested in mapping the decline of slavery in England have suggested that the institution had disappeared by the twelfth century. It is possible to detect the beginnings of a decline in the late Anglo-Saxon period, but most academics are agreed that the number of the enslaved fell after the Conquest in 1066, when slavery as a system of labour extraction through personal servitude gave way to serfdom, a system of servile labour organised around landholding in which individuals were bound by virtue of their tenure rather than their status. This alternative form of unfreedom expanded during the twelfth century under the pressure of population growth and land shortage but then declined as a result of the Black Death, which undermined the tenurial restrictions that bound peasants to the land; serfdom as a form of unfreedom withered away. As a result the vocabulary of slavery is absent from the history of late medieval England, where the unfree are usually described as serfs or villeins, following Paul Vinogradoff’s interpretation of the legal treatise known as Bracton. This paper draws on a range of published primary materials including the legal treatises of the late medieval and early modern periods, published records of the royal and manorial courts, and medieval and early modern labour statutes. It suggests that the emergence of villeinage and the powerful notion of what Orlando Patterson defined as ‘intrusive’ enslavement have problematized what it meant to be unfree in the late Middle Ages. The number of those enslaved did decline as a result of economic and institutional change, but slavery as a legal status remained visible in law and practice well into the early modern period.

# Thursday 4th May 2017, 5.00pm - Poul Holm (Trinity College Dublin)
The North Atlantic Fish Revolution - a Distant Mirror of Climate Change and Globalisation
Venue: History Faculty Room 9

Cabot’s discovery in 1497 of abundant cod populations around Newfoundland had fundamental geopolitical implications. Through the sixteenth century, marine products were among the first foodstuffs to be exposed to globalising processes while climate change (the Little Ice Age) impacted ocean productivity. The fish revolution changed the human landscapes around the North Atlantic. I explore three questions: (1) what were the natural and economic causes of the fish revolution; (2) how did marginal societies adapt to changes in international trade and consumption patterns around the North Atlantic; and (3) how did consumers, investors, and politics in the major European countries perceive and respond to the fish revolution? The answers may help us understand the role of environment and climate change in the past, how markets impacted marginal communities, and how humans perceived long-term change.

# Thursday 27th April 2017, 5.00pm - Margaret Lanzinger (Vienna) and Janine Maegraith (Cambridge)
Composition of Wealth: Between Kinship Entitlements and Market Access
Venue: History Faculty Room 9

Transfer of wealth by inheritance is still relevant and has even gained in importance in recent years. In this context it is important to define wealth, what it is composed of, and how much of this was handed down to the next generation. These questions are central to our research project. For the area of early modern southern Tyrol we analyse wealth transfers through inheritance and marital property, access to the land market, as well as the broader perspective of how wealth was tied to kinship and entitlements.

# Thursday 2nd March 2017, 5.00pm - John Morgan (University of Manchester)
Storm surges and state formation in early modern England: coping with flooding in coastal and lowland Lincolnshire
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Recurrent flooding was a condition of life in low and wet grounds. Erecting dams, scouring ditches and laying drains consumed significant amounts of labour time and money, as the profitability of agriculture rested on maintaining appropriate water levels. The success of one farmer was reliant on another, requiring complex co-ordination and administration. I will outline how flood protection was provisioned, its costs and their impact.

# Wednesday 22nd February 2017, 5.00pm - Harmony Dewez
The role of pragmatic literacy in estate management
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 16th February 2017, 5.00pm - Julie Hardwick (University of Texas at Austin)
Accounting for women: account books, petty commerce and re-thinking the transition to capitalism
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

In 17th-century France, even small-scale traders used ‘account books’ as instruments of everyday commercial activity. Wives usually kept accounts in small enterprises, producing perhaps the largest surviving corpus of non-elite women’s writing. The ‘books’ were freighted with legal, commercial, cultural and personal meanings. The gendering of financial record keeping is one of the ways in which women were integral in the intensification of market practices.

# Tuesday 14th February 2017, 2.00pm - Professor K.A.P. Siddhisena (University of Colombo, Sri Lanka)
Ageing Population and Elderly Care in Sri Lanka
Venue: HB101, Sir William Hardy Building Seminar Room, Department of Geography

Professor K.A. Padmasiri Siddhisena is Emeritus Professor of Demography, University of Colombo. He is one of the pioneers in the field of Demography in Sri Lanka. He was the Founder Head of the Department of Demography of the University of Colombo. In addition, he served as the Director of the Demographic Training and Research Unit (DTRU), the Director of Colombo University Community Extension Centre (CUCEC), Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He holds B.A. (Hons.) and B.Phil (Hons.) in Economics from University of Colombo, M.A. in Demography from Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, and M.Sc and Ph.D. in Population Planning from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He served as the Founder Secretary and the President of the Population Association of Sri Lanka (PASL), and the editor of Sri Lanka Journal of Population Studies (SLJPS). His teaching and research spread over a broad range of topics, including fertility and mortality analysis, Migration and Urbanization, Ageing and Elderly Care and Population and Development issues. He served as UNFPA and UNDP Consultant to improve the census data in Bangladesh, Timor Leste and Myanmar. In addition, he served as a Consultant to several research projects of WHO, ILO, UN-ESCAP, World Bank, IOM and WHO. He has authored more than 70 articles published in local and international journals. Prof. Siddhisena also served as Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield, UK, University of Ryukoku, Kyoto Japan, University of Oxford, UK, Visiting Senior Fellow of the Royal Society, London, ESCAP and UNFPA in Bangkok. He rendered his expertise in the formulation of National Policy on Population and Reproductive Health in Sri Lanka in 1998.

