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

Research seminar series run by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Campop).

Seminars will take place in person in the Geography Department and online via Microsoft Teams at 4:00pm.

The support of the Trevelyan Fund (Faculty of History) is gratefully acknowledged.

Convenors: Romola Davenport (rjd23@cam.ac.uk), Alice Reid (amr1001@cam.ac.uk), Hannaliis Jaadla (hj309@cam.ac.uk), and Leigh Shaw-Taylor (lmws2@cam.ac.uk).

There are no forthcoming seminars at present. Please check back here later.

You may wish to view the archive of previous seminars.

Core Seminar in Economic and Social History

<p>Seminars take place on Thursdays at 5:15 pm in the Lightfoot Room, St John's College - <u>with exceptions as noted</u>. All are welcome, either in person or <a href="https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87828018181?pwd=Vhcqll9gAduJpRw1JKj4Bck6oR3sza.1"; rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">online</a>.</p><p>
The Core seminar combines multiple seminars: Medieval Economic and Social History; Early Modern Economic and
Social History; Modern Economic and Social History and Policy; Global Economic History; Quantitative History; Financial History; the Centre for History and Economics; Labour History; and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Their specialist seminar programmes do not run in Michaelmas term, but each meets separately again in the Lent and (sometimes) Easter terms.

Seminar convenors: Amy Erickson (ale25@cam.ac.uk), Alice Menassa (aam205@cam.ac.uk), Emily Chung (evc28@cam.ac.uk), Guillaume Proffit (gpap3@cam.ac.uk)

Economic and Social History at Cambridge: www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk</p>;

View the archive of previous seminars.

# Thursday 8th October 2026, 5.15pm - Tom Johnson, Oxford

‘He hath payd his part’: The Political Economy of Fishing Doles in Late-Medieval England

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

A dole was a stake or share in a fishing voyage that was allocated to someone who provided capital or labour towards the venture. Although they varied locally by port, doles were always allocated to the owners of a vessel, the masters, and the crew. Despite the importance of doles to organization of the premodern fishing industry, they are very understudied due to the lack of good documentation. In this paper, I examine a set of churchwardens’ accounts from the Suffolk village of Walberswick in order to ask whether doles worked to redistribute the wealth of the fishing industry among the community.

# Thursday 15th October 2026, 5.15pm - Xavier Duran, University of the Andes

Note different room

Why Was the Wheel (Not) Used in the Andes? A Hypothesis Explaining the Slow Adoption of Wagon Transport and Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Venue: Castlereagh Room, Fisher Building, St. John’s College

Wagon transport was invented about 3,000 BCE, most of the world used it by 1,000 CE, but it was not adopted in the Andes until late 19th century. Why did adoption take so long? First, we document the construction of the earliest wagon road on the Andes. Next, we develop a threshold technology-adoption model calibrated using human and mule energy consumption and unique historical data from a human trail and the first Andean wagon road. Model predictions align with historical social choices. Pre-Columbians selected a straight, steep, short route for human porters to reduce energy costs, while the Spanish used it with mule packs. Late nineteenth-century transport demand growth surpassed the model’s threshold and contributed to construction of the zigzagging, gentle, long wagon road route. Finally, since the hypothesis proposed is based on the interaction between human physiology, topography, and transport demand, it may help to understand broader overland transport technology adoption patterns. We present work in progress defining and measuring a topography tax to test the hypothesis more broadly in different historical and geographical settings.

# Thursday 22nd October 2026, 5.15pm - Mar del Rubio Varas, UPNA (Pamplona)

The First Gigawatt: Industrial Policy, Business Strategy, and the Social Foundations of the Renewable Energy Transition

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

n December 1994, Energía Hidroeléctrica de Navarra (EHN), a small public-private utility from one of Spain’s smallest regions, switched on a wind farm outside Pamplona. Within a decade, EHN had become the first company in the world to develop and operate a gigawatt of renewable capacity. Its eventual unwinding —which saw a major portion of its assets pass to Iberdrola in 2002, and the remainder acquired by Acciona between 2003 and 2004—helped cement both as the world’s second- and third-largest wind companies, while its industrial partner Gamesa became Spain’s national turbine champion. Spain is routinely cited, alongside Denmark and Germany, as a model for countries attempting their own renewable transitions, yet almost every existing account of that success operates at the level of national policy, feed-in tariffs or EU directives. In contrast, we follow the actual companies, ownership structures, and the regional policies that made it possible on the ground, based on interviews with the people who actually did it.