# Wednesday 8th February 2017, 5.00pm - James Davis
Travelling to town: medieval peasants in the urban marketplace
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 2nd February 2017, 5.00pm - Christof Jeggle (University of Würzburg)
Divergences or varieties in European economic development?
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

The debate over divergence in early modern Europe sees the Dutch Republic and Great Britain as the core of progressive economic development, and considers that the rest of the continent lagged behind. Using qualitative indicators I will question the notion of divergence in a continental perspective, offering case studies and proposing some reassessments in respect of comparing economic development.

# Wednesday 25th January 2017, 5.00pm - Nicholas Amor
The Suffolk clothier in the age of Henry VII
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 19th January 2017, 5.00pm - James Shaw (University of Sheffield)
Women as creditors, debtors and intermediaries: the informal economy of credit in seventeenth-century Venice
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Despite the laws against usury, Venetian records reveal much about the workings of an informal economy of credit in which women played a prominent role, not just as creditors and debtors but also as intermediaries linking neighbourhoods to broader circuits of exchange.

# Thursday 1st December 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Osamu Saito (Hitotsubashi, Japan)
Industrialisation, inter-sectoral linkage and occupational structure: Britain, Germany and Japan, c.1850-1935
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Economists and economic historians since Sir William Petty have long held a belief that economic development follows the stylised sequence that, first, the primary sector declines and the secondary sector grows, then at a later stage the tertiary sector grows. If sectoral shares are defined with respect to output only, this probably holds in many countries. As for the labour force, however, the developmental sequence seems different. Findings so far available from the International Network for the Comparative History of Occupational Structure (INCHOS) have revealed that in Britain, the secondary-sector share of employment grew very little during the industrial revolution, in which the dominant feature was a shift away from the primary to the tertiary sector, while in the case of Japan, industrialisation was accompanied by a sluggish reduction in the share of primary-sector employment (no reduction in the number of farm households in absolute terms). Among the countries surveyed, Germany is the only one whose evolution fits in with Petty’s sequential pattern. In order to account for such diverse experiences, this paper focuses on inter-sectoral linkages as well as the varying capital-labour ratio across the branches in the secondary sector. On the basis of input-output tables available for Britain, Germany and Japan, calculation will be made of the direct and indirect effects that manufacturing growth would have on the creation of employment, which will enable us to determine to what extent the differential employment creation impact on the primary and tertiary sectors can account for the observed differences in occupational structural change that took place in the three countries.

# Thursday 24th November 2016, 5.00pm - Sebastian Keibek, University of Cambridge
The development of the male occupational structure of England and Wales between 1600 and 1850
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Historical occupational structures provide excellent insight into economic developments, particularly at sub-national levels, for which they are often the only quantifiable data available. This paper builds on earlier work of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911’ project. It presents new methods for addressing key challenges in creating reliable occupational structures, such as the allocation of labourers to occupational sectors, and the incorporation of by-employments. It combines the existing dataset of three million parish register observations with a new dataset of one-and-a-half million probate records in such a way that the strengths of each data source are used to neutralise the weaknesses in the other. This results in a set of national estimates at much higher frequency (every twenty years) than were available before, and going back a full century earlier in time, as well as the first set of robust regional and local estimates. These form the basis for a reflection on the existing literature on the long-run history of British industrialisation, in particular on levels of productivity growth and on the balance between national and regional forces of change.

# Thursday 17th November 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Chris Dyer, University of Leicester
Inequality and social mobility in medieval England
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 10th November 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Pat Hudson and Dr Keith Tribe
The Piketty opportunity: inequality, global comparisons and a new agenda for economic history
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

This seminar will focus upon a recently published collection of essays, The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-first Century: the Piketty Opportunity (Newcastle, Agenda Publishing 2016). First the editors will briefly explain the purpose and the structure of the volume. They will make clear that, in its attention to key definitions and concepts, relating to inequality, and in its focus upon regional specificities on a global scale, the volume attempts to promote Piketty’s work as a springboard for developing new ideas and approaches in economic history and for re-introducing politics and political power into the heart of economics.
Pat Hudson will outline some of long-standing debates, concepts, measures and methods, in economics and economic history that Piketty’s work exposes for examination. Comparative measures of ‘development’, growth theory, definitions and measures of capital and wealth, technological innovation, ideas about convergence and divergence, the central importance of politics and ideology in economic change – these can all be placed in the spotlight created by Piketty, with salutary implications.
In his insistence on the importance of understanding the dynamics and the implications of accumulation and inequality, Piketty offers a new angle on development. In his preference for induction, for new data gathering, for descriptive rather than analytical statistics, and in his questioning of the utility of multiple regression analysis especially in relation to complex cross national data, he opens up ground for a critique of approaches and methods that have dominated the fields of economics and economic history for decades. Piketty and his colleagues also fundamentally unsettle the assumption that the night watchman state and liberalised markets are good for growth.
Piketty’s data and his thesis (with their absences as well as their presences) demand that many lines of conventional research be given renewed attention, in particular the impact of inequality upon the distribution of financial assets and investment patterns, on aggregate and differentiated patters of demand (hence of innovation and economies of scale), on human capital (through unequal access to education and training as well as nutrition and health), and on the nature of the state and political instability.
Keith Tribe will next seek to open out issues of comparative method in the study of economic history, whilst also emphasising the major argument of the volume: that Piketty has created an opportunity to bring economic, political and historical analysis closer together. Drawing upon the chapters that address the specificities of the economies treated by Piketty as “the developed world” (France, Germany, Sweden, UK, USA), he will first point out differences in institutional structure and chronology raised by the authors, suggesting that these undermine the usual practice of making comparisons in which either an abstract model, or one particular national developmental model, is used both to elucidate basic trends and also to register “deviations” from this trend. He will argue that this is as much a problem for long-run economic historical work on one particular territory/state as it is for cross-country comparisons in a restricted timeframe. The big question is how best to make sense of social and economic development without falling back upon conceptual frameworks that suppress difference and impose artificial uniformity. This is both a very old story – the origins of capitalism, the emergence of individualism, the story of industrialisation etc. – but also an argument that seems to need constant re-emphasis, given the persistence of presentist historiographies of the past.
To move on from the opportunity that Piketty has created it will be necessary further to question the goals of growth and development: how to promote better social outcomes from economic growth, how to reconcile growth with equity and sustainability. The ways in which the success or failure of national economies (and of the international economy) might be measured will also need more sophisticated yardsticks than are currently applied, yardsticks that place distributional issues back at centre stage. The role of new technologies in determining growth rates and income distribution, in developing as well as in leading nations, will need more attention than Piketty gives it. Above all, we must take Piketty’s lead in finding better ways to link economic analysis nationally and internationally to politics and to the exercise of economic and political power. Economics in the twenty-first century, both nationally and globally, must be related to the trajectory of democracy and its abuses.

# Thursday 3rd November 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Bernard Harris, University of Strathclyde
The growth of sanitary intervention in nineteenth-century England and Wales
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

This paper examines the loans contracted by local authorities and other public bodies for public works during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The value of these loans has often been regarded as a sensitive barometer of sanitary effort, and they have been used to measure the impact of sanitary reform on mortality decline in England and Wales between 1850 and 1914. However, the extent, distribution and purposes of the loans themselves have rarely been examined in any detail. This is particularly true of loans which were authorized under Local Acts from the early-nineteenth century onwards This paper presents new data on the development of these loans following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In addition to loans which were sanctioned by the Local Government Board after 1871, it also examines loans which were sanctioned by the Public Works Loans Board after 1817, and by the General Boards of Health and the Privy Council after 1848. It also investigates the loans authorized under Local Acts from 1817. By combining data from these sources, we shed new light on the relationship between sanitary intervention and mortality change from the middle of the nineteenth century.

# Thursday 27th October 2016, 5.00pm - Dr Judy Stephenson, University of Oxford
Labouring in early modern London
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Although they are often referred to, labourers in early modern London are an ill defined and little studied group. They are usually taken to be the ‘unskilled’. This paper draws on business and institutional records to give long needed detail on labourers employment in London from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Using case studies from various sites around London it examines what sorts of work labourers did, in construction and elsewhere, how they were hired and deployed for it, how they were paid, and what their relationship to others working around them were.

The labourers that existing literature has referred to were semi-skilled assistants to craftsmen in the construction industry, such as masons, bricklayers and carpenters, and they worked in mixed teams in large firms. Many of them worked for the same firm or contractor for many years. This was not the only group, however. Large contracting firms of labourers deployed general or common labourers, who carried out digging and hauling work, across numerous sites for the Crown and City. Other unskilled men in brewing, maintenance, on the river, at docks, and in other trades were called ‘labourers’, and provided varying levels of strength and biological capital for varied levels of pay.

Labouring men were paid by the contracting firms who placed them, not by the institutions where they worked. Only a small elite of foremen earned the day wages of the traditional literature. The vast majority of London labourers earned substantially less, over unpredictable hours, lived without security of employment, and by the end of the eighteenth century were no better off than their predecessors a century and a half before.