# Thursday 29th October 2026, 5.15pm - Jutta Bolt, University of Groningen

Geographies of Healing: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial-Era Healthcare Facilities in British Africa

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

Geography is a critical component of healthcare access, particularly important for dispersed rural or remote populations. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where large healthcare disparities persist, access to hospitals stands as a key determinant of population health and development. This paper maps historical patterns of hospital distribution to unravel the long-term impacts on contemporary health landscapes, with an emphasis on the spatial dynamics of persistence and change in both hospital establishment and longevity. Drawing on a comparative analysis of state- and missionary-funded hospitals in twelve former British colonies over the 20th century, we explore the determinants of initial hospital establishment during the colonial period and the enduring effects of these hospitals. We have developed a novel spatial database that enables cartographic representations of historical healthcare facility distribution. As the first comprehensive attempt to map both historical hospital locations and explore the extent of locational persistence across different countries, this paper fills a critical gap in our existing knowledge and provides a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic processes of change in healthcare infrastructure and its implications for contemporary development in African nations.

# Thursday 5th November 2026, 7.00pm - Edmond Smith, Manchester

Doing Business with Strangers: Trust, Institutions and the History of Globalisation

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

Globalisation depended not simply on ships, markets or states, but on the ability of people to cooperate across enormous distances and deep cultural differences. How did merchants, investors and travellers learn whom to trust? How were promises enforced in the absence of shared laws or close personal relationships? Drawing on recent work in economic and global history, this session explores the roles of trust, reputation, networks and institutions in facilitating exchange and considers what these mechanisms can tell us about the historical development of globalisation.

# Thursday 12th November 2026, 5.15pm - Cedric Chambru, ENS Lyon

A Tale of Two Datasets: Historical Research and Food Riots in Early Modern France

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

On May 2nd 1775, helpless police watched rioters gather on the market of Gournay-en-Bray in Normandy to lower the price of grain. Reading accounts from the provincial administration, Jean Nicolas noted that the composition of the crowd was unknown. Working on similar documents, Cynthia Bouton identified female protestors. Were mistakes made? This type of discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of quantitative studies to investigate such questions as the agency of women in social conflict during the early modern period. More generally, such discrepancies seem to validate recent concerns about the reproducibility of research across all fields of social sciences and humanities. In the 1980s, scholars in Europe and the United States launched projects to study the incidence and character of collective violence in the early-modern and revolutionary eras. Some of these scholars specifically targeted food riots for analysis because they seemed to signal the clash of popular politics with shifts in economic and social policy on the eve of the age of revolution. In this paper, we propose to assess concerns related to reproducibility and explore the mistakes made in two unique and independent large-scale research projects on riots in early modern France. Our objective is to systematically study the extent to which these two projects, which relied on similar historical sources, resulted in the creation of comparable datasets. By comparing the original records established by the two researchers, we analyse the role played by errors of palaeography, categorisation, coding, or interpretation in the analysis of the same event. We further include one additional regional sample created to expand the initial work of Jean Nicolas in order to discuss how more thorough investigations in the archives might help us revise existing conclusions about the historical trends in food riots. Overall, we highlight why and how inadvertent errors of sampling by historians could threaten the reliability of historical research and the findings of studies using quantitative historical data.