# Thursday 20th October 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Paul Lovejoy, York University, Ontario
The economics of the ‘Second Slavery’ in the Jihad states of West Africa
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

This paper argues that an understanding of the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolutions from the late eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century must take account of the jihadist revolutions that swept most of West Africa during the same period. The paper specifically focuses on the political economy of the jihad movement and the economic transformation of the region that ensued with the foundation of the jihad states, particularly the Sokoto Caliphate, by far the largest of the new states. The Sokoto Caliphate, established in 1804-1808, in what is now northern Nigeria and parts of neighbouring Niger, Burkino Faso, and Cameroon, developed an economy based on slave plantations and a vibrant textile industry. It is argued that the economic ramifications of the jihad movement challenge many recent interpretations of the economic history of Africa.

# Thursday 13th October 2016, 5.00pm - Professor John Turner, Queen's University Belfast
Common Law and the origins of shareholder protection
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 6th October 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Gareth Stedman Jones, University of Cambridge and Queen Mary, London
'Pressure from without': Karl Marx and the politics and economics of 1867
Venue: Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

1867 was the year of the publication of ‘Capital’, and the intention right up to the spring of that year was to publish the whole treatise, not just the first volume. It was also the year in which the International Working Men’s Association made its greatest impact in Europe and in which growing political agitation in Britain resulted in the Second Reform Bill. My paper explores the connection between these events.

# Wednesday 25th May 2016, 5.00pm - Mark Forrest (Dorset History Centre)
The changing fortunes of Poole, Lyme and Melcombe: wool, cloth, tax, trade and the fifteenth century Dorset economy
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 12th May 2016, 5.00pm - Hülya Canbakal (Sabanci University, Istanbul) (with Alpay Filiztekin, Sabanci)
Slaves and slave ownership in Ottoman Bursa, 1460-1880
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Studies of slavery in the Ottoman Empire focus on slavery among and for the official elite in the capital, with an emphasis on the 15th and 16th centuries, on the trade and its abolition in the 19th century, or more recently, on microhistories of slave lives beyond the harems and military households of the official elite. This study builds on the latter two trends. Using probate inventories from the city of Bursa and its hinterland, it examines long-term patterns in slave ownership and employment among commoners as well as the local elite. Probate evidence indicates that slave-holding steadily declined over the four centuries examined and by the time of its abolition, was already a marginal practice in this important provincial city. Price trends reveal a decline from the 18th century onwards, suggesting that declining ownership was due to causes other than supply and prices. We present statistics of ownership and characteristics of the slave body, and examine prices and supply and demand in connection with wages and purchasing power.

# Wednesday 11th May 2016, 5.00pm - Ian Forrest (Oxford)
Trust and Inequality in Late Medieval England
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 28th April 2016, 5.00pm - Beatrice Zucca Micheletto (University of Rouen)
Women, property and work: some considerations of the Italian case (Turin, 18th century)
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Recent research that emphasises differences between northern and southern Europe has argued that in southern countries where a dowry system was widespread, young girls, married women and widows were not encouraged to participate in the labour market since they could merely count on their dowry. On the contrary, I will argue that in pre-industrial Turin, dowry and women’s work were strictly connected. Not only was the dowry often earned by the work of young girls, it was also invested in the family business in which wives and widows played a crucial role as workers. The speaker has recently published Travail et propriété des femmes en temps de crise (Turin, XVIIIe siècle) (2104), and articles in Gender & History (2015); The History of the Family (2014), and Feminist Economics (2013).

# Thursday 10th March 2016, 5.00pm - Lloyd Bonfield (New York Law School)
Give me your wealthy: immigration policy in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 9th March 2016, 5.00pm - Mark Bailey (UEA)
Patterns of migration in late-medieval England
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 2nd March 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Jane Humphries (Oxford)
Ellen McArthur Lecture: Eve Also Delved: Gendering Economic History (4)
Venue: LG18, Faculty of Law, Sidgwick Site, 10 West Rd, Cambridge, CB3 9DZ

4. The nature and causes of the male breadwinner family

Lecture 4 returns to a longstanding debate in economic history and gender studies in terms of the chronology, nature, causes, and consequences of the rise of the male-breadwinner family structure. It will revisit this debate drawing on earlier work with Sara Horrell as well as recent research findings including ideas and arguments discussed in the earlier lectures.

# Tuesday 1st March 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Jane Humphries (Oxford)
Ellen McArthur Lecture: Eve Also Delved: Gendering Economic History (3)
Venue: LG18, Faculty of Law, Sidgwick Site, 10 West Rd, Cambridge, CB3 9DZ

3. History from underneath: women and girls’ experience in the era of industrialisation

Lecture 3 also builds on earlier work, in this case using working-class autobiographies to uncover the experiences of families which lived through the industrial revolution. My 2010 book used proletarian life writing to uncover aspects of work and family life inaccessible through conventional historical sources. But all 600 plus accounts were authored by men and so presented an exclusively male perspective. In the lecture I will draw on women’s stories to provide female reflections on childhood, child labour, schooling, parenting and family life, looking particularly at the ways in which experience was gendered and speculating about its implications for our understanding of the division of labour and the cultural power of gender in post-industrial society.