# Thursday 19th November 2026, 5.15pm - Matt Myers, Oxford

Note different room: https://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/6694/

Rethinking Global Labour, Energy, and Production History

Venue: Boys Smith Room, Fisher Bldg - St John's College

At the centre of many accounts of the modern world is the idea of a certain kind of transition in subjects of labour and forms of energy. What Eric Hobsbawm termed ’the rise of the wage-worker’ approximates to the decline of water-power and the rise of a carbon economy. With the crisis of energy in the 1970s, labour and its associated movements across the world begin their long decline. This talk questions several received ideas in the history of labour and energy using research findings from several European countries and their imperial domains. It concludes with possible directions for a global, comparative, and transnational labour history and invites discussion on the methodological and conceptual challenges of writing labour back into broader accounts of energy and production.

# Thursday 26th November 2026, 5.15pm - Eric Monnet, Paris School of Economics

Note different room

Bretton Woods Reconsidered: State Autonomy, Gold and Global finance

Venue: Castlereagh Room, Fisher Building, St. John’s College

Eric Monnet will survey his research on the Bretton Woods system, which challenges the familiar portrayal of Bretton Woods (1944-1971) as a golden age of financial stability and macroeconomic autonomy, and discuss the questions and challenges ahead. Viewed against the troubles of financial globalization since the 1980s, the period is often understood as one in which capital controls insulated domestic policy from international financial flows and exchange-rate pressures, while gold had lost its central monetary role. The historical evidence paints a more unsettled picture. Countries struggled with their external accounts, monetary arrangements were fiercely contested nationally and internationally, and gold remained considerably more important than usually acknowledged. The arrangements envisaged in 1944 never operated as expected: Bretton Woods evolved through repeated adaptations to the re-emergence of global finance. Rather than a trouble-free interlude governed by stable, clearly defined rules, it appears as a period of transition, negotiation and improvisation. Its history reveals both the difficulties and the possibilities of reconciling state autonomy with global finance, while raising new questions about international monetary cooperation and the sources of domestic policy autonomy.

# Thursday 3rd December 2026, 5.15pm - Catherine Lefevre, Glasgow

Financing Foreign Policy: UK Government–Bank Relations During the Development of the 1981–2 Sovereign Debt Crisis in Poland, Romania and Hungary

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

This talk demonstrates how UK banks helped finance the UK’s foreign policy toward Central and Eastern European (CEE) during the Cold War with the support and encouragement of the UK government. It examines the relationship between the UK government, UK banks and the Bank of England during the development of the CEE sovereign debt crisis in Poland, Romania and Hungary and shows that UK banks played a key role in the development of East–West relations during the Cold War through actively developing business ties with CEE countries which the UK government saw as an opportunity to further its foreign policy goals in the region.

Quantitative History Seminar

<p>Supported by the Centre for History and Economics and the Trevelyan Fund (Faculty of History).</p><p><br></p><p>The seminar meets on Wednesdays at 4:15pm:</p><p>- William Hardy Building Room 101, Department of Geography</p><p>- online on Zoom (see individual talks for link)</p><p><br></p><p>Convenors: Aleksandra Dul (amd217@cam.ac.uk), Alexis Litvine (adl38), Christoph Hess (cah99)</p>

There are no forthcoming seminars at present. Please check back here later.

You may wish to view the archive of previous seminars.

Additional seminars of interest to Campop members

Additional seminars of interest to Campop members.

View the archive of previous seminars.

# Thursday 8th October 2026, 5.15pm - Tom Johnson, Oxford

‘He hath payd his part’: The Political Economy of Fishing Doles in Late-Medieval England

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

A dole was a stake or share in a fishing voyage that was allocated to someone who provided capital or labour towards the venture. Although they varied locally by port, doles were always allocated to the owners of a vessel, the masters, and the crew. Despite the importance of doles to organization of the premodern fishing industry, they are very understudied due to the lack of good documentation. In this paper, I examine a set of churchwardens’ accounts from the Suffolk village of Walberswick in order to ask whether doles worked to redistribute the wealth of the fishing industry among the community.