# Wednesday 24th February 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Jane Humphries (Oxford)
Ellen McArthur Lecture: Eve Also Delved: Gendering Economic History (2)
Venue: LG18, Faculty of Law, Sidgwick Site, 10 West Rd, Cambridge, CB3 9DZ

2. The spinster: a tragic heroine of the industrial revolution?

Lecture 2 takes these arguments down to a specific occupational/industrial case study in terms of the tragic fate of the hand spinner, an until recently forgotten figure in the British industrial revolution. This has changed with the success of Robert Allen’s ‘high wage economy’ interpretation of industrialisation, and inclusion of the spinning jenny in his list of macro inventions. The spinster moves from the economic periphery to centre stage, her earnings depicted as growing sufficiently dramatically to prompt the invention and innovation which placed the textile industry in the vanguard of the first industrial revolution, a perspective which rests heavily on Craig Muldrew’s earlier empirical work on the extent and remuneration of hand spinning. The lecture draws on current research (with Ben Schneider) which uses previously neglected sources to estimate the productivity, employment and wages of female and child spinners. In contrast to the high wage view, our data do not show a steady rise in wages prior to the spinning innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. I will speculate why spinners did not share in the HWE and suggest an alternative interpretation of the appearance and expansion of the factory system.

# Tuesday 23rd February 2016, 5.00pm - Professor Jane Humphries (Oxford)
Ellen McArthur Lecture: Eve Also Delved: Gendering Economic History (1)
Venue: LG18, Faculty of Law, Sidgwick Site, 10 West Rd, Cambridge, CB3 9DZ

1. Women, work and wages: from the Black Death to the industrial revolution

Lecture 1 builds on earlier work (with Jacob Weisdorf (2015)) in using historical evidence on women’s wages as a lens through which to view their economic activities and position in society. We have linked material provided by other historians to the fragmentary evidence from diverse primary sources on women’s wages to provide an account of women’s wages from the Black Death to the Industrial Revolution. These estimates can be compared with various widely accepted series of men’s wages over the same time period in a historic account of the evolution of the gender gap in pay. Not only does this cast new light on debates about the power of capitalist development to fracture patriarchal continuities, it also challenges two recent mainstream themes in economic history. The first challenge is to the idea of a girl-powered boost to economic growth following the Black Death. Both De Moor and van Zanden (2010) and Voitländer and Voth (2013) have argued that the restructuring of agrarian production in response to demographic contraction by enhancing the relative remuneration of women workers promoted delayed marriage and reduced Malthusian pressures enabling increased investment, especially investment in human capital. The empirical record appears out of synch with this interpretation and forces new ways of thinking about the 15th century reaction. The second challenge is to the now dominant interpretation of the British industrial revolution as originating in a ‘high wage economy’. In this interpretation the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivised innovation and the adoption of the new techniques elevating Britain onto a higher growth trajectory inaccessible to competitors in Europe and Asia. Recently women and children have been explicitly included in this high wage economy albeit with minimal empirical evidence available in support. The lecture will explore whether the early modern and modern evidence on women’s wages is consistent with the HWE.

# Thursday 11th February 2016, 5.00pm - Naomi Tadmor (Lancaster)
The settlement of the poor and the rise of the form
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 10th February 2016, 5.00pm - Daniel Curtis (Utrecht)
The shock to reinvigorate medieval economic history?
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 27th January 2016, 5.00pm - Susan Oosthuizen (Cambridge)
A reconsideration of Domesday population densities in the Cambridgeshire fenland
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 14th January 2016, 5.00pm - Andrea Caracausi (Padova)
Craft guilds, apprenticeship and human capital formation in early modern Italy
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

Abstract not available

# Thursday 3rd December 2015, 5.00pm - Gareth Austin (Geneva/Cambridge)
Global Economic Development and the Anthropocene
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 26th November 2015, 5.00pm - Patricia Clavin (Oxford)
Human Security, Food and International Order, 1918-1939
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 19th November 2015, 5.00pm - Maria Agren (Uppsala)
Gender and Work in Early Modern Sweden
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 12th November 2015, 5.30pm - Michael Anderson (Edinburgh)
Note this seminar will start at 5.30pm
British Demography, c.1850-c.2000. How and Why was Scotland Different?
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 5th November 2015, 5.00pm - Phillipp Schofield (Aberystwyth)
Medieval English Peasants and Culture
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 29th October 2015, 5.00pm - Sheilagh Ogilvie (Cambridge)
Was Domar Right? The Second Serfdom in Early Modern Bohemia
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 22nd October 2015, 5.00pm - Anne Murphy (Hertfordshire)
The Bank of England and the Genesis of Modern Management
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 27th May 2015, 5.00pm - Jo Sear
Consumption and trade in East Anglian market towns and their hinterlands in the late middle ages
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 14th May 2015, 5.00pm - Friederike Scholten (Münster)
Rational investment behaviour on manorial estates – Grain storage in the Rhineland area and Westphalia (18th & 19th century)
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

The investment in the storage of grain stocks was done for numerous reasons involving both commercial as well as non-commercial motives. The ledgers of three manorial estates located in the Rhineland area and Westphalia in the 18th and 19th century document seasonal sales behaviour and the volume of carry-over stocks. In combination with grain prices of nearby urban markets and using the correspondence between the landlord and his administrator, this paper will investigate the nature of manorial management, looking at how much ‘rational’ investment there was compared to. paternalistic exchange with dependents.