# Thursday 15th October 2026, 5.15pm - Xavier Duran, University of the Andes

Note different room

Why Was the Wheel (Not) Used in the Andes? A Hypothesis Explaining the Slow Adoption of Wagon Transport and Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Venue: Castlereagh Room, Fisher Building, St. John’s College

Wagon transport was invented about 3,000 BCE, most of the world used it by 1,000 CE, but it was not adopted in the Andes until late 19th century. Why did adoption take so long? First, we document the construction of the earliest wagon road on the Andes. Next, we develop a threshold technology-adoption model calibrated using human and mule energy consumption and unique historical data from a human trail and the first Andean wagon road. Model predictions align with historical social choices. Pre-Columbians selected a straight, steep, short route for human porters to reduce energy costs, while the Spanish used it with mule packs. Late nineteenth-century transport demand growth surpassed the model’s threshold and contributed to construction of the zigzagging, gentle, long wagon road route. Finally, since the hypothesis proposed is based on the interaction between human physiology, topography, and transport demand, it may help to understand broader overland transport technology adoption patterns. We present work in progress defining and measuring a topography tax to test the hypothesis more broadly in different historical and geographical settings.

# Thursday 22nd October 2026, 5.15pm - Mar del Rubio Varas, UPNA (Pamplona)

The First Gigawatt: Industrial Policy, Business Strategy, and the Social Foundations of the Renewable Energy Transition

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

n December 1994, Energía Hidroeléctrica de Navarra (EHN), a small public-private utility from one of Spain’s smallest regions, switched on a wind farm outside Pamplona. Within a decade, EHN had become the first company in the world to develop and operate a gigawatt of renewable capacity. Its eventual unwinding —which saw a major portion of its assets pass to Iberdrola in 2002, and the remainder acquired by Acciona between 2003 and 2004—helped cement both as the world’s second- and third-largest wind companies, while its industrial partner Gamesa became Spain’s national turbine champion. Spain is routinely cited, alongside Denmark and Germany, as a model for countries attempting their own renewable transitions, yet almost every existing account of that success operates at the level of national policy, feed-in tariffs or EU directives. In contrast, we follow the actual companies, ownership structures, and the regional policies that made it possible on the ground, based on interviews with the people who actually did it.

# Thursday 29th October 2026, 5.15pm - Jutta Bolt, University of Groningen

Geographies of Healing: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial-Era Healthcare Facilities in British Africa

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

Geography is a critical component of healthcare access, particularly important for dispersed rural or remote populations. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where large healthcare disparities persist, access to hospitals stands as a key determinant of population health and development. This paper maps historical patterns of hospital distribution to unravel the long-term impacts on contemporary health landscapes, with an emphasis on the spatial dynamics of persistence and change in both hospital establishment and longevity. Drawing on a comparative analysis of state- and missionary-funded hospitals in twelve former British colonies over the 20th century, we explore the determinants of initial hospital establishment during the colonial period and the enduring effects of these hospitals. We have developed a novel spatial database that enables cartographic representations of historical healthcare facility distribution. As the first comprehensive attempt to map both historical hospital locations and explore the extent of locational persistence across different countries, this paper fills a critical gap in our existing knowledge and provides a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic processes of change in healthcare infrastructure and its implications for contemporary development in African nations.

# Thursday 5th November 2026, 7.00pm - Edmond Smith, Manchester

Doing Business with Strangers: Trust, Institutions and the History of Globalisation

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

Globalisation depended not simply on ships, markets or states, but on the ability of people to cooperate across enormous distances and deep cultural differences. How did merchants, investors and travellers learn whom to trust? How were promises enforced in the absence of shared laws or close personal relationships? Drawing on recent work in economic and global history, this session explores the roles of trust, reputation, networks and institutions in facilitating exchange and considers what these mechanisms can tell us about the historical development of globalisation.

# Thursday 12th November 2026, 5.15pm - Cedric Chambru, ENS Lyon

A Tale of Two Datasets: Historical Research and Food Riots in Early Modern France

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

On May 2nd 1775, helpless police watched rioters gather on the market of Gournay-en-Bray in Normandy to lower the price of grain. Reading accounts from the provincial administration, Jean Nicolas noted that the composition of the crowd was unknown. Working on similar documents, Cynthia Bouton identified female protestors. Were mistakes made? This type of discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of quantitative studies to investigate such questions as the agency of women in social conflict during the early modern period. More generally, such discrepancies seem to validate recent concerns about the reproducibility of research across all fields of social sciences and humanities. In the 1980s, scholars in Europe and the United States launched projects to study the incidence and character of collective violence in the early-modern and revolutionary eras. Some of these scholars specifically targeted food riots for analysis because they seemed to signal the clash of popular politics with shifts in economic and social policy on the eve of the age of revolution. In this paper, we propose to assess concerns related to reproducibility and explore the mistakes made in two unique and independent large-scale research projects on riots in early modern France. Our objective is to systematically study the extent to which these two projects, which relied on similar historical sources, resulted in the creation of comparable datasets. By comparing the original records established by the two researchers, we analyse the role played by errors of palaeography, categorisation, coding, or interpretation in the analysis of the same event. We further include one additional regional sample created to expand the initial work of Jean Nicolas in order to discuss how more thorough investigations in the archives might help us revise existing conclusions about the historical trends in food riots. Overall, we highlight why and how inadvertent errors of sampling by historians could threaten the reliability of historical research and the findings of studies using quantitative historical data.

# Thursday 19th November 2026, 5.15pm - Matt Myers, Oxford

Note different room: https://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/6694/

Rethinking Global Labour, Energy, and Production History

Venue: Boys Smith Room, Fisher Bldg - St John's College

At the centre of many accounts of the modern world is the idea of a certain kind of transition in subjects of labour and forms of energy. What Eric Hobsbawm termed ’the rise of the wage-worker’ approximates to the decline of water-power and the rise of a carbon economy. With the crisis of energy in the 1970s, labour and its associated movements across the world begin their long decline. This talk questions several received ideas in the history of labour and energy using research findings from several European countries and their imperial domains. It concludes with possible directions for a global, comparative, and transnational labour history and invites discussion on the methodological and conceptual challenges of writing labour back into broader accounts of energy and production.

# Thursday 26th November 2026, 5.15pm - Eric Monnet, Paris School of Economics

Note different room

Bretton Woods Reconsidered: State Autonomy, Gold and Global finance

Venue: Castlereagh Room, Fisher Building, St. John’s College

Eric Monnet will survey his research on the Bretton Woods system, which challenges the familiar portrayal of Bretton Woods (1944-1971) as a golden age of financial stability and macroeconomic autonomy, and discuss the questions and challenges ahead. Viewed against the troubles of financial globalization since the 1980s, the period is often understood as one in which capital controls insulated domestic policy from international financial flows and exchange-rate pressures, while gold had lost its central monetary role. The historical evidence paints a more unsettled picture. Countries struggled with their external accounts, monetary arrangements were fiercely contested nationally and internationally, and gold remained considerably more important than usually acknowledged. The arrangements envisaged in 1944 never operated as expected: Bretton Woods evolved through repeated adaptations to the re-emergence of global finance. Rather than a trouble-free interlude governed by stable, clearly defined rules, it appears as a period of transition, negotiation and improvisation. Its history reveals both the difficulties and the possibilities of reconciling state autonomy with global finance, while raising new questions about international monetary cooperation and the sources of domestic policy autonomy.

# Thursday 3rd December 2026, 5.15pm - Catherine Lefevre, Glasgow

Financing Foreign Policy: UK Government–Bank Relations During the Development of the 1981–2 Sovereign Debt Crisis in Poland, Romania and Hungary

Venue: Lightfoot Room - St John's College

This talk demonstrates how UK banks helped finance the UK’s foreign policy toward Central and Eastern European (CEE) during the Cold War with the support and encouragement of the UK government. It examines the relationship between the UK government, UK banks and the Bank of England during the development of the CEE sovereign debt crisis in Poland, Romania and Hungary and shows that UK banks played a key role in the development of East–West relations during the Cold War through actively developing business ties with CEE countries which the UK government saw as an opportunity to further its foreign policy goals in the region.