# Wednesday 13th May 2015, 5.00pm - Jean Birrell and Ros Faith
Peasant farmers and their workers in medieval England
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 23rd April 2015, 5.00pm - Helen Berry (Newcastle)
We normally have dinner with the speaker afterwards. All welcome.
Foundling Hospital Children and their Employment, c. 1750-1850: Some Preliminary Findings
Venue: History Faculty Room 12

This paper presents preliminary findings on the occupational destination of children whose upbringing was co-ordinated by the London Foundling Hospital and its satellite institutions. This is the first attempt at applying quantitative and qualitative methods to the analysis of c. 5,800 apprenticeship records which were kept with remarkable diligence by the Hospital’s Governors and administrators during the first century of the Hospital’s existence. The industrial-scale ‘processing’ of infants and their progress through the systems created and overseen by the Hospital’s Governors, including the period of ‘General Admission’ when the charity was funded by direct government grant, makes it possible to gauge the geographical distribution, and occupational grouping, of foundling hospital children with some precision, using records for first, sometimes multiple, apprenticeships. Linking the foundling apprentice database with GIS software and a modified form of PST coding makes it possible to map the distribution and occupational clustering of foundlings.

# Wednesday 25th February 2015, 5.00pm - Eleanor Standley
Medieval textiles and the Portable Antiquities Scheme: a handmaiden’s yarn
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 19th February 2015, 5.00pm - Joseph Harley (Leicester)
Pauper inventories and the material lives of the English poor, c.1680-1834
Venue: History Faculty Board Room

This paper uses nearly 350 pauper inventories from Dorset, Kent and Norfolk to assess the material lives of the poor. It starts by analysing furniture and hearth-related items and then moves on to assess how ‘new’ goods, such as tea, came to affect the poor’s everyday lives. Through this I will examine the extent to which the poor were able to engage with the market and will offer a unique perspective on what people ate, how they relaxed, how they kept warm, how they slept and so on.

# Wednesday 11th February 2015, 5.00pm - Susan Kilby
Knowing your place: contrasting peasant landscapes within medieval manors
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 5th February 2015, 5.00pm - Judy Stephenson (LSE)
Skill, work and pay in London building trades, 1660 - 1790
Venue: History Faculty Board Room

This paper uses the archival records of some of London’s major seventeenth century building projects to show the scale and scope of building contracting and contractors in the long eighteenth century, and how skill was deployed and valued in the resulting hierarchies and networks. Although it is frequently assumed building craftsmen worked in small artisan teams in this period the evidence shows that with large market and project expansion, contractors and subcontractors used complex and flexible organizational hierarchies that responded to market forces and transaction costs. I examine human capital inputs to the building process at all levels, design, administration, supply, construction, and across a number of trades and show evidence of shifts in relative reward for different groups.

# Wednesday 28th January 2015, 5.00pm - Steve Rigby
Justifying inequality: peasants in medieval ideology
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 22nd January 2015, 5.00pm - Dr Wouter Ryckbosch (University of Antwerp)
Singing the praises of tea. Social hierarchy, consumption and Asiatic luxury in the early modern Low Countries
Venue: History Faculty Board Room

Across large parts of Europe exotic novelties such as tobacco, porcelain, cottons and tea turned from exclusive luxuries into everyday staples over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More social groups and strata than before were now drawn into the realm of market consumption, as sumptuary legislation and traditional moral anxieties with regards to the vices of luxury were seemingly abandoned. This change is generally understood as a crucial aspect in the so-called ‘consumer revolution’, leading the way to growing commercialisation and eventual industrialisation (De Vries 2008; Berg 2004). This paper sets out to study whether the introduction and adoption of tea drinking in the Low Countries should be seen as a reflection of endogenous early modern social transformations, or if it perhaps served as an agent of change itself. How were social hierarchies reflected, transformed or perpetuated through the practices of (and discourses on) preparing and drinking tea in the early modern Low Countries? Clues will be sought for in probate inventories, trade statistics, scientific discourse, and popular ballads.

# Thursday 4th December 2014, 5.00pm - Dr Jaco Zuijderduijn (Leiden)
Living la vita apostolica. Life expectancy and mortality of nuns in late-medieval Holland
Venue: Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Data on vital events of medieval women are extremely scarce. We use a dataset based on a necrology of nuns in late-medieval Holland to arrive at estimates for the development of life expectancy and mortality. The first study of its kind for the Low Countries, it shows striking differences in the development of life expectancy and mortality between Holland and England. In the fifteenth century, life expectancy at age 25 in Holland was much higher than in England. Also, mortality among our population of nuns was much lower than among monks in England, and mortality crises were less frequent. Our results support claims by Van Bavel and Van Zanden (2003) about the relatively early recovery of the population of Holland, as well as the mild impact of infectious diseases. The comparison with England suggests that this country’s crisis of the late Middle Ages was most likely the result of a high-mortality demographic regime.

# Thursday 27th November 2014, 5.00pm - Professor Sir E.A. Wrigley (Cambridge)
What was an organic economy?
Venue: Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

It is a striking fact that the classical economists, Adam Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo all believed that prolonged economic growth was impossible — ironic since Adam Smith is sometimes pictured as suggesting the path to the industrial revolution. But they had good grounds for pessimism given the nature of the economies with which they were familiar. It is convenient to label all economies before the industrial revolution as ‘organic’. I shall try to explain the nature of these economies and the kind of change necessary to escape from the restrictions under which they laboured.

# Thursday 20th November 2014, 5.00pm - Professor David Reher (Complutense University, Madrid)
The aftermath of the demographic transition in the developed world
Venue: Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

The Demographic Transition refers to a period in European history characterized by important changes in both fertility and mortality. This period of change dates from the nineteenth century though there is some disagreement as to its end. Some experts consider that the Baby Boom of the mid-twentieth century terminated the process of fertility decline, while others consider that many of the long-term effects of the demographic transition are still very much at work as we move into the realm of rapidly aging societies. The Demographic Transition led to a series of social and economic changes that are component parts of modernization processes in the societies affected. The extent to which these beneficial effects will spread to the developing world that is currently in the midst of its own demographic transition remains to be seen, but should be considered a distinct possibility.

An important aspect of the Demographic Transition was that childhood mortality declined to very low levels, thus losing its ability to constrain people’s reproductive choices. While in the past the number of surviving children was often quite different from the number of children ever born, achieving a desired number of children often meant having large numbers of childbirths. In this way, high mortality families tended to be high fertility families, and low mortality ones were low fertility ones. Once mortality reached very low levels, it became irrelevant for reproductive choices. From a wider viewpoint, this meant that overall demographic systems were no longer tethered to prevailing mortality as they had been in the past. This key change was followed shortly thereafter by two other changes that completely turned the tables on traditional demographic stability. In the decade of the 1960s, artificial synthetic contraception became widespread and a veritable cultural revolution that marked the end of many traditional values.

The implication of these changes is that we no longer really understand the way demographic systems function because none of the tradition constraints on behavior are any longer in place. The fact that after the 1960s everywhere in the developed world extremely low fertility has been the norm leading to extremely rapid aging and increasing difficulties in sustaining all types of welfare systems based on intergenerational transfers of goods and services underscores the importance of this issue. During the same period, the internal disparities in reproductive in the developed world have never seemed larger, with some countries showing near-replacement fertility while others showing extremely low levels, often as low as 25-35% below replacement. What has happened?

Most answers to this question are based exclusively on very recent data taken from the period of extremely low fertility and may lead to conclusions that are not sensitive to the historical realities involved. The author proposes an alternate way of looking at fertility behavior in the developed world and reaches the conclusion that over the past 50-60 year there are some areas in Europe with relatively low fertility with relatively high fertility. In other words, significant reproductive disparities have been a part of the landscape of the developed world for a long time. These surprising results suggest that there must be other long-term factors at work that help explain reproductive disparities that have held for at least the past half century and perhaps far more. A tentative framework for understanding these differences based on social, political, cultural and economic typologies of countries in the developed world is proposed and discussed.

# Thursday 6th November 2014, 5.00pm - Professor Paul Warde (East Anglia)
Note change of venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall
Trees, trade and textiles: tracing ecological dependency in British industry, c.1550-1750
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall

Abstract not available

# Thursday 9th October 2014, 5.00pm - Professor Simon Szreter (Cambridge)
How much venereal disease was there in England's modern demographic history?
Venue: Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

There have been no previous attempts to evaluate the quantitative importance of venereal diseases in modern Britain’s demographic and epidemiological history. This paper will present new research undertaken with Kevin Siena providing estimates on the prevalence of venereal disease in late Georgian England, including London. The estimates will then be compared with figures published by Simon Szreter for England and Wales and for London in the early 1910s.

# Wednesday 4th June 2014, 5.00pm - Mingjie Xu
Disorder and rebellion in Cambridgeshire in 1381
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 21st May 2014, 5.00pm - Alex Sapoznik
‘To dig and to delve and to drive away hunger’: peasants and the intensification of English agriculture, 1000-1300
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 15th May 2014, 5.00pm - Andrew Burn (Durham)
'Pity the poor keelmen’*. Modelling seasonal work and annual income in early industrial Newcastle upon Tyne
Venue: Linnett Room, Robinson College

Newcastle was transformed in the century after 1560 as industrial labourers arrived to keel its coal. Earlier migrants were often seasonal, returning home in winter when trade was slack; but by the1660s workers were more likely to settle permanently in the town, begging the question ‘how could they afford to survive the winter’? Working backwards from trade accounts and other sources, I offer an assessment of daily wages, perks, and the seasonal distribution of annual income, showing that the number of days worked, as well as the rising nominal wage, was crucial in this survival. This in turn provides a new north-eastern perspective on living standards debates that still tend to be dominated by southern England’s agricultural and building labourers.

# Wednesday 14th May 2014, 5.00pm - John Langdon
A war over water: the contestation of river environments in medieval and early modern England
Venue: Walters Room, Selwyn College

Abstract not available

# Thursday 1st May 2014, 5.00pm - John Walter (Essex)
‘Know all men whom this may concerne...’*. The Protestation returns and early modern social and economic history
Venue: Linnett Room, Robinson College

In 1641 and in 1642 Parliament used the Protestation oath to swear the nation. Taken at parish level, this required returns listing those taking (or refusing) the oath. This paper provides an introduction to these little-known and under-used sources. Surviving in their thousands and providing for some counties complete coverage, the returns provide a partial census. In some parishes, the returns were ordered either by family, household, occupation or gender and/or age categories. In others, the silent ordering principles by which the names were returned (topography or status hierarchies) can be recovered. A rich cluster of contemporaneous parish-level fiscal listings (poll tax, subsidy, Collections for Ireland) offer possibilities for comparative record linkage.

# Thursday 13th March 2014, 5.00pm - D'Maris Coffman, Cambridge
The brewing industry in England revisited
Venue: Umney Lounge, Robinson College

Based on joint work with Richard Unger on a comparative history of British and Dutch brewing, this paper re-examines the trajectory of the English brewing industry in the late 17th and early 18th centuries against the experience of Dutch brewing. Particular emphasis is paid to how the London Company of Brewers lobbied the excise and how the advent of duties on malt and later hops affected the structure of the industry, especially since the wardens’ accounts of the London Company of Brewers shed light on these efforts. Fifty-five years after the publication of Peter Mathias’ seminal work, the paper ends by reflecting on why his account remains such an important study.

# Thursday 6th March 2014, 5.00pm - D’Maris Coffman (Cambridge)
The brewing industry in England revisited
Venue: Linnett Room, Robinson College

Based on joint work with Richard Unger on a comparative history of British and Dutch brewing, this paper re-examines the trajectory of the English brewing industry in the late 17th and early 18th centuries against the experience of Dutch brewing. Particular emphasis is paid to how the London Company of Brewers lobbied the excise and how the advent of duties on malt and later hops affected the structure of the industry, especially since the wardens’ accounts of the London Company of Brewers shed light on these efforts. Fifty-five years after the publication of Peter Mathias’ seminal work, the paper ends by reflecting on why his account remains such an important study.

# Thursday 20th February 2014, 5.00pm - Samantha Williams (Cambridge)
The punishment of unmarried parents in London, 1695-1834
Venue: Linnett Room, Robinson College

The parents of illegitimate children were liable to punishment by the church and secular courts. Under canon law church courts could hear sexual offences, including fornication, cohabitation, and bastardy. However, far more cases of bastardy were prosecuted by recognizance or indictment at quarter sessions. An Act of 1576 made provision for the imprisonment of unmarried mothers in the house of correction for one year as ‘lewd women’ where they could be set to hard labour. The failure of both parents to maintain their child could also result in commitment to gaol. This paper will examine the implementation of the law for bastardy in London between 1695 and 1834.

# Thursday 6th February 2014, 5.00pm - Alex Shepard (Glasgow)
Maintaining oneself in early modern England
Venue: Linnett Room, Robinson College

This paper explores the responses provided by witnesses in the English church courts to questions about how they maintained themselves or got a living, drawing on a dataset of over 13,500 statements recorded between 1550 and 1728. The discussion reflects on the evidence of women’s productive activity and on the discrepancies between male socio/occupational titles and what they actually did for a living, in order to argue that there was rather more gender convergence in the working lives of men and women than is conventionally acknowledged either by economic historians or by historians of women. The paper also argues that a gradual shift of emphasis from having to getting a living began to reshape concepts of work for both men and women from the later seventeenth century.

# Thursday 24th October 2013, 5.00pm - Dr Alice Reid (Cambridge)
Call the midwife: death in childbirth in historical perspective
Venue: Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Death in childbirth is one of the main causes of death to women aged 20 to 45: this is true today and has been the case throughout history at times when other causes of death to adult women were also much higher. This paper will provide an overview of maternal mortality (defined as the risk of death to women associated with pregnancy or childbirth) since 1650 with consideration of the main perplexing questions relating to the topic: what can explain the unusual and persistent geographical patterns in British maternal mortality? And why did maternal mortality not decline with the rest of adult mortality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